Episode #100 He Wrote The Sales Bible of Silicon Valley - Aaron Ross

Aaron Ross—yes, THE Aaron Ross who wrote "Predictable Revenue"—joins Bridge the Gap on this milestone episode 100 to blow up the myths and tactics plaguing go-to-market teams in 2025. Is outbound really dead? Are SDRs dinosaurs? Has AI actually changed sales forever, or are we just screaming into the void with 40,000 cold emails? We go deep on what still works, what’s broken, and what founders and revenue leaders must rethink if they want to grow today.

If you’re tired of the SaaS echo chamber and want raw, tactical wisdom from someone who helped Salesforce add $100M+ in ARR, this one’s for you.

Follow Aaron: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronross/

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Transcript

This is Bridge the Gap powered by Revenue Reimagined, the podcast where we dive into all things revenue. Each episode, we bring you the top founders and go-to-market leaders to challenge how you think about growth and help you bridge your biggest go-to-market gaps. I'm Adam Jay. And I'm Dale Zwizinski. 

As always, thanks for hanging with us. There's a million ways you can be spending your time and we're grateful for you choosing to spend it with us. Be sure to check out our newsletter if you want the show notes and tactical advice on how to bridge your GTM Gaps. Let's get to it. 

Welcome back to another episode of the Bridge the Gap podcast powered by Revenue Reimagined. Today's guest is someone who quite literally wrote the book on Modern Outbound. Aaron Ross is the author of Predictable Revenue, a playbook that's influenced just about, probably, every SaaS sales org over the last decade. 

He helped Salesforce design and implement the cold-calling 2.0 model that added over 100 million in recurring revenue, and since then has advised hundreds of companies on building scalable sales systems. But today, we're not just going to talk about looking backward. We're not going to focus on predictable revenue. We're going to talk about what's changed, what parts of the playbook still work, what needs to be rethought, and most importantly, Aaron, where GTM strategy is headed next. Thanks for joining us. Sounds good. 

You guys are going to start off the laundry list. Like, how many people today have said, oh, predictable revenue is dead? 

It's so funny because people are trying to figure that out. It's just so much data, right? There's so much data out there. It's like, what do you put your predictability on? 

Yeah, or the SDR is dead. Or, you know, this is dead. I mean, it makes for good marketing. Some people actually believe what they're saying. And I think when you're older, you know, like, nothing actually ever dies. Direct mail. It's repurposed. Direct mail is still alive and kicking. You know, steak, dinner. 

We have clients that get some of their biggest deals from direct mail. So it's just more channels, more stuff. It's a different direct mail. You can't send the same crappy postcard that everyone does. You've got to stand out. 

It makes for a better controversy, though, if you say that something people are familiar with is dead. So, yeah, absolutely. 

So it's funny, my wife and Jared designer, she says also, she's like, we did that 15 years ago, and now it's coming all back. Like, everything is all cyclical. 

Yeah, the bell bottom in the 70s and then 90s. There's five pack time for the bell bottom to come back. Exactly. 

Aaron, so you wrote the book that launched like thousands of out-volunteens. What do you think people still get right when they follow it? And what is going to happen when they miss the mark? Like, you wrote the book and people followed it and they did really well. And then they miss the mark. Like, what went well and what goes well and not go well in that process? 

Yeah, well, the thing is, I think when people read, so the original book is predictable revenue, and then there's a sequel called From the Possible to Inevitable. And when people read, especially the predictable revenue book, or they used it and they're successful and then the world changes. And so there's a lot of these people who say, so the book was, they see the key ideas were, you need to have predictable lead generation in order to create predictable growth. 

And a lot of people here would be like, yeah, duh. But actually there's a time, it wasn't that long ago, when most SaaS companies or B2B companies wanted to grow revenue by adding salespeople. So again, so separating the closing and the selling, so specializing your teams, predictable pipelines and lead generation, different kinds of leads. 

So these core principles, when it goes through some of those, what people would do is, we're going to build an outbound team, and we're going to send email, make calls, and have SDRs. And any kind of channel was a victim of its own success. Right, blogging, email, SEO, it's all the same. So of course, as every channel gets more flooded, and this is also for future channels, because this is not just something that only happened in the past. Any channel, LinkedIn, they all get flooded. 

