From Lemonade stand to Influencer Analysis with John Crestani

Jeff Kikel: 00:00:00

Hello, Freedom Nation, and I'm so glad to be sharing this best of interview with you of John Crestani. So John started off his first entrepreneurial venture was a lemonade stand at a local golf course. And he went on to build a marketing career digital marketing career and now helps digital influencers understand the value of their businesses. I hope you enjoy this interview, John was just a joy to interview and I really truly wanted to share this best of interview with you on our channel.

FN Intro/Outro: 00:00:40

Welcome to the freedom nation podcast with Jeff Kikel. On this show, Jeff shares his expertise in financial and retirement planning from a different perspective. Planning for Your Freedom Day, which is the first day that you wake up and have enough income or assets and do not have to go to work that day. Learn how to calculate what you need, how to generate income sources, and listen to interviews from others who've done it themselves. Get ready to experience your own Freedom Day.

Jeff Kikel: 00:01:14

Hey, everybody, it's Jeff here, once again with the Freedom Nation podcast. And guess what we are in our new home in Northwest Austin and new podcast studio, you'll be seeing more and more of it as we have the interviews where it's not just me on the screen. What? For today, our first interview out of the new podcast studio is Chris Chris, Donnie, Chris is out in Malibu, California. He is the epitome of the Freedom Day story. I cannot wait to tell his story or have him tell his story to you, Chris, how you doing, buddy?

John Crestani: 00:01:48

Oh, it's John. Oh, geez.

Jeff Kikel: 00:01:50

Good Lord, man. It's one of those days.

John Crestani: 00:01:53

No, no worries, no worries. Don't worry about it.

Jeff Kikel: 00:01:58

I'm so excited about the studio. I didn't get your name on. It On. So now that I've screwed that up, let's just get it. Tell us your story. Man. How did you how'd you end up out in Malibu and and where you're at today?

John Crestani: 00:02:17

Totally man. So, you know, one of my dreams, I'd say coming out of college was, you know, I want to be a multimillionaire. I want to live in Malibu. And, you know, so just just really, you know, chugging through the years that's happened. And I'm really excited about the downside is I didn't realize how there's no young people in Malibu, you know, it's kind of lonely. So, you know, I'm kind of in the middle of nowhere. So, you know, and I'm relatively young. So I didn't realize that. But that being said, the way I got here was through marketing, through sales and marketing. And I think my story is pretty common for a lot of entrepreneurs. But I, I started out selling stuff. You know, my dad had me selling stuff, and lemonade stands at our local golf course, when they had tournaments in the weekends. And when I got into college, I started selling study guides to international students. And how did I find that international students were such a hot audience for study guides, I mean, I was making five to 10,000 Extra a semester. And I'd say, there's, you know, I'd say there's an animalistic hunger, that, that happens to people to make money. And, you know, it's, you know, when you really tap into that true desire that comes from your core, to build a business to add value to people to you know, find, you know, who wants what you have to sell, you can make it happen, you know, and I'll get into more specific tactics folks can use if that's something you want to go into later on. After college, I work for a marketing agency for two years, went off on my own. After the two years, I was always the best employee at my, you know, people say, Oh, you're an employee, but I was the best employee at my office. First, in last to leave performance always hit every number. I was managing people's ad accounts. And when I started doing that on my own, I started making I went from making 6000 a month to making like, 60,000 a month. And yeah, I

Jeff Kikel: 00:04:27

think that's I'd rather be unemployable and do that. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

John Crestani: 00:04:31

And when you're paying yourself and when, when you're, you know, you rise to that income level. So I put myself in a business model, which was affiliate marketing that allowed me to earn that type of income and nobody was saying, Oh, we're paying them too much. And then after that, I sold it. You know, in 2017. To present I started selling information on how to do affiliate marketing, how to start an online business, and just this year, I started my second business, which is advanced pay and that's my All focus in life, which is a really it's data analytics. It's influencer analytics. And influencer marketing is just the highest ROI place. People don't like buying products from ads. People prefer to buy products from people they trust. And the social media has made that possible. But there's no analytics on who's going to give you that ROI. People don't even have estimations, you know, who are my competitors working with? So that's what we're doing right now. And that's where I'm at. I'm live in beautiful Malibu building some horse stables over there. I do. I have two kids, and beautiful daughters three and five. And that's basically me.

