Phillip Stutts, the founder and CEO of Win BIG Media and Go BIG Media, has had a successful career in the cut-throat world of political marketing. With over 2 decades of experience and contributions to over 1,433 election victories, including 3 U.S. Presidential victories, Phillip is a well-respected leader in his field.
Despite facing trauma and disabilities in his life, Phillip has never let these obstacles hold him back. Instead, he has used his experiences to drive his massively transformative purpose and inspire others to do the same.
In this episode, Phillip shares his journey from growing up to his current role as a marketing expert and best-selling author. He has spoken in front of 50 million people and made more than 350 national media appearances on networks such as ESPN, CBS, FOX BUSINESS, FOX NEWS, MSNBC, and CNN. He has also been interviewed by renowned business, entertainment and health leaders, including Anderson Cooper, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Dr. Drew Pinsky.
Phillip’s latest book, “The Undefeated Marketing System: How To Grow Your Business and Build Your Audience Using The Secret Formula That Elects Presidents,” hit the top #65 out of 6 million titles on Amazon and has been praised by FOX BUSINESS as a “marketing system that has generated record sales” for his clients.
If you’re looking for inspiration and a guide to success in life and business, Phillip Stutts is the person to turn to. Check out his podcast and book to learn more about his marketing techniques and life lessons.
Learn more about Phillip:
- Personal Website: www.phillipstutts.com
- Company Website: www.winbigmedia.com
- Instagram: @phillipstutts
- Facebook: @ceophillipstutts
- LinkedIn: Phillip Stutts
- Twitter: @phillipstutts
Show notes:
[3:22] How’d it happen for Phillip Stutts
[6:57] Trauma and its dramatic impact
[10:46] Being the abused to abuser
[18:37] The “wanna-be” entrepreneur
[20:06] On being ADD as a kid
[23:35] The Undefeated Marketing Podcast—let’s dive deeper
And now here’s Phillip Stutts.
Full transcript below
Video With Phillip Stutts – The Moneyball Approach to Growing Your Business
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Podcast with Phillip Stutts. The Moneyball Approach to Growing Your Business.
Phillip Stutts
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
marketing, people, entrepreneur, literally, trauma, company, esophagus, book, psychedelic, therapist, data, years, customers, doctors, business, money, mdma, philip, life, spend
SPEAKERS
Phillip Stutts, Mike Malatesta
Mike Malatesta 00:05
Hey everybody, welcome back to the How’d it Happen Podcast. I’m so happy to have you here as I am with every episode, and today, I’m fulfilling my mission to you with another amazing success story. I’ve got Phillip Stutts with me. Philip, welcome to the show.
Phillip Stutts 00:24
I’m honored to be here. Right.
Mike Malatesta 00:26
So, let me tell you a little bit about Philip, and why you should be as excited as I am. That he’s here. Philip is the founder and CEO of Win Big Media, and founder executive chairman of NGO Big Media. The first is a corporate marketing agency, and the second is a political marketing ad firm. He comes from the cutthroat world of Political Marketing. He has over two decades of experience working on campaigns with billions of dollars in political ad spend, and contributed to over 1400 election victories, including three US presidential victories. Congratulations on that record, 1400 seems like how do you even get into
Phillip Stutts 01:06
1414 33 now? Yeah, team 33 Now,
Mike Malatesta 01:10
so Phil plays the game of political and corporate marketing on the highest level, battling it out, battling it out with fierce competition, multibillion dollar budgets, and a win or die mentality. He’s spoken in front of 50 million people in his career, and he’s been on every media outlet you can imagine. And on some of the biggest podcasts out there, including James out teachers, which is one of my personal favorites. I think Phillip holds the record for the number of appearances on James’s show. Now, Philip has written multiple bestsellers. His newest book, is the undefeated marketing system, how to grow your business, and build your audience using the secret formula that elects presidents. And it’s a really fantastic book. I wasn’t quite sure that you know, when I got into it, but I thought it’s really cool how he brought it together political example, business example. It was kind of neat and in every chapter. Finally, Phillip hosts the undefeated undefeated marketing podcast, which is a fairly new podcast, but he seems to be crushing it with getting some really, really killer people. On the podcast, I listened to his episode today with Peter Diamandis and yeah, it was really good. So congratulations on that gone. Well, you can connect with Phillip at Phillip pH, I ll IP Stutz s t u TT s calm or at win big media.com. So, so let’s get into this. I start every show with the same question. And that is, how did happen for you?
Phillip Stutts 02:51
I laugh because I know that you start the shows this way. And the answer is I don’t, I don’t think I’ve made anything. And it’s not a humble, it’s not a it’s not a rooted in shame. It’s that I’m on a journey every day of my life. And I don’t feel like I’ve licked anything. I have big goals and big outcomes. But ultimately, I’m probably 5% into my journey of where I want to be in my life, where I want it to go. And so to feel like I’ve made it, I feel very blessed. I feel like I’ve I’ve achieved a lot of the goals I’ve set in my life. But it’s more about my journey and trying to grow and get a little bit better every day. And then I really don’t even focus on where I am. And, you know, when I mean I’m definitely I do do a lot of different things in the therapy side, like I’ve done psychedelics, I have a therapist, I’ve done a lot different things. And you know, I think one of the things that says I need to celebrate some of my victories more and I admit that, but at the same time, everything about my life is about growth. And if it’s about growth, it’s not about where I am, it’s about the destination and the journey to get to the destination. And so for me, it’s it’s an endless hike up a mountain and I just want to enjoy that hike up the mountain every day. And that’s all I really think about and focus on.
