Chad Thibodeaux / Business Coach & Launch Strategist

Chad is a business coach and launch strategist who has helped over 5000 people launch their online coaching businesses.

Chad Thibodeaux, a business coach and launch strategist, shares his journey from being a pastor to finding his true passion.

He emphasizes that failure is an event, not a person, and that necessary endings can lead to new opportunities. Chad discusses the importance of shifting one's perspective and not tying their identity to their past roles. He highlights the significance of doing what brings happiness and fulfillment, regardless of the career path.

Chad's story serves as a reminder to embrace change and pursue one's true calling. Chad Thibodeaux shares his journey as an entrepreneur and how failure shaped his life.

He emphasizes the importance of embracing one's strengths and not being afraid to start and quit projects. Chad also discusses the difference between an entrepreneur and a business owner, highlighting the visionary nature of entrepreneurs. He provides insights into launching a business, focusing on identifying the problem, agitating it, offering a solution, and making an offer.

Chad encourages entrepreneurs to take action and not get stuck in overthinking or small tasks. Chad Thibodeaux shares valuable insights on starting and growing an online coaching business. He emphasizes the importance of making it easy for people to enter your sphere and work with you. He advises focusing on the big things that matter, such as identifying the problem, understanding what prospects have tried, leveraging your skills to solve the problem, and making an offer.

Chad also discusses the concept of prototyping and launching your business idea to test the market demand. He highlights the significance of staying focused and avoiding distractions from tools and technology. Chad provides a framework of four buckets: launch, pubescent, scalability, and authority, which guide the growth of a business. He shares strategies for generating engagement on social media and qualifying your audience.

Links:
Launchit.online
http://www.teachaitome.com (code: HEADSMACK24)

Paul Povolni, the founder of Voppa Creative, has been a creative leader for over 30 years, with clients around the world. He’s led teams in creating award-winning branding and design as well as equipping his clients to lead with Clarity, Creativity and Culture.

Headsmack Website

Transcript

Chad Thibodeaux (00:02.67)
I'm Chad Thibodeaux Business Coach and Launch Strategist in your listening to the Head Smack Podcast.

Chad Thibodeaux (00:10.826)
Hi, I'm Chad Tobito and you're listening to the HeadSpack Podcast.

Chad Thibodeaux (00:18.166)
Hi, I'm Chia Tibodeau, business coach and launch strategist, and you're listening to Paul Pavone on the Head Smack podcast. Actually, that's not how you say it, right? Pavone?

Paul Povolni (00:27.122)
Yeah, Pobolnyi is close enough.

Chad Thibodeaux (00:28.898)
Got to do it one more time. Hi, I'm Chad, Tobito Business Coach and Launch Strategist, and you're listening to the Head Smacked Podcast with the one and only Paul Povolny.

Paul Povolni (00:40.894)
Perfect. All right. Thanks, man. All right, let's get started. Let me just mark this clip. Are you familiar with Riverside? OK, cool.

Chad Thibodeaux (00:41.985)
Very good.

Chad Thibodeaux (00:48.522)
Yeah, well, no, I used them when they first came out and then I ditched them. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (00:54.222)
Okay, so once we're done, once I hit stop recording, it takes a couple of seconds for it to upload from your computer as well. And that way, even though you might look fuzzy or I might look fuzzy or whatever, the recording is gonna be great. So we just gotta wait a couple of seconds for it to finish uploading at the end of this.

Chad Thibodeaux (01:00.938)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (01:12.478)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no. Yeah, I'm familiar with that. So yeah, so because it's taking the fee from mine and sending it to yours. Yeah. And then it stitches it together. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (01:15.162)
All right. Right. Yep. All right. Perfect. Let's get going. Hey, welcome to the Head Smacked Podcast. This is Paul Povolni. So glad you're here. I am excited to be talking to Chad Thibodeau. He is a business coach, a launch strategist. He's helped over 5,000 people launch their businesses with online coaching and all the other things that people have passionate about and want to launch. And so he's made a big difference.

doing well at it and Chad thank you for being on

Chad Thibodeaux (01:48.778)
Absolutely, man, I can't resist.

Paul Povolni (01:51.638)
I'm looking forward to this conversation because we got introduced several years ago. And I don't even know how I saw your videos, how I got your name. I think somebody probably recommended you for something. And so I thought, well, I'm going to check him out. And so I checked out some of your online content and you were providing some really amazing content for free to people that were wanting to launch a business, wanting to start a business. And I thought this guy's brilliant. I'm going to, you know.

connect with him and stay connected with him. And we got to work on a few things early on, but I'm glad that, you know, I stuck with you and watching your stuff, just super rich and valuable. And so tell me a little bit about your journey because you weren't always a business coach and launch strategist, right? You didn't wake up, you know, at six years old and, you know, I'm gonna be a business coach. So tell me a little bit about your journey. Like what brought you to that spot?

Chad Thibodeaux (02:44.479)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (02:48.074)
because it's not where you started and you've got a great story of how things happened along the way. So let's start from as far back as you want to start off.

Chad Thibodeaux (02:53.238)
Yeah.