And so of course it's not something today, whether it's email or calling or LinkedIn, it doesn't pick a channel or direct mail, you just can kind of spray and pray. Like, yes, you could do that and get great results ten years ago. But now, and you need to be better, more targeted, more insightful, like nothing new, more targeted, more insightful, more empathetic, which means you understand them more closely, knowing where they are, what they look, what they're interested in, and that could have changed in the last three months or six months. And so the last bit I put on is that, you know, again, like AI, I think it's like, yeah, AI can change all kinds of stuff. And there's some changes we don't know. What it hasn't done yet is create new kinds of work. We don't even know what that is yet. That'll happen and we don't know. 

And so yeah, of course people, all the SDR is dead, and the BDR is dead, and the XDR is dead, and first of all, no, it's not. But the idea actually, the corporate, so the thing is people can use the tactics with the book, with there's these core principles that were there. The specialization of your team is a core principle, right? You need more types of people, more types of jobs, you can do fewer things better, whether they're human or whether they're agentic. You know, so the SDR, and also not every company should do outbound. Not every company should do blogging or content. 

So like you have to know your business. Can we pause one second? What you just said is so true. Not every company should do outbound. Aaron, you don't know how many people we speak to that the very first thing they say to us. We need to build outbound, and we need to do it because we need to send out 40,000 messages. Oh my God, I gave you exactly. Take a step back. 

Well, think about they've got the pressure cooker of, okay, they have investors. Some don't, okay, well either there's investors, or maybe they're not, or the CEO, if they're not the CEO, or they've got social pressure, right, comparing despair, like, there's all that we're living in a society of, it's like this swimming in, basically like fake pressure. It's not even real, right, it's just all societal. 

You don't have to grow 100% a year to get the funding, to get the thing, like, you don't have to. It's this weird rat race, it's a new rat race. It's not the corporate rat race, it's the societal rat race, or the SaaS rat race, or the AI rat race, or the Ampic rat race. 

It's the segment of hyper growth, like hyper growth. Show me one place where hyper growth has ever worked. Like, you scale quickly if you're a unicorn, but by luck most of the time. It's not like you plan to hyper growth. 

Yeah, and you know what, the thing is, like, if you do it and want to do it, great. Amazing. If you want to raise money, great. If you don't want to raise money, great. I think it gets caught up in people, it's like in the whole, it's for the validation, the ego, and also like that addiction of success. Like, money can be addictive in its way, and you know, you're not having an ego and having to, you know, raise from a certain amount from a certain BC, a certain valuation, or hit a certain growth rate. If you're not doing that, you feel like a failure, because all, especially for, it's not, it used to be mostly men, and that's what gets you know, pie eating out, because if you don't hit that, and like these external factors of signals of success, then you know, because they're not taught to grow up with some sort of inner self-confidence that is mostly disconnected from external validation. Like, of course we all, and so again, it's like, ah, I'm failing as a person if I don't have this. So there's this big tangled web around why people come in like, ah, I need to do, let's say outbound, right? Because it could be, I need to lose weight, gain weight, I need to get married, or not get married, or whatever. 

I need to do outbound, I send all these messages, because there's this pressure, and you know, I'd be happy to tell people, and I don't even do outbound, I'm not supposed to do it anymore, it's like, just don't do outbound, right? And see if they fight you on it. If they really need to do it, they'll probably, you know, figure it out. And then if they do need to do it, you know, when I was doing it for a long time, you know, a lot of those things, look, it's going to take you six to 18 months to see real revenue from it, but basically it's going to take longer than you want. You know, you need to make sure you have the right people doing the right things and the right expectations, and yeah, of course you get all the stories, you know, people are always going to publish case studies that are the, you know, 1% success cases, right? 

That's the news, right? You get the Unicorn and the Instagram case studies, you get the AI grants from 0 to 6 million ARR in nine months, because those are exciting, but that's not what most people are doing. So again, this distorted reality distortion that we all live in, you know, if you can kind of see that, it's like, how are you the tail or are you the dog? 

If I get that right. Is it wagging you or are you wagging it? And so yeah, it's all this weird, you know, pressure, and I think what it does is I've seen even more now, whether it's outbound or not, it could be, you know, if I do work or on board, it's usually going to go to market and growth, but there's a lot of companies that, you know, ping pong around. 

Let's try this, let's try that, or even with an outbound, let's try these, let's try that, and let's try, you know, this kind of SEO and, you know, because it's not working fast enough. And so they switch. And I know before it works. 