Mike Malatesta 04:37
Okay, fair enough. And the celebrating victories thing, can you talk to me a little bit more about because I’ve I feel like I’ve had a problem with that. So
Phillip Stutts 04:47
I think we all entrepreneurs do don’t do you
Mike Malatesta 04:50
think so? I think some are really good at celebrating,
Phillip Stutts 04:52
rare. I agree some not many that I’ve been around
Mike Malatesta 05:00
Why is that? Why do you think that is? Why is it for you?
Phillip Stutts 05:02
I think most entrepreneurs come from a background of trauma, and they’re overcoming trauma and they found that outlet through entrepreneurship, I can tell you I doubt my daughter who is going to have every everything that I did it and I don’t mean in, in buying things for her but the attention she needed needs in life, the love the ability for from my wife and I to listen to her and respect where she comes from. All of those things, there’s no, there’s not that she’ll have her own trauma. And whatever it is, we all have trauma, right. But for her, I don’t know, she’s gonna be an entrepreneur, because there’s no burning need to prove anything, because she’s so comfortable in who she is, at nine years old. I’ll never have the kind of comfort level that she has already in her life. And I celebrate that thing. It’s amazing. But I think for entrepreneurs, we’re we’re rooted in a lot of trauma that we channeled into something good and positive and betterment of the world. A lot of we all have trauma, right. And I think some people channel their trauma into crime, some of them into abuse, entrepreneurs channeling into creating jobs and a better life. I think that’s amazing. And maybe that’s the celebration in and of itself.
Mike Malatesta 06:21
You know what I had someone on my podcast a while ago who actually referenced PTSD, in conjunction with entrepreneurs, which I’ve never heard before, I’d never heard. So sort of always heard it in a military setting. And I just guess I’d never really thought that much about the dramatic impact that trauma would have on someone.
Phillip Stutts 06:42
Yeah. Have you ever done? You’re gone to a therapist?
Mike Malatesta 06:46
No, I haven’t. Are you laughing at me?
Phillip Stutts 06:51
Well, I’m laughing at you. Because we all have trauma, right? I’m spending eight years I’ve done 1000s of hours of therapy in various forms. I’ve literally taken LSD and MDMA, which is, you know, ecstasy with a therapist, in my wife in the room. And to unlock all of that trauma, if you don’t know what that is, it’s, it’s about to be legalized in this country. It’s in its third clinical trial at Johns Hopkins University. And they’ve really done it with a lot of people that have been a lot of veterans that have been over in Afghanistan and Iraq, who experienced massive PTSD. And they found that instead of ignoring their problems, or giving them a drug like Prozac for their whole life, that just by taking MDMA, or mushrooms, they can overcome all their PTSD, PTSD, or their trauma, in literally hours, it’s over. And I’ve done it, I had to do it illegally, I had to do it underground, I did it with a therapist, and it’s the most impactful thing I’ve ever done in my life. And so I’ve overcome a ton on that and understood where all my behaviors come from, when I act out where that you know, when I yell at somebody, or I get frustrated at somebody, that’s just the shame I feel from when I was five years old as a kid. And I know where it comes from. And I’ve just done a lot of work on myself. And so when I look at, you know, ultimately your original question, I’m proud of who I am and where I’ve come from. But, you know, I’m at the beginning of this journey, I didn’t know I’m 47, I didn’t start this journey until I was about 39. And this journey of transformation of who I am, and you know, I had the chance to over, you know, we repeat the patterns of our parents over and over and over again. And that’s the kind of stuff that in your teenage years, you will never be like them in this way. And you name 10 things in the wake up 20 years later, and you’re doing all of those things. And I have no resentment, my parents did the best they could with the tools they had. But the bottom line is that I had to change my behaviors in order for my daughter to have less traumas of what I went through. So I didn’t pass those on to her. Anyway, long story short, that’s, you know, what you asked the entrepreneur question, I just channeled it into entrepreneurship. One of the things that I have uncovered in all my work is how much rejection I went through in my life. With the massive amounts of rejection, I’m not going to go into all of it, but massive, like 10 times more than anybody else. Any normal or regular person or on average, let’s just say, and when you go through that much trauma, I have a rejection from basically five years old until, you know, my 20s or my you know, late 20s When I decided to become an entrepreneur. reject rejection doesn’t bother me as much anymore. So I’m the perfect entrepreneur. I get shut down every day. You know, things don’t happen every day. Things don’t work. workout every day. And I’m like, okay, yeah, it’s just a little bit of rejection, I can handle that I’ve got a muscle for it. And so maybe that’s, that’s a good thing for me as far as being an entrepreneur.
