Valuing Your Connections and Optimizing Towards Happiness
My guest today is a developer who understands the marketing strategies needed to grow a business, and is an expert in implementing them. He helps course authors, product creators, and self-funded businesses increase their revenue from their existing traffic.
As the CEO of DelfiNet, a full-service development and marketing consultancy, my guest has helped companies all around the world improve their revenue conversion strategies. His portfolio includes a large range of companies, including both small startups and Fortune 100s.
He’s passionate about developing solutions to solve real business problems and employing solutions that are intuitive and easy to use.
Now, Let’s hack …
Keith Perhac.
In this 37-minute episode Keith Perhac and I discuss:
- Why you need to value your connections
- Doing things that don’t scale
- Find your own pain points and create products to solve them
- How to learn what works and what doesn’t
- Why Keith would turn down making a lot of money
The Show Notes
Valuing Your Connections and Optimizing Towards Happiness
Voiceover: Welcome to Hack the Entrepreneur, the show which reveals the fears, habits, and inner battles behind big name entrepreneurs and those on their way to joining them. Now here is your host, Jon Nastor.
Jonny Nastor: We are back with another episode of Hack the Entrepreneur. Thank you so much for joining me today. I am your host, Jon Nastor, but you can call me Jonny.
My guest today is a developer who understands the marketing strategies needed to grow a business and is an expert at implementing them. He helps course authors, product creators, and self-funded businesses increase their revenue from their existing traffic.
As the CEO of DelfiNet, a full-service development and marketing consultancy, my guest has helped companies all around the world improve their revenue conversion strategies. His portfolio includes a large range of companies, including both small startups and Fortune 100s.
He’s passionate about developing solutions to solve real business problems and employing solutions that are intuitive and easy to use.
Now, let’s hack Keith Perhac.
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Welcome back to another episode of Hack the Entrepreneur. Today, we have an extra special guest all the way from Japan. Keith, welcome to the show.
Keith Perhac: Thanks for having me.
Jonny Nastor: Absolutely my pleasure.
Keith Perhac: It’s great to be here.
Jonny Nastor: All right, Keith. Let’s jump straight into this.
Keith Perhac: All right.
Jonny Nastor: Keith, as an entrepreneur, what is the one thing that you do that you feel has been the biggest contributor to your successes so far?
Why You Need to Value Your Connections
Keith Perhac: That’s a good one. That’s a great question. I think the number one thing that has really contributed most to that is valuing the connections I have and valuing the people I work with and my clients. It’s really hard for me because I have a very much out of sight, out of mind personality. If people aren’t around me, I forget that they’re there, but it’s been really important to me to make sure that all my clients feel taken care of and that someone is always there answering their questions at any point.
I’ve noticed, as my company went on, whenever I was doing that, my company was doing well. I was making more money. I was getting more clients. I was getting more referrals. I was getting more business. Whenever I got too busy and I stopped caring about taking care of my customers in a really hands-on and personal way, then business started dropping again. That’s been something that’s really important to me — not automating that connection with the people I’m working with.
Jonny Nastor: Nice, so basically doing things that don’t scale?
Doing Things That Don’t Scale
Keith Perhac: It’s doing things that don’t scale. We do scale it a little. For example, when people email me, it goes into our ticketing system, and someone’s watching it. It’s scaling in a way that we’re being responsive, but it is something that doesn’t scale. You can’t scale that to 1,000, 2,000 people, right?
Jonny Nastor: Right.
Keith Perhac: That’s the purpose of what I wanted to do with my company, which is a boutique, smaller. We’re only about 10-people, right now, agency that helps a small number of clients. We only have a handful of clients, about 20.
Jonny Nastor: Wow.
Keith Perhac: That’s who we really focus on.
Jonny Nastor: I love that boutique style of business.
Keith Perhac: Yeah, me too. I used to work with Toyota and all the big companies. I just hated it. I got out of that.
Jonny Nastor: Nice. You say how you work kind of out of sight, out of mind, and how you need to be surrounded by people, but it’s interesting because you are in the middle of nowhere in Japan.
