Navigating Entrepreneur Dips With Steven Sauder

LMScast with Chris Badgett

In this LMScast episode, Steven Sauder talks about how he overcame the difficulties of becoming an entrepreneur, started his own marketing firm, and started his podcast, “Through the Dip”.

Steven Sauder is a seasoned businessman, Steven Sauder founded Hustlefish, a digital marketing firm that specializes in paid advertising, SEO, and website creation. He talks about a crucial “dip” he had when trying to quickly grow his firm by spending substantially in infrastructure and employing account directors, only to watch the plan collapse because of poor sales and excessive expense.

He learned from this experience how crucial it is to test concepts carefully and put sustainable growth ahead of pursuing quick expansion. Steven’s podcast offers insightful information for others by focusing on the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and the lessons they have learnt from conquering them. His organization, Hustlefish, offers digital marketing services such as SEO, paid advertising, and website creation to customers that appreciate consistent, achievable growth.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a very special guest. His name is Steven Sauder. You can find him at Hustlefish. That’s at hustlefish. com. But first welcome to the show, Steven. Thanks. It’s awesome to be here. We’re going to talk about Steven’s podcasts. And we’re going to talk about his work as an agency.

We’re going to talk about marketing and different ways to think about that. But let’s start with your podcast, which is new as of this recording. It’s about to come out. I’m going to be a guest on the show. It’s called through the dip. Is that right?

Steven Sauder: Yeah. Yeah, that’s correct. We’re just getting started.

It you can find it right now on Apple podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to it. But all there is like a little one minute and 30 second intro. But if you head over there and you subscribe You’ll get notified the second we drop our first real episode, which Chris is going to be in the first batch of those.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. A podcast is no small commitment. Tell us the story of Through the Dip, why you’re starting it, what the angle is, who it’s for. And yeah, what it’s all about.

Steven Sauder: Yeah, that’s a great question. I’ve been around entrepreneurship pretty much my entire life. I worked for a lot of entrepreneurs. So people that were starting businesses for about 10, 15 years started one with one guy who was working out of his kind of a, like a one car garage.

And there was only four of us. Now I think they’re up to 80 people and they have some international offices thrown in there. So just being on that ride has always been a lot of fun. But about seven years ago. I started my own business and starting your own company is uniquely different to working for somebody else’s. Even though you get to watch what it’s like to start a company.

When you’re in that seat, trying to make the decisions and trying to decide Where the company should go or what. How you should spend your money or should you do a. Or should you do B it’s just a very different feeling and a very different seat to be sitting in. And while I’ve been working and building our marketing agency we’ve been working on it for about seven years now. And there was these moments where you where growth kind of stalls out.

The goals that you set, you start slipping and all of a sudden. Like these big, brilliant dreams that you had start slipping away just a little bit. Because life hits and whether it’s like the economy going up and down. Whether it’s some other force in the industry, Whether it’s personal life stuff and all of a sudden every once in a while, you find yourself in this dip and things will start going down. You have to start making some tough decisions around, where were you going to spend your money?

Who were you going to pay? All these kinds of big questions that aren’t necessarily easy to answer. And there’s not a cut and dry answer. It’s not like this is right and this is wrong. And you’re sitting there and you’re having to hold all of those things and try to figure out and navigate your way through the dip.

As an agency we just went through a dip about a year ago. I feel like some of the lessons that I learned going through those dip was some of the most important lessons that I’ve learned. I don’t think that I could have learned them any other way. And so in going through that All of a sudden I had this curiosity to talk to other people that have navigated their companies their businesses through a dip and what lessons did they learn?

What was it like? How did they make those tough decisions? And especially when you have the moment to look back a little bit and reflect on those decisions. We, like answering those questions of what would have you told yourself. Or what would have advices would you give yourself. Or even I think more you, interestingly would you do it again? Is the pain that I’m going through that dip worth it? So that’s where the idea of the podcast through the dip came from is to connect with other entrepreneurs and just learn about their lessons of navigating a business and making some of those tough calls and tough choices.

Chris Badgett: I love that. There’s a lot of content on the internet about success. And, winning and what I would call survivorship bias, but what about the hard times? So yeah and surviving that and figuring all that out and helping others with that. It’s a really noble podcast. I look forward to.

Being a serial listener to it. I love learning from other people’s stories. Tell us about one of your dips from about a year ago and your agency or whatever was going on there.

