496 Dan Monaghan

Introduction to Dan Monahan's Impact

[00:00:00]

Jeffrey Feldberg: Some entrepreneurs build companies, others reshape entire industries. Dan Monahan is one of the rare few who's done both.

 From launching WSI in the early days of the Internet to growing it into one of the world's most influential digital marketing agencies, Dan has spent nearly three decades helping businesses adapt the waves of technological changes most people never see coming.

His work has completely shaped how thousands of companies compete, grow, and stay relevant in a digital landscape that reinvents itself every few years. But what makes Dan truly fascinating isn't the scale of his success. It's the way he thinks.

Dan approaches business as an evolving system, one that rewards curiosity, long-term thinking, and the courage to reinvent before disruption forces the issue. He built, WSI, not from a playbook, but from an ability to understand human behavior, global trends, and the [00:01:00] invisible forces that shape help people discover and trust information.

He's also the author of the AI Search Revolution, a book that doesn't just explain the future of search, but rewrites how entrepreneurs should think about visibility, trust, and growth in an AI driven world. This is the story of an entrepreneur who has lived through every technological wave since the dawn of the digital era, and who continues to redefine what's possible for leaders willing to evolve.

Sponsor Message: Deep Wealth Mastery Program

Jeffrey Feldberg: And before we start the episode, a quick word from our sponsor, Deep Wealth and the Deep Wealth Mastery Program. Here's Bill, a graduate, who says, the Deep Wealth Mastery Program has transformed the KPIs we're using to accelerate growth and profits.

Or how about Emry, who says, and I love this, and I quote, the Deep Wealth Mastery Program helped me create the right mindset for both growing my business and later my future exit. I now know what questions to ask, what to do and what not to do, which is [00:02:00] priceless. The team and I have found dangerous skeletons and gaps that we're now addressing due to the Deep Wealth program. Today, our actions have a massive ROI. 

Absolutely love that. 

And now, speaking of growth and adding value, check out what Bruce says, and I quote, As a business owner, I'm always looking for new programs, systems, CEO peer groups, and strategies to improve my business. Hands down, the Deep Wealth Mastery program is the absolute best. I'm both growing my business and preparing for a future exit at the same time. It doesn't get any better. 

And I gotta tell you, as I hear these testimonials, this is exactly why I do what I do. My mission, the team's mission here at Deep Wealth, is to literally change the social fabric of society, one business owner at a time and one liquidity event at a time.

The Deep Wealth Mastery program, it's the only one based on a nine figure deal. And that deal, that was my deal. You know my story. I said no to a seven figure offer. I created a system that we [00:03:00] now call Deep Wealth Mastery and that's exactly what helped myself and my business partners welcome from a different buyer, a different offer, a nine figure deal.

So if you're interested in growing your profits, preparing for a future liquidity event, Whether that's three years away or 33 years away, and if you want to optimize your post exit life, Deep Wealth Mastery is for you. 

Please email success at deepwealth. com. Again, that's success, S U C C E S S at deepwealth. com. 

We'll send you all the information about the Deep Wealth Mastery Program, otherwise known as the Scale for Ultimate Sales System. Better yet, why not hop on a complimentary strategy call? We'll see where you are at your business and what's standing between you and your financial independence and your dreams.

So that's where you want to be. You want to be with other successful business owners, entrepreneurs, and founders, just like you, who are looking to create market disruptions, whether you're a startup, whether you've been in business for three or four decades, whether you're manufacturing, whether you're a high tech, SaaS, low tech, [00:04:00] whatever the case may be.

Come on in and network with other business owners, with other businesses, just like you, because they all want to lock in their financial freedom and enjoy both success and fulfillment. Again, the 90 day Deep Wealth Mastery Program, it has your name on it. All you need to do is take the next step. Please send an email to success at deepwealth. com. 

Deep Wealth Nation. 

Welcome to the Deep Wealth Podcast

Jeffrey Feldberg: Welcome to another episode of the Deep Wealth Podcast, Deep Wealth Nation. Let me ask you a question. How's your marketing coming along? How are your leads? Are your leads down? You're spending more on marketing, but you have less to show for it? And if you said yes, and chances are, you probably did well, I've got great news for you.

We have a very special guest in the House of Deep Wealth. He's not only a terrific friend of mine, he is a friend of the Deep Wealth community, a member of the Deep Wealth community, a thought leader, an entrepreneur, and now author with his first book. And he's gonna be talking all about what's going on with search and AI and what you should be doing, what you shouldn't be doing, but you're gonna put a plug in right there.

Dan, welcome to the Deep Wealth Podcast.

Dan Monaghan: Thank you, Jeffrey. Honored to be here and be a guest, [00:05:00] something. I've wanted to chat with you on this podcast for quite a while.

Dan Monahan's Journey and Early Days

Jeffrey Feldberg: Dan, you and I go way back and full disclosure, Deep Wealth. Dan and I have been friends for decades, but that aside, for someone who's new to you, Dan, and your incredible mind and how you think and what you've been doing, what's the story behind the story? Where have you been?

What got you from where you were to where you are today?

Dan Monaghan: Well, it's a bit of a long story. Back in the early nineties, I was running a publishing company and we heard about this worldwide web thing and we needed to put a website on. I've always been a bit of an early adopter, so I wanted a website, and what I realized is that the people that could design a really nice website, it took forever to download on the screen.

And the guys that could code it really well, it looked terrible. And even if I could get both of those people on the same page, neither of them knew anything about how to drive traffic to that website. It was like hanging a flyer on a tree in the middle of a forest. So I realized I had to learn about all this [00:06:00] stuff.

This was before the days, before search engines. This was back in the days we had the internet Yellow pages where you'd look up a topic in a big Yellow Pages book, and then you'd find the URL and you'd type it in. So I learned all about this and I realized that businesses needed to know this and not everyone can go through that whole learning process that I did. So I started a web development company. Called WSI and which stood for, We Simplify the Internet. And because I was a franchisee, putting myself through university, I ran an ice cream bicycle franchise. I knew a little bit about franchising. I'd said, to my younger brother, why don't we franchise this thing?

I was in my early twenties at the time. 

The Evolution of WSI and Digital Marketing

Dan Monaghan: And we did, and within a short period of time, it had become global we were essentially franchising digital agencies. And then along came search engine optimization, Google came along and then along came social and then mobile.

And so we've had to continue to reinvent the business [00:07:00] continually over the years. But today we're celebrating our 30th year anniversary. And I don't know of any digital marketing company that's been around. I'm probably, I'm sure there are. I've challenged people to try to name any that. And I've never, heard of one.

But it's been a long journey. It's been a fun journey. 

The Impact of AI on Marketing

Dan Monaghan: But interestingly to your point about, where we're at now I was speaking at a marketing conference in Las Vegas back in, this was around 20 17, 2018. And I was talking about how AI was being used in digital marketing.