Keith Perhac: I am.
Jonny Nastor: It seems like a strange place for you with that quality.
Keith Perhac: It’s actually one of the reasons I’m thinking about leaving right now. Not sure if we’ll actually do it or not, but the two important things for me is, one, that I have people to connect with. We’re actually all remote, so I don’t have anyone here in the office with me.
Jonny Nastor: Oh, wow. Okay.
Keith Perhac: Yeah, it’s just me and my wife. We’re actually spread out over Japan, over the US. We had one person in the Philippines for a while and one person in England for a while. We’re all spread out, but we stay in touch on Slack. We’re always in our Slack rooms. We have daily meetings where we have a 15-minute meeting just to catch up, see what everyone’s doing.
That’s how I’ve kept everyone in sight, and same with the clients. I try to make a Skype meeting once a week or once every two weeks with all my clients, touch base, see where we’re at, and make sure that I’m still excited about things, make sure they’re excited about things, and make sure everyone’s on the same page.
Jonny Nastor: Nice. I love how you can still do that. You can keep in touch so much.
Keith Perhac: Technology has just been amazing. When I came here, I came here 12 years ago, and in order to call people, I needed a phone card that I would dial into their phone system, and then put in my special number. It was like 20 cents a minute and everything. Now, I call Skype. I can call any US number for free.
Jonny Nastor: Yeah, we’re on Skype right now having a conversation completely for free.
Keith Perhac: We’re on Skype right now. Yup, exactly. It’s amazing how much technology has enabled, honestly, people like us, the entrepreneurs, the technical people to be able to take their business wherever they want. I have one Japanese client at this point, sorry, two. I have two Japanese clients at this point. Everyone else is in the US, Europe, or around that area.
Jonny Nastor: Nice. I love it. Okay. Let’s go back a bit. There seems to be this time in every entrepreneur’s life when they realize one of two things. Either they have this calling to make something bigger than themselves or a difference in the world or, as mostly seems to be the case, they simply find they cannot work for somebody else. Keith, can you tell me what side of the fence you fall on, and when you discovered this about yourself?
Find Your Own Pain Points and Create Products to Solve Them
Keith Perhac: I flip-flop a lot actually. I haven’t worked for anyone for about five years now, so I don’t know if I could go back to it. At the same time, I do miss the kind of 9-to-5, I don’t have to care about the business kind of thing. I just have to care about my projects, which is always really nice, right? The main reason I went out on my own was mainly I hated my current job. It had just gotten into drudgery. I was doing everything but sales at the company. I was doing the product design, so I was deciding what we were making. I was doing the marketing, so I was building all the assets around it. I was actually designing the project and programming the product.
Jonny Nastor: Wow. Okay.
Keith Perhac: Yeah. I was doing everything. All they had in the company besides me was I had my small dev team, and then I had the sales team, and then the administration. I’m pulling this company along, and we got bought out. I was like, “Well, if I’m doing this all myself, I don’t want to keep doing this for someone else. If I’m doing this all myself, why don’t I just try to get that last part, which is the sales and administration, and try to do it on my own?”
Jonny Nastor: Nice.
Keith Perhac: That’s what jumped me out is that, “Hey, I’m doing everything anyways. This is a great chance.” There’s very few times when your company gets bought and you have that clean break, right?
Jonny Nastor: Right.
Keith Perhac: Yeah, “Let’s go out and try it.” It’s working so far, so I’m four and a half years in.
Jonny Nastor: That was it? Four and half years in and you only had to try it, I guess you could say, once, and it succeeded and got you where you are?
Keith Perhac: I’ve changed what I’m doing a ton. I started out. I was a freelancer. I wasn’t running a company. I started out freelancing, doing conversion rate optimization. My first gig was actually hired as a front-end developer. I kept that moniker for about four years while working with that client even though I had gone to building his marketing strategy, his back end, all the technology that he ran his business on. That was my first go into it. That was the starting place.