Yeah, I will. Well, the first thing you have to know is sort of my philosophy. So an entrepreneur is not something that you do. It's something that you are. And so I have as far as I can remember, I have had an entrepreneurial mindset. I mean, I have started things and done all sorts of things. In fact, I created my first six figure business when I was 16 years old. I did a landscaping company and end up selling that business to my mom and dad when I went to college and paid for my first year of college, which was pretty cool. And

From there, I started a couple of other companies I ultimately sold and made some money. But most of my life, most of my adult life, I was actually a pastor of a couple pretty large churches. And yeah, that guy, that guy who stands on stage and foams at the mouth and, you know, dissects your

Paul Povolni (03:38.854)
Yeah. Smoke machines and yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (03:51.134)
And so we have the ability to take small churches and make them very large very quickly using just some innate skill sets and gift sets that we had. And through the process of doing all that, I just learned that I just wanna help people. So toward the end of my ministry, because we were able to have some success taking small churches and making them large, we got, you know.

many denominations come to us and said, dude, we don't know how you did that, but could you put that in writing, figure it out and teach our churches how to do that? And so the last couple of years of my ministry, I became a coach, a church consultant, where I'd go into these small churches and help them go from drab to fab in just 90 days. In fact, that became the name of my book called, From Drab to Fab, that's what I called it. From Drab to Fab in 90 days or less. And in fact,

Paul Povolni (04:26.994)
Well...

Paul Povolni (04:37.354)
Go from what?

Chad Thibodeaux (04:45.174)
That became the name of my training manual was called the 90 Day Turnaround. And I was gonna brand that, it was gonna be 90 Day Turnaround everything, right? So 90 Day Turnaround in your health, a 90 Day Turnaround in relationships, a 90 Day, and I don't know, doing this podcast, I'm sort of getting motivated, maybe I'll go back and do that. But so I did that and had a really, really good ministry. And so I was pastoring in large mega church and doing the podcast and then.

Paul Povolni (04:50.41)
Hmm.

Paul Povolni (05:01.505)
Hahaha

Chad Thibodeaux (05:11.078)
as life would have it, things started going south with my wife and I and ended up getting a divorce. And I don't know if you know anything about churches and divorce, but typically once you get a divorce, they put their proverbial foot, or actually they put their literal foot in your proverbial backside or even your literal backside and they give you the boot. And so what I had done for almost 20 years of my life just poof, went away.

Paul Povolni (05:31.99)
Yeah, that's terrible.

Chad Thibodeaux (05:37.518)
one day and it put me at a crossroads where I'm wondering if many of your audience has been where they're in the in a transition period where they're moving from one page of the chapter to the next and that's exactly where I'm at where I found myself and I had no idea what I wanted to do what I was gonna do and because man I yeah

Paul Povolni (05:57.822)
Well, you probably thought you were going to die in that role, right? You thought like, this is, this is it. This is my calling. This is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (06:03.166)
Yeah. Right. Yeah. So anytime you feel like you have your future secure, and then something comes to remove that security, what I learned very quickly is your identity goes away. Because an identity is simply the label that you or someone else places upon yourself. And so for me, it was husband, it was pastor.

Paul Povolni (06:15.37)
Hmm.

Chad Thibodeaux (06:23.85)
Right? And so, and so they didn't, nobody called me Chad. They called me Pastor Chad. Right? And when people saw me, they thought of my, my ex-wife and, and this was a label. And what I learned very quickly, I'm going to bring this around here in a little bit. What I learned very quickly is that when you have your identity in what you do, it's very easy to feel like a failure when what you do dissolves.

Paul Povolni (06:24.829)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (06:46.398)
In fact, it's so interesting because you start a business and you may have it for two, three, four, five years and then all of a sudden you can't figure out how to make it profitable and you end up having to close it down. Well, we look at that as a failed business, but it wasn't a failed business. The things that you learned through that process, the money that you made through that process, the lies that you impacted, the people that you impacted doesn't say failure to me. It may say temporary, it may say short lived, but it doesn't say failure to me. What I learned is, and I don't know who said this, so I can't give them credit, but some

Paul Povolni (06:46.759)
Wow, yeah.

Paul Povolni (07:08.231)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (07:16.112)
someone famous, said that failure is an event, not a person.

And I learned through that process that as long as I looked at myself as a failure, all I was going to be was a failure. All of the, if the only way I looked at my marriage was it was a failed marriage and I was going to be a failure. You know, we had eight and a half good years. We had three awesome kids, you know, and that relationship served me and her well for that particular period of time. And so what I learned was I learned that you have to shift your perspective on what Henry Cloud calls necessary endings.

Paul Povolni (07:23.284)
Wow.

Chad Thibodeaux (07:52.484)
But just because you have a necessary ending doesn't mean that you failed. Yeah. Thanks for watching.

Paul Povolni (07:53.155)
Hmm.

Yeah. Well, and I think that is the key is, is not tying the event to yourself, to your identity, you know, with saying, yeah, I, I failed, you know, as opposed to the business failed, um, you know, and, and making that a part of your ongoing identity and, and keeping that on yourself, you know, well, I can't do this because I failed. I'm a failure.