And at the time we were using it for workflow automation, for lead scoring and these kinds of things. And I ended my speech by, explaining that the last few moments of that play Le Miz and that moment where the bishop and Jean, Paul Jean are meeting and it's basically a story about redemption and it's so powerful.

And I said there's one thing that AI will never be able to do that is the purview of [00:08:00] humans, and that is storytelling. Well then ChatGPT is launched, and I'm proven wrong because today Chachi PT has basically sucked up the entire. In many ways, the essence of humanity, and it is now writing. So it was actually a couple years before that we changed our company tagline to embrace digital stay human, because we saw how, digital continues to speed up and become advanced, but the human element is still so critical to that.

And so as we have jumped on the AI bandwagon around the time chat, PT launched, and we've totally transformed our business around AI and now providing AI consulting to companies it's the, this essence of the human is so critical to, to what we do. But we can dive deeper into that. But that's 30 years in a nutshell.

Jeffrey Feldberg: And Deep Wealth Nation as we're talking about this, please go to the show notes. In there is a link for Dan's book, the AI Search Revolution, Adaptive, SEO, in the age [00:09:00] of ai. And so Dan, when I was reading the book, and you and I were talking about this offline, you don't mess around. Boom. Right away. First chapter, it's an extinction level event, otherwise known as AI and marketing and SEO, and you're really putting that doomsday scenario out there.

So from a very high level, because I know as entrepreneurs we're seeing what's going on, but so many of us, it is just burning the candle at both ends. We don't have an explanation. We're just going along with it. Oh, maybe something's off. Maybe it'll get better. I'll just throw more money at it.

I'll throw more people at it. But it really isn't so very high level. What's going on in terms of why are for so many entrepreneurs, the marketing leads are more expensive, they're fewer, they're not great quality. Volume is down, sales are down. It is just really a doomsday scenario. What's going on with that?

Dan Monaghan: Well, there's a whole bunch of elements to this, you mentioned the book and I use the metaphor there is, imagine an asteroid is coming to Earth and nobody knows about it. That could be happening at any point in time in, history of [00:10:00] humanity. We just don't know.

 But all of a sudden we know. Someone discovers that, wait a second, there's an asteroid coming here now we gotta let people know about that. But then the question is, what do you do about that? And there's all kinds of things we, as humanity could do. But the challenge for businesses right now, I am telling you, and I'm telling your audience that there is an asteroid coming and it's the impact of AI and agents on marketing and specifically on search marketing.

And what's happening, Gartner is reported that by the end of 2026, Google will have lost 25% of its search traffic. By the end of 2028, it will have lost 50% of its search traffic. So, and that's really proving out in the numbers we're seeing now. Most business people they don't know the asteroids coming.

In other words, they're not looking at their analytics, they don't realize their web traffic is down. And the other thing they don't realize is even if. There's this concept of a zero click. Even though Google's [00:11:00] traffic is down, the traffic they do have is 50% less likely to click through to the websites, because now Google is answering questions right on its page, it's called, it's a zero click answer.

So you go to Google for a, to answer a question, and Google gives you, you're not clicking on anything. 'cause Google has sucked up the internet and learned. So Google answers it, but people are also getting their answers from chat. GPT. They're getting their answers from perplexity. A lot of people don't realize, that you can actually call one 800 ChatGPT and actually speak to AI for free.

So there's so many different ways that people can get their answers now without going to Google in the traditional ways. What that's doing is it's evaporating a lot of traffic that used to come to websites. And so that's the most businesses are not aware of that 'cause they're not looking at their traffic.

On the other hand, businesses that are using, we, we call it adaptive, SEO, it's a phrase we coined a number of years [00:12:00] ago. And by SEOI don't mean search engine optimization, Search Everywhere Optimization, because for the next generation, the number one search engine is TikTok. They're not searching on Google the way we did back in the day.

And so it's How are you found on Pinterest, on TikTok on Instagram, on Reddit how is your presence manifesting itself on all these platforms? So Adaptive, SEO is about ensuring that you're meeting your customers where they're at. The interesting thing is that those companies that are ahead of it.

Are beginning to see ChatGPT traffic coming into their site. And from our research and our customer experience, I can tell you that a ChatGPT visitor, your to your site is way more valuable than a Google visitor. They far more likely to convert. And they're deeper down in the funnel because of what they've learned in their research.

And there's just so much more credibility associated with being cited [00:13:00] in a large language model like Chachi pt. So again, it's preparing for this extinction level event. It's killing off the old, but it's birthing the new and that's what we're at the forefront of doing with WSI.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Okay, so let's talk about that and let's do some basics here. And I'm just chuckling to myself here, Dan, because I know maybe in five years it might even be in three years. Can you imagine you and I having a talk in 1999 and we're recording it and there's this new thing called the worldwide web, and we're talking about dial up modems and you gotta go into this worldwide web, you gotta get this internet connection.

And if we're listening to that today, we'd be laughing saying, wow, how archaic, how crazy. And I'm sure in not so distant future listening to this conversation will be much like that. But for someone who's listening in, yeah, they've heard of ai, of course, it's in the headlines every day. They've heard of chat, GPT and some of the other bots that are out there.

I know from Fortune 10 companies to corporations, to associations. They've been flying you all over the world paying high price dollars to have you [00:14:00] come in, give a little bit of your time to do a keynote, talk about this thing called artificial intelligence. So from a very high level, for someone who at the surface knows.

Generally what AI is, but they really don't. What's going on with AI as we record this conversation? Where is the world in terms of adopting AI and what would you want us to know? And then let's dive into what you've been doing and the search engine and all those other good things that's awaiting for us.

So let's start with the basics.

Understanding AI and Its Implications

Dan Monaghan: Well, first of all, it, AI is not new. It's been around for a long time and we were using it. Many years before ChatGPT was launched. This is a different type of AI that we're dealing with today. So there was traditional machine learning, which was really good at spotting patterns and making predictions.

So back in the day, it was, they'd be giving you Netflix recommendations on Facebook. They'd be giving you content recommendations. That's using classical AI machine learning, which is great, as I said at predictions and pattern recognition. In 2017, [00:15:00] Google wrote a white paper called Attention is All You Need.

And that described this new way that machines could learn, they call, it was called Transformers. And what this meant is that we could train machines to learn really like the way we train children. A child, it might be very smart, but it doesn't know much. So we have to give it knowledge.

So as we feed knowledge into this new, these transformers, these large language models, they begin to learn. And yes, people can be more, technical and say, well, it's not really learning it's really just predicting the next most likely, token or the next most likely letter. But in practical terms, it is developing a type of intelligence.

In fact, the average human IQ is about a hundred. And if you are, and I believe it's around one 30, is genius level iq. Over the last three years since Chachi PT has launched, they keep coming out with new models and they keep moving along. [00:16:00] Essentially they're testing them on human iq exams. And the, it continues to move along the perspective through the bell curve, past average intelligence to a point where GPT five.