That’s where I started learning a lot about building a business, the tech, and the skill set that people need to be able to succeed in the online marketing community. From there, I got really busy, so I brought on someone else. Then I got really busy again, so I brought on another person. Then I got really busy again, so I brought on someone to manage all of it. It just kept going on. The way I’ve been hiring recently is that I keep trying to find the pain points that I hate to do every day. You want to be able to focus. If you hate something, you’re not going to do it, right?
Jonny Nastor: Yeah.
Keith Perhac: We were talking about keeping up with people. I love talking to people. I love jumping on a Skype. If my job was sitting on Skype talking to my clients all day, I’d be the happiest person in the world. What I hate more than anything is email. Email is just the bane of my existence, so I have someone, as we were talking about a minute ago, that helps me monitor my email and does that day-to-day touch, just to make sure that people feel supported — especially when I’m asleep.
Because of the time difference, they’re up. They have something urgent. They’re like, “Keith, what’s going on?” Then I can have Scott, my account manager, come in and say, “Hey, Keith’s asleep. We’re on this. It’s fixed.” I wake up and things are done. That’s what I’ve really been hiring for is, “What parts of the job do I not like, am I not good at, and I need help on that.”
Jonny Nastor: Nice. At that segue, Keith, tell us something you are absolutely not good at, besides email.
Keith Perhac: Besides email.
Jonny Nastor: Email is such a given. We all are terrible at it. We really are. It’s a nightmare.
Keith Perhac: Okay, but I will say this. Scott, my account manager, he loves it.
Jonny Nastor: Really?
Keith Perhac: He loves touching base with people, and he loves making sure that things are moving. I can’t do it. I can’t do it at all. Yeah, he loves it.
Jonny Nastor: I love it, too, but I got to tell you. I took an hour today out of my morning. I’m like, “I’m going to catch up on email that’s been from last week to the weekend. Just chaos. I’m going to respond to a whole bunch of people.” By the time I was 20 percent of the way through, those people were always responding back to it. I was like, “This is making it worse.” That’s all I’m thinking. I just have to stop. I don’t know what to do.
Keith Perhac: There was someone who was saying, I think it was Rob Walling. He only does email in the morning and at night.
Jonny Nastor: Oh, smart.
Keith Perhac: That way, you get the first responses done, and you check and make sure you have what you’re doing for the day. Then at night, you can respond to everything. No one’s going to email you back with urgent stuff at 6 pm or 8 pm.
Jonny Nastor: That’s smart. That’s really smart.
Keith Perhac: I’ve been trying to do that as well. You had asked what’s my least favorite thing to do. Proposal writing, actually, is one of my least favorite things. Proposal writing and any sort of administrative sales overhead is, to me, putting down on paper what we’ve already discussed and fleshed out and have probably some sort of doc or a chart or something that explains. We’re taking information that we both agree on, and just rewriting it so that someone can sign it.
Jonny Nastor: You like making the sale, though?
Keith Perhac: I love making the sale. I don’t know if I’m good at it or not, but I just love solving problems.
Jonny Nastor: Which is a great way to think of it. It seems like you’re really good at it. You seem to be doing well for yourself.
Keith Perhac: It’s been working out. I will never say that I’m good at sales. I have no formal training. I read a lot of books on it, and I practice a lot. But I’ve never taken a sales course. I would never call myself a salesman, but maybe that’s why I’m successful. I don’t come at it from a sales perspective. I come at it as like, “I really want to solve your problem.”
Jonny Nastor: Yeah. I was wondering, because as you were talking about that, the connection between the technical side of you and also wanting to know how to market online, it’s weird. It seems like the only two people I know like that are you and Patrick McKenzie, both in Japan. I’m like, “What do they put in the water over there?”
How to Learn What Works and What Doesn’t
Keith Perhac: It’s the lack of fluoride. It’s actually interesting. Patrick is my best friend here. I’ve known him for almost 11 years now. He’s the one who convinced me to drop it all and to start out on my own. We lived next door to each other. I was actually his landlord for a year when he was living in my second house. It is true. There are very few people that really get the marketing and technology. There are a lot of people that say they do.