Mike Malatesta 10:11
And that’s, that’s interesting, because this whole thing about, you know, as a teenager saying, I’m never going to be like that. But the reality is, you’re taught how you’re taught. And it’s hard for you to know what other reality there might be. But this whole sort of rejection thing, when was it? Where, when? And how did you first convince yourself and I got that in air quotes? Because it seems it sounds like you’ve just sort of figured figured that out more recently. But how did you sort of think you were past it? When you were never really past it? It’s it? How do you think you were when you were a young adult? Say, for example, like, I got out of, you know, I’m out of the house now. And I’m,
Phillip Stutts 10:55
oh, I, the, the, the abuser or the abused became the abuser. I became the rejecter.
Mike Malatesta 11:02
Oh, okay. Yeah, I was your power was, Oh, that
Phillip Stutts 11:05
was my power, whether you work for me whether I, you know, I didn’t have a serious girlfriend. I was 32. I just went through women like crazy. I rejected everybody I could I literally went from the abuse to the abuser and I wasn’t abused. I’m not saying that. I’m saying that metaphorically. Yeah. But I, I treated people horribly, I was going to reject them before they could ever reject me. And that lasted, you know, in some form or another, not until I was about 4344 years old. I’m 47. And in a in a MDMA psychedelic session, that was revealed to me, and then I had a choice, what was I going to do with that information? And I had to change or I could go down the path of a broken marriage, a broken family, a broken business, and those are the those were the gonna be the consequences for me very soon. And I had to turn that around. And, you know, I’m a work in progress.
Mike Malatesta 12:03
And are you willing to sort of take me through the journey of the first time with that? Because first of all, the first time experimenting or, or maybe experimentation isn’t the right word? I’m not sure what the right word is. But you know, I hear Tim Ferriss talk about that a lot. Sure. Max talked about that a lot. But I’m wondering to myself, Okay, what has to happen? Before you say, Okay, this, you know, this is something that I need to experiment with, or try and then well, how do you feel going into it? Were you excited? Were you nervous? Were you? Yeah, I just having never been through it. I’m just curious about that. Well, one
Phillip Stutts 12:45
thing is you never go into psychedelic medicine, if you haven’t done previous work on yourself, like to just walk in and think it’s gonna solve a problem is wrong. I had done four or five years worth of therapy, a lot of therapy with, with psychologist with therapists. And there tended to be a point where I plateau where I just couldn’t get the uncertain things I was completely blocked by. And I have someone that I’m very connected with that said, Hey, you should try this, it’s going to help. And he said it to me, because I did the work before. He introduced it to me. And so I went to, there’s a one most famous sort of therapist in this world is out of New York, I went and he flew it up, my wife and I flew up to New York, to do it. And I was so nervous, because I knew I would face my demons. You got to face your demons. Yeah. Whether it’s MDMA or LSD, or mushrooms or Ayahuasca or whatever it is, you are going to face shit you didn’t want to ever face that’s the and here’s the thing, 99.9% of people, they’ll just decide not to face that stuff. I tend to always take the road less traveled in the most painful road in the short run. Because on the other side of that, that short term pain is long term happiness, joy, empathy, kindness, generosity. But you have to make the decision to do that. And people don’t want to look, we just see this with COVID. nobody’s willing to do any of the hard work. I’ve worked out for 25 straight years, about four to five days a week, I eat an incredibly healthy diet. And yet, the government wants to place restrictions on people that do the right thing that are unvaccinated, versus people that are overweight. Have you know, comorbidities aren’t doing the right things and it’s just like, good. I’ll take the booster or I’ll take the vaccine and guess what? I get to do whatever I want in society now. Right? So you punish the people that They do the hard work that that’s the way the world works right now and the people that are healthy, and probably could get COVID and probably do okay on it, and then have natural immunity. They’re the ones that get punished. And so it’s a metaphor. And my point is, my most people never going to walk into that therapists office and go, I’m going to take a drug and find out all of my demons, and then I’m going to have to look at myself in the mirror, and I’m going to have to make a decision of what I want to do. I did not want to do this, this was not an easy decision, I have never been so nervous in my life. And I was so nervous to do this. And so nervous about what it would reveal that I looked at my wife in the hotel room as we were going to ordering the Uber to go do this and go to this therapists office and do this psychedelic session that I looked at her and I said, I don’t want you to come, I’m going to go by myself. So the last act that I did before I did this and had this revelation that I just talked about when the rejection was that rejected my wife and told her stay in the room.
Mike Malatesta 16:00
Right? And did she? She did and,
Phillip Stutts 16:03
you know, it was, that was not a good thing. It was something I had to face after the session. And I actually knew now why I did that in the past, I just would have been like, No, don’t come in. I had no unconsciously I had no idea what that was why that was. And this time, I came back from the session. And I said, I know exactly why I did that. And I’m sorry, you know, and I had to it’s not about apologizing all the time. It’s about changing behaviors. And so I’ve, you know, I usually do a psychedelic session, I spent a year in therapy, integrating that session, and then I go to another one. And then I spent a year in therapy and agreeing that session, and then I go to another one. And so that’s sort of my path. And do you
Mike Malatesta 16:45
did that first one reveal what you thought it would fill up? Or did it reveal something that you weren’t conscious of when you was
Phillip Stutts 16:56
no, not conscious of it at all? No, no? No, but it’s where all of my behaviors came from was a fight or flight to not be rejected?