Was rated at 1 48 iq. And that was on the Norwegian MENSA exam. And that came out in August of this year. So we're now talking about something that is higher than average human level intelligence. Now, it's not Einstein yet. Einstein was said to have an IQ of one 60 but interestingly enough, everyone's been just watching, on the edge of their seat for the last month waiting for Gemini three to launch.

That's Google's large language model. It keeps going back and forth. The companies, there's like four or five major large language model providers, and each one is competing against the next well open AI's, chatt, it's 5.1, was the smartest, but then just last week, Google, Gemini. 3.0 came out and it is now above that [00:17:00] 1 48.

I haven't heard what the IQ really is. But we're talking about something that is incredible intelligence. So, why this is important. Essentially we all have Einstein in our pocket. We can access that level of intelligence from our mobile phone, from our like I said, from calling 1-800-ChatGPT.

So right now people are using it to write emails for them. They're using it to, to, ask, simple questions that they might otherwise ask Google. Is that the, if you had Einstein in your pocket, is that how you would use it? Probably not, you would start thinking about, wow, how could I solve these big equations and these big problems?

What kind of competitive advantage would I have if I really had Einstein in my pocket? And I could, get that kind of advice for my business, for my life, for my family. And so smart business leaders are using AI in a much more strategic way. And so anyhow, that, that's a little bit of a journey through classical [00:18:00] or machine learning AI through to where we are right now.

And I just, one last thing I think I should add is that the thing you're going to hear about more in the future is agents, right? So this is where we, instead of just having asking AI a question and giving you an answer, you're now giving it a task and it's giving you an outcome. So, so you're saying, I want this outcome and it's gonna go figure out all the pieces that it needs to put in place to deliver that outcome.

And so, just to clarify, when you ask chat PT today, we ask it to complete a task, but in the future, we're gonna ask it to complete an outcome. And that's where agents will now come up with the plan they want that they need to put in place to achieve that outcome. So that and by the way, not to complicate things, but I said that a lot of that, if you look at your Google Analytics, the traffic that's coming to your website, a lot of that traffic now is the large language models that are coming to your content to learn.

But the next thing you're gonna begin seeing [00:19:00] is that a good percentage of traffic of visitors to your site will not be human. There'll be agents. Are actually coming to your site, not just to learn, but to do things. And so we now need to build our sites that are in a way that they're aligned with this new agentic protocol on how we can build our site, not just to speak to humans, not just to speak to Google and search engines, but now to speak to agents that will be visiting our sites on behalf of humans.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Okay. Wow. A lot to unpack here. Lemme see if I get this right from what you're saying. So first thing, you should. Is that artificial intelligence? AI is nothing new. What is new about this is the interface and how it's been interacting with us. But behind the scenes, AI has been there for quite some time, recognizing patterns, doing all kinds of things behind the scenes.

But chat, GPT and others like this have now brought this right to us where we can interact with it in a very easy way. I suppose it would be like back in the day before you had the worldwide web, you actually did have the internet, but it was [00:20:00] complicated. It was not graphical. You had to have all text-based kinds of interfaces with it and not easy.

And the next thing that you shared with us is. Our traffic not to confuse activity with progress. So what we're seeing at our website is not the kind of traffic where people are actually visiting. Yeah, people are still visiting, but it's now these bots and that the more we move down this timeline, these bots are gonna start acting on behalf of people, behalf of companies.

And as a company, we've gotta figure out how am I gonna interact with them? How am I gonna make it easy that they can come do business with me, find out about me and get what they want? 

Adapting to the New SEO Landscape

Jeffrey Feldberg: And deportation, as you're thinking about this, Dan, I wanna read a quote from the book very early on and you say, and I quote, here's the truth.

If your SEO provider is still selling page one of Google as a finish line, they're stuck in the old playbook. Rankings still feed the machine, but citations and mentions aside who gets seen in the AI era. But unlike the dinosaurs, businesses already have some of the tools to survive. If they adapt, [00:21:00] and businesses that don't adapt won't just lose rankings, they'll eventually vanish from visibility, even if their old SEO still technically exists, end quote.

So there's a lot going on there, but it sounds like innovate or die is what I'm hearing.

Dan Monaghan: Yeah, absolutely. And, just to give you some a little bit more context on that. So, for example their new platforms are, have a higher level of relevance than they have before in the past. For example, getting your brand cited on Reddit wasn't nearly as important as it is today. Having content on Wikipedia wasn't nearly as important as it is today.

Your brand mentions. What's interesting is that when we talk about adaptive SEO, it's beginning to look more like traditional PR because what we really want to do is get brand mentions out across the internet because that is what is being sucked up by these large language models. That's how they're training themselves.

So let me give you an example of, something we might do differently [00:22:00] today. If someone asked you and I'll just bring it home to a relevant example here with a podcast, if someone said, would you like to speak on my podcast? Or Could I interview on my podcast? Well, a business executive might be really busy and might say, well, how many.

People follow your podcast and they'll make a decision. Obviously you're in the top 1% of podcasts around the world, but there's another 99% who they might say, well, I'm not, if you're in the bottom 10%, I'm not gonna do your podcast because you don't have a large audience. Well, if that podcast, if the transcript of that podcast is published on the web, we've now put more content out there.

Even though there might not have been that many listeners to the podcast. We've now created a whole bunch more unique content with brand mentions throughout it that is gonna be sucked up by the large language models. So these language models are feeding voraciously on words, on content. And so the more content you can get about your brand out there, the [00:23:00] better o obviously across, whenever you can get it across higher profile platforms.

That's that much better. But in the past, that wouldn't have been as relevant for SEO as it is today for what we might call adaptive, SEO.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Okay. So the rules have definitely changed and what worked before. And to get a little bit technical, having back links to my website and getting ranked, that's going outta fashion. Just like the dinosaurs went outta fashion, just like the horse and buggy went outta fashion. And so let me ask you this, Dan.

I'm now thinking like someone in Deep Nation and okay, Dan, Jeffrey, it sounds like a great story and I hear you on that. I go to my car, I don't have to know how the engine works, I just push a button. The car starts and I drive. How do I do this? With this adaptive SEO? I wanna start getting prospects to my website, and I wanna do more business, and I want to get known out there.

If someone's typing in their favorite AI bot, whatever that is, they're typing in a question and it's my area. I wanna get mentioned by that AI bot. [00:24:00] So Dan, how do we begin to do that? Where does a rubber hit the road for us?

Dan Monaghan: Well, the book outlines a lot of the different things to look at and think about, but it's really, it's not so much a how to book. It's a little bit more of a why to. If it was a how to, it would probably be, a few thousand pages. 'cause there's a lot of complexity to it. But one of the things we can do is we've actually built a tool that I'm happy to share with you and you can share with your the members of the Deep Wealth community which will actually show you where your ranking across all the large language models then we have and what you can do about it in each of those areas.