Every time I work with a company that’s like, “Oh, yes, we get marketing and technology,” what that generally means is we have marketing people, and we have technology people. I’ll talk to the marketing people, and they’re like, “Yes, put this Facebook pixel on all the pages.” I’m like, “This pixel doesn’t have any information. Does it need to be in this denomination? Should we put in the values?” They’re like, “Let me check with the team.” I’m like, “What do you mean, let me check with the team? That was a very simple question.”
It’s one of the biggest hurdles that we’ve seen is that you either get a technology person that is interested only in the tech and doesn’t care about the business needs, or you get someone who’s interested in the marketing but doesn’t understand how hard or easy it is to manage something going forward. They’ll set up this huge marketing funnel, and they’re like, “Okay, now you have two days to implement it all.”
Or, they set it up in some system that works great for one funnel. It’s like ClickFunnels. I love ClickFunnels to death. They set it up, but they set it up in such a way that you’ll never be able to use it again. There’s a very big disconnect between marketing and technology because they are such different mediums. The modern marketing, this modern internet marketing, you have to understand both, at least to a degree, to be able to be successful in it.
Jonny Nastor: Yeah. It almost seems like a dangerous combination to have both. That’s why it’s so interesting. Because the way you say, there’s tech people who aren’t into the marketing side and the marketing people who aren’t into the tech side or don’t give it its full value. Sometimes it even goes further than that where there’s actually almost an animosity. The tech side thinks the marketing side is complete crap, and the marketing side is like, “These tech guys just are complaining and worrying about having to build these funnels for us.” It’s almost like a fight within a company.
Keith Perhac: It is. I hear a ton of tech people say like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe they wrote an email that made them $250K. I wish I could do that.” Not even, “I wish I could do that,” it’s like, “I could do that. It’s such a scam.” It’s not a scam. They’ve been doing this for seven years, cultivating this list. They’ve been doing this for a ton of time, cultivating this, learning what works. Then at the very pinnacle, they can send an email that makes them $250K.
It’s like saying Apple just makes computers, and it’s amazing that they can just make a phone and it sells all this money, that makes all this money. It’s the culmination of everything they’ve done over their entire history.
Jonny Nastor: Exactly, but nobody wants to think of that. Nobody wants to think of that success, that $250,000 email, it’s like, “Well, I could have written that email.”
Keith Perhac: Exactly. It’s like the insta-successes that you see. It’s those overnight successes, like Baremetrics is a great example. Everyone was like, “Oh, yeah, it was an insta-success. He built it in three days and made all this money.” Yeah, but he also spent six years on other projects that never made it. He had gone through so many iterations, and this was the culmination of all that.
Jonny Nastor: Yes.
Keith Perhac: It’s not like you just get to wake up, say, “I’m going to do it,” and then do it on your first rodeo. It’s possible, but not very likely.
Jonny Nastor: Right. Just to be clear for everyone, the Baremetrics, that was Josh Pigford. He was on about two weeks ago on the show. I’ll link to that for people, so they can find it if they missed that. I was wanting Josh on the show as well for months now. I finally got him and he was awesome.
Keith Perhac: Yeah, Josh, I met him the first time at Bacon Biz, which is Amy Hoy’s convention in Philadelphia. He is a smart cookie. He is really just brilliant.
Jonny Nastor: He is, yeah. We had that discussion about how it seems like you just came out of nowhere. He’s like, “Yeah, nowhere like 10 years I’ve been working online.” It’s like, “Exactly, right?” Now it seems easy, doesn’t it. It is easy to write that email when you’ve put in seven years of building that relationship.
Keith Perhac: Exactly.
Jonny Nastor: You can almost write any email at that point and do really good in sales — because you spent the seven years.