Chad Thibodeaux (08:08.844)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (08:20.342)
Well, I don't even like to use that word because even if you close your business, your business didn't fail. Your business just closed. So, I'm going to go ahead and close this video.

it just came to an end. It had a necessary ending in many ways. And what it does and what I've learned is that when I went to that period of life, that period of time, I had no idea what I was going to do. And I just assumed that the rest of my life was not going to be very good. That was my assumption. And in fact, the next 12 months were terrible, right? So here I am, I'm trying to figure out I lose my job, what am I going to do for a living? And so a buddy of mine by the name of Casey Graham,

Chad Thibodeaux (08:59.312)
called the preaching rocket and what he was going to do was he was going to help pastors learn how to speak better. So he launches this course he does this webinar with 24,000 pastors on it if you can imagine. He does a webinar and he sells this thing and he does 2.2 million dollars in his initial launch of the rocket company this first year.

Paul Povolni (09:09.234)
Wow.

Chad Thibodeaux (09:16.674)
And I knew, I've heard of Casey and who Casey was, and I'm like, you know what, that guy's smart, but he's not as smart as me, and if he can do it, I can do it. And so what I did was, Tony Robbins once said that if you want to be successful, find someone else who has been successful and model what they do. And so what I did was I hacked the heck out of Casey and did everything that he did, and Casey made $2.2 million, it's his first year at the Rocket Company, and I made 14,600 bucks the first year of my business, right?

Paul Povolni (09:25.164)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (09:43.786)
Ha ha ha!

Chad Thibodeaux (09:45.314)
And complete, you talk about failure, man. I'm thinking I'm a failure. I can't figure out why I can't get this thing off the ground. But remember, there's no such thing as a failure. There's necessary endings. And I learned so much. And through that process of that first year, I learned some things I'm going to share with you in a little bit. But let me tell you how bad it got for me. So I was making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year as a pastor and church consultant. And the very first year after that, I made $14,600.

Paul Povolni (09:48.218)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (09:53.246)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (10:13.046)
can't keep the lights on at 14,600 bucks. So my kids were young. I had a 10 year old, a five year old, and a three year old.

Paul Povolni (10:13.159)
Wow.

Chad Thibodeaux (10:21.342)
I sort of hate to admit this on camera, but I just will because it's part of my story. But in order to keep the lights on, I would drive Lyft and Uber. In fact, over on my shelf over here, I still have the sticker that I put on my dashboard to let people know that I was a Lyft driver. But I just couldn't leave my little kids because they were young, so I would go to the store and get like adult levels of melatonin. And about seven o'clock at night, I'd give them what we call the night vitamin, and they

Paul Povolni (10:49.514)
Hmm.

Chad Thibodeaux (10:50.976)
and then man 15 minutes later they were just all crashed and passed out in their beds and I sneak out the back door get in my car and I would drive Lyft and Uber to about sometimes two three o'clock in the morning just to make a couple hundred bucks and that's the only way that I could afford to keep the lights on and pursue what I thought was my was my dream at the time so I did that and things start going well and then August 11th came and it was

Paul Povolni (11:09.278)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (11:17.962)
It was hard. August 11th, 2017. That wasn't all that long ago. It was just seven years ago. And we get a phone call, come to find out the home that my ex-wife and I owned in South Carolina was being foreclosed upon.

Paul Povolni (11:23.197)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (11:32.298)
because of lack of payment. Now we had renters in there, but the property management that was managing all of that for us had told us that the renters hadn't paid rent in six months, therefore the mortgage hadn't been paid. And so here I am, I'm like freaking out, like what am I gonna do? So I'm doing all of this marketing, and then I get this phone call, and I have this huge crisis come over me.

Paul Povolni (11:32.387)
Oh wow.

Paul Povolni (11:44.919)
Oh wow.

Chad Thibodeaux (11:57.994)
Right after this crisis comes over to me my ex-wife reminds me that I promised my little six-year-old daughter Olivia that I would take her to the back-to-school Skating party that night well the last thing I wanted to do was to go to a back-to-school skating party But I only had $11 cash in my pocket. That's all I had my bank account was negative I had $11 cash in my pocket hearing I'm 41 years old like what the heck like I gotta be better than this you know

Paul Povolni (12:07.284)
Hmm.

Paul Povolni (12:11.532)
Right.

Paul Povolni (12:19.667)
Bye.

Chad Thibodeaux (12:23.55)
And so we get to this thing and we had a little coupon to get in for five bucks and I'm like, okay, I got 11 bucks. I can at least get in and do this night. So we go to the door where we're gonna get in a skating party and we're met by this girl in pigtails, striped shirt, little mini skirt and some roller skates on and she goes, well, that'd be $10. Remember, I only have 11 in my pocket. Like 10 bucks, I'm like.

Paul Povolni (12:44.774)
Oh wow.

Chad Thibodeaux (12:47.222)
The sheet says $5. She says, yes sir, $5 for you and $5 for her. I'm like, no, I'm not gonna skate. And she goes, I'm sorry. She goes, we're gonna come in, you have to pay $5. Now, Paul, I'm a pretty educated guy. I have two master's degrees, and one of them in communication. And I used every ounce of negotiating ability that I had.

Paul Povolni (13:07.415)
Well...

Chad Thibodeaux (13:09.75)
to get past this, to use against this 16 year old girl, to get past her with only five bucks. And I wasn't very proud of that, but I won, okay?