Mike Malatesta 17:07
Right. Interesting. Okay. Well, thanks for sharing that I appreciate you wrote in the book. Until I was 40. I was a lost soul and a want to be entrepreneur, and it seems like seems like that line might lead up to some of what you just talked. Yeah, a lot of it. What’s been amazing to me is like, if that’s true, and I’m assuming that it is true, it’s true. You wrote it, you know, since 40, or 47. And, you know, that that’s what’s been found, because, you know, when you look at, you know, your resume your bio, and all the things that you’ve that you’ve done, you know, the the, I would say the normal person looking from the outside is looking at that and go lost it 40 I don’t know, doesn’t look, he doesn’t look lost or want to be. So I’m just curious. I want
Phillip Stutts 18:01
to be entrepreneurs. This I had a one man business me. I had never I had it for nine years, I had never even knew what a profit and loss statement was. I didn’t know what a balance sheet was. Literally, I didn’t know what it was nine years in. I finally took a class and, and they brought it up and I go, what’s a p&l? And they go, how long have you been had your business? I said nine years. They said, How are you running? I gotta just look at the bank account. That’s a one a printer.
Mike Malatesta 18:29
Okay? So look at a bank account, turn everything else over to accountant to do your taxes. And that’s that,
Phillip Stutts 18:34
yeah, he produced a p&l and I never looked at I didn’t know what it was. It made me nervous to look at it. I didn’t even look at it. So that’s the entrepreneur. The lone soul was everything I told you about earlier. Right. Okay. And, and, you know, that’s clearly, you know, I guess we just define that pretty clearly.
Mike Malatesta 18:50
Yeah. Okay. All right. I just wanted to make sure that I had that right. Yeah.
Phillip Stutts 18:54
So let’s I was good at what I did. I was an artist. Well, yeah, that’s not an entrepreneur.
Mike Malatesta 18:59
Right. Yeah. See? Yeah. Okay. So let’s talk about how you became an artist.
Phillip Stutts 19:06
So, you come on an artist, you know what I mean by that, right?
Mike Malatesta 19:09
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Really good at what you do. And you know, you’re like a, I don’t know, like a painter, right? People want to hire you because you paint great stuff. And you were good at helping people win elections or put put campaigns together. Right. Yeah. That’s what you’re talking about. Yeah, that’s how, how did you get started with that?
Phillip Stutts 19:30
Well, I mean, I’m a I’m the first generation of ADHD kids. And, you know, there there was no ADHD. They hadn’t come up with the H part yet. They would just add it was attention deficit disorder. I was diagnosed by a therapist when I was 17 years old, or not, I’m sorry, 15 years old, in 1989. And they put me on Ritalin. And, ultimately, Mike, I can only do the things I’m really passionate about because my attention just can’t Stay with it right? If you give me something I’m passionate about man, I’m super focused like insanely focused, right almost to the point of, I can’t focus on anything else. And so I only cared about two things growing up, I care. I love college football, but I’m five foot nine, and 150 pounds and college football was not going to be in my future. But I like watching it. And the other was, I liked political campaigns. I didn’t I don’t care. But I didn’t care about like tax policy and environmental policy and all that kind of stuff. I cared about the elections, I was so fascinated by how people got elected, sort of the marketing of it. And it ultimately ended up being what I ended up going into, because I was so passionate about it. And, you know, there was a three, there was a three year period from 2000 2001 2002 by the end of 2000. I’m sorry, 2000. Yeah, basically 2002 1002, where I had a total of about 22 days off total, including weekends over a three year period. And I loved it, man, I loved it. I hated it. It was everything to me. I could work Saturdays all day long. You know, to midnight, I loved it, you couldn’t stop me. And that’s kind of why I got into it. I was running governor’s races, you know, the United States governor, Governor racer, that Louisiana at the age of 29 years old, I was running a helping to run a US Senate race at the age of 28. I was in the West Wing meeting in the White House, the President 26 It was heady stuff, man. And, and it fuel had a lot of fuel for
Mike Malatesta 21:39
that 26 meeting in the in the in the White House of Fame. I think that’s the one where you were with Secretary of Education. Age is that that was so funny. Because, yeah, nice story, because the I had a fighter pilot on my podcast. And he said that, you know, when you come out of flight school, you know, you’re you think you’re this big deal, right? And you get into the next stage, I can’t remember what the next stage was. But the nickname they give everybody that goes into the next stage was n and f g 1234. Whatever it is, and F G stands for new frickin guy. And so you go from, like, way up here to you know, you’re sort of nobody and then the book you reference. I think it was President Bush, you refer to you as one of these guys, or something that Secretary Secretary Yeah, that he gets, you know, he gets somebody bolted on to him really, I guess to help him like an assistant or something and you so NFG came to mind with when when you made reference, right? Sort of the same like you think yeah, just got appointed this great appointment. And and it was an obviously their status and, and in recognition for a job well done with that. But you’re still just an NF T. Right? Yeah, that’s really make it. Yeah. So your podcast, the undefeated marketing podcast, but what? What are you What made you do it? And what are you trying to accomplish with it?