Yeah, well, that's the problem. Aaron, let me let me ask you. So if you were to sit down today and write kind of the 2025 version of predictable revenue, what's the one thing off the top of your head that is in the first book that wouldn't make the cut today? 

Okay, I'm asking questions. So, well, I would say like for the predictable revenue book, there was something that was not in that book that made into the second book, the From Impossible book, which was the very first chapter that was nailing a niche. Right. So that was like, oh, you know, that's online. Okay, so today, and I'm not planning on writing, I'm not going to write a book, although I'm talking to people about helping, you know, advising them on helping them think through it and write one. To me, you know, it's like where I thought, you know, I do speaking and I get talks, I have ideas in this area. 

But where I go to is, there's these key principles that still apply. You know, people struggle with specializing your, you know, basically sales team, whether they're human or not. You know, more jobs, so people can do fewer things better. It's nailing a niche, which is you have to be even more insightful and more specific and more targeted. And these are not going to, so AI will change lots of things. 

They're not going to change these principles. So renailing your niche. In other words, you know, it's like just rethinking how you're creating a pretty typical pipeline because the channel is always changing and their metrics are changing. 

And also what worked six months ago may not work today. So it's kind of more though, you know, adaptive to it as well. And another is culture. You know, to me, so here, okay, so that's kind of reviewing this stuff that's still as relevant or more so in the overwhelming world. The newer stuff, you know, I touched on this in the prior books, but really I would expand on creating a culture, like a growth culture, which is combining some level of challenge, which most people have but with caring, you know, sort of, I think with missing in general, as needed more than ever in both a hybrid slash remote world and an AI busy world is ways that you can connect with your team. 

Because how you do that will affect a lot of things, including, you know, their loyalty, their belief in the company, their belief in the product, and the way they treat customers, as well as your ability to grow them and their ability to contribute. So that would be a bigger section of focus. And the last one, which is the newest part, which wasn't, I mean, I alluded to some of this in prior books. Even in predictable revenue, I had an example around how I worked with my team to, you know, help them help redo the comp plans, like a collaborative approach. Yeah. But the newest section would be, you know, I give this talk now, it's called creating predictable revenue in an unpredictable world. So it touches on these things and did look for the future. I have like no one, I don't know where AI is going to take things. It's exciting, also scary. Yeah. 

No one really knows. But one thing that will serve you well, no matter what happens, you know, the thing that is the most durable or can be our relationships. Now, those relationships can look like how you treat your internal people, how your relationships with your team. It can be your relationships that your salespeople create and have with customers. 

It can be your relationship with your market. You know, what that could be doing a one to many, one to one, right? I've created a lot of relationships. 

There are more one to make two books and things. It could be your, you know, companies are focusing on partner, you know, ecosystems, communities and partners. So there's a lot of ways you can take this and, you know, apply it to your business. So relationships to me, no matter what happens on the tech side, there are going to be things that help you have more durable success. Say relationships, combine some sort of systems, equal, durable, gross. That's like the newest thing for the future. 

I love that. Someone just asked me a very similar question on LinkedIn. Like, okay, so like if outbound is dead. Which is not. Of course. 100%. But where's the focus? And, you know, my initial gut is relationships go to network, you know, social selling, making sure that you're like fostering and nurturing those relationships. And I think going back to my old sales leader days, like a lot of people like to say, oh, I have a relationship. Well, what is a relationship? A relationship has to be bi-directional, right? A relationship isn't that I can, you know, oh, I have Aaron's cell phone number and I can text them and he gives me a thumbs up. A relationship is we can actually have a conversation and ask each other to help one another. 

It doesn't have to be bi-directional, but yeah, it can be. Tell me more. Well, I mean, there's lots of people I reach out to that I don't really know, but they know me and they will refer me on or like we're doing a friend, right? So I have a friend, here's the example where maybe the future. I met him through another sales guide. He's an entrepreneur with a sales business in Germany. Right. I'm in Europe. 

I moved to Edinburgh from Los Angeles, you know, six years ago. Just great guy. Like, we have a good time. Like good friends. And we're like, we've kind of wanted to do something together, some kind of business together. I've known him for like two or three years. Finally, we're like, okay, let's do an event in Munich. 