Keith Perhac: Exactly. It’s like Brennan Dunn. I think Patrick and I’s podcast was the first podcast that he had been on when he released Double Your Freelancing Rate. He had just this meteoric rise to success, but it was built on a lot of background. It was built on a lot of work and a lot of connections and a lot of really understanding the market and having dealt with this for the last five, 10 years.
Jonny Nastor: It so makes sense that you are on this show today. Everybody you’re mentioning has been on my show already. They laid the groundwork for you.
Keith Perhac: I really dabble in this Internet. I ‘dabble,’ … I really work in this Internet marketing society, this group, and I think that there are very set generations of who is becoming popular in this sphere. You had your first generation, which was like the Ryan Deiss and Jeff Walker and all that. Then you have your second tier or second generation which is Ramit Sethi, Derek Halpern, Eben Pagan. Now you have this new generation coming up, which is the Brennan Dunn, the Nathan Barry. I’m blanking on some names right now.
Jonny Nastor: The Josh Pigfords, the Patrick McKenzies.
Keith Perhac: Josh Pigford, exactly. This is the new generation of that Internet marketing of that … I hate the word. I’ll call it product people. It’s really interesting to see how each of them, each generation, grows and then becomes the gold standard, and then the new generation comes out having learned from them.
Jonny Nastor: Yeah. It’s true, and it is interesting that I’ve been in it long enough now that I’ve seen all three of those generations at this point, which is really cool. I just met actually Ryan Deiss. I hadn’t thought of him in years. I met him about a month ago at a conference, and he asked to be on my show. We just booked it for July.
Keith Perhac: Wow. That’s nice.
Jonny Nastor: I’m excited. He’s the first of the first generation that I’m going to get to have on. It’s really cool. But we should get back to you, Keith, because you are also part of this now third generation of Internet marketers. It’s really cool.
Keith Perhac: People tell me that. I guess it’s one of those things, like you don’t see yourself how other people see you, right?
Jonny Nastor: Exactly.
Keith Perhac: I totally don’t think of myself in that group at all. I want to help people. I want to work on it, but I don’t see myself as like a forerunner or even in the forefront at all. I just went to MicroConf Las Vegas with two of my friends and coworkers, and one of them came up to me at first. He’s like, “Keith, everyone knows you here.” I had never been to MicroConf Vegas before. I had been to the Europe one, but I had never been to the Vegas one. But it was true. Everyone knew at least who I was, and that was very strange to me.
Jonny Nastor: Yeah. Was it? Was it something that you struggled with at all, to deal with, that you were the one people were coming up to you and trying to talk to you now?
Keith Perhac: I don’t see it in that light. I just see, “Oh, someone’s coming to talk to me. That’s awesome.” My account manager, he was there as well. He’s like, “Okay, what’s the sales plan?” I’m like, “There’s no sales plan.” This is the one time of year where I get to be in the community of my peers and people I really want to learn from. I just want to talk to people. I just want to talk to people. I want to see what they’re doing. I want to give them ideas. I want to get ideas. I just want to talk to really brilliant, smart people because that’s what this conference is. It’s just a conference of brilliant people in my circles, in my industry.
Jonny Nastor: It is. Yeah, MicroConf Vegas is that. That’s very cool. Okay, let’s move to projects if we can.
Keith Perhac: Sure.
Jonny Nastor: I know you just started with another partner, SegMetrics, so you have a few things going on. Keith, although you don’t see it yourself, maybe that you are at this forefront of this community in a certain way and people do want to probably work with you or give you ideas of things you could do, I’m sure there are opportunities that pass through your inbox — if you ever check it. I want to know, what’s a process you go through right now, if something comes across your desk or an idea comes through your head, something like SegMetrics, and you are like, “Yes, I need to put some resource into this and run with it”?
Why Keith Would Turn Down Making a Lot of Money
Keith Perhac: I’ve always been a very yes person because I really liked working on everything. I love to solve any problem that comes across my desk. It kind of screwed me over a couple of times because I overextended myself, and especially on overextending myself on projects that don’t necessarily pay. When you think of a SaaS product, the first few months or maybe even the first year of a SaaS product, is not going to make you any money, depending on your growth rate, right?
