Adam Torres and Jeff Sauer discuss scaling businesses.
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Show Notes:
What does it take to leave corporate America and start a new business? In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Sam Nei, CEO at One Stop Roofing, explore One Stop Roofing and Sam’s journey as an entrepreneur.
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About Jeff Sauer
Jeff is the co-founder of Measure Holdings Group LLC, the brains behind MeasureU.com, ProfitSchool.com, and MeasureSummit.com. He’s a business coach, award-winning blogger, and former owner of a five-time Inc 5000 award-winning agency.
With 50,000+ digital marketers enrolled in his training programs, Jeff has been inspiring data-driven marketing across 20 countries. He’s a top 25 PPC expert who loves turning complex data into actionable insights.
When he’s not empowering marketers, Jeff’s living the digital nomad dream, building a remote business across 50+ countries. He’s raised the world’s most well-traveled kid in the process!
Jeff’s passions include uncovering market insights, micro-investing, and balancing business with wanderlust. His travel blog has been inspiring globe-trotters since 2012.
Originally from [City], Jeff now calls the world his office. He’s always ready to chat about data, digital nomad life, or how to make your business more profitable and enjoyable!
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So we are in 2025, my first interview for 2025. I have Jeff Sauer on the line.
He’s co founder over at profitschool. com and measure you and Jeff, man. Happy new year. We’re we’re back. Yeah. Happy new year. This is great. Yeah. What, what a great way to kick off the new year with you on the show. And also, I mean, our topic today, doing more, do doing more by doing less. If we’re going to talk about scaling, we’re going to talk about focusing on data.
I know as, as we start our new years, many people are focusing on resolutions or what they could do better or different in their businesses and in their lives. So we’re going to have some fun with that today, but let’s start this episode. The way that we start them all with what we like to call our mission matters So Jeff at Mission Matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts.
That’s what we do. Jeff, what mission matters to you? Yeah, it’s all about helping individuals struggling with things like technology and data. To get a new lease on their career and their business so they can find their way and thrive in this digital world. And so we have two different brands that we focus on.
One’s called measure you. com. And what we do is we help individuals thrive by learning the world of data driven marketing and in a way that it’s, that’s accessible. They can get a job offer, job promotion, more responsibility in their career as a result. And then at Profit School, we help small businesses, generally less than 15 people.
We help them grow and scale their business without making the common mistakes that will set them back or cause burnout or make the wrong investments. And so it’s really all about helping the little guy, the little gal, the little people out there. Not even little in that sense, just people who are looking for that new opportunity and need solid mentorship from people who have done it before and people who are really invested in their success.
Thanks. Now for you, did you start as an entrepreneur, were you always the data guy where you, was that always like one of your interests? Yeah. So it’s, I’ve always been technical. I have a computer science degree, so yeah, I’ve always been involved with data and that was how I got into freelancing. So I was a freelance database engineer doing that type of stuff.
But when I started the business, I realized that that’s just a very small part of what’s going on. And so for a while I had to sort of abandon that in order to find opportunities to, to get really good at business. So like the same skills that I learned with, with learning data and computer science, it’s like I had to apply that to being a business owner.
And then eventually when I, when I went out on my own after, you know, all the different career steps, I got back into it and I said, what better way to, to showcase what I’ve learned and to help people then by helping them with the things that I, that I started my career with as well. I think it’s interesting the way you, you word that.
So when you talk about being, going from being a freelancer with, so you’re working for yourself for, for much of your time and being, you know, for hire versus starting a business and starting to, you know, provide an opportunity for others as well to partake and to create opportunity, like talk about that transition, cause that’s different like mindset and otherwise functional.
Like that’s a different, it’s a different road. It’s a different path. Yeah, it’s so different, right? Like I, and this is something that’s evolved over the years, just trying to really fully understand that transition. So I used to think that a freelancer was more of like an entrepreneur and more of a business owner.