Steven Sauder: Yeah, we had some really ambitious growth plans and we had a, what I thought at the time was a really good plan to do it. I don’t, I still don’t think the plan is necessarily bad, but we put a lot of eggs.

In a single basket. And so what we decided to do was we were going to try to double our agency over the next 12 months. And what we wanted to do was go out and hire sales people or account executives, if you will, like that’s what we call them in the agency world, in different local markets.

Cities that had about somewhere between 150, 000 people more or greater up to about a half million people is the largest that we were looking at and have them get really plugged into their local community and sell our marketing services to other business owners. The premise behind that was that marketing is such a relationship business that it’s really hard to run ads around it.

It’s really hard to convince people to buy your product without having some sort of relationship because you’re asking them to put up money and you’re going to take that money and make, go spend it to make more money and then give that money back to them. It’s almost like like the financial advisor kind of world, also a very relationship driven world where it takes a lot of trust to kick something off.

So that was our plan to grow. So we hired three. Different account executives in different locations. We hire team around it so we can handle the increase flow. And we spent a lot of money on software so that we would be in a good place to be organized and streamlined and efficient as we started growing.

But the problem is that the sales never materialized the way that we thought they were. That what we thought people could do Just fell flat. And I think there’s a multitude of reasons for that. Like whether it was the right person or maybe we were selling or trying to sell the wrong thing, or maybe we didn’t have our services quite packaged up as well as they could, or build as much marketing around it as we should have.

I think all of those things played a little part in why it didn’t scale the way that we wanted it to scale. But. Ultimately what that resulted in was our overhead was incredibly high. We were just like burning through cash to have all these people, a part of our team. And then this question comes up, it’s like, how long do you burn through cash with the hopes of.

Hitting that sales goal that you have, like, how hard do you push to meet that goal? And at what point in time do you have to just pull the plug and take a loss on it and just say. You know what, this isn’t panning out the way that we expected it to work. We got to stop the bleeding somewhere and we got to downsize and we got to scale back to what we could do so we can live to fight another day.

So ultimately at the the beginning part of this year, we made the decision that, you know what, the numbers just are not looking good. There’s no way you could look at the numbers and reasonably assume that things were going to change the next three months. Unfortunately we had to go and do some layoffs and let go of some great people on our team, like people that I wish we could have kept. But there’s just no way to keep someone if you don’t have the sales to support that salary and it’s not it’s just not sustainable.

And so we ultimately had to let some people go, which was really disappointing. But now we’ve been able to right side that ship and we’re still growing just not as fast as I initially wanted to, or initially had planned. But it’s amazing to just like looking at myself like my attitude or what I was feeling.

In the moments when things weren’t going as well and the moments where things are going better now and like the level of anxiety and how I was trying to deal with that and working harder and longer hours, but like that not seeing that payoff just gets really discouraging. And all of a sudden, like just my energy level it’s felt like I just gave everything I could, but there was no more.

To give and you’re not sleeping at night because you’re trying to figure out maybe if I did this, maybe if I did that, maybe I could, get this deal to work out. There’s, I think there’s something to be said about pushing and fighting hard for something, but also not pushing too hard for something that you’re trying to create, to have it right.

Either things are going to happen and grow with you or else you’re fighting against everything Tooth and nail and maybe the world’s trying to tell you something else. Like maybe you’re going down a wrong path there Or you’re fighting a battle. That’s a little too hard to fight.

Chris Badgett: So if you could go back in time And talk Excuse me to your previous self when you were considering building a sales team knowing what you know Now what advice would you give to your previous entrepreneur self?

Getting ready to hire all these account executives.

Steven Sauder: I’d probably tell myself to go slower and to test things out more before doubling down. I think it’s really easy to have this mindset, at least for me, that like time isn’t on your side. Like I only have so many years here in this world. I only have so many, like so much money that I can make or how big can I get this?

Like I, I want to try to grow this company to be as big as I, as it can get. And I only have so many words, years to do it. So let’s go fast. But I think that’s a really dangerous mindset cause it gets you, it gets you into you referenced this earlier about people broadcasting this idea of success, right?

Like 10 X and everything. Or how do you. Like this idea of like viral growth versus this idea of just like sustainable growth. Like by virality is inherently not sustainable. If you look at viral marketing campaigns, usually it’s, it is something that like, Moves forward incredibly fast, but it doesn’t have a long lifespan.