Jonny Nastor: Right.
Keith Perhac: It’s a lot of hard work. I’ve had to stop myself from saying, “Yes, I’m ready to take on new projects.” Right now, when a new project comes across, I really weigh, “Okay, how interested am I in it?” That’s the number one thing. If I’m not interested it, then I’m not going to do it, and I’m not going to do a good job on it even if I did do it. It’s like, “Is this something that interests me in a marketing or a technical way?” Would this be fun to market? Would this be fun to build? Also, can I see the value of this?
One thing that someone had come to me, what was it? It was real estate. It was a site builder for real estate. I was like, “Yeah, this could make an f- ton of money, but I really don’t care.” I really have just no interest in this whatsoever. I don’t know the space. I could build something, but I couldn’t be very useful at it. I had to pass. It was interesting, but I had to pass. I gave it to another friend.
I have to make sure that it’s something that I really believe in because, also, when you start a project, especially a long-term project — I’m not talking about consulting clients, I’m talking about big projects that I would want to start — you have to realize, are you going to be interested in this in two to three years? Because once you start a project, if you have customers, you’re going to be doing this for the next two to three years. If you’re successful, you might be doing it for the next 10 or 20 years.
That was one of the things that Patrick had said with Bingo Card Creator and Appointment Reminder. I forget who it was, but someone had said, “Patrick, are you really interested in helping nail salons manage their appointments?” He’s like, “No, not at all, but it’s an easy business.” His friend was like, “Then just don’t do it. Really, just don’t do it.” You’re not going to be able to put in the effort because you don’t care about it.
That’s the number one thing you have to look at when you’re looking at, “Okay, do I want to start a new project,” is, “How much do you care about it?” One of the things that I’ve been really lucky about in looking at is we have Summit Evergreen, which is courseware for people who want to build online courses on the Internet. Kajabi is our biggest competitor, Kajabi or WishList Member. It’s a hosted online courseware. That’s very specifically targeted at online product people.
Then we have SegMetrics, which is analytics for Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft is the number one email host or the email system used for online product people. We have this synergy. Then the third project I’m looking at right now is the glue between that Infusionsoft and that Summit Evergreen. I’m staying within my wheelhouse.
Jonny Nastor: Ah, smart.
Keith Perhac: A) You get to keep more interest in it because they all kind of gel together. Also, the developers and the people you’re working with, they’re all able to jump from one project to another because it’s all in the same world. Also, I can keep my interest up about that because it’s what I’ve built my entire business around. If I suddenly say, “Oh yeah, I don’t like marketing on the Internet,” I have more problems than these three products that I’ve made.
Jonny Nastor: That’s true. That’s smart. It’s interesting, too, the evolution sort of, the way when you start out, like you said, you say yes to everything. You just do. You don’t think long-term in years in this, if it’s successful, 10 years. Then somebody brings you a great idea that could make, as you say, an f-ton of money, and you don’t care. That’s a good place to be.
Keith Perhac: It is. Granted, if I had done that, and if I was, I guess, more ‘business savvy,’ I’ll put that in quotes, I would make a ton more money probably, but would I be happy? That’s what I’m optimizing towards, is being happy with my company, being able to work on the things that I want to work on, and not having to be beholden to crappy projects or crappy clients.
Jonny Nastor: Nice, optimizing towards being happy. I like it. Okay, that’s going to segue us into this final question I have for you.
Keith Perhac: All right.
Jonny Nastor: There’s this idea I’m bouncing around and now asking everybody about it. I’m calling it the ‘entrepreneurial gap.’ As entrepreneurs, we seem to have this issue where we’re dreamers. We’re always looking, aiming goals, and our view of where we’re heading is always straight ahead. We set goals one month, three months, six months, a year, five years, 10 years down the road. Before we even hit those goals, we set five or 10 loftier ones in the future. Everything will be better in six months when my business is doing this. In a year when my business is doing this, it’ll be better. Everything will be good then.