So there's a lot of kind of self-help in that tool. And we can also share some additional resources links to some of our our tools and resources in your program notes. But it's, it's like anything where there's complexity involved. You probably wanna speak to somebody that has some expertise in that area.

And one of the things you'll want to do is ask them. How has the world changed? And [00:25:00] if what they're telling you sounds like some of the stuff that's in the book, then you know, that they're future forward thinking as it relates to, in the past, most businesses didn't do their own SEO, they went to an SEO company or an SEO expert or provider.

The key here today is that you need to go with someone who understands the asteroids coming and not just that, that it's happening, but what to do about it. In other words, they are in a position, and that's really, from our experience, it's about maybe 10% of SEO companies. And, but they're in a position to allow you to leapfrog the competition, to use this, not just how do I recover my position, but how do I gain a competitive advantage based on these changes. And the other thing is, it's a bit of a long game, so it's not something that happens overnight. So you need to begin making those investments today that traffic drop is between now and 2028 that Gartner's talking about, that Google's gonna lose. It's already happening but it's gonna continue happening over the next number of years.

So, so we've got time, the [00:26:00] asteroid's not hitting tomorrow, but it is coming and it's getting closer every day. So the sooner we begin to act the better. And you just need to be working with somebody that understands the new rules of the game.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Yeah. So much to really unpack there. But let me ask you this, Dan, as we're talking about this, I don't wanna go completely down this rabbit hole, but it'd be great for Deep Nation to understand. So one thing that you shared with the AI and what everyone else is sharing, and it's a question that comes up.

So ai, it's coming to my website, it's taking all of my information, it's incorporating it into its own language model and is using that to. The answers. So as a business, even as an individual, should I be concerned that, hey, my intellectual property, my information is now being used by these AI bots, these companies behind the scenes, not necessarily from my advantage, but for their advantage.

Dan Monaghan: It's a serious problem for companies that are publishers that really are in the business of selling their information. And, traditionally there'd be different approaches to that. They'd either gate the content where people had to pay for or log [00:27:00] in, or they would sell advertising.

On their site. Those are a couple of the different business models, which neither really work today because if the large language models are coming to your site and sucking up all that information, they're giving the content to the visitor without them having to go to your site. So ads are no longer relevant.

The traffic to your site is just collapsing if you're in the publishing business. But if you are in a business where being known by the customer, you're selling a product, you're selling a service, then it's actually, this is a huge opportunity. You want the large language models to come to your site and learn everything about you so that when people go to chat, pt, and ask a question, your brand is coming up, you are being cited.

And so it really depends on what your strategy is. Now there is a way. Where you can actually block these large language models from visiting your site. But that's kinda like the ostrich putting its head in the hole, because that's not going to, it doesn't mean traffic is [00:28:00] gonna come to your site, it just means your content's not out there in the large language models.

There, other, your competitors' content is out there. There's not an easy way to dodge the bullet on this. You need to adapt to the changes.

Jeffrey Feldberg: And so Dan, while you're talking about that, what's been consistent with your entrepreneurial journey? What I've always admire and in a classical entrepreneurial framework, you found a problem. This was a problem for you. Hey, how do I do this? Or how do I do that? You figured it out, Hey, if this could help me, maybe this can help other people.

Then you figure out a way to package it and get it out there. And so what I love what you've done right now in the WSI Adaptive, SEO, you're now beginning once again, that process, which for many, Hey, this sounds confusing. I don't even know where to begin. I can't even pronounce these acronyms or these words.

You're beginning to do that. And I'm gonna throw another quote out there that you said Still think SEL begins and ends with Google. That's not a strategy, that's suicide. So let me ask you this. I'm coming to you with WSI and team. Okay? Here's my company. [00:29:00] Here we are. We're doing the old way of things. Dan, what are you and the team behind the scenes what could you help me with? How long would that take? What could I expect to see? What would that look like?

Strategic Marketing and Customer Acquisition

Dan Monaghan: So first of all we need to begin with the end in mind. We gotta work backwards from the customer. We gotta understand your business model, and this is probably something you should have been doing, as a business before anyhow. So it just gives you an excuse to do it now because a lot of people have just been relying on Google and in the early days, relying on cheap traffic from Google and they didn't need to build a brand and they didn't need to have a clear strategy and they didn't need to have a clear ICP, ideal customer profile.

So some of that brand strategy work they've cheaped out on because they could just buy cheap traffic from Google. And remember, aside from all this AI stuff, even if ChatGPT and generative AI never happened, Google would still be a problem. Because remember, Google is an auction and the price keeps going up and up, and we're competing almost like seagulls fighting over a french fry.

We're just competing [00:30:00] with all of our competitors for that limited amount of traffic. But the problem is traffic's even getting more limited. Based on, generative AI as we've talked about. So what I mean here is that we it's not about getting traffic anymore, it's about getting the right traffic and converting that traffic.

So we've gotta think more about the funnel than we've ever thought about in terms of our offers, in terms of our creative, in terms of meeting our client where they're at. A lot of agencies focus on, generating website traffic. Our approach is we take a performance marketing approach.

In other words, we're looking at the entire funnel, right through the CRM, right through to the sale, and right through to the renewal and the lifetime value of that customer. So it really requires stepping back from, digital marketing for a second and just saying, what is the value of a customer?

The question any listener can ask is, do you know what the lifetime value of a customer [00:31:00] is? So yes, revenue, but also the profitability of that client. How much can you invest then to acquire that customer? And so understanding those kinds of metrics are a really important place to start.

And then working backwards and saying, where is that customer? Who are they? Because there's a lot of things we can do that are, have nothing to do with Google, nothing to do with chat. GPT. They has have more to do with data. If we really know where this customer is, there's ways we can harvest those customers off the internet.

Purchasing data, appending data, scraping data enriching data and reaching those people through other means through programmatic. Display through email marketing. There's lots of different other channels. So I guess what I'm, the way I'm answering this is we gotta not get tactical and say, how do I just get more traffic from Google?

Or how do I get into chat? GT Let's step back and look at a strategy. We have something we call a business strategy framework where we look at, and it's a series of four meetings that [00:32:00] we have with the client where we build out their entire customer journey, their persona, their competitive advantage, their market positioning, their offer and then we build out from there the strategy and the tactical elements that are going to help them get market share and profitable market share.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Okay, and let me ask this without giving away any trade secrets, because I know you've taken all of what we're talking about. You've applied it for yourself, for your companies, and so what can you share with us? How's it been working for you? What have you seen, what's been working, what's not been working?

Give us some of the, Hey, the proof's in the pudding. Here's the pudding.

Dan Monaghan: Yeah great question. There's just so many examples. So we actually have a group of companies, seven companies , so WSI is a cornerstone brand, but we have a total of seven franchisor companies. We have an in-home tutoring company, an in-home healthcare company. We have a salon business, we have a staffing and recruitment business.