Like very rarely does a viral thing have a long, have any sort of legs that carries it for years. It carries it for a moment and it’s cool for that moment. But I think approaching life where you’re not fighting against time and you’re not fighting against scale and you’re growing at something that is, you’re looking at more like sustainability, in growth.

How can you hit the next milestone without risking everything? There’s too much, there’s too much I think, wait that or I’m not sure what the right word to use. But people lift up people who like, not hit the home runs all the time. But it’s not the home run hitters that carry a baseball game.

And when the championship, like they’re a part of it, but like the people that could just show up and have a good batting average and just do get a couple of singles, maybe a double here, there that’s how you move the chain. That’s how you move the bases. That’s how you score.

In football and baseball and this is the truth of sports and it’s the truth of business too, but everybody wants that Hail Mary pass or that home run hit and it’s easy to fall into that trap.

Chris Badgett: So for context, what’s on offer at Hustlefish? What does the marketing agency offer? What kinds of services?

Steven Sauder: Yeah. We are a digital agency, so we do paid media. So like PPC, like Google meta tick tock like Instagram, Facebook, like all the, like the ad stuff we do SEO, and then we build a lot of websites and do some branding stuff around that. So essentially someone comes to us asking like, Hey, how.

How can I sell more of my things? Then we look at that and figure out what levers need to get pulled to scale your business or to sell more. And in working with a lot of clients, our best clients are Let’s The ones that have realistic growth models that are slow and make sense. And I’ve seen this a hundred times with the people that come in and say I want to become five times bigger and here’s this tiny budget.

But if we do it right, we can get there. It’s it doesn’t work out 99. 9999 percent of the time. But somehow I fell into that trap too. Like I, I was just like, Oh man, I think we can do it. I think if we make all the right decisions we can pull this off. But service wise, like generally when a client comes to us, we look at three things.

We look at one, do they need more traffic coming into their site? Do they just need more exposure? Two, do they need a higher conversion rate? To get whatever they want done. Or do you need to work on profitability and more of just business model type stuff? Generally, when someone’s talking about growth and scaling their problem, or the thing that they’re trying to fix, or the thing that they’re trying to propose to propel forward falls into one of those three areas.

And so we’ll help out with the first two. If it’s a little bit larger on the business model side. We’ll usually have some conversations around what they could do differently, but ultimately they’re the ones that have to fix it. But when people are coming to us looking for growth, those are like the three areas that all of our services plug into.

Chris Badgett: So we ask this question a lot on this podcast, but particularly for the agency folks out there. You tried outbound sales with sales team, but what is over the years actually working in, to answer the question, how to get clients, like what’s the mix? How do you get clients?

Steven Sauder: I think it is. For a marketing agency.

It’s all about relationships and like building those relationships with people and it’s hard to hack relationships. You can’t you can’t fake it, you got to log the hours. You got to log the time and be there and help people out wherever you can help them out. And. So I think some agencies have figured out ways to scale via like outbound type stuff. Although I’m always a little dubious about the numbers that they’ve projected out there just because all the agency owners that I know and talking to them and their numbers and what sales is looking like for them.

It’s almost always comes down to who they know and the relationships that they’ve built over time. So how long has Hustlefish been going? So we, Hustlefish is about seven years old now, but for a long time, it was just like a side hustle sort of thing. And so in reality, it’s been like more four years where it’s been a real business with like employees and like a full time commitment, for me, versus, working on a.

Chris Badgett: How much of the business comes from referrals from existing clients? I

Steven Sauder: would say maybe 40 to 30 percent of it comes from like referrals where we don’t know the person at all. And We know the person that referred them, but we don’t know the referred person that comes and talks to us.

But we usually have a good idea of how that relationship got connected back to us. And the rest of it’s like very one to one sort of relationships where we know. The person on a more personal level than just a random business sitting out there in the middle of nowhere.

Chris Badgett: How much has local played an aspect in your agency?

Like in the media area where you live versus the wide internet. Yeah.

Steven Sauder: A local is a hundred percent where. Everything comes from I, I don’t think there, I don’t think we could trace any of our customers back to a purely digital relationship where there was no geographic sort of point. We did this really interesting test about two years ago where we did a bunch of cold emails.

Reaching out to other agency owners saying, Hey if you have you’re really great at, creative copywriting but we can help build websites for you. We got some really great clients all inside of the state that we were in. So Indiana once you sent to somebody across the state line.