We'll just do it in like six weeks and invite some sales leaders and so on. And, you know, I'm messaging people on LinkedIn about this event and, you know, I'm getting a lot of responses and, you know, people, a lot of people say, hey, I, you know, I like to read your book or I saw this and like they know me better than I know them. And it's starting a two-way relationship, but start off as one way. 

So good point. It's that one the many you were talking about. So it's interesting because that is what's kind of happening at a macro level. People are trying to do one of the many's a lot podcast. Yeah. Founder intent. I mean, yeah, I mean, LinkedIn is a great example. There's how many people you have, you know, hundreds of thousands of followers, like how many people you really know, right? 

But you put something out there like, hey, I'm going to be in Germany doing this event. And really, yeah, you know, it should be interesting to see what's going on. Yeah. 

And I think, you know, speaking of founder, like, so again, we can create one to many relationships through content, through events, through brand, through these things. It's fine. You know, for me, and I watch some of these guys, you know, like Adam Robinson, you know, he's obviously done really well. 

He's one of the pretty good revenue dead guys. And there's some others, but I know that you get to tell what the other thing that I would include too is you really got to figure out, you know, how to fix your core. And I thought that's the right term. But, you know, in a really busy world, like, you know, you as a person, whether you're an entrepreneur or a salesperson, like how can you continue to figure what you're the best at or really good at or want to be really good at and kind of try to offload the things you're not great at. And for example, I'm not great at consistent content, right? 

The content treadmills that the LinkedIn, the founder, like, content guys do, I just, I can't, I can't. That's not my book content. Like, that's where, like, I'm a book person. When I do content, it's usually towards books. 

If I'm meeting people, I'm thinking, you know, I like meeting people, but if there's more of a business context, like, maybe they'd, you know, be interested in a book or refer the book or like, that's my lens. You know, but I'm 53 now. And I've, you know, even in the last, like, five years, kind of really, like, saw that. So, you know, again, it's this, the thing about the part of the book is it's a different version of specialization. It's more like each person in such a busy world where it's so confusing and there's so many demands on you from so many people, friends, family, teammates, customers, et cetera. You know, how can you kind of continue to figure out what you can and should be, you know, really great at and try to offload as much of the other stuff as you can? 

And I could tell you, no one does gifting better than Simbosho. If you're looking for a proven way to win and retain more customers, visit Simbosho.com. Yeah, definitely. 

So let's take a little bit of a shift. You've worked with tons of leadership teams. You've gone through a bunch of work. What's the biggest thing that you're seeing today that's not working? What's in the go-to-market strategy? And where do they go look first? Like something's not working. It's a common pattern. Where do they go first to get that fix? Yeah, it's a good question. 

You know, I'm on a couple boards and I've been on, you know, just thinking, you know, I think first of all, there's so many different types of companies and challenges. But I do think that one of the common themes is that there's so many things that can work and things that you should be doing. that people just get too scattered doing too many things. It's kind of like marketing. 

Is it a priority thing? Is it a priority thing or is it like not like putting the work in type of thing? 

No, I think it's trying to juggle too many balls because there's some of you should feel like you need to be doing and you feel like if I, if the fear, it's a version, I'm going to use the fear of missing out whether it's driven by the investors, the CEO, CEO to VP, whatever it could be sales, could be marketing, could be product features. It's really hard for people to kind of zone in on like what are these really, these few things we really need to do that are most important and remember, okay, they're going to take longer than we think they will to get really right. Right? Because as humans we all think, oh, it'll take two weeks or two months or two years and reality it's three times that. 

So, yeah, it's like really sick to that. I wish more people knew that. I wish more people knew like just because you are a sales leader or you've done it in the past or you've done it somewhere else, like it's just different. Like you have to like go through the process. You have to evolve and figure out where the challenge is before you can fix it. And then you got to give it time to get fixed. 

Yeah. And I think something that's really been lost in the shuffle and I haven't gotten anyone to really zone in on this honestly. I thought I don't, I'm not sure why or, you know, so going back to this talk I gave about relationships and I have these examples. I'm still kind of, but there's one example that is, I don't have a term for it, but it's kind of like customer, you know, refer, refer, some sort of referral playbook. 