Phillip Stutts 23:11
That’s really easy. I wanted to get a free content out to people that read the book, or people that want to understand how the marketing world has completely been turned upside down. And there’s a new approach. A Moneyball approach, not a guesswork approach is a way to be successful in marketing. In the in the crazy disruptive digital world. There’s a process and a formula to follow. And obviously, I read the book, which you kindly put up at the being of this interview, but I said we should I want to continue to have conversations on it. And I have a simple rule. The only guests that come on are my friends. And I it’s funny, this is really what I do. I get pitched every day from strangers that want to come on. And I tell them if they pay me $5,000 They can come on otherwise, I’m just gonna have my friends. And I know they’re gonna all say No, right? No one’s paying me five grand. That’s the whole point. But my friends are Jay Abraham, who’s literally the greatest marketer in the history of, you know of him in America in the history. He is the greatest he’s helped make over $22 billion for his clients. He’s on the Mount Rushmore of marketers in this world. I’ve had, like you said Peter Diamandis and James L. Teacher. We we’ve got a guy coming up in a couple of weeks, named Brian miles who just sold his company for $137 million. And he walks through his new startup, how he’s marketing that and how he plans to scale it and grow it and exit. I just want to I want to give free content out to help people. This is one I always say, I write a blog. I have a podcast and I have a book that you can pay bucks for and you can pretty much get all you need on the marketing front for about eight bucks. I mean, you can get endless content from me. And for me, that’s a lot of fun. I have fun doing it.
Mike Malatesta 25:05
And Jay Abraham, he’s kind of interesting to me because I listened to him a lot. And your your marketing program, the five step program is all about data, data, data, data data. In a world where we can, we can have so much data that it can be very difficult to know what to do with and if I remember Jays career sort of, you know, he was the same way with data, data data, I just had to get it in a lot different way, then
Phillip Stutts 25:33
we become really good friends and he loves obviously, I make his approach a lot easier. And so we do a lot of stuff together.
Mike Malatesta 25:40
Right, right, right. And I mentioned that I listened to your your episode with Peter Diamandis, we are both in abundance 360, which is Peter’s mastermind, I suppose. And, and one of the things that is unique, I think about that group, one of the many things that are unique about that group is this idea of a or an MTP. And I think in your podcast, and even in a blog that you wrote, you basically credit, Peter with saving your, your life or something. Yes, something along those lines, which is pretty heavy, pretty heady stuff. Can you talk about your I’m still working on my massively transformative? Yes, I can run it by you if you want. But your your yours developed? Not. Not long after you know, you joined and you had a and now it’s if I, if I, I’m up to date correctly, it’s, you’ve made some remarkable progress.
Phillip Stutts 26:38
Yeah, so I have an incurable oil doctor say it’s incurable. I don’t, but it’s a doctor say it’s an incurable esophageal disease called Achalasia. Basically, the muscles and the nerves in my esophagus don’t work, they’re dead. And so for eating purposes, it’s extraordinarily hard for me to eat food because everything gets lodged in my esophagus. No matter how much water I drink, food stays in the esophagus, which makes my esophagus erode and is susceptible to cancer. It’s a it’s a big problem affects about one out of 100,000 people, millions of people have this. There’s no, you know, up to this date, there’s no cure to the disease. And so when I was at abundance, 360, Peter got on stage, and you’ve seen him, he says, people to take out your notebook and, and, you know, take a moonshot, moonshot, something people say is impossible, and you’ll make possible and he’s like, and do it in five years or something. And so I wrote my notebook, I’d find a cure to this disease in five years, that was in February or late January 2017. So we’re in 2022. So we’re talking in January, January 20, as of today, and so we’re talking five years ago, write a very long story short, but I started on this cure path, found and partnered with Johns Hopkins University, we extracted almost a billion stem cells out of my thigh muscle group in a lab, they created the first what they would call compassionate use case in history with me the compassionate use case is like a clinical trial, except on the first one before it’s like three steps before a clinical trial. I’m the only person has ever attempted what we’re about to tell you. No, no animal has ever attempted it. I mean, this hasn’t been tested on animals
Mike Malatesta 28:30
and one this is a Philip stocks original. Yeah, so they
Phillip Stutts 28:33
injected in, right for the pandemic in February 2020, they injected 250 million stem cells into my esophagus to try to help hopefully regrow or re restart the muscle in the nerve in, in my esophagus. That procedure did not work. And it took that was in February 20. So then, in the fall of 2021, they basically said we can do this one more time. We want to try different areas of your esophagus. Do you want to do it? I said sure. So this time, they injected about 650 million stem cells into my esophagus into a different region. And about three days later, I started eating easier and we don’t know why. Yet, in March of 2020, to go back to Hopkins, they’re going to scope and look at everything and figure it out. But it’s now what four months later I still have relief. My it is not cured. It is I’ve I can eat about 3025 to 35% Better than I was able to eat for the previous 11 years, which is massive for me. I mean, that is like a game changer. It used to take oh I don’t know 64 To 280 ounces of water to get down one meal And now I can get that meal down and about in about 32 ounces of water 30 to 40 ounces of water. And so we don’t know what happened. But the bottom line is that I’m the first person in human history who’s ever improved his condition with this disease. So this disease does not ever improve, it only sort of devolves. And so yeah, we don’t know what it is. I’ll find out in a couple months. But I’m pretty hopeful and pretty excited. And it all kind of goes back to Peter inspiring me to take that moonshot.