It was pretty much crickets. Like we got some conversations, but like this, the sale never closed or it wasn’t a great client. There’s something I think really important about geographic region and the amount of weight and trust that people put into knowing that you are there. There’s people that I didn’t meet in person.

For a long time that I chatted with, because we were in the same geographic state, like that’s the only commonality. And the only reason why they said yes to talk to me. And that’s where like the relationship started. But if. If I would have emailed somebody all the way across state lines to somewhere else, I think it would be way, way harder.

I think the one thing that’s interesting about this though, is I’ve had the exact opposite experience in the WordPress community, has this has no idea of geographic location. It has everything to do with the love for WordPress or the commonality of using that tool set or that technology.

And so I think there’s something really cool that WordPress has been able to do that many other industries have really struggled to.

Chris Badgett: In your offer stack. You do some WordPress stuff, but you also do things like paid ads and SEO, which doesn’t necessarily have to be WordPress based. How did you, how do you think about the stack of what the tools you work with and using things outside of WordPress as an example, some agencies are like super focused on WordPress and everything is just related to the WordPress site, but like running paid ads is very different.

And those are different platforms with different roles and that kind of thing. How do you think about focusing an agency on one piece of the stack versus providing more of the portfolio of solution that you do?

Steven Sauder: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think we started off just doing development stuff and that’s pretty much all we did. You build somebody, a website, and then all of a sudden either a. They need to get better conversion rates out of They’re users. Which is a little more dev centric. But still pretty firmly based in like this idea of messaging and how do you say something and but then also if.

You also need to get traffic for that site. So a lot of people have great ideas but then just don’t have the execution to generate the traffic around it. And so we would build these awesome sites and they’re just sit out there. And we wanted to get a lot more involved with how do we get these sites to do the thing that they’re supposed to do?

So drive traffic and drive conversions. And to do that, we just started working our way. Back up that, like we started out with SEO first cause it’s the closest to development maybe. And then, added paid ads onto that added, conversion rate optimization onto that.

Then as you add those services and then all of a sudden you start having people that are coming in with different technologies. Like they’re using Shopify instead of WooCommerce. Or they need a custom app built cause they’re doing something crazy custom that no one else is doing. And all of a sudden we started working in a bunch of different platforms and a lot of different services.

It became more about what is the ultimate goal. What are the best tools to use to hit that goal versus this is our little niche or stack that we’re playing in.

Chris Badgett: I love that. What’s a counterintuitive insight that you’ve figured out with working with paid ads over time?

That’s not as obvious. Oh that’s a good question. A

Steven Sauder: counterintuitive

I think the more hyper specific you can get with ads, the more interesting they become. And a common way to do that is to go down this route of like. How do I resonate with my person’s needs the most? Yeah. I think a more interesting way to do that is how do I throw up a face that somebody recognizes? Or how do I have somebody that is in their world talking to them?

So for instance we’ve been doing a lot of thinking about podcasts and like how to grow this podcast, right? An interesting way to do that would be to say, all right, when we do our podcast. I could take our podcast, chop it up into a bunch of little like ad snippets and throw it on Instagram Facebook or whatever.

And market to people who are in the WordPress space. Who are into courses and teaching people how to do things. And the chances that they would know you and recognize your face is insanely high. And so like I could run an ad instead of saying. I’m going to run an ad to people who are in this industry.

I say, how do I talk to somebody in this industry? And then funnel them to my podcast. That would be like a very interesting sort of way of doing it. If you’re thinking about it from a local standpoint. Who locally do people know? So I think an interesting thing is like a lot of, or some colleges have a kind of connection between like the college marketing department and other.

Companies and like we’ll do cross promotions with like their players and other companies and stuff. And so like you could take a basketball team, and have them come to your restaurant. And you could run ads with the basketball team at your restaurant. So all of a sudden now your ad isn’t, Hey, do you want.

Pizza or whatever it’s, Hey, check out where the basketball team hangs out. Like you love your college’s basketball team. You should hang out here. And so you’re not, you’re not approaching it from a need standpoint. You’re having people resonate with a need. You’re having people resonate with a person, which has a lot more deep, personal, like emotional ideas behind it.

That I think you can connect with people in a more real. Sort of way because it’s person to person or it’s moving it closer to person. So I don’t know I think for my like a counterintuitive ad sort of thing I think that’s an interesting way to start looking at ads is not just saying how do I?