And now I’ve come around almost full circle to saying a freelancer is basically an employee who. You know, it’s more of a contractor or, or, you know, it’s sort of like acting like an employee, maybe not legally, they’re an employee, but it’s somebody who’s on a team sort of getting paid by the hour and so on.
Well, if they have one person, there was usually no leverage as a freelancer. Yeah, exactly. Like you’re, it’s time for money just by a different way. Right? Like an employee time for money. Freelancer. But then if you start your own business and you, and you get good at that, you can, you have leverage, you can have team members, you can have support.
You don’t feel like you’re always on the clock. You can make a, you can make higher margins by, by the investments you do. You can have money. You can earn money in your sleep. Those are sort of the dreams that we all have. Freelancer. I think it’s a stepping stone, but it’s not really the end game. Yeah, in my experience, at least for sure.
And so essentially, once you go that business route, then you get to work a hundred hours instead of 50, right? Yeah. You get to work a hundred hours. So you can say that you’re only working four hours a week, right? But you’re in control of your time, right? Yeah. I mean, but that, that’s the whole point, right?
As you’re, you’re trying to, you’re, you’re investing, you’re basically trying to create an asset as opposed to time as your asset. Now, I do want to spend some time talking about that. You’re a, you’re a fellow podcaster. And I don’t know if I mentioned this in the intro, but you’re also a host of the profit school podcast with your cohost, Chris Mercer.
I’m a huge fan of podcasting and one of my, as everybody that ever has listened to this show knows. One of my missions is to get everyone to start a podcast. It doesn’t have to be through us and our. Agency, but however they choose to do it. I think that people need to get out there and tell their story.
So whenever I have a new podcaster or new to me, podcaster on the show, I like for them to talk a little bit about their journey. Like, so what, what caused you to start the podcast and where you at? Like how many episodes in like, give us a little bit of a fail. Yeah, man. So this is a, it’s sort of a crazy story, but I started as a networking conversation between me and a competitor.
So Mercer was my competitor. He was just this, just this person who had a similar product that I did. And I never really wanted to talk to him. Didn’t really want to know him. And then I talked to him and I was like, this guy is actually pretty generous. He’s not, he’s not being like a competitor. He’s being like a.
Colleague, you know, fun to talk to. And so we talked for like an, a year every month. And I was like, man, this is really good. We should turn our conversations into a podcast. Cause it was very constructive, very like, you know, good vibe. And so. About a year into talking privately, we’ve made it public. We said, well, what do we want to do?
We’re, we called it business unfiltered at first. Cause we’re like, we’re just going to talk about business without any agenda. And so we did about, we did 50 episodes of business unfiltered. And during one of the recordings, I pulled them aside. I like said, let’s stop recording and let’s get real. And I said, I want to merge companies with you.
Whoa. And so after a podcast episode, I decided this is the guy that I want to have as my business partner. And we had a little bit of experience together and now we’re over a year into it as merged companies. So those are almost like interviews, like you’re interviewing each other from the standpoint of for a business, a merger that you didn’t even know almost in retrospect, right?
Like you didn’t go into it with that idea, right? It was like. 50 first dates or 50 dates with each other to figure out how we approach problems. And we learned that we’re like, we’re better off together. And so we’ve done 50 more episodes since then, but yeah, it’s pretty crazy. That about hit the, so you’ve hit the hundred episode mark.
Yeah, we recorded 97, the 97th one today. And that’ll go out in February. So, yeah, so we’re getting there. Congratulations, by the way, podcasts, like they quit or for whatever reason stopped recording way before that. So that’s amazing. What do you think has kept both of you in the game and kind of going strong?
It’s that we, funny thing is we create topics from conversations from earlier episodes. So we’ll be in the middle of an episode and be like, Hey, we should do a topic on this one. And so we’ll write it down and we haven’t run out of topics yet. And we, I think I seated 30 topics and now we have hundreds of topics.
And it’s like, we just never, we have always have something to talk about and we always just keep on maintaining it. It’s pretty easy for us to do. Cause it’s a audio only podcast. So we can do it, you know, without present being presentable. We just sort of go together and. And having a partner makes it motivating.