Paul Povolni (13:14.982)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (13:17.59)
So we get in, we get in, get my daughter roller skates, and all of her friends have this little glow on the dark necklace. And she goes, daddy, can I have a glow in the dark necklace? And I'm like, well, let me see how much they are. So I looked, there were three bucks. And man, you would have thought that I was daddy war bucks, man, I pulled that six bucks out of my pocket. One, two, three, slant it down on the table, bought her this necklace, put her skates on her, she gets out skating.

Paul Povolni (13:33.532)
Hahaha

Paul Povolni (13:36.985)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (13:40.778)
And as soon as she gets on the floor, she did what you and I did. She fell flat on her face, right? Skating, cause she never skated before. So I run over there, I pick her up, I can sole her and she looks over and she sees this little girl with what's called a skate mate, which is like a walker. Okay. That you use to not fall. And she was, daddy, can I have one of those? I'm like, yeah, baby, no problem. So I go over to just get one of those and little did I know that they cost money. And the lady goes where they cost $5. Well, here I am 41 years old, been successful my entire life.

Paul Povolni (13:45.79)
Hmm

Paul Povolni (13:55.772)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (14:06.61)
Hmm, well...

Chad Thibodeaux (14:10.754)
and I don't even have $5 to pay for that. And I remember walking on the skating rink, looking at her, and literally big tears coming down my eyes saying, baby, I'm sorry. Daddy, daddy can't afford this. And she goes, that's okay, daddy. And she skated and she had a really good time. But the entire time, Paul, I'm looking at her, I think, you know, man, what kind of loser are you, bro? You're 41 years old. You're an educated man.

Your life is a wreck. It's a mess. And all these senses of failure just came up on me even more. And it was at that moment that I knew that something had to change. Because what do they say? If nothing changes, nothing changes, and I knew that something had to change. So I went home and I took an introspect like what was going on. Well, the very next day I get an email from ClickFunnels.

Paul Povolni (14:42.74)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (14:56.216)
Right.

Chad Thibodeaux (15:05.414)
telling me that I had been selected to participate in what was called the design-a-thon and Russell Brunson It's all my designs my funnel designs that I made in the business that I thought would failed Okay, but he saw my funnels and thought they were amazing invited me to be part of this and named me I click funnels top 30 designer. Okay, and see you're one of the best designers in the world I want to invite you to Boise, Idaho

Paul Povolni (15:16.081)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (15:23.431)
Wow.

Chad Thibodeaux (15:28.406)
and I want you to work with me and I'm gonna hire you to build funnels. So me and 29 other people did it. Now what you have to know is Russell Brunson's a tightwad. He doesn't pay for anything. Okay. So he wanted me to come up and build funnels for him but I had to pay my own way. I didn't have any money so I had to borrow money. Well actually I didn't borrow money. What I had was I had a prepaid credit card that someone had given me a long time ago and I had some money on it and just enough money to get to Boise. But I didn't have enough money to pay for a hotel.

Paul Povolni (15:34.354)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (15:38.221)
Hahaha

Paul Povolni (15:48.723)
Hmm.

Chad Thibodeaux (15:57.446)
and there was only like 150 bucks on there left after my plane ticket. And so, don't even know why I was sharing all of this with you, but here's what happened. So I go there and on the Airbnb website, they have this little trigger that you can pull that says here's how much money I wanna spend, and I brought it all the way to the left, and it wouldn't go any lower than $26. 26 was the lowest that it would go. I'm like, okay, if I could find a room for $26 a night.

Paul Povolni (15:57.597)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (16:21.394)
you know, I gotta be there three nights, okay, I can get in for like 120, 130 bucks, I'd be good. And I'll just figure out how to eat later on. So I did that, and that $26 room ended up being a shared room.

Paul Povolni (16:26.682)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (16:36.078)
with this young blonde girl named Chelsea. Chelsea to this day is still a friend of mine, which is interesting. And so I go there and she had a bed and then there was a little futon, a little Ikea futon. And I don't know why this is celebrating behind me, but it was exciting.

Paul Povolni (16:51.294)
Yeah, I think it's probably your Mac computer setting for responses or reactions.

Chad Thibodeaux (16:56.718)
Yeah. Well, anyway, so it was exciting. So, so we go there and there's this little futon like literally about this big. And she looks at me and she goes, you're way too big for that. She goes, Okay, now listen, she goes, if you don't put a move on me, I'll let you sleep in the bed. Like, are you serious right now? Like?

Paul Povolni (17:00.364)
There it is.

Chad Thibodeaux (17:19.866)
Oh my god. Okay, so here I am 41 years old. I just got this award from you know, or I just got this invitation from Russell Brunson. And I go there. And now I'm sharing a bed for $26 a night with this person stranger that I don't even know. And I'm so embarrassed. I go to ClickFunnels and Russell looks at all the stuff and he gives me an award not for a top 30 designer but he gives me an award for a top six designer. He said your stuff is so good. He named me a top six global designer for the

Paul Povolni (17:20.446)
goodness.

Paul Povolni (17:44.051)
Wow.