Jeff Kikel: 00:05:37

That is brilliant. So, you know, what was that? What was that transition? Like going from, you know, basically selling you to selling information? I mean, how did how did you make that transition?

John Crestani: 00:05:49

Great question. So, so what I noticed was that the, you know, when I was marketing other people's products, I didn't have First off, I wasn't building any asset, I was just putting up ads, I was buying an ad here for $1. And hoping to make $2, from selling basically the customer or the leads to the companies. Yeah. And it fluctuated a lot. But I said I don't, I'm not building anything that can create freedom for myself now, because I have to grind all the time, every day, every month to always keep my golden goose, lay, and eggs. And I said, and I'd sold, I'd sold my that business for a minimal amount of money to a business partner of mine, but nothing life changing, right? So I was in a place where I said, What do I want my business to be, you know, this is end of 2016, what do I want. And I said, I don't want to have to grind every day. And I wrote it all out, I wrote out what I wanted and what I didn't want, I said I didn't want to manage a bunch of employees, I wanted something where I figured out marketing, I build an asset and I make money. And that's what I did selling information products. And that is still making six figures a month, or seven figures a year to this day, that happened really fast, I just took the time and effort and skills I already had, and put them in a higher value place. I also started saving money, which I hadn't been doing in my early and mid 20s,

Jeff Kikel: 00:07:24

which is a good thing, I might recommend that you do that. And doing

John Crestani: 00:07:27

that through my own business, I was able to sock away a massive amount of money every year tax free, and buy real estate and do all this different stuff. And I've been able to build up a pretty sight nice sized nest egg for myself, so that I can focus, you know, but I'm still hungry, I want to be a billionaire. And I want to solve problems at that scale. So that's why I'm really slid on

Jeff Kikel: 00:07:52

are well, and then maybe what you're doing is not only if you're you know, if you have a business and that information products business, it may or may not have some value at you know, at some point in the future. But you know, what you're doing is if you're in that type of business, where I'm using my brain, I'm selling kind of my brain and there's not a lot of value to my brain, then take that money and skirt that off to some other asset, like you're doing I mean, so you're doing the right stuff, move it to another asset that generates an income stream, another income stream out of it, whether it's real estate, whether it's insurance, whatever strategy you use, that's how you create, you know, another asset that has value at that point. And then now you're off kind of building the new asset. So let's talk a little bit about advanced PE and how that how that works. And, you know, because I have you know, I've looked at a Philly area, I've looked at influencer marketing. And you know, quite frankly, my feeling on some of it was I think half of its bullshit, quite frankly, as far as their audiences. Because there is ways to pay and grow your, your, you know, audience on things like Instagram and things like that. So how were you able to kind of get past the BS and get into the ROI side?

John Crestani: 00:09:08

Sure. Well, if you think about it from a very fundamental perspective, the reason people are on social media is not to look at ads, they're there to engage with people. Okay, so first off influencer marketing, it cuts out the middleman. But the problem is, is you can't really do it at scale. Whereas you can just tell Facebook I want to reach these sorts of people Facebook's AI is so advanced they can figure that out. But influencer marketing you're really relying on right now you're relying on people to tell you what people to work with. Yeah, no, you're like you're you're you're going to some dude who's saying Oh, yeah, I know a bunch of micro influencers. You should work with Jeff. And and you know what, people are messy and the people that get the most business usually are, you know, doing sales or not using is the best marketers here. When people have the best sales pitch, there's, there's a wonky correlation there, it doesn't work out. So what we're doing is we're bringing data to it. So we're saying, you know, if you are, if you are a business broker, let's say, you know, you can say, who are the top influencers working with business brokers, I can give, you know, and if I have only $1,000, to spend, who are a few dudes I can work with. But we see, but the hardest part is identifying who is the right person to work with? Oh, yeah, absolutely. And we do that not through demographics, not through hashtags. We're doing that by showing who is already working with your competitors, who are the biggest influencers for Business Brokers, who's moving the most, you know, weight loss products, or protein shakes, we show you who's moving revenue right now, rather than, like, who put a hashtag up for business? That's