I did it by myself. I had another episode, another podcast I did for a hundred episodes. And then at number 100, I said, I’m taking a break and I never came back to it. And the main difference is that this one, I think there’s just so like, I don’t think we could just do it forever because there’s so many topics to talk about.
And we can bring in stories from our internal workings. We can bring in stories from our past. It’s just a really fun way to discover and get to know each other and create content at the same time. To give us a flavor for the content, like maybe talk about one of the episodes or a story from it, or just to give, you know, an idea, cause I definitely want my audience to definitely go check out your show.
So, but give us an idea of what, of, of, of, of a topic. Yeah. So at profit school, we sort of our operating system comes down to three different things, offers, products and systems. And so we try to have something rooted in one of those three things. We think that’s the three components of a core small business.
You have to have those three teams or functions in your business. So you need to make offers in front of people. You need to have a product that somebody buys and you have to have a system to make sure you don’t fall apart. And so Everything we talk about falls into one of those three things.
Generally, like we did one about handling conflict. We were talking about conflict and we had a conflict with each other. And so we decided like, let’s do an episode about how do we handle conflict with each other? And, and we have a pretty, we have a straightforward agenda. It’s like you define your problem.
You, you talk about the strategies of solving that. And then you talking about tactics and specific case studies of how you’ve done that or how you might do it moving forward. And then you end the podcast goes about 30 minutes and we, you know, we, we actually don’t over rehearse it because we find that it gets, you know, the vibe.
Like we, we drop surprises on each other because we’re not overly rehearsed. We’re, we just have a topic and we go for it. And so it’s dynamic. And the thing is sometimes we, we leave meat on the bone because we went in a whole different direction. That’s when we have the next episode. And so it really works well for us is that it’s like, there’s always something that we can continue to go through.
So yeah, anything around the offers, products or systems of a business we consider to be fair game and we do a pretty well, pretty good mix between them. So jumping around a little bit here, profit school. com and measure you. How do those two coexist like, or work in tandem or how do those two function?
Yeah. So our core business was teaching people how to do Google analytics, Google ads, that type of stuff. When we merged, that became measure you. And that’s like our baby. That’s the majority of the revenue, majority of our longevity in the industry. And then But what happened was people would come and they take a Google ads course from me or a Google analytics course from Mercer, and then they’d say, Hey, I’m pretty good at this.
I actually, now I got promoted at my company and I’m like in charge of measurement. I’m in charge of the, of the ads, you know, and they’d say, Hey, I’m getting people requesting me like neighbors and cousins and stuff to do their, their ads for them. I’m going to start a business. And you know, how do I start a business?
And I was like, well, actually I had an agency. That I was a part of for 15 years and very successful. We sold it in 2021. I’ll tell you how to build an agency or how to do, how to be a more efficient freelancer, how to price your products and all these different conversations people had, because they, it was like an Ascension.
It was like, once they get done with courses on how to learn a skill, they need the business skills. And so we. For a while, we just, we would put business courses into our core academy, but we realized that not everybody really wanted to learn business, only a small fraction of people. So we said, let’s take all of our business content and let’s create a different brand for that.
So we can both attract a new audience there and make that the place they go to once they graduate from measure you certain segment of people. And so naturally we, we sort of turned them into two different brands and that’s how we got to where we are today. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And especially because you came from that background, like you did it.
So when you’re teaching or when you’re, you know, when you’re creating the content and you’re talking to a freelancer, somebody that’s going to do a business or otherwise, like you did it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. We are the avatar for the people we teach. Right. Which really, I think it comes across and how it makes it authentic, right?
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And so talk a little bit more about the courses, like the courses and like the actual content and what people come to you for. Yeah, yeah. So it’s funny, I. Taught this to the employees of my agency because there was no good courses out there and I had to learn it on my own. But we, but as we scaled, we, we grew from five employees to 50 employees and we would hire, we were hiring like three people a week and it’s like, you got to do something.