So we have multiple businesses, which give us the ability and the way that [00:33:00] evolved is years ago I realized, we've developed this capability of generating leads and marketing and sales and customer acquisition. What if we just acquired other companies and then applied that technology across those other businesses?

'cause if you've got a home care business, you need to generate new customers. 

AI in Business Operations

Dan Monaghan: If you've got a in-home tutoring business, you need to generate new customers. So WSI became the engine that fueled the growth of these other companies. Now, the reason I say that is that drinking our own champagne, we're using ai, generative AI and all this digital marketing that I'm talking about.

We're using this across all of our brands so we're not just pro a provider of this stuff, we're a user of it. And then once we've got it nailed and it's working successfully across our brands, our companies, then we roll it out to our customers. So all that to say there's so many different examples that I can give you in terms of how AI is working, not just to generate leads, but [00:34:00] to improve operational efficiency.

To improve the customer experience. 

The Power of AI Voice

Dan Monaghan: I'll give you one anecdote, which we haven't really talked about, is AI voice. So it's interesting, right now it is so good AI voice that many people don't realize that it's AI voice. And there is this dynamic of speed to lead. So right now, when you're generating leads online, it's such a competitive environment, whether you're building, getting those leads from meta or from Google, how quickly you get to that lead is really a key driver in your success.

Well, you can't be by the phone, especially if you're a small business. You can't be by the phone all the time, or you might have one customer on the line and somebody else calls in. So we need to meet the customer where they're at. And AI voice is hugely impacting for booking appointments. Just to give you an example, we have found with one of our businesses where we're using AI voice to follow up on leads. So these are leads [00:35:00] that come in from, in this case LinkedIn marketing and advertising. This our AI system, we call her Ella, so that's her name, and she calls the customer and says, I'm an AI assistant for WSI, and I'm following up on your lead.

We give people the option of choosing to speak to a human instead. And what's really interesting is that a very high percentage of people don't select the human. So people they know they're talking to AI voice in this case. They feel like they can ask any question they want, they can hang up whenever they want without feeling like they're hanging up on a human.

And what's interesting as we measure it down funnel, in other words, we look at the total number of leads what is our cost per sale or what is our cost per discovery call? And what we're finding is it's as good or better with voice AI than it is with a human. So now, not only have we eliminated the cost of someone following up on those leads, like a traditional call center, but it's actually totally [00:36:00] scalable because if we want to double our lead gen, we don't have to double.

And the people that are handling those leads on the front end because AI voices is totally scalable. So that's just one example. But I can give you, examples across sales, marketing, legal, finance, operations in our franchise businesses our business coaching of our franchisees. 

AI Consulting and Future Trends

Dan Monaghan: Across all those segments, how we're using ai.

In fact, just you mentioned how, we got a bit of a our background is identifying a problem, solving it for ourselves, and then saying, Hey, how can we help the rest of the world with this? We've done the same with ai. Now. We've applied AI so deeply across all our businesses. We've now created a branch of our company that's AI consulting.

Helping businesses do this exact same thing, not just digital marketing, but how can we help you streamline your operations and maximize your profit using ai.

Jeffrey Feldberg: As always, Dan, you're so much there to unpack. We can go not just in questions, these could be [00:37:00] episodes, it could be entire series of what's there. But let me go back to something that you said earlier. Part of what's ahead for us that we haven't done yet, that's gonna be new for everyone are these bots or these agents.

My goodness, as we talk about this, it sounds like the matrix, when we talk about agents, I can be back there, but there's these AI agents and it's no longer gonna be only human to human. It's gonna be agent to agent. And if I read into that and Jeffrey OnBase off base, if my business isn't set up with an AI agent, I'm gonna miss out on that kind of interaction, that kind of business.

So I'm gonna ask a tough question because everything is changing not by the year or by the decade, literally by the hour, by the day. It's at such a fast pace where we record this interview today. Best guess, where are things heading in terms of these interactions and how is it gonna transform or what's it gonna look like in transforming society and life business, personal, everything in between as we know it.

The Future of AI and Robotics

Dan Monaghan: Yeah, it's a great question and I'll answer it in two [00:38:00] ways. First is, I heard Jeff Bezos ask this question. In the early part of this century, which sounds like a long time ago. But they said, he was asked the same question. He said, what's more important is not what will change, but what won't change because it's hard to invest in, uncertainties of what will change, but we can invest in what won't change.

And as I looked at our own business, back in 1995 we talked about what we called the ABCs of internet success. You need to leverage advanced technology. So back in those days it was a website, right? Secondly, you need to bring traffic to that site, bring customers to the site, and then see you need to convert them into customers and revenue.

And what's interesting is 30 years later. It is exactly the same. What we do is we use the latest advanced technology, we bring customers into that digital presence, and then we convert them into into customers or sales. And so I think, 10 years from now, it'll be very [00:39:00] much the same, but it'll be totally different technology stack.

The technology we use today is obviously far more than a website. So that's what won't change. And I think that, the area that we're gonna continue to lean into is how do we just continue to navigate new technologies to bring customers to our platforms and to bring them into our sales funnel and turn them into customers.

But in terms of what will change, I think, that's the, that's the big question that we struggle. I'll tell you one of the things that we're beginning to see a little bit, but I think is really underrated is the merger of AI and humanoid robotics. The concept of, if you take this intelligence and AI is multimodal, right?

So it can see, it can hear, it can think, it can speak, it can do all these things, which are, I, they're even trying to help it, smell and taste. But aside from that it's so many of these elements that are essentially the human brain, right? So if you took, take this multi modal technology that can see, can hear, [00:40:00] can think, can speak, and you put it inside a humanoid robot, you're now basically you have the ability to replace humans in so many things, so many mundane tasks that we don't want to do.

But what does that mean? AI whether it's our, humanoid robotics or whether it is. Just the, AI that we're talking about today. 

Human-AI Collaboration

Dan Monaghan: What it allows us to do, it frees us up to do more of what humans can do. It's amplifying our humanity in many ways. People are afraid of how AI will replace humans, but I think it's more about AI with humans and AI amphi amplifying humans.

And I think the, the metaphor that or the analogy that I sometimes make is, if you think about Ironman Tony Stark, right? He is, he's in that suit that gives him superpowers. He's flying through the sky, but he's speaking to Jarvis. It's not Tony Stark or the suit, it's Tony Stark and the suit.

And so what we have to think about is [00:41:00] how AI can help amplify our capabilities in everything we want to do. And it's not AI for AI's sake, we've gotta focus on what problem are we trying to solve in our business and then apply AI to that. It's very easy to get down rabbit holes of all kinds of shiny objects, but let's not lose sight of what problem are we trying to solve and make sure we're applying AI to that.