Chad Thibodeaux (17:49.84)
So I come home that night and I tell this girl Chelsea like what happened and she goes, oh Here's what she said. She goes today must be the greatest day of your life So she told me today must be the greatest day of your life because this Russell Brunson gave me this award. I said no, I Said to be honest with you. I Hate building funnels and I just got an award doing something that I hate

Paul Povolni (18:01.415)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (18:05.392)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (18:16.714)
And it began hitting me that just because I'm good at something doesn't mean that I have to make a living doing it. Just because someone recognized me doesn't mean I have to take that leverage and stay in that particular world. And so she goes, she asks me a question that I want to pose to your audience. Remember, she's like 26, 27 years old, this little blonde girl, Chelsea. She goes, if you can make a million dollars doing anything.

what would you do? And I was like, good question, I don't know.

So I grabbed a pencil and notepad and I go into the room on my side of the bed and I'm sitting there and I have my notepad and I just did this little exercise. It was called RT5, that's what I call it now. So I just drew a line at the top of the paper with two columns, one was R, one was T, one was five. R stood for resume and I just, for whatever reason, I just wrote down anything I've ever made a living doing. T stood for task and I did the arduous task of writing down everything that I had ever done. And I ended up with like two or 300 of them. But I took a highlighter and I highlighted

Paul Povolni (18:53.647)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (18:57.19)
Hahaha

Paul Povolni (19:03.048)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (19:20.231)
Mm.

Chad Thibodeaux (19:22.32)
the task that I did that I actually enjoyed. And then I forced myself to take those tasks and narrow it down to five things. And if I could do these five things and make a million dollars, I'd be really happy. And I narrowed it down to five things. One was speaking, one was teaching, one was consulting, one was strategy, and one was doing video. When I got done, I got even more depressed because where did I do all those things at? I did all those things as a pastor and I can't, I can't go back and be a pastor. And then I had this aha moment.

Paul Povolni (19:46.379)
Oh wow.

Wow.

Chad Thibodeaux (19:53.266)
I had my head smack moment that pastor is not who you are. Pastor is what you did to make it work. And are pastors the only people that teach? Are pastors the only ones that speak? Are pastors the only one that do strategy? Are pastors the only one that give hope? Are pastors the only one that show up on video? No, they're not.

Paul Povolni (20:05.827)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (20:24.226)
They're not

Paul Povolni (20:43.498)
Yeah, I can hear you fine. It's saying your browser is preventing recording. So you might need to refresh the page, so just command R and see what happens.

Paul Povolni (21:14.61)
All right. I do know that sometimes with Riverside, it'll get kind of pixelated, but it's still recording at a high quality. Um, so go back to, um, you know, what you had said, you know, you'd come up with the five and you realize that it was pastoring that brought that to you.

Chad Thibodeaux (21:15.065)
Okay, you're gonna have to stitch this.

Chad Thibodeaux (21:37.961)
So what I realized was that as long as I was doing those five things, that it didn't matter what I did for a career, as long as I was doing those five things, I was doing happy. I was gonna be happy. And my identity was in what I did as opposed to who I was. And those five things is who I was. And so what I learned was that the pastorship was just a vehicle that I used to make money. Now, what do you do, Paul, when your car breaks down?

you go get it fixed, but what happens to your car when it's irreparable?

Paul Povolni (22:11.486)
Time to junk it. Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (22:12.901)
you junk it and you go get a new car. And that's what I did with my life and with my ministry was, okay, that vehicle that I was using to make money no longer work, but it served me for a time. So I'm gonna junk it and I'm gonna go get something else. But I knew I didn't wanna do funnels, right? Because I didn't wanna do spin behind the screen all day. And so I took those five things and said, okay, what have I done in my past? What opportunity do I have right now that I can leverage that I can use?

Paul Povolni (22:27.92)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (22:40.429)
use this skill set on that someone would need. And very quickly I said, you know what, I have started and sold multiple businesses. I've always been an entrepreneur. I'm very good at those five things that we just mentioned. I wanna go teach people how to start businesses, okay? Now,

Paul Povolni (22:57.258)
Hmm.

Chad Thibodeaux (22:58.241)
my life has been shaped based upon failure. So when I got divorced, I went to a therapist and the therapist asked me, what would your ex-wife say is the worst thing about you? And I said, that's easy. She would say, Chad starts things all the time and then he gets bored and he quits. I was like, it's awful. And my therapist looked at me and he goes this, he goes, why do you think that's bad?

Paul Povolni (23:16.046)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (23:21.125)
I said, well, my coach thought it was bad. My dad thought it was bad. Everybody I know thinks it's bad. My ex-wife thinks it's bad. And he goes, Chad, he goes, wait. He goes.

Do you know how many people there are that can take something and make it profitable? He goes, a lot. Do you know how many people can take nothing and create something out of it? Very few. And he goes, Chad, that's not your biggest weakness, that's your biggest strength.

go learn how to make money doing it. So I took that RT5 process and I went and launched my very first coaching business called Catapult. We help you start. I took all those things that everybody had told me my entire life that I was no good at and I've now turned it into a coaching business and I've helped now 5,000 people launch their companies in 54 different countries, you know, over the past seven, eight years, which has been so much fun. Right now I'm the head of coaching for a very large hundred million dollar a year coaching agency

Paul Povolni (23:59.073)
Yeah, well.