So I started doing an internal training program. Then that became an external training program in Minneapolis where I’m from originally. And then, and then I got, then a university came up to me and said, Hey, can you do this at the university? So I started teaching digital marketing and ads and stuff like that and analytics at the university level.
And And then I started doing it online. So I, I basically just kept on going. I really wanted to be a digital nomad in 2015. So I, I basically quit the agency world day to day and started creating online courses because that was the only way I could travel the world and have a business and have income.
So I created courses and traveled to about 40 different countries over the course of five years while building the business. And now it’s evolved to like they used to just be pre recorded courses that update everyone one or two years and now that now we actually produce them live once a year and then you can watch the recorded version throughout the year and then the next time the next year comes around, we just updated it to whatever the modern, the current version of that technology is.
And so the courses are usually between 10 and 20 hours. They’re very thorough from absolute beginner. You’ve never done this before. You get the beginning part all the way through the advanced techniques in one course. And they’re, they’re, they’re really around the skills that, that people see on every job description out there.
Yeah. I’m a big fan of when somebody reiterates. And year over year update their content and make sure that, you know, they’re bringing the most up to date, you know, information versus, you know, things move pretty fast. How do you, how do you stay up to date? Like, how do you and your team stay up to date to make sure that year over year you’re bringing the best, you know, quality, high value content you can.
Yeah, it’s a combination of things. I’d say that we have people who do, we provide services. So we have done for you services that we do for clients, just a handful, just to keep us fresh. So the people who are teaching it are doing it. And so they recognize when the interface has changed, they recognize when the policies happen and actually every month, and this is anybody who goes to measure you and signs up for our free toolbox every month, we give you a, what’s new.
So we give you an update of what’s new on every single major platform. The Google platform. So you, you, if you just watch that one video, you’ll always be within a month of what the current things are. So we do it from practicing and then the thing is like when you’re, when you’ve done it for a long time, you get into maintenance mode, which is, you know, in a little bit of time, you can make a big impact because all you’re doing is just knowing where to go.
You look for the updates and you look for what’s changed and then you’re, you’re basically folded that into your existing framework. Now, the main difference between us and other teachers is that we teach off of a framework, not off of an interface. So I’m not teaching you Google analytics. I’m teaching you Google analytics so you can implement a framework.
And that framework is ultimately your strategy. And a strategy is ultimately what makes you stand out in the marketplace, in our opinion, and makes you effective. So you mentioned aligning products, offers, and systems essentially for growth, we’ll talk a little bit about like that ideology and how you really came up with it.
Yeah. So it’s, it’s funny. That’s just how we organized internally when we merged. I I’m a marketing person and that’s my background. And so I was in charge of when we, when we merged, I was in charge of the marketing sales of the business. And then my partner is really a systems guy. He’s really heavily involved in, in making sure that.
Everything works automation, all that, all the stuff that, you know, the backend so that everything is just running smoothly running the team, running meetings, all that stuff. And so he’s more on the system side and then there’s this third element of what is the product we sell? So that was a pretty natural and we both were product people.
And so we sort of had responsibilities. Overlapping between these things. And, and then we also have a director of product who is one of our team, long team members, who’s also overseeing the product. And it just made sense to organize our team that way. It’s not overly complicated. We don’t need to have seven meetings a week about every department.
It’s just those three things make us. Work, make the world go around. And they’re so interconnected that just having those three things was sort of like the simplest operating system you could have for your business. Now at my old agency, we implemented a lot of complicated management things. And when you go out the org chart and you, and you look at all the things they recommend, you need a hundred thousand dollar people.
You need to have 20 of them. Right. So it’s like suddenly you have to have the payroll of like 10 million company in order to survive. And it’s like for companies that are not in that, right. Level. It’s like, what’s the minimum they need? So more minimalist versus maximalist. And, and that, that just totally hits home to me because having been a digital nomad for five years and having lived out of a suitcase and having stuff in storage, it’s like you need to be pretty minimalist.