Jeff Kikel: 00:11:03

exactly right. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Or who put a hashtag up for dance moves or something like that, that, you know, may or may not have my target audience

John Crestani: 00:11:13

in the back. Exactly. So we don't care what people what content people are posting about, we care what brands or what companies, or they are promoting nice, because we found, we care about who's selling, that's all we care about, is getting ROI, and how much how much do you have to pay? Because what the other thing that doesn't always work out with these influencers is a lot of people say, Oh, we're gonna do only performance deals. Yeah. And, you know, we only want to do performance deal, because, frankly, I'm dumb. And I don't know what you know, what you're gonna do. We show you what they're going, like, what their estimate what they've done in the past, because these influencers on their side, they don't, they've built up a name and a reputation and audience, they don't want to put their name reputation, their audience on the line for somebody who's never paid them before. And they don't even know if they're gonna pay him.

Jeff Kikel: 00:12:07

That's exactly right. Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, I mean, I think that's the future. I mean, I think you're right on the forefront of, you know, where, where the world is moving. And yeah, I think you've gotten past the, you know, the 12 year old kids, you know, unboxing something, and you've got legit people that are influencers nowadays, that that are out there, it'll be interesting to see if you're able to identify some influencers that may not be, you know, the top 100 that are out there, you know, find some of these micro influencers that, that are much more easy to target. And because I mean, honestly, I just see the the Pay Per Click advertising, just getting more and more and more expensive, and less and less effective.

John Crestani: 00:12:50

And it's also because the tracking, like all these privacy things we have, you know, don't get me started ranting about all the geopolitical data, things that are going on. But yeah, yeah, we talked a little bit about this earlier, you could get me ran for hours here. But basically, you can't track things as well anymore. So the ads are, you know, it's it's hurting, we're seeing as we spend 1000s of dollars a day in advertising. And we've seen, like, in order to reach an individual person on YouTube, for instance, that has gone up roughly 15 times, at least for in our niche 15 times in the last four years. Good. And these, these are this just to reach the same person. So that and that squeezes that squeezes your margin that forces you in adapt your business, raise your prices, it forced us to raise our price, we've had to raise our prices 10 times good, lower, or, you know, 10 times of what the price was in the last couple years to deal with this. So yeah, it's Yeah,

Jeff Kikel: 00:13:55

I mean, it's just, and you're just taking the small guy out of the out of the equation. And I see, I know exactly why they're doing it. Because you know, a small person and a big person are as big of a pain in the ass. So I'd rather get paid by the bigger person.

John Crestani: 00:14:09

The fact of the matter is, at the end of the day, Google and YouTube and Facebook, there's never been more money being spent on marketing in the history of the world, like marketing wasn't even a thing until 100 years ago. And now you can barely even reach people if you don't pay money, or you know, so it's yeah, it's changing.

Jeff Kikel: 00:14:29

Yeah. Well, I mean, I like I said, I think I think where you're going, the the beauty of this is to you shouldn't be shouldn't get a big slap down from the, from the companies because you're using your own private data in those cases. You're not relying on them for data that they control. Yep. Fantastic. Well, cool. So is the dance paid launched already, or is it still kind of in the the startup stage?