Chad Thibodeaux (24:18.647)
I work with them and in my own CAVU practice, I help people get out of their way and create breakthroughs that they do. And through the process, what I learned was that all of us sell the same thing. We just sell it differently. And what we sell is we sell this little thing called hope.

Paul Povolni (24:36.638)
Hmm.

Chad Thibodeaux (24:38.473)
people will buy hope. And so through the process, I also started a nonprofit organization called Hope Fuel, where I created seven pillars of hope, and I jump in, and I help people learn that as long as these seven things are firing in your life, then your life is going to be pretty well. So I know that's a very long answer to your question, but that's what I'm doing right now. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (24:57.41)
No, this is fantastic. And I think there's so many things even within what you've shared that, you know, an incredible head smack moments that I think if somebody just acted on those, um, you know, one of the things that I've said over and over is ideas are everything and nothing at the same time, uh, until you act on them, you know, and I think with, with what you're doing is you, you know, your

Chad Thibodeaux (25:15.621)
Yeah. Right.

Paul Povolni (25:22.43)
perpetually acting on those ideas. Now they don't all, you know, continue, they don't always, they don't become the vehicle for you as you move forward, but you implement them. You know, one of the things that I think, you know, is sometimes talked about is the difference between an entrepreneur and a business owner. And I think there are some businesses, there are some entrepreneurs that

When they become a business owner, you know, when it becomes daily grind, they've pursued that passion, they've pursued that idea, and then they've got to manage people and they've got to do all this stuff. They're like, I'm out. Like that's not what fires me up. I'd rather be doing the starting and the innovation and pursuing you ideas. Um, then managing people, managing a job. And so, you know, do you see that there being a significant difference between an entrepreneur and a business owner, or are they?

Chad Thibodeaux (25:57.317)
Yeah. Right.

Chad Thibodeaux (26:15.409)
Yeah. No, two different things.

Paul Povolni (26:15.678)
pretty much the same thing.

Chad Thibodeaux (26:19.005)
is not something that you do, it's something that you are. So the way I define being an entrepreneur, it's just a visionary personality who plants a seed of enterprise in the fertile ground of opportunity. That's what I call it. Okay, and so you can be an entrepreneur and still have a nine to five job. You may be a business owner or you may be a strategy person, but you may be more of an entrepreneur inside your relationship, like you're gonna plant some kind of seed of entrepreneurism or enterprise in the fertile ground of opportunity.

And then you're going to water that with some kind of innovation and risk-taking that's sort of there in hopes of harvesting the fruit of success. And so while navigating the unpredictable storms of the market. So that's how I define entrepreneurs. I'll break this down. In fact, this would be a fun podcast in and of itself because there's so many different things. So the first thing is an entrepreneur is a visionary. And so business owners aren't always visionaries. Sometimes visionaries. So you have, you know, sometimes business owners are, um,

Paul Povolni (27:07.955)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (27:18.725)
are well I guess the best way to say this I can't remember who wrote this I read in a book where there's really four types of people four types of business owners one is you have the builder

This is the visionary who says, you know, man, I see that land, I want to go build a building on it. Then one is the innovator that says, man, I see that building that the builder is going to build. But goodness gracious, think about what we could do with that building. I bet we could put a theme park inside that building or I bet we could do whatever. It's an innovator. Then you have the merchant. The merchant is the person who goes and says, you know what, that building needs built. I have relationship with contractors and asphalt people and bricklaying people and architects or whatever.

Paul Povolni (27:29.832)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (27:46.423)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (27:59.319)
So they merge it, they build the relationships to make that happen. And then you have the banker. The banker is the one that makes sure all the dots are dotted and all the T's are crossed, right? So an entrepreneur sometimes possesses all four of those components, but really it's visionary. Regardless of where you are in that process, whether you're an innovator or a builder or a...

Paul Povolni (28:15.976)
Right.

Chad Thibodeaux (28:22.557)
you know, a merchant or a banker, you're still gonna be an entrepreneur, but you have to be visionary. And then you have to plant a seed. That means that you are the seed planter. So in other words, you're not sitting back waiting for something to happen, you're making it happen, okay? And you're making that opportunity happen. And that's what we do, is we don't wait for an opportunity to come our way, we go and we make the opportunity happen. And then we water it with innovation. So in other words, what that means is like, we're always creating inside of our mind.

Paul Povolni (28:28.232)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (28:35.579)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (28:51.015)
Right.

Chad Thibodeaux (28:52.671)
ever and they're willing to take risk. See most people you know you're not an entrepreneur if risk-taking scares the bejesus out of you. You know you're an entrepreneur if you love to take risk okay because you have hopes of harvesting the fruit of success while navigating these unpredictable storms of the market and that's just sort of what makes an entrepreneur an entrepreneur.

Paul Povolni (28:53.43)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (29:01.062)
I'm sorry.

Paul Povolni (29:04.965)
Right.

Paul Povolni (29:13.33)
Yeah.