So here's, maybe people are still overwhelmed and so busy they can't get, I think this is a great idea and I don't know, I maybe just can't fit because it doesn't fit that current playbook. But, you know, like, okay, and I've had a conversation with a CEO like the number one thing you need to do is talk to customers and then ask them for referrals to other customers. And there's ways to help with that, right? There's all kinds of tools to surface, you know, I'm going to talk to Bob and here's three people kind of like Bob and I talked to him and he just, you know, he's overwhelmed, right? And he just can't get it in his mind that that's like an incredibly valuable and then meanwhile he's trying to do like SEO and even outbound like, don't, don't, don't do this stuff like it's just not right. 

Referrals are like that's number one. Like if you have a, if you have a referral in a conversation, that's interesting that they wouldn't take that handshake. Yeah. 

Well, it's work. And I think so there's a couple of things. One, I think it's when people are really stressed, they revert their processing power goes down and they can kind of only do what they've done before. So I think about all the failed people or executives, you're like, ah, I'm not getting enough deals. I just need to like make more calls. My calls aren't working. I need to make more calls or my email isn't working. 

You send me an email. So there's something about humans, like it happens often enough. Almost like not their fault because it's just like the way we've revert in a fire flight towards doing more of the same thing. And it's like, it's, it's getting the same results. 

Yeah. You know, it's, I mean, same in, same in relationships, same in business. It's like we're, there's a human thing there. And like to do a new habit, a new process, a new thing is just by two, like there's a big chunk of brain power. 

And if your brain can't get this much in, it just, I don't know, like it slides off or something. But the, the, I'll tell you, the gist of it is I understand why referrals are not like very systematized and especially like B2B companies. Part of that is kind of me, like promoting specialization because you have, you know, prospect, you know, there's SDR types and there's failed people and then there's customer success or account managers. And so now you've got this misalignment of incentive. I feel like a corporate or person now. 

But the people who want, who need more meetings don't have the relationships with the customers who have the, you know, referrals. And so in my mind, if you said, look, we're going to make this a priority. And so once either, you know, people are basically signing or three to six months later, once they've got some great results and they're, they're, they're happy, have a conversation with them. And so the, there has to be some kind of teamwork aspect where, you know, revenue, accountability people talk with the customer success, the relationship owners and say, look, let's jointly go to this customer to, hey, would you be okay? We've had some success, you know, if we, there's some other people that we think could be benefited as well. Can we ask you to make some intro to make it easy on you? 

All right. And it should be a live conversation, not some automated email because people don't, and they say hopefully yes. And then later they go back and, you know, again, you can surface, say, here's two prospects this person might know. 

You know, would you mind making these intros? So it's more of like a, you do need some teamwork and there's some new kind of metrics and there's new, there's a new playbook of some, it's not like that big a deal, but it is a different playbook with different stuff. So I think it's just hasn't clicked for people yet. 

And I don't have the right term for people to be like, oh, shit. Why aren't we doing this? Why are we doing, is that the investing in all this money on these other channels, which might be working or may not. And we're just ignoring potentially the best one and the one position for the future. So that's what I've done. 

No, I think it's, this has been something that has been talked about for five years, 10 years. Like when you first sign the contract, potentially you have the honeymoon period, like there could be references or referrals there. And then like you're saying, like three months in, you get like some success. Like once you get the first success, like then you may want to have that second conversation. I think in many cases, the CS team, who is now transitioning over the last 12 months into a more revenue generating organization is starting to do that, run that play. 

It needs to be probably built a bit more succinct. Like maybe you run some AI to scrape their LinkedIn to find people that are in that in your, in your ICP and say, Hey, can you make me introduce, like if you don't know anybody, here are a couple of people that I think would make good introductions and they may know them or they may not know them. 

Yeah. And there's, I know, I have a buddy creating something called connect the dots to help with that. And there's other companies who've tried this over the years and, and there's, there's one other aspect to this, which is, you know, it's not just the one time thing. You need to be able to recharge the battery because if you ask for too many referrals, you know, maybe it's even three and one month. The first thing it kind of, it's called a battery. It's like drains of batteries. So there's this other aspect. But yeah, I don't, I don't think it'd be that, it's not, you know, they could deal to figure out something that's going to work to help power that. Me and mate, it's one of these things where it might just need to have a couple of case studies and examples of people that, Oh, okay. Wow. Someone else did it. And it kind of makes it easier for me to understand how it would work and what to do. And now I can fit it into my little like, you know, mental tunnel to make it work in my place, my company. 

Aaron, what's next for GTM? So predictable revenue. Let's get predictive go to market. What's coming down the pipe? You know, we know, obviously AI is huge. But where is buyer behavior going to shift all of the next 12 to 24 months? And like with AI, where, where are people going to miss out? Where's it being used wrong? Yeah. 