We never seem to get there. It’s just always pushing. We want bigger, loftier things. Oftentimes, we fail to stop, turn around, and look at where we’ve come from. You have in the last four and a half years now, built something really, really, really valuable and impressive. I would love it, Keith, if you could now, stop, turn around, look at where you’ve come, look at what you’ve learned, what you’ve accomplished, and tell me how you feel about that.
From a Fish Out of Water to Seasoned Swimmer
Keith Perhac: I think it’s just me screaming for about five minutes. You’re exactly right. We don’t, as entrepreneurs, as business owners, I would even say as people, look back at what we have done. That’s something I notice a lot in the courseware systems that we’ve built. When you finish this six-week course, this nine-week course, you’re like, “Oh yeah, I knew all this.” It’s so funny. You forget how little you knew at the beginning. I’ve been trying to make myself take more time for both of those, both for looking back and for looking and making solid goals. I do have a problem making goals and sticking to them.
The catalyst to that, why I started doing that, I went to MicroConf Europe last year and then the year before that. Unfortunately, I don’t get to go this year for travel reasons, but the first MicroConf Europe that I went to was the first conference I had gone to that was not a developer conference in Japan. I knew no one. Patrick took me there. I had talked to Brennan on Skype. I had talked to Nathan Barry on Skype. I really did not know anyone there. I was complete fish out of water.
I went back last year, and I knew everyone. It was like a reunion. I was seeing all my friends. We went out drinking. We actually went out shooting guns in a bunker somewhere in the middle of Prague. People were inviting me to things before I had gotten there. It was a completely different experience. It was no longer, “I’m going to a conference where I don’t know anyone, I’m nervous, or I’m an outsider.” It was, “I’m going back to see all my friends.”
Jonny Nastor: Nice.
Keith Perhac: That was in 12 months. It just completely blew my mind because I felt I hadn’t changed at all. I felt nothing has changed in the last 12 months. But then I go back to this conference, and I’m like, “I know what all these people are doing for their business. We’ve been on podcasts. We’re in masterminds together. I’ve obviously grown because look at this community that I’m now a part of.” I didn’t even realize it.
That was really the catalyst that made me think, “Okay, I really have to go back and look at what I’ve been doing over each three, six, 12 months, and see how I’m growing, see what I’m improving on. That’s what’s going to tell me what I should do next with my company, and that’s what’s going to tell me what products I should do next, or where I should focus next.”
Jonny Nastor: That’s awesome. That’s so great. It’s great you made that realization sort of early on.
Keith Perhac: Yeah.
Jonny Nastor: That’s amazing.
Keith Perhac: It only took me three years, but overnight success …
Jonny Nastor: Right, but you have a whole lifetime ahead of you still.
Keith Perhac: Overnight success, right?
Jonny Nastor: Oh, that’s awesome. All right. Keith, we’ve got to talk about your businesses in passing. Can you specifically tell the listener where to go find out more about your businesses and also where they can find out more about you?
Keith Perhac: The number one place to find me is KeithPerhac.com. I realized a couple of months ago that I am the only Keith Perhac on the Internet. You can just search for me, and I show up everywhere. Everywhere that shows up is actually me.
The two places I’m pointing people to right now for the projects I’m doing are, of course, Summit Evergreen, which is online courseware, or people who want to build products, build membership sites, that kind of thing, and then SegMetrics. It’s better analytics for Infusionsoft, so it lets you track where people are coming from, how much people are paying you, track where your customer’s from, and really understand your business if you’re using Infusionsoft. If you’re not using Infusionsoft, it’s not really for you, kind of thing.
Jonny Nastor: Nice. That works. I will link to Summit Evergreen, SegMetrics, and you are on Twitter?
Keith Perhac: I am. I actually have a really horrible Twitter name, so again, just search for Keith Perhac, and you’ll find me.
Jonny Nastor: I believe it’s @Harisenbon79 — Harisenbon something? I don’t know.