Write the best copy or say the thing that resonates with people. How do you get? The person that already resonates with that person to say the thing. It’s a little bit similar to like influencer marketing, but done it in a more like local air way that someone who wouldn’t call themselves an influencer marketer would engage with that or something like that.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. In our pre chat and related to what you just said you’ve mentioned marketing with heart. So going more for the heart than the need or some logical argument. Tell us more about what out in the world is the possibility of marketing more with heart.

Steven Sauder: Yeah. I think there’s things that people resonate with more than solving a problem or making money or doing whatever.

So if you’re creating a course for somebody, um, I was talking to this person about they have this blue, they teach people how to play the ukulele and do bluegrass jams. So you could market that in two different ways. You could, you would go to somebody and you could say, want to learn the ukulele?

I can teach you how to play the ukulele. Or you could say, want to learn how to play the ukulele and jam with friends or want to learn how to jam with friends. I will show you how to jam with friends or be a part of a jam session. And I’ve seen signs up and I’ve seen people doing jam sessions and parks and stuff, and I always been like, Oh, that’d be cool to be able to join them.

I have no idea how to be a part of a jam session. I can play the guitar a little bit. I’ve never jammed with people though. So that’s a very foreign concept to me, but all of a sudden, like you’re taking this idea of learning an instrument. But putting it with people and putting it in context of society and a social sort of element around it.

And I think that touches a lot closer than this need of, Oh, I need to learn how to play the ukulele is no, I need to learn how to play the ukulele so I can jam with people. And that moves it way closer to. You could say like a need or want in somebody’s heart, but it’s more tangential than what your product or service is offering, but it actually like connects more with people and with people’s hearts, because I think relationships and doing life with other people.

It is such a huge part of emotion and life in general. There’s a there’s an improv comedy club right down the road. And they do improv lessons. They get some people who just want to learn improv. But almost all of their marketing stuff is you want to make friends? Like improv class is the way to do it.

And you have this huge group of people that I don’t think would ever take improv,but they’re like, I want to know how to connect with people better. And I see that link between improv and connecting with people. So I’m going to go sign up. I’m going to go sign up for that class. They’ve taken their product and services and not just Oh, I’m teaching you how to do that.

And they made it something bigger. They made it into a community and they have a lot of other things that go around that, like reinforce that idea over and over again. But I think that gets you closer to what people love and what people care about the closer you can get to that and not just, Oh, here’s the list of the problems that I solve.

I’ll teach you to do X. Play the guitar. Or here’s an app that solves why like I think like what you’re doing with like lifter is really cool. Yeah, here’s an, here’s a plugin that you can post courses. Awesome. That’s a need solved. But if you can say no, here’s how you create a community and here’s how you create a course so that people are engaged with you and this is how you build this whole thing around this idea that you have, like that’s, that way more.

then just like a plugin that solves a problem. And things like LMS cast and like podcasting and the stuff that you do at like showing up at WordCamps and stuff like that. I think connect that all together. And it’s no, it’s not just a plugin for sale. It’s something larger here.

There’s something bigger than just solving the problem of how do you do courses on WordPress?

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And yeah, it is something bigger, which I’m sure we’ll talk about. In our interview, so If you’re listening to this or watching this on youtube write down or go look for through the dip there was a great guest on this show.

His name was dane maxwell. I think he lives in indiana or illinois He wrote a book called star from zero and he had this framework of for really any business, but the whole thing was customer result mechanism. And he said, one of the biggest problems with businesses is that people get really focused on their mechanism, like running ads or stand up comedy.

Or playing an instrument. That’s just the mechanism. And we all know this as marketers is the people buy what they really want as a result. But often when we’re selling a service or a product, we over focus on the mechanism. And he had a word for that mechanism first thinking. And when you look at results and broaden out from jus. People who want to use my mechanism, that’s not really a target market.

That’s not really a clear result, but things like make friends. Discover community. Even community respect is something under the iceberg of conscious awareness. Like sometimes people buy a product because they’re looking for more respect from their community. It’s like a motivating factor.

Steven Sauder: I think what’s interesting is that. What I’ve found is people that focus on the mechanism this isn’t like a blanket statement. But there’s, I think there’s this tendency or this trend that like, if you focus on the mechanism. It’s often because you don’t understand, or you don’t know the heart component of that first. Like you have set out to solve a problem to whatever, to just solve that problem, right?