Well, the first thing AI is only, is the label is only going to be around for, I mean, not necessarily that long. It's because it's going to be a utility like, you know, internet electricity and gas. Yeah. It's got the internet when the internet first came out as always the internet company and then after a few years, it's like, well, it's just a company that is. 

So I don't know. You know, again, I think time again, there's the obvious, you know, improvements, accelerations of things we're already doing. And, but there's all kinds of things that'll be created that we don't really know yet. 

So like once you have agent to agent, you know, buying and selling or researching or I nobody really knows. And plus no one wrote, no one really knows, you know, it is true that the, the speed of the change that could happen in terms and also including the job market could be ugly. Could, I don't know, more likely to be ugly than smooth because again, it's probably going to happen so fast. It could happen so fast. 

And you're going to talk about reading an article the other day, the CEO of Anthropoc was saying 50% of white collar jobs. He believes could be taken over by AI, leaving to like a 10 to 20% on his way. 

Yeah, I mean, maybe, you know, he also, you remember, he's got some sort of agenda in this too. It's not like he's, you know, it's what little little one. 

And yeah, lots of people will adapt. A lot of people won't adapt. I think too that the, there's always like the, 

the tech people and the people who are already kind of like have money, whether they made it or, or inherited or got it from other place, like, oh, you know, there's going to have to be retraining and you know, people just have to figure something out. You're like, yeah, that's a lot of like real people. 

Like, do you have any children, parents, sisters, brothers in that boat? You might take a bit more seriously because no one's really giving a shit right now, because it seems like, because the shoe hasn't really dropped. Uh, and how that affects, but even more so, you know, the effect it's going to have on, you know, like the uncertainty already on society, because everyone talked to, I started after COVID, right? And after COVID, and there's the cost of living crisis and then I don't know, elections and AI, everyone just has a sense, including executives, right? This one VP of sales told me like he's just a little bit terrified of how fast things are changing. And, you know, that sense of what no one knows going to happen next month. Like the floor could drop out. Which, you know, maybe we'll maybe won't put that anxiety, creates again this reversion to it's harder for people to make better decisions, longer term decisions, the right decisions. 

They refer it back to prior behavior. Give me the quick win. I just need like the 40, you said 40,000 things right now for outbound. Like I need the quick win because this is the other and it's like this, um, you know, this, uh, yeah, it's like almost regression towards I'm just going to turn in the crank. Like, and if the crank isn't working, I got turned harder. 

So I don't know how long, I mean, that's the side you'll taste to kind of adapt between, I don't know, cause like you got AI and you got robotics. Like blue, who knows how much blue collar, you know, how many people drive for Uber with weight? I mean, there's a lot of people aren't talking about that nearly enough. And who knows, you know, some going back to in relationships and who knows what all that stuff is going to do. But if you're focusing on creating and building good relationships, whether you're going to be looking for jobs, looking for funding, looking for customers fill in the blanks, just having a base level of mental health, community health, um, creativity, people to talk to, like that's going to serve you. I just thought that's what I'm doing. 

Like trying to, um, how do I do things that are interesting to me that are, you know, feel creative with the right people? Um, and I still have to make money. I got 10 children. 

I got a big family. And I didn't start at Salesforce early enough to retire a long time ago. Um, so even then it's rather than going back to, Hey, how do they make money in the before? It's, you know, what feels right. And you know, really to me, it's like more of an intuition because I don't feel like the things I do, I could go back and use, you know, a regression analysis and AI to predict from what works in the past, what's going to work for me in the future. But I can focus on what feels right. What's interesting. 

Where are the gaps and who can I do it with? And, you know, feel like I keep doing that. Then it's going to keep working out. What's next for you? 

Good question. Um, so I'm going through, I've got like, I went through my own midlife crisis the last few years, right? So I had a business, uh, doing outbound in North America that I was just sick of doing the work and part of that was the work itself. Part of it was, it wasn't a good partnership in business partnership for the longterm. 

So I had a divorce out of that business divorce. And so I've got this, you know, first it was this, well, I want to make money doing what I love, but I have no idea what that is. So like, first of all, what do I actually like to do? 