It’s like, do we really need this or not? So we went more for the simplicity angle. And that’s sort of how we always, we’re always just trying to chop it down to what’s the simplest way to do it as opposed to the most complex way to do it. And we think every business should get to that point until they really Need complexity, I guess, which will you ever need it?
I don’t know. Yeah. You mentioned working with a handful of of clients still on the agency side. It seems to me like when you do an assessment or you’re bringing in a new client, like there’s, it’s going to be one of those. Even if that’s just how you mentioned you, you organize internally, but it seems like usually one of those levers.
Something can be approved, whether it’s a product, the offer or the systems. And is that what you find? I’m just trying to put myself in the shoes of like your, somebody at your agency, like there’s always something that I don’t want to say is off, but can be approved, that’s going to help them with their overall objectives.
Yeah, a hundred percent. And it could be more than one as well, but if a company is struggling, it’s one of those three things and, and it’s, you can even go deeper than that. Like, so we actually have, I created something called profit score and it’s like profit score. ai and you can do a little assessment, I think it’s 12 questions and I’ll tell you whether you need help with your offers, products, or systems based on those 12 questions.
But usually somebody is like, yeah, I’m falling apart at the seams. That means they have a systems problem. If somebody says I’m burnt out and I’m working harder than ever, yet I don’t have any money, that’s an offers problem. They’re not making offers to enough people and they don’t have a pipeline so they can charge what they’re worth.
And if somebody says, yeah, man, I’m constantly like under charging for what I do, or like my clients don’t respect me, that’s usually a product problem because they don’t actually know how to price their products or they don’t really understand what their product results supposed to be. And so they treat themselves like a commodity as opposed to something that’s premium.
Hmm. And so how do you go? And I know each one of these are going to be different. Each one of these businesses are going to be different, but I’m guessing you probably narrow in on one or two and you work through that before you go through. Cause, cause when you just now said all of those, I feel like everybody can be like, that’s me, that’s me, that’s me.
That’s one way or another, right. On some level or percentage of answering that question. So how do you go about like chipping away? Yeah. I mean, that’s a good question. So at profit school specifically, we have. A mastermind where we cycle through those topics. So somebody joins and these are usually individuals or small partnerships, you know, less than five people, maybe 10 people.
And they, they all have pretty similar problems, which is that all those things are a problem. The problem is that they’re all problems, right? They all are on some, on some percentage or variation. Yeah, for sure. And the urgency around working those problems isn’t, you can’t just work on one. You have to work on all of them.
So we cycle through those. Every week we talk about either your offers, products, or systems we have. And then we use our internal stuff we’ve developed over the course of the last 20 years and from our previous lives and previous companies into like, here, here’s how you, here’s the easy way to solve that thing.
So it’s like break, fix of problems using frameworks that we’ve already had to use. For our successful companies. And so a lot of it’s just diagnosing what the problem is and then help recognizing that that’s a real problem and that it’s something that does need to be addressed and then sharing not only how we have solved that problem, but also the tools we used and also how the other people in the group have solved it.
So it’s like a good camaraderie thing. It’s a good, you know, it’s a, you’re with a group of people who are going through the same things. So you have peers and you have validation pretty much immediately versus struggling on your own to do it. Can you give an example of that? Like it doesn’t, you don’t have to name a company if you don’t want to or anything like that, whatever.
I understand. Some people want their privacy, but like an example of like somebody goes into the thing and then like, and the result was like, can you give an example? Yeah. I mean, the common one is, I mean, a lot of people that we work with our agencies are small, you know, freelancers turning into agencies where they have clients and.
They have one really big client and then they don’t have anybody else. And they’re so busy with their client that they don’t really, they’re like, nobody knows who I am. I have no pipelines. I have no sales calls. And so we’re just like, well, have you ever emailed, have you ever sent an email letting people know that if you ever made an offer, do you have, do you have an email list?