John Crestani: 00:14:54

Yeah, so we have a prototype up we're building our databases right now. We only have a couple 1000 Create the YouTube creators that were cataloging data on, we need to get that up to about half a million YouTube creators, about one that's about 1% of the audience of creators. So we need to get that up to half a million. And we need to get that up to about 10,000 brands we're tracking, we're only tracking about 1500. So when we get to that point, it's going to, it's going to be what I consider valuable. But yeah, we're, we're just, we're just three months in and we're, we're chugging hard, though, that's not

Jeff Kikel: 00:15:29

bad for three months. And it's, I mean, it's gathering the data that that's the challenge to begin with. Once that's done, you know, then then it's a lot easier, and it's scalable, and it has lots of value to it. That's awesome. Well, I'm excited to hear and I can we're gonna stay in touch so I can hear what's going on with it.

John Crestani: 00:15:47

I'll throw you on our monthly company update. I want to

Jeff Kikel: 00:15:51

Yeah, and if you're here in town, we'll we'll go out and grab a beer. Yeah,

John Crestani: 00:15:54

go out to town regularly because our investors are, or the VC we're working with is out in the 16th. Congress.

Jeff Kikel: 00:16:02

Oh, well, I'm up north. I kind of I try and avoid often. If I can stay up north. I'm out by the lake up north. So

John Crestani: 00:16:10

take me to your favorite barbecue place or something? Well, hey, brother,

Jeff Kikel: 00:16:13

you got it. We'll hit the Oasis and, and hang out, hang out and drink margaritas or whatever. Perfect. All right, man. Well, you ready for the Fast Five questions? Let's go. All right. So you wake up in the morning, your business is totally gone. You have 500 bucks in your pocket, a laptop computer, place to live food and drink? What are you going to do first?

John Crestani: 00:16:35

First off, I'm not going to spend the money. You know, there's no equation where it's like, I'm gonna get a 20% ROI on you know, $500 Yeah, I'm not going to look at it that way. I'm definitely not going to look at the money that way. I'm going to look at how can I put my ads? So how can I how can I make money without spending money. And the first place my mind comes to is create content. Get on YouTube, you know what if I have a laptop computer, I'm assuming I have a webcam, or at least I can download

Jeff Kikel: 00:17:08

and be on the computer right? OBS Studio,

John Crestani: 00:17:12

I'm gonna go on there. And I'm going to post I'm just going to start creating content, I'm going to figure out a niche where I can sell my skills in and I am going to create a YouTube channel, I'm going to do Tik Tok, I'm going to probably create a forum, do Instagram, you know, do all the things. And I'm going to post content every day, around skills I have that I can sell in this case, it's you know, I'm really good at managing advertising. So I would post about advertising in my case and try to generate clients for myself that will just give me money. And I'm going to take every dollar of that and I'm just going to put it in the bank until I have you know, I have a rainy day fund. And maybe after I have a couple months of payment, you know, for my life. I will spend some money on something. Yeah, yeah. Treat yourself at that

Jeff Kikel: 00:18:07

point, because you've made it that is outstanding. What's the biggest business mistake you've ever made?

John Crestani: 00:18:13

Biggest business mistake I ever made? That's a great question. The biggest business mistake I ever made was, I'd say wasn't taking the, probably the time and the energy to really figure out and sit down and talk with one of my former business partners to figure out how we can effectively work together. When I was running my ad agency. I brought in this guy that could do sales and bizdev he was just a natural he schmoozed like no other person he was, you know, he worked his net. I mean, he was amazing. And he was bringing in huge deals. And he slowly started to cut me out of the deals, we had agreed with 5050 and I started getting cut out, but I was making so much money from my performance marketing I should have, I should have, you know, I didn't care that much. But in hindsight, he so I left company, which you know, I just said hey, I'm, you know, I got my systems going, it's just me, I'm making a shitload of money, you know, 75,000 a month. But he was an amazing salesperson. He was one of the best he he was one of like, the top five people I've ever met at this he was definitely the best networker I've ever met in my life. He had something special, and he built that company. I handed off two of my assistants to him and I put them in touch with somebody else who could manage ads. He built that company and sold it for almost $100 million dollars

Jeff Kikel: 00:19:47

that's amazing with

John Crestani: 00:19:49

with a partner that I put them in touch with Yeah. And it wasn't that they had any skills or anything I you know, I didn't have I was you know, I but I just I had gotten complacent and comfortable. I'd say that was the biggest mistake I ever made when you find a spectacular individual. Figure out how to make things work out. Yeah, there's some types of people which don't come you don't come across very often. And he was one of those people.