Mike Malatesta 30:35
And without treatment would be where you’d need a feeding bag at some point, or what how? Oh, yeah,
Phillip Stutts 30:40
I mean, I’m, I’m on a trajectory where they would remove my socks, they gave me in 2016, the Mayo Clinic gave me five to 10 years before I was removal of the esophagus and on a feeding tube, and I still have my esophagus, I changed, everything changed, my diet changed, obviously, did this procedure changed, you know, a lot of a lot of behaviors in my life. And, and, you know, I’m sitting here, still going strong and actually improving. And so we don’t know what that means. You know, I have a lot of people that suffer from Achalasia. And, you know, they think that this miracle that whatever’s happening to me is this miracle cure is just around the corner. And I’m like, if it whatever it reveals, it’s going to still take years to get there. And I’ll I’ll be leading the charge. But, you know, I’ve taken a huge step forward. And actually, I did it for years and eight months. So I made my goal of doing it within five years. And now it’s how can we continue to make this better?
Mike Malatesta 31:49
And if I remember correctly, before that, that before Peter said that, and you wrote that down, you had been, you know, basically on a track of, well, whatever the doctors say, I just do, you weren’t even really, I think you were taking the path. If again, if I remember correctly, that a lot of us take like, like, I think about my mom, now, you know, she’s got all these different things, right? Well, the doctor says this, and the doctor says, Well, yeah, but you’re not getting any better. So maybe the doctor, maybe another doctor, you know, might have a different opinion. But I think I remember you saying that. You were I don’t know you were sort of like maybe ignoring it, or just going along with whatever they told you. Is that right?
Phillip Stutts 32:30
Yeah, no, I mean, they I definitely had my head head in the sand and I outsource my disease to my doctors. And I, you know, I, you know, I’m really grateful for the experience because it prepared me for COVID keto. So, again, in 2016, or 17, I went for a checkup at the Mayo Clinic, the Mayo Clinic and they and I said, Hey, I think I want to try to find a cure to this disease. And they’d like laughed at me. And they literally giggled at me and said, Yeah, take your take your medications we gave you by the way, those medications go away. Yeah, the medications have long term dementia effects, but they work in the short run, take those medications, and we’ll see you in six months. Yeah. And so it taught me that there’s, look, I don’t begrudge the Mayo Clinic doctors are the they’re the best in the world. But they see 100 patients a day, and I’m being lumped in a group with 100. Other patients who may have different symptoms, may have different problems, may have different diagnosis is of the same disease. And they’re just all putting us in a box, giving us a pill and telling us to go home. And it made me realize how screwed up the medical system is. And while I have five different doctors right now, I take all their opinions, but then I formed my own. And, you know, during COVID, like I literally reached out to all my doctors, and I said, What’s the best way to handle those. And four of those doctors said, Don’t ever take the vaccine, these are doctors. And one of them said, take the vaccine. And the other four said if you get COVID, here’s the protocol, all the things you need to do. And so I said, Okay, great. Now that I had all that from information, I can make a plan. But it’s going to be the point I make because I consulted the best doctors, I have functional doctors, I have regular doctors, I have celebrity doctors. But ultimately, I have to listen to them, and then make the best choice for me because they do a great job. But I’m one of many, and I need to figure out what works best for me.
Mike Malatesta 34:49
And do you do you think that this progress that you’re making with these psychedelic sessions, for example, are happy Having some kind of impact on the progress that you’re making with the disease, as I think is
Phillip Stutts 35:05
all Yeah, like, I think it’s all intertwined. Yeah.
Mike Malatesta 35:09
Okay. So let’s move to your book, John. And there’s a lot of stuff in the book. But the thing that got my attention was when you basically broke it down in one sentence, and it was marketing is a bloodbath. And I, having been, like, so mom around entrepreneurs all the time. And I think that marketing is one of the things that most of them, the vast majority of them, want, you said, Put your hand head in the sand about your health, I think most of them want to put their head in the sand about marketing, because they can’t, they can’t. It can’t wrap they can’t figure it out. And to them, they see it as you know, money with with no tangible return. Some some not that they don’t see a return, they just can’t put like you said I can’t you know, I’ve never couldn’t read a p&l didn’t have a balance sheet. It seems like they have no p&l or balance sheet for marketing. Spend and you in your book you talk about well, marketing’s a bloodbath. But here’s basically a five step process that I know if you follow it. And interestingly, you also give examples of when you didn’t follow it with clients and why it didn’t work out, which I thought was really good. Like, he didn’t just say, Yeah, everyone I do works great, because you’re a human to and sometimes you get pressure back and you, you know, change, but But you were able to put, you know, these five steps together, and I guess I just want to, you know, you want to walk through them, or you just want to tell me why what’s what ultimately should people be thinking about when it comes to marketing?