Keith Perhac: Harisenbon. It means 1,000 needles in Japanese. It’s so funny because I’ve been using that forever. I’ve been using that for about 12 years now for all my online handles. Everyone thinks I’m someone named Haris Enbon. People will say, “Hey, Haris. Hey, Haris. What’s going on?” I’m like, “I don’t know who Haris is, but apparently it’s me.”
Jonny Nastor: I went all the way to Harisen, Harisen Bon, for some reason. I don’t know. Anyways, I will link to all that in the show notes so it’s very easy for everyone to find. I will link to Patrick McKenzie, Josh Pigford’s, and Brennan Dunn’s episodes so you can go back and listen to Keith’s friends and see how they talk about him.
Keith Perhac: Excellent. Jon, it’s been so great. Thank you so much for having me.
Jonny Nastor: It’s absolutely my pleasure.
Keith Perhac: All right, cheers.
Jonny Nastor: Wow. That was such a fun conversation. I thank you, Keith, for joining me, and I hope that you out there listening got as much as I did out of that. Keith’s one of these people that I didn’t know as much as I thought I did about him, leading up to this conversation. I was blown away by him. I love the Japan connection. I like that, too. That’s really, really, really cool.
We mentioned a lot of stuff throughout it. It all will be in the show notes for you. Also, I have this sheet of paper with all of these things that he said. Keith just kept … one thing into the next. I was like, “Man, where’s this guy going to go with all of this?”
Then when I listen back, there was one thing he said. There was one thing that Keith said that really, really, really stuck out to me. Did you get it? Did you hear it? Let’s do it. Let’s find the hack.
Keith Perhac: You have to realize, are you going to be interested in this in two to three years? Because once you start a project, if you have customers, you’re going to be doing this for the next two to three years. If you’re successful, you might be doing it for the next 10 or 20 years.
Jonny Nastor: And that’s the hack.
Wow. Keith, Keith, Keith, this is so epically true. The idea that you have to enjoy something no matter what the market — it’s not that it has to be your hobby or it has to be this burning desire of a market that you might be entering, but you have to be involved in the project enough. It’s true.
The longer that you’re going to be in it is the more successful it is. If it is successful, then you have customers — customers that need attention, customers that need care, customers that need support. Then, you might need to find more customers as well to continue it on.
I love this idea. I know that when we’re starting out, we often think very, very short-term. We just think about, “Well, if I did this, could I make money at it right now?” Well, where does that money come from? That money comes from you selling a product or a service. That money comes from you getting that exchange of value in some way from your customer, but that customer has to be taken care of.
I’ve discussed this before, the whole live in days but work in months. Then Keith takes it even further, work in years or even decades because you have to think this way. Don’t get into something that you are super not into or not interested in, in any way. Again, it doesn’t have to be that you’re into golfing, and you’re going to start a golfing business, but the business itself.
You can build a business in any market and that can interest you if it’s done right. So think about doing it right or think about the way you are doing it. Picture yourself doing this one year, three year, three years, 10 years from now, and see if you’re still into it. One thing, businesses don’t just take off. You don’t just get a business, and a month later, it’s huge. It doesn’t work like that. It seems like it because these overnight successes we hear about, but these overnight successes are the culmination of years and years of hard work. It’s just the way it works.
Keith, I do appreciate that, and I know that was sort of an extension of Patrick McKenzie advising you and talking to you about how you have to think about it. I love that we got to bring that back into the conversation.
All right. That’s the end of another episode of Hack the Entrepreneur. I’m so happy, again, that you did decide to join me today and enjoy this conversation with Keith and I. It was a lot of fun.
If you haven’t, check out the website, HacktheEntrepreneur.com, I would love to see you over there. Love to have you on the email list. You can reply to any of those emails. Say hi. Tell me what’s up. Tell me if you’re listening. It would be great to hear from you. I would love to chat. Yeah, that’s it.
We have another one coming up in a couple of days. I hope you are enjoying your summer as much as I am. Please, until then, keep hacking the entrepreneur.