Yeah. I love that. And I think there are some people that are more, you know, they love that visionary. They love the idea generation. They love the executing of ideas. And there are some people that you give them a well executed idea and they'll keep the engine running. Like they'll keep oiling it. They'll keep the stuff moving the way it needs to move. And that's where they thrive. They, they don't thrive in coming up with ideas. They don't thrive in

being the innovator, the visionary, it's like, you, you give me the SOP, you know, and I will keep this running as smoothly as you could imagine. And, and I think when, when an entrepreneur gets pushed into that position of being that engine driver, they're keeping things going, that's when they get antsy. And they're like, I, this, this is not what I signed up for. And that's where they hit that critical point of what do I do next? And some jump ship.

and others scale and they find somebody else to run the engine while they then can pursue their passions. And so I think, I think understanding those roles and where your passions lie and where your giftings lie, I think is so critical for you to have that longevity of keeping things going.

Chad Thibodeaux (30:32.637)
See, something that's risky about that, which I love as an entrepreneur, is there's a fine line between, am I just not good at that? The video is going off again. Are you there?

Paul Povolni (30:48.05)
Yeah, I could still hear you. I think it was just pausing. Um, but in the final thing, it should be fine.

Chad Thibodeaux (30:52.743)
Okay.

Okay, well, it's coming up on my screen. Big big thing that says we cannot access your video.

Paul Povolni (31:00.806)
Oh, do you have like multiple browser windows open apps open? Like it's something maybe messing with the feed.

Chad Thibodeaux (31:09.105)
I'll close some stuff.

Chad Thibodeaux (31:13.429)
Okay, there we go.

Um, so it was, oh yeah.

So there's a big risk in that, right? So, and I love taking risks as well, I'm an entrepreneur, but you gotta think about it. So, like with the way that you just said it is like, sometimes we get bored or whatever. What you have to worry about if you're an entrepreneur and you're either in a nine to five job or you're in a business or whatever, you have to ask yourself, am I just bored or am I just not focused? There's a big difference between those two things. And here's what we do. So you've heard of like perfectionism, you've heard of procrastination,

then everybody says they have ADHD, right? Those are the three things. And so a lot of entrepreneurs, we do really, really well under pressure, right? So we have a deadline, you know, for seven months from now before we have to have something done. Well, when are we gonna start on it? Six months, 30 days from now, we're gonna start on it, right, because that's just how we work. And we work really, really well under pressure. That's a little bit different than procrastination. Well, procrastination is I know I should, but I don't. Yeah, I know I should, but I don't.

Paul Povolni (32:05.652)
You're right. Right.

Chad Thibodeaux (32:20.221)
And what I teach people is you don't have a procrastination problem. Actually what you have is you have an anxiety problem, you have a fear of failure problem. What you've done is you have attached.

a negative outcome, or excuse me, a negative response to the outcome, therefore you don't do because you're afraid of failing. Because if you thought that, you know, if I launch this business and I know I'm going to make a million dollars, well, goodness gracious, you'll start today and you'll work all night until that business is launched because you know a million dollars on the other side, but you don't. You actually think you're going to fail. And so because of that, you push that response off for as long as you can. And then at the last second, you jump in, you got all your creative juices, you go do, okay.

Paul Povolni (32:37.79)
Hmm.

Paul Povolni (32:48.957)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (33:01.175)
with it, we look back and we're like, ah, I wish I would have started that earlier. That wasn't all that bad because the reality of your fear is never as large as the perception of your fear.

Paul Povolni (33:06.54)
Right, right.

Paul Povolni (33:12.414)
So when you start coaching, um, the, you know, some, an entrepreneur or somebody that wants to launch an idea, um, I'm sure there's things that you need to like head smack out of the way, like get, get some ideas out of there. Let me do some reprogramming. Let me do some, some adjustment here. What are some of the things that you find with the people that you're coaching with the people that you're helping launch your business? What are some of those things that they need to get out of the way before you can actually.

kind of set them on the right track.

Chad Thibodeaux (33:44.005)
Yeah, so what I typically do is I use an analogy. OK, so Paul, you and I, you have a bicycle and I have a bicycle. OK, and let's say that we're on the street and we're going to have a race and the winner of this race gets one hundred dollars. OK, so you're going to be ready to go. I'm ready to go. And so we say on your mark, get set. And right before we say go, we say, oh, by the way, the winner is the person who crosses the finish line last.

Okay, so now you're on a bike and you have to go as slow as humanly possible. What happened to that bike?

Paul Povolni (34:14.663)
Hehehe

Paul Povolni (34:22.482)
falls over. Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (34:23.725)
it falls over. Okay. And the reason is, is because when you when you choose to be on a vehicle that's designed to move forward, and you choose not to move forward, it has no choice but to crash.

This is what happens in launching businesses. When you launch a business, your business is designed to move forward and to launch. And so when you procrastinate or you use perfectionism as an excuse not to launch, you have caused your business to fail and it has no choice but to fail. So what I try to do to get people out of their way is you don't have to get to the finish line immediately, you just have to start. And that forward motion will create momentum. And so that's what Andy Stanley said.

Paul Povolni (35:02.363)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (35:07.027)
Andy Stanley says that momentum is simply forward motion fueled by a series of wins. So what we try to do when we're launching businesses is, we don't have to launch, but what's the first thing we have to do to get a win? So I typically start with, let's create a name, a description, and outcome. What do you want the name of your program to be? What do you want the description to be? And if it all works, what would happen? What would be the outcome? So we typically start with a name, description, and outcome. And then what we do is we ask two questions. We say, OK.