Phillip Stutts 36:50
Well, I mean, think of it like this, if you there are a lot of people may not I grew up with a lot of people that love to gamble. And they love to go to the casino. And they would have about $1,000 in their pocket. And they’d be walking into the casino. And they’d look at me and they’d say, Philip, when we walk out of this Casino Night, we’re leaving in that limo and they’d be pointing to the limo. Now, this is back in the 90s, early 94 limos actually meant something, right? And they’re like, We’re leaving in that limo, right? And they walk on, and they not only lost 1000, they withdrew another two or 3000, they lost that and they’re out all this money, and they’re depressed, and they’re sad. And they’re like, What did I do, and marketing is kind of the same way. The house is always gonna win. So the house of the big tech companies, right? The house is Facebook and Instagram, and Google and YouTube, they are always going to get your money. Regardless. Now, you could have a hot hand every once in a while and do really good at your marketing. But eventually you’re going to lose and you’re going to lose more than you want. And ultimately, I found out in the marketing industry, when I did a ton of research for walked into the corporate marketing or business marketing industry. When I when I kind of started applying political strategies to businesses, but when I walked in, I went, oh my god, everybody, all the marketers in this industry, literally guess everything. They sit around a table, and they they butter up the owner, and they tell him how great they are. And then they say, Oh, we came up with this incredible concept. It’s a whole new brand for you, and all this stuff. And then in my brain, I’m thinking, well, they they just made that up. They just sat around and brainstormed at a conference table. And what if that concept or that brand or those ads? What if they don’t actually work on the customer or the client? Like you’ve just wasted all this money, without any assurances that you’re going to have an ROI. And so I said, you know, it’s weird, what the way we run marketing campaigns to like politicians is rooted in sort of a Moneyball approach. It’s all rooted in data, every decision is rooted in data. And, you know, it’s optimized. And so we have to, you know, in politics, if I lose more than I went out of business, in the there’s so much innovation in political marketing, because we have an election every two years, we have candidates that raise a lot of money and spend it all and if you you know, you lose, you’re out of business, no one’s gonna hire you, you got to win a lot more than you lose all of those things. But we’re so massively innovative that what we realized since 2004, was the team was playing the data and analytics game in marketing and then utilizing that to optimize client campaigns over and over again for better performance. And you know, I have the whole book is about the five step formula that we use to like presidents and how businesses have used it how we’ve used it with businesses. We have four clients right now my on the corporate side, that are one is 106 year old furniture company and They had the best six months in the history of their company, in 2020 Furniture Company, we work with a law firm out in New York. And they’ve had the best two months in the history of their law firm, a 27 year old law firm after working through our system, we work with a pest control company that’s been around for 37 years. And they have had the best month in the history of their company in the past year. And we work with a granola food company, and their Black Friday and 2021 was the greatest Black Friday sales they’ve ever had in the history of their company, the company’s been around for 12 years. And I’m not saying that because I’m some genius, I just follow a data backed approach to their marketing, where every step of the way we’re evaluating the data and optimizing what works and getting rid of what doesn’t, and the messages we come from, or we use for brand for anything else, all of those messages. They come from what the customer of the company thinks, not what you guess, and hope they like, or you go on, oh, my customers, they love this product, well, maybe they’ve never been communicated properly on some other product that you have, that could make you 10x. And my point is, is ultimately it goes back to the step one of our process, which is, you know, understand your customer. And for me, I gambled and bet everything on that. So I have a partnership with the largest data collection analytics and AI company in America. And we have in our database, 240 million American consumers 550 million connected devices. And we’re tracking 10 billion with a B 10 billion online purchasing decisions every day, and a trillion searches. And I can literally overlay your customer list your client list, b2b, b2c doesn’t matter, econ doesn’t matter. And then I can track their movements online. And then I can spit out a 55 to 75 page report that tells you everything you’ve ever wanted to know about your customers, what social media platforms, they’re on in a chronological order. So if you’re spending money on Facebook, and I can tell you that Facebook is the sixth performing best platform, why are you spending all that money now I’ve optimized your entire budget to play Moneyball to make sure that every dollar you use is utilized effectively and efficiently. And then the message is, we can tell you what the top three values are in the lives of your customer, the top three values Who the hell can do that today? I can. And if you knew that your top three values of your customer, wouldn’t you be marketing to those out he’s not in a manipulative way, in an empathetic way. And so my point is, is that you know, the rest of the steps they can speak for themselves. But we do a deep dive. So you know, we just did this report for our mutual friend Peter Diamandis. And, you know, Peter is partners with Elon