Like you are like, let’s take like lifter LMS, for example if you were a Person that was like. I’m going to build a plugin to sell. What should I build? I think there’s a market gap in learning management systems on WordPress. All right, we are going to build that plugin and we are going to put all the features in it. W’re going to solve all our customer stuff yet.

It’s really hard to move out of the mechanism place and get into something deeper. Because it has to almost flow from something deeper inside of you as the founder and the creator of this thing. Like it has to start at a level that you actually care about this thing for something larger than just solving the problem.

And what I’ve talked to, I don’t know if this is good advice or bad advice. So take it with a grain of salt. But I almost think that if you find yourself working on a product and it’s just all about the mechanism it is better to step back is the product that I should be working on right now, or is there a product that I could be working on that I truly care about?

I truly care about bluegrass music and I would love to figure out how to get more people involved in that. And so now I’m solving this problem to do it. Or. I truly care about this idea of businesses going through the dip and it’s not lonely. It’s not terrible. You learn some of the best things.

You shouldn’t try to avoid the dip at all costs possible. Like sometimes going through it is the only way you’re going to get to where you want to go. And so how do we celebrate the hard times and the lessons that we learn and the hard one. And there’s something like deeply meaningful about that for me that is propelling me forward to do this podcast versus just Oh, there’s a space.

I want to do a podcast. What could I do a podcast about? I think it should be X, Y, or Z and let’s just do it. So if you find yourself focusing on the mechanism, I think it’s really hard to shift and start focusing on the other. I forget the other two triangle things that you said, but it’s probably hard to focus on.

You have to focus on those unless you actually care about it deeper than the problem.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. I love that. And the other two were clear customer and results. So like actually having a specific avatar and the result, which has me, the result has many layers. And I think what you’re tapping into is yeah, they may want to get in better shape by signing up for the gym, but underneath all that, they may want to.

Quote, look good naked or, be more attractive to the opposite to whoever they’re going after or whatever. And it’s, there’s like all this stuff below the surface and the closer you get to that, the stronger your marketing is.

Steven Sauder: Yeah. Yeah. If you, I think that it is the avatar thing is hard to create a good avatar if you don’t truly care about that avatar to begin with.

is, if you look around examples I don’t know if you’re familiar with beehive, like the newsletter software but the guys that created that, they created morning brew and they lived and breathed emails and they know what they’re doing. And the stuff that they’re launching is just like incredibly smart compared to all the other newsletter stuff that I’ve engaged with.

And it, You get this feeling that it’s coming from this very personal place of like I did this thing and it was hard and my goal is to make this thing easy for everybody like I’ve been there and there’s this resin there’s this way that they resonate with their audience that I haven’t seen come from a lot of other other tools.

There’s others out there that are similar, but I’ve, but it’s, I don’t know. It’s interesting.

Chris Badgett: And just a cheat code for that. Some of the most successful people I see with like courses and coaching programs and building communities and stuff, they’re really, their customer avatar is really just helping a previous version of themselves.

So number one, your own story and your own past pain points and everything. So instead of going and trying to find an opportunity in the market. Look in the rearview mirror of your life and, look around and see other people at that spot currently. And that’s a cheat code because you understand it too.

You can identify that person and help find them, but yeah, just to tip.

Steven Sauder: I think then three I think all of us looking back at our future selves that were or our past selves that were struggling with something like, you just want to give that person a hug and be like, man, you’re going to figure it out.

It’s going to be okay. Here’s how, and here’s why. And here’s there’s something that, that connects your soul back to that person. And by being,

Because you have that connection, I think you can create this stuff that just resonates with that person so much deeper without having to like try to come up with some weird cliche avatar to try to fake it or something like that.

Chris Badgett: And that’s why Steven’s starting the through the dip podcast. So go check that out.

He’s been through dips and he’s, knows other people have been through. And he’s curating and looking to help entrepreneurs as they navigate the dips. So that’s a search for through the dip podcast. You can also find Steven at hustlefish.com. Is there anywhere else people can connect with you, Steven?

Steven Sauder: No, yeah, those two places. Through the dip. com, you can sign up with your email address right there, and you’ll get notified when we’re launching our episodes.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. Thank you for coming on the show, Steven. Really appreciate it. Awesome. Thanks, Chris. Really appreciate the time.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [e-mail] slash gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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