But in, in answer to the bigger question, where is it going? Yes it's going to be humanoid robots. It's going to be driverless cars, it's going to be flying cars. It's even, the next thing is really the interface. Like today, if you walk through any mall, you walk down any street, you got people that are staring into their hand, right?

If I told you 15 years ago that you'd have a mom and a daughter sitting at a Starbucks at a table, and they're both staring hypnotically into their hand. Into that device that they're holding in their hand. These are two humans that are sitting across a [00:42:00] table and they're basically in some ways, lonely in a moment staring into their phones.

That is gonna go away as we find new interfaces. OpenAI has bought out. Johnny i's company, Johnny, Ives the creative design genius behind Apple, and they're looking at building new interfaces for, so we're not gonna be stuck staring into our screen anymore. Zuckerberg launched a couple of months ago the latest version of the meta glasses, so we're going to be in I believe we'll have a much more human interface to AI and it's gonna start looking much more like Tony Stark speaking to Jarvis, in the suit. So we'll be wearing devices, whether they're on our, like a pendant around our neck, whether it's in our glasses.

But I think we're going to go to a much more human interface and go beyond. The devices in the future. And AI will be with us everywhere. And quite frankly, you mentioned the Matrix. It's gonna look a lot more like the Matrix in the future,

Jeffrey Feldberg: It's interesting as you talk about that, Dan, I'm gonna date myself here with a quick story. I [00:43:00] remember this is even pre-internet. Before the internet there was something called BBSs Bulletin Board Services and it was a precursor to where the web was gonna be, but this was something called ASCII or ANSY.

It was all text-based and. You had these graphics, but it was these letters that was being drawn out on the screen that looked like a big picture and, but it was all much today like it is with ChatGPT or Grok, or your favorite AI bot. It was all text-based and you're typing and it comes out on the screen.

No graphics whatsoever. And then this thing called the Worldwide Web that we now know is the internet came along and eventually not right away, but eventually everything became graphics and it looks nice and there's music and there's videos and everything else that's going along with that. And so to your point, the interface that we have today is gonna go by the wayside and it'll be much more if I can use that word, in terms of how we're interacting with it.

Lemme go back though to something that you said a little earlier about the narrative that regardless of the technology, the narrative, the story, [00:44:00] as long as humans are gonna be involved in doing business, the narrative always plays an important role. And as I'm saying this, I'm being even taken back to the deep default mindset roadmap.

And in step two, X-Factor, step three, future buyer, we talk about, well, what's your business narrative to keep that existing client? To get that new client or to have that new investor or that buyer coming to the scene and help out with the company. So when it comes to the narrative, whether it's now an AI agent to an AI agent, or human to ai, what's going on with that narrative?

Is that changing or do you think that's gonna be a fundamental part of the secret sauce that keeps us successful as a business by having these incredibly powerful stories or narratives that we're building into whatever the technology does or takes us.

Dan Monaghan: Yeah. And it's a bit tough to say because we always have to remember that what we see today, the AI we see today is the worst it'll ever be. So in terms of where it's gonna be in three years from now, four years from now, like I said, back in twenties, 18 or 19, I was saying that AI will [00:45:00] never be able to be, tell stories.

And today it tells incredible stories. But that's just because it's been trained on the essence of humanity through everything that's ever been written. But I would say that today my view would be that humans have this unique ability to feel and that empathy, the ability to understand and to connect, in that human to human way. I'm not sure that AI will get there for a little while. I think, there's this factor of taste, it's a very hard thing to quantify. Somebody like Johnny Ive would be, that creative genius would have the ability to look at something and say, yes, this is right, or no, it's not right.

I don't have that as it relates to, the designing of a house or the designing of a home. But I can look into, when a designer says, take a look at this logo, or take a look at this room. Do you like it or not? I can say yes or no because I have the ability to. To say that hits the spot or it doesn't it, it presses my emotional buttons, or it doesn't, [00:46:00] and I don't know that AI is going to, AI might say, here's three or four designs, here's three or four video scenes.

I don't know that it will pick the best one yet. I think that's still that human something, DNA, call it empathy, call it taste call. I don't know exactly what you would call it, but I think everything we do, as much as we have applied AI across all of our business processes in all of our businesses, we still have what we call human in the loop.

So 85% of the work is all automated by ai. 15% still requires the human to direct the AI and make the decisions. So AI provides us with options and choices, but the human is still making the decision. And I think that'll be the case into the foreseeable future. It's interesting just talking about where the future is going and talked about the matrix.

One of the things, and I think it was Marshall McCluen who said the future is, or no, it was William Gibson who said, the future is already [00:47:00] here. It's just not evenly distributed. Everything you see in the matrix is already. Even the concept of solving crimes before they happen.

They're now in LA they're using machine learning for predictive criminology or predictive policing, algorithmic criminology, I think they call it. So they are actually surging police into areas where crimes will occur before they've occurred. The personalized, when walking through that movie and pushing out an ad that's personalized to you, speaking to you that already exists.

It's just not so flying cars. They already exist. The self-driving vehicles. If you've ever driven in a Waymo you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, you should try to find a way to do it right, because it's incredible. I got out of the car and I thanked the driver just out of, habit, there's no driver in the car, right? So all this technology already exists. The world we're talking about, the humanoid robotics, they exist. It's incredible. Unitary in China is leading the charge. [00:48:00] People talk about the the optimist humanoid robot and that's very cool.

And there's right now about a hundred, I think one of the leading research firms said there's about a hundred humanoid robot companies that are all chasing the same, golden ticket to come up with, what becomes our live-in humanoid, for about 20,000 bucks or 200 bucks a month will have a live-in robot in our homes that's doing all the stuff we don't want to do.

So what it's allowing us to do is the stuff we do want to do to be more human. And I think that is that's where the world's going.

Jeffrey Feldberg: And as a futurist that you've all. Is been, and I know this is a large part of what you're doing when you're gallivanting around the world and giving these insights and these talks, leaving the whole search engine and optimization and AI and all those other kinds of things, just big picture wise. 

The Impact of AI on Jobs

Jeffrey Feldberg: We're hearing now these new debates with AI when it first came out, which is just a few years ago, in terms of the AI that we're talking about.

It's not that old. Oh, it's gonna be incredible. We are gonna have more jobs that are gonna be [00:49:00] there. No one's gonna be losing their jobs, and we're gonna be able to do all these things that we weren't able to do before. And now that narrative, there's an opposite of that. Oh yeah. No, the jobs as we know it, they're all gone.

It's gonna be very few jobs and people are gonna be put into poverty. So you have these two extremes. Where do you really see things going down? If we cut through that noise, realistically speaking, best, guess what's on the table for us? What's ahead for us?

Dan Monaghan: Well, we could do a whole other podcast that might have a slightly different slant because the truth is that there are elements of this. That are not super positive for humanity for a whole series of different reasons. But again, every technology throughout time, whether it's the invention of fire, the releasing of and harnessing of the atom, great technological breakthroughs have had very negative side effects.