Musk, and Peter has is now we’re going to do some more projects for him. But you know, this guy is like blown away, or Mark Cuban has endorsed this data approach that I have, because I’ve worked with Mark and advise mark on this kind of stuff. And I can go on and on and on and on. I mean fortune 200 companies, startups, private equity, venture capital, I’ve worked with almost every single industry, b2b b2c, e commerce, everything. And I’ve never, ever had one single person invest in this product and not be blown away by what they find. And so look, I just, it’s not that I’m trying to sell it, I’m just trying to tell you, there’s a different way to market in this age. And the fact is, is that you’re being taken advantage of as a business owner, every single day by the marketing industry. And you know, I’ll give you one, one last story before we get out of here. So we did some work for Shark Tank company. It’s actually this office chair I’m sitting in right now. And when they came, so they were on Shark Tank, they were on strike tank. And when they and when they came to us, they said, Hey, we just got a bunch of VC money. We got to triple the company in the next two years. And we looked at their data. And we found out kind of like I said earlier, Facebook was the fourth performing platform for their customers. They were spending 85% of their ad dollars on Facebook. And they had a Facebook marketing agency. So do you think that Facebook marketing agency is ever going to tell them not to spend 85% of their budget on Facebook, now they’re probably getting 100 And my thing is, I don’t give two shits, where you spend your money. I care about what your customers are and what they want to hear from you. And I just follow the data I’m I am literally media, social media, traditional media. I’m platform agnostic. I go with the data tells me and that makes me ethical. And it also makes me efficient and ruthlessly efficient with marketing. And the clients that we work with have grown and so I know the formula works and I decided to tell the tell the whole story in the book and I think you you absolutely said this. My book is not a textbook. My book is a fun book marketing book on stories. I did an interview earlier. Today, and this guy said to me, oh my god, I saw this book and I read another marketing book. He goes, and I read the first page, and I’m like, Okay, this guy engineering and then I read the second page. I’m like, Oh, that was a cool story. And then all of a sudden, he goes, I couldn’t put it down. Because the most fun, it’s a ton of fun marketing stories. Do you ever want to know how political campaign works? This is the book, if you want to know how that translates over to business success, then this is the book and I just tell everything through stories.
Mike Malatesta 45:26
Yeah. And that’s what I liked about it. Because you start, everyone sort of starts with a political story. And then you move it to, you know, to a real business case, story that, yeah, it makes it like the juxtaposition is really, it’s really, really cool. And you know, that the thing that you said there that was very interesting was when you go and you run all this data, you don’t really even need to know what the company thinks of its customers. Or what No, I find that out yourself in
Phillip Stutts 45:58
it. Yeah. When I deliver the report, I go, I just want to give you a heads up, I don’t know much about your company. I know everything about your customers. And that’s what this call is gonna be.
Mike Malatesta 46:08
Awesome. Alright, Philip, thank you so much for joining me today. I know you got to run. I do appreciate it. I definitely recommend that you buy Phil’s book, undefeated marketing, you could also listen to it, by the way, I’m recording my book right now is that was that a cool process?
Phillip Stutts 46:23
I didn’t record it. i Everybody gave me the advice. Don’t do it yourself. It’s the worst thing you’ll ever go through. And I’m so glad I didn’t the guy that did it. I’ve really, I literally audition like 10 people. And I really liked this guy a lot. I will say this before we get out of here. If anybody is interested in learning how their customers would look in our data, we do offer a 30 minute free consultation. It’s a phone call with my top data team members. And they will literally say, you know, tell us about your customers. And then they’ll tell you how our data interacts with that and what to expect. If you were to invest in it. You do not have to invest in it. But it is a free assessment and you go to Philip stutz.com/insights. And it takes you literally 20 seconds. Yeah, I think you’ve even filled this out before
Mike Malatesta 47:14
I did. I did. Yep, I’m going to go to the company that bought mine. And I’m going to I’m going to actually go to five people today and recommend they go and and take advantage of this case it is a killer. It is a killer, killer report that will open your eyes to a bunch of things. I think we were a little bit too new and putting too many companies together and we just couldn’t figure out what we were doing. Phil
Phillip Stutts 47:37
always said if people said they don’t want to do it, it’s never about me. So you’re good. It’s in your business lifecycle. It has to be a good fit, right? But the bottom line is, you know before you go out and spend a ton of money on marketing, get it right to begin with invest your dollars and what work so that you’re not looking back to your shenana and going I can’t believe how much money we’ve spent we’re back to square one. That’s what I’m avoiding for all these business owners.
Mike Malatesta 48:03
And it doesn’t matter right b2b b2c e commerce whatever.
Phillip Stutts 48:07
Yeah, we work with a billion dollar b2b company. We work with a lot of E commerce companies and we work with a lot of b2c companies to
Mike Malatesta 48:14
cool. Thank you so much for being on the show. Yeah, what
Phillip Stutts 48:17
an honor man, thank you for having me. I take care