Jeff Kikel: 00:20:20

Yeah, that's amazing. But that's that's the one you kick yourself in the ass. It's the 100 million dollar pain in the ass. So what's a good book that you recommend for our audience?

John Crestani: 00:20:34

Good book I recommend for your audience. Well, I'll is all right, if I do one business book and one, one, like

Jeff Kikel: 00:20:42

the book that the bonus plan,

John Crestani: 00:20:45

business book, I definitely say cash vertising. Okay, cash vertising by Drew Eric Whitman, this is a tactical book about marketing and writing ads, and just the psychology of marketing. That's absolutely amazing. And then for really, for a really fun read. This is more of a little more this author, I typically only recommend to advanced readers, but this one's called ream D. It's kind of a play on letters. It's usually read me there's a readme file that all CDs, and this book is by Neil Stevenson, and it is just a it's 1000 pages. It's fun, I'd say if you're gonna do that book, it's one of my favorites, give it at least 200 pages. But it deals with Russian mobsters, hackers, video game billionaires, Chinese virtual gold mining, um, you know, Lauren, and hands, you have, you know, just princesses you have the whole gamut. It takes place all around the world, because it's on a private jet, or you know, that goes different places. And it is one of the most wild stories you will ever read in your entire life.

Jeff Kikel: 00:22:09

It sounds like it only needs to throw was the kitchen sink in there and it'd be perfect.

John Crestani: 00:22:13

Well, let me throw another thing at you. He invented the term cyberspace and meta brow wound, this person has been personally hired by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Sergey Brin at separate times to consult with either of them individually or for their companies as like a futurist officer. Saturday's AI is far ahead of his time. And if you're looking to get rich, just find something in his book that hasn't been invented and do it and just

Jeff Kikel: 00:22:45

make it Yeah. What's a tool you use in your business every day that you might recommend to our audience,

John Crestani: 00:22:52

Slack, Slack?

Jeff Kikel: 00:22:53

I love slack. And I can post them in a row that said that,

John Crestani: 00:22:57

you know what, it keeps all my people together, and especially when you're working with contractors like I am asynchronous workflows. It is it's fantastic. That's brilliant.

Jeff Kikel: 00:23:08

I had I had a client or somebody I interviewed last week, she actually uses it with clients, too. Yes, she actually has her clients on there. And it allows them to just interact really well with with their entire organization. I had the first time I had heard that one. So

John Crestani: 00:23:24

you have to be on the paid plan for that. Yeah, that's okay.

Jeff Kikel: 00:23:27

Paid plan works. Yeah, it's what's the best way for somebody to get a hold of you, if they if they want more information?

John Crestani: 00:23:36

Sure, send me a message, direct message on LinkedIn or on Twitter. I'm most active on those platforms. Keep in mind that I do have over half a million YouTube subscribers. And you know, I have a lot of people that follow my stuff. So I get a lot of messages. So if you send me a message, I'd say vite be very, don't just say, Hey, I'd like to have some of your time. Like our pick your brain. Just be very pointed with the specific questions that you have for me on your message.

Jeff Kikel: 00:24:06

Nice. That is awesome. Well, John, thank you so much. Just absolutely amazing interview. I love love, love, love your story. Absolutely. The the Freedom Day story right there. If everybody would just listen to him and model what he's doing, you're going to be your own billionaire down the road, too. So thanks a lot. Appreciate it. John, thank you for your time today, and your advice and sharing a little bit about your life. And we will see you down the road. Everybody. Once again. We produce these twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays so keep your eye out for the upcoming shows. And if you are on certainly feel free to subscribe to the channel make sure you do because occasionally we sneak in a little sneaky one, a bonus episode here and there. So make sure that you're subscribed so you get access to those Thanks a lot and we will see you guys back here the very next time.