And so the thing that's different here, obviously, the industrial revolution happened, but it happened over a period of time this is happening and humanity had time to adapt. This is happening at a speed [00:50:00] that it really is difficult for humanity to adapt or it will be in the years ahead. 

Adapting to Rapid Technological Change

Dan Monaghan: And so the best shot we got is to be continuing to use this in our lives, to stay curious and to listen and learn.

It's not a time to be falling asleep at the switch. The object is you need to be adapting faster than the rest of humanity. You don't have to be the fastest, you just can't be the slowest. You just gotta be moving and learning faster. One of my favorite quotes is that the only sustainable competitive advantage we have is the speed at which we learn.

That was Peter Senge in the book, the Fifth Discipline. And I think that is such a meaningful principle for businesses and for us as individuals. We're competing with the rest of the world, and the speed at which we learn is that competitive advantage. Now, I'll tell you one thing, this really clued in for me when I was speaking to a former machine learning guru, heading up the development of Bing, the Google's competitor. [00:51:00] This guy's got a PhD in machine learning. And I said, wow, you must be like just loving this AI as it's, he said. I can't keep up. He said it's stressful. I'm reading three research papers a week.

I just can't keep up. And I always remind myself whenever I'm feel feeling overwhelmed, which is all the time, as it relates to ai, that he's overwhelmed so a lot of times people feel, I'm overwhelmed. I can't play in this game. I just gotta pull back. And I just remind people get comfortable with being uncomfortable because we're living in a world of change that's accelerating.

And so just because you're feeling like you're falling behind, just because you're feeling like you're not up to date doesn't mean that you should pull back from the game. It just means that you're in the game and you just need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. 'cause we're all gonna feel overwhelmed as this change continues to happen.

But in answer to your question I think right now as it relates to jobs. If you look at the economy, you look at most industries, most businesses, [00:52:00] there's a kind of a pyramid shape to them, right? You've got the most experienced at the top, the CEO, and then you've got intaking, more junior, inexperienced people.

At the bottom. The job force is gonna start looking, unfortunately, much more like a diamond. The we're businesses are not hiring young people the way they used to, because they're replacing a lot of those functions with ai. They're hiring the young, smartest people. But their AI and your ability to learn and adapt is a core, price of entry.

It's a baseline. And so they're gonna, law firms. Accounting firms, consulting firms, a lot of that traditional white collar work that is looking more like a diamond shape. The base, just so you know, you could ask that question. So what does that mean for the future if you don't have all these young people that are coming into organizations that are being groomed to be, to move up the ladder?

And I don't know that I have the answer to that, but that's one of the realities, obviously mundane work [00:53:00] is it's, most people would think it's okay for AI to replace mundane work. Like, is it okay that. That Amazon is gonna have hundreds of thousands of robots that were doing the work that humans used to do, the boring, unsafe work in warehouses.

Some people would say that's okay, and that's a good thing. But ultimately as that continues to accelerate and we move into humanoid robots, and by the way, they're already using these humanoid robots in factories online, so I'm not talking about them, the arm that comes down like, and puts a, a weld on a joint.

No, I'm talking about humanoid robots. They're being used in Mercedes plants, BMW plants, where they're actually working on doing what a human would've otherwise done. I think it's Unitary and Optimus have those in use right now. There's so many of them out there right now. There's five or six major ones, but they're already doing work of humans. And so yes, there's gonna be a displacement there as well. But I think you know exactly what that means. I don't know that we know the answer to that yet.

[00:54:00] People are talking about, should we have UBI universal basic income? I've never heard a good explanation of how that actually works. People have said we should be coming up with a robot tax, so Jeff Bezos is paying so much per head per robot. Again, I'm not sure how that really works, around capital investments and how you tax that.

So I don't know that we have the answers, but I think we'll definitely have a political discussion. In the years in the not too distant future on how we address that. And then of course, you have the whole issue of alignment how we make sure that AI is aligned with the the needs and desires and objectives of humanity as it continues to exceed, as it, moves beyond not only human intelligence, but what they're calling superhuman intelligence.

So, SGI, super generative intelligence. So where AI becomes smarter than entire humanity. And again, that would be discussion for a whole other podcast, but [00:55:00] but yeah we need to adapt for sure.

Jeffrey Feldberg: I, it is interesting and I'll share with you, Dan, the narrative, at least that I tell myself just a data point of one, and I have some optimism for the future, and what I remind myself of is every time there's been a change, yes, you have people that are displaced when it comes to jobs, and easy to say when you're not one of those people that are displaced.

That said though, if you look at the titles of jobs even from three years ago, five years ago, that didn't exist. And look at how many people are now in those areas. For myself, much to what you're saying is, okay, yes, there's gonna be some job displacement, but what new kinds of positions are gonna be coming around that have to work with AI and take what we can do as, as people, as humans to the next level that, hey, it'll be a better place.

Not perfect for sure. And to your point, the gaps are much shorter now than what they used to be. But the old entrepreneurial saying, where there's a will, there's a way, and I have that optimism that we'll figure that out. Let me ask you this before we start going into wrap up mode, and I wanna [00:56:00] go back to the AI search revolution for a listener in Deep Wealth coming outta this episode.

If they could do one thing, and again, this isn't wrap up, this is just a strategy from the book, and as I'm saying that, I am going back to my notes here and reminded, and I'm gonna quote, and I love how you put this old SEO said, use the phrase project management. System six times on the page. So project management system 16 times just to get ranked adaptive.

SEO says, answer the damn question, answer it early, answer it clearly, and anticipate what follow up questions the user might have. So that's some great advice, some practical advice. I know the book is not meant as a how to, you're there. Hey, this is what's going on behind the scenes. Here's what you need to understand so that you can act in a leadership kind of capacity, that you can be responsible, you can take your company to the next level, whatever that means for you.

So coming out of here for a listener who says, I've been so behind on this ai, I feel like it's too little, too late, or I don't understand a thing of what's going on, or, yeah, I'm right [00:57:00] in there. I love it. Gimme some more things to do. But if there's one thing that an entrepreneur can do that could really move the dial, not a how to, but an awareness, a best practice, a strategy.

Practical Steps for Embracing AI

Jeffrey Feldberg: Before we go into Rappa mode, Dan, any suggestion, anything that you care to share with us of what we should think about?

Dan Monaghan: So, absolutely. The, the, that expression, the journey of a thousand Miles begins with a first step. And I think you have a vision of where you want to go. So a first step in the direction of your goal, your objective, and if the, in this case, the objective is I want to be more I want to be an AI driven leader, or I want to be an I want to be more cognizant of AI in, in how I can apply it in my business and in my life.

The first thing you need to do is take that next step. So first of all, how are you plugged in? How are you learning? If you're not following any newsletters, then sign up for an AI newsletter, something like Superhuman or the Neuron, or there's a whole handful of free AI newsletters.