If I could do something, what would that be? And for like two years, I have no idea. Um, and then over time, what I got more clarity is, oh, okay, what I actually really in drawn to and like to do are books. So that's writing, um, writing with other people, helping other people. 

So, you know, advising and crafting, um, writing new books and the new books are a bit different. So one's called income operating system. I'll title is going to change just how people can make more money. Uh, the other books called each shit and grow, just like kind of crazy family stories from having a, and supporting a family 10. So the new books and working with some others, again, talking people about a new sales book, we'll see. So books, speaking and partnerships, you know, which great for me when I have a really good partner, someone I trust, like I've got a business with a great partner in Brazil. 

Amazing. It's kind of predictable revenue Brazil. Um, they're growing like the North America business was like declining. 

The Brazil ones growing, like doing great. A lot of these on things like culture, treating people well. Um, it's not like the tactics. It's a lot of the soft skills. Which leads to the right decisions and for the big picture and right decisions for the tactical stuff. So, um, you know, whether you call it a guy, I'm on a path of making, uh, I'm not making as much money now doing what I love that I did when I was, um, doing really kind of full time outbound stuff, but I'm on track and my plan is to make more money doing what I love. Uh, and again, I feel like I'm not totally locked into exact keeps getting more clear, um, then I'm making more money doing that. Things I love to do, like to do, even like to do, then I did doing the consulting. 

So, but love the lovey king. This one, yeah, like this thing in Germany, that's it's promising. I want to do some stuff with this guy. Like, and you know, I've struggled like a lot of people having friendships over the, for a long time and you just realize, um, you know, I do like having, if I have a business or project with someone who I like, it's like a friend that it makes it easier to like maintain that versus being something else to do on top of all the kids and the things and the other. 

So Dale, we need to be friends. 

The relationship is very interesting. I think the pendulum will swing way back. Like, I think the pendulum, like scale breaks everything. We look at marketing automation. We look at cold outbound. We look at outreach and so while like scale breaks everything and so we need to come, we need to come back to the other side of the pendulum. Let's wrap this up a little bit. You have for a little bit of rapid fire. See, uh, see what you, what you like, what you don't like. What if I said no? 

And we want to do it. Why am I? I'm doing a good thing. 

What's the first app you check when you wake up in the morning? 

Uh, usually in text because if I have kids in the States, if there's some emergency or something, which there really is, but yeah, text. Early bird or night owl? I don't know. 

You know, I haven't had a choice in either one of the other. So for so long, I have to get up early to get the kids school and step late because, you know, people and other times like kids and the wives and things. Well, I like to talk late. 

So what's, uh, what's your favorite indulgent snack or food? Uh, coffee. Good coffee. 

Not because what's your favorite? Just like, yeah, I'm a big coffee guy. 

No, like, you know, I like, uh, washy latte or a hot chocolate. So I live in Edinburgh. Best place is called modern standard, which is nearby and, uh, yeah. So like, or a hot chocolate where they don't have the powder. They actually not like chocolate in, you know, usually like 20, 25 dollars. You know, yeah. 

So living in Edinburgh, uh, Edinburgh is one of my favorite cities. I coincidentally had the best Thai food of my life in some back alley in Edinburgh, probably 15 years ago. Um, but of all the places you've been, or maybe you haven't, what's your dream vacation destination? 

Uh, for me, I, you know, I actually don't know. I couldn't tell you because like my brain can't get out of the mode of if I'm going places for work or with kids or, you know, some other things. So I've traveled a lot. Um, so I don't know. I don't have, I don't think it'd be just me. Oh wait. 

Okay. Probably go back to your family. That's like, I had a, yeah, there's like a, I really loved being there with some family, um, uh, 10 years ago. And there's, I've been a couple of times at that last time, there's something that was really, like special about it. I love that. Awesome. 

Let's, let's wrap it up. Um, if you were to fix, go to market today, what's one thing that you would tell people today, like go do this. I think I know what the answer is, but let's wrap it with that. 

Yeah. I think that'd be fair how to, um, you know, create a better, at least with the federal relationships with your customers and ask them for more referrals. Love that. I knew it was going to be. Yeah. If it wasn't that, I think it'd be, you know, everyone's here, had a, you know, may exercise and sleep more. 

I love it. Aaron, thank you so much for joining the show. Thank you for all the knowledge you have given to the sales community. Um, it was a pleasure to chat with you guys. I'm just getting started too. I love it. Thanks so much for listening. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. 

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