Do you have, have you posted like what you do on LinkedIn? Like if you, have you done anything to publicize what you’re working for? Are you just sort of like this, this person who’s at the beck and call of your clients and you’re not doing anything and it’s like, okay, so. And so we have this thing called a power planner where if somebody’s saying, yeah, and if they’re coming to the mastermind week after week and they haven’t done anything to promote themselves or to like make an offer to somebody, we’re like, don’t come back next week unless you have an email opt in form on your site.
And then if they, and then they collect email addresses. Okay. Don’t come back unless you’ve come back when you’ve sent this email. Now, we don’t, we don’t, we’re not that harsh, right? Because I like it, man. Tough love. Do not come back. You don’t call me. You lose my number if that newsletter isn’t started.
All right, man. Can we give them the accountability, right? Yeah. So they have, they have accountability where they would actually come in. And then eventually that becomes a habit for them where they don’t want to come empty handed. They want to come back when they’ve done this. It’s embarrassing. You don’t want to come to a class without your homework every, every day.
Come on. And when you see people who are thriving, guess what? They all have the same characteristic. Yeah. They don’t overanalyze it. They do it. You’re competitive too. People who are thriving almost always are people who just don’t make excuses and they just do action and they’re not worried about perfection.
Perfection often gets in the way like, Oh, I can’t, I can’t send cold email because it’s not perfect. I can’t reach out to somebody cause it’s not perfect. You’re never going to have a perfect condition. And ultimately if you want a perfect condition, you probably should go back to being an employee in that case.
Well, Jeff, we’re live today, January 2nd. First day of recording for me on the, in the new year. What’s in the plan? What’s in the plan? What’s next for you for 2025? Give us the vision. Yeah. Yeah. So we want to be a well oiled machine internally that serves our customers, people who are either trying to get into the marketing and measurement world and learn their skills there, or people who have a business, but are struggling with things we’ve just talked about, right.
We want to set the standard. For how businesses are run. My goal is that when people, and this sounds crazy, but I’ve already done it once is that I want people to teach, I want people to teach the methods that we do at profit school at business school, I want to be one of the books they recommend. I want people to implement the op system before they go and do something like traction before they go do something like scaling up or these are any other, you know, there’s other brands that are out there doing that because those things are geared towards.
Companies of 50, 100 plus people, and I feel like a lot of companies can’t even get to that point because the advice is not ready for them yet. I want them, I want to be the one that they say, Hey, any business under 20 people under 15 people, you got to read Jeff and Mercer’s book. That’s the book you need, and that’s the one that you’re going to go on, and that will get you to the point where you can decide if you want something else or not.
But most people won’t decide they want something else because we got what they need. Amazing. Jeff, how do people follow up? How do they learn more? How do they connect? Yeah. So we’re, we’re available on all the channels. We have a YouTube channel, youtube. com slash at measure you measure you. com. You can sign up for our email list, right on the whole thing.
You get, we got a free community there. We have about 50 different free tools, right? When you sign up, you can get access to tons of workshops. I mentioned knowing what’s new in the digital marketing world. You get, you get that email every single week from us about that. So signing up there is a great way to know about everything we’re doing and you get the benefit of that free community.
Same thing for profit school. So profit school. com, you can sign up for, you get your email address. We’ll email you. We have our podcast. We do some live trainings. We are teaching people our system. We have a mastermind group where people can just jump right in. And for a pretty reasonable price, they get a whole year of coaching from Mercer and myself.
Every single week. And so yeah, we just live to serve our, our community and help people get the results they’re looking for. We don’t think we’re, we’re not perfect by any means, but, but we’re just continuing to work it out. And so we’re about a year into our merger of our companies and 25 is a year that people are going to start to be like, yep, this is, this is, this is the option for us.
This is where we’re going is we’re implementing profit school. We’re implementing what they teach at measure view. Amazing. Loving the merger, loving the podcasting side, creating and leading with value. It’s just, it’s just a great story. One that I’m happy to bring to my audience. Speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content. New ideas and hopefully new inspiration that helped you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Jeff, man, really appreciate you coming on the show today and I’m pulling for you in 2025.
I’m looking forward to watching the continued growth that you and Chris are having. So thank you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.