Start following those, and every day they'll give [00:58:00] you a couple of prompts to try and just start trying and learning along with that. You're not gonna become an expert, but you're gonna now start immersing yourself. And you're gonna peak your curiosity and you're going to begin priming the pump. So just taking that first step.

And so if you're already AI savvy and you know how to use chat pt, well then sign up for Claude. Claude is much better at writing than chat. PT is chat PT is very good at thinking and problem solving. If you've never created an image using nano banana, which is Google's AI image creator, it is by far the best.

It'll blow your mind. If you've never created a video before, then use VO three which is a Google product. Again, it's free. And you can now create a six second video. Just take an image a picture of your dog. Put it in there and it'll, and click the video button and it's all of a sudden gonna turn your dog into a video of your dog walking around.

Or you can say, walk on. Its two front [00:59:00] legs, or whatever. Now, that's not gonna solve a business problem, but it's gonna begin to make you more comfortable and confident in using ai. So wherever you are today, take that next step. If you've already done everything that I've just talked about, then start playing with an agent, or I'll tell you one thing that will blow your mind.

There's a product called Lovable. Again, this stuff's free, right? So if you've never created a website using AI or created a, an online calculator or created a landing page or anything you wanna do, just go to lovable.com and play with that tool and it'll blow your mind. All of a sudden you go, I can't believe I did that.

Wow. So just I would say it's all about taking the next step into your level of uncomfortableness. Are you raising the bar? Every week are you getting a little bit better, a little bit more immersed, a little bit more curious? That's what I would recommend.

Jeffrey Feldberg: And really what you're saying in Deep Nation, I hope you're listening. Dan. My takeaway is, Jeffrey, be curious, do some [01:00:00] education, some self-education, get involved with AI and at least become familiar with the terminology, how things work, what's going on out there? What's the latest and greatest? Dan, it'll be interesting five years from now, we're even 10 years from now, we play this conversation.

Are some of these companies still around or they're no longer here and they've been replaced by others, but the best practice, the strategy that you're sharing, and you've always been brilliant with those. Immerse yourself with what's going on so that you can see the future today, you can take your company to the next step and be leading the charge instead of acting outta fear or ignorance or just doing nothing, which is probably the worst choice of all.

Dan Monaghan: You've nailed it. Yeah.

Final Thoughts and Reflections

Jeffrey Feldberg: And so that said, Dan, we are gonna go into wrap up mode, and it's a tradition here on the default podcast. It's my privilege, my honor, where every guest I have the pleasure of asking the exact same question. It's a fun question. I'm gonna set this up for you. When you think of the movie Back to the Future, I want you to imagine that incredible, magical DeLorean car that will take you to any point in time.

So Dan, it's tomorrow morning. You look outside your window. Not only is the DeLorean car [01:01:00] curbside, this is the fun part. The door is open waiting for you to hop on in which you do. You're now gonna go to any point in time, Dan, as a young child, a teenager, whatever point in time it would be. What would you tell your younger self in terms of life lessons or life wisdom or, Hey Dan, do this, but don't do that.

What would that sound like?

Dan Monaghan: Yeah, great question. I think I would actually tell my younger self to be a little bit more patient. I've always had this sense that I've gotta make it happen. Today, I've gotta make it happen in the next year. And there was that expression, and it's been attributed to many different people.

But, we overestimate what we can do in the next year and we underestimate what we can do in the next 10 years. And so I would encourage myself to to go, there's a premise. Go slow to go fast. I would encourage, give myself a little bit more latitude to pause and think a little slower [01:02:00] and go maybe give myself three years on something that I might've otherwise given myself one year on.

And realize, if there's one thing I would probably tell myself that you're gonna be ahead of the curve. A little too ahead of the curve in some cases. So there's the one thing to be leading edge, it's another thing to be bleeding edge. And there's multiple instances. When you consider that I founded WSI two years before Google was founded I have in some cases given up on ideas that just where the world hadn't arrived there yet.

So I worked on something, I gave it a certain period of time, I said it didn't work, I assumed it didn't work, and then I moved on to the next thing. And I think what I would do is probably just that premise of going slow to go fast. So that's probably what I would tell my younger self is don't feel so pressured to have it happen.

Now, what's important is that it happens.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Words from the heart and words for the wise. Absolutely. Dan and De Nation, I hope you're listening and paying attention to that. This is from the trenches. Dan has been there, he's [01:03:00] done that. And Dan, right before we wrap up, someone in De Nation, they have a question for you. They wanna speak with you. Maybe they even want you to.

Come in and give a keynote for their organization, or perhaps they'd like some help with their company, help them get to the next level. Where would be the best place online that someone can have a conversation?

Dan Monaghan: Yeah, great question. There's a bunch of places where they could find me, but probably the easiest is just go to look me up on LinkedIn, connect with me on LinkedIn, message me there. I'm happy to connect and I mean there's and I can point you in the right direction to whichever property would, answer your questions or, point you to resources.

But probably my LinkedIn profile would be the easiest way. Just Google me and you'll find.

Jeffrey Feldberg: And de palpation. It doesn't get any easier. All the links, everything you need to know. It's in the show notes. It's a point and click and take Dan up on his offer. My goodness, his companies are in over 80 countries and counting. He runs so many organizations. He's seen it all. Take Dan up, have the conversation with him.

That said, Dan, congratulations. It's official. This is a wrap. And [01:04:00] as we love to say here at Deep Wealth, may you continue to thrive and prosper while you remain healthy and safe. Thank you so much.

Dan Monaghan: Enjoy their time. Thanks Jeffrey. 

Jeffrey Feldberg: So there you have it, Deep Wealth Nation. What did you think? 

So with all that said and as we wrap it up, I have another question for you.

Actually, it's more of a personal favor. 

Did you find this episode helpful? 

Have you found other episodes of the Deep Wealth Podcast empowering and a game changer for your journey? 

And if you said yes, and I really hope you did, I have a small but really meaningful way that you can actually help us out and keep these episodes coming to you.

Are you ready for it? 

The dramatic pause. I'll just wait a moment. Drumroll, please. Subscribe. Please subscribe to the Deep Wealth podcast on your favorite podcast channel. When you subscribe to the Deep Wealth Podcast, you're saving yourself time. Every episode automatically comes to you, and I want you to know that we meticulously craft Every one of our episodes to have impactful strategies, stories, expert insights that are designed to help you grow your profits, increase the value of your business, and yes, even optimize [01:05:00] your post exit life and your life right now, whatever you want that to look like.

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So all that said. Thank you so much for listening. And remember your wealth isn't just about the money in the bank. It's about the depth of your journey [01:06:00] and the impact that you're creating. So let's continue this journey together. And from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for listening to this episode.

And as we love to say here at Deep Wealth, may you continue to thrive and prosper while you remain healthy and safe. 

Thank you so much. 

God bless.