Paul Povolni (35:19.922)
Hmm, yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (35:37.007)
What's the biggest problem that you're, not problems, problem. What's the singular biggest problem that someone has that this business you want to start solves? And then we make them just say one problem. And then I'll come back and say, is that the biggest problem? No, they get this, okay. What's the biggest? And we narrow it down to the biggest problem. So then what I say is like, okay, and so let's just do the exercise, Paul. Let's just make it up, okay? So what's the biggest problem your business solves?

Paul Povolni (35:57.787)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (36:06.666)
Clarity, helping people get clarity.

Chad Thibodeaux (36:08.009)
Clarity. OK, that's not a problem. That's a solution. OK, what problem do they have that clarity would resolve?

Paul Povolni (36:12.326)
OK.

Paul Povolni (36:17.533)
They don't know who they are.

Chad Thibodeaux (36:19.781)
Okay, that's a symptom. Okay, what problem do they have where not knowing who they are, what is it causing in their life? How is it negatively manifesting in their life?

Paul Povolni (36:32.958)
they are fractured in what they are doing, in how they're communicating, and how they're presenting themselves.

Chad Thibodeaux (36:39.741)
Perfect. And because they're fractured, what's happening to them?

Paul Povolni (36:44.606)
they are spending time doing the things that they don't need to be doing.

Chad Thibodeaux (36:48.133)
Okay, so do you see how I just back the train up? Okay, so most business owners when they're starting, they always start with solution. Like I had no doubt you were gonna give me a solution. And then you, just like everybody else that I work with, you back up one step at a time and then you finally get to the problem that you have, okay? And so then I ask this question, okay, give me the problem again, the final problem you just mentioned.

Paul Povolni (36:50.747)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (37:05.202)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (37:13.772)
They are fractured in what they're doing and they don't know, they're wasting a lot of time and money.

Chad Thibodeaux (37:18.237)
and they're wasting a lot of time and money. So what's something they think they needed to fix it?

Paul Povolni (37:24.99)
Probably more effort. A lot of them think it's more effort as opposed to clarity. Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (37:27.793)
The thing is if I just work hard, okay, if I just work hard, what's another thing?

Paul Povolni (37:32.336)
Um

Paul Povolni (37:36.126)
They, they.

Chad Thibodeaux (37:36.329)
Will they buy a gimmick? Will they buy something to try to fix it?

Paul Povolni (37:40.358)
Yeah, they'll try a quick fix. They'll try, you know, whatever the latest thing is without understanding that it's, it's a waste of time and money that they're not solving the problem.

Chad Thibodeaux (37:52.085)
Right, so what I do is I bring them back and say, okay, you already know what your problem is, and you already know who your competitors are because you just told me two or three things that they're doing. So when you commute, but they still didn't get the result that they want. So now you've, so we started with the problem, and what I just did is called agitate. So I just agitated the problem. Like here are three things that they're doing that's not getting them the results. So now you have something to throw a stone at, right? So they have something to compare. So then S is solution, like what should they do? If they wanna solve that problem,

Paul Povolni (38:08.156)
Mm.

Chad Thibodeaux (38:22.359)
And you told me earlier they need to get what?

Paul Povolni (38:24.618)
clarity.

Chad Thibodeaux (38:25.425)
And you need to get clarity. So that's the solution. And if you had clarity, then this would go away. And then O is Offer. Now what you can do is you can offer your services to help them get the clarity that they need so they can stop wasting their time and finally get the result that they want. So what I do with them is we try to get momentum. So the first thing is we help them create a name, description, outcome. Then I walk them through the four-step pass-through process. Problem, annotate, solution, offer. Now I got a business. Now I know what I'm selling. And then what we do next is then we

Paul Povolni (38:39.993)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (38:51.173)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (38:55.339)
the price, like what do you want to charge for that particular thing. We don't ever let you charge based upon the amount of time you're going to spend, we let you charge based upon the result that it's going to make for your people. When I'm done with that, typically in about 25 or 30 minutes, I have an entire business already outlined for them and their job is to go live tonight.

Paul Povolni (39:06.843)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (39:14.37)
Wow.

Chad Thibodeaux (39:15.345)
Not live tomorrow, not live next week, your job is to go live tonight. Because you already know the problem, you already know what they're trying to do to solve it that's not working, you already know the solution that they need in order to make it happen, now all we have to do is make an offer. Okay, now let me ask you a question. If I was to get somebody on a call with you, if I was to get someone on a call with you and you had 30 minutes, could you convince them that they should buy your program because they need clarity? Okay, so then the only thing that you're missing in your business is people getting on calls with you and that's the easiest solution.

Okay, you're gonna create a piece of content, okay, around one of those three agitations, around the problem and agitation, create a piece of content for it. You're gonna go out there and you're gonna share the content in anyone who engages. So anyone who DMs you or anyone who puts a comment or anyone who likes you, you're gonna reach out to them and create a conversation with them and help them.

Okay, and as you help them, you're gonna look for an opportunity to invite them to get on a call with you and say, I'd love to give you some complimentary advice. Would you jump on a call and we talk and get on the call, talk to them. And if it's the right fit, you invite them to be part of your coaching program. You can start today. And that's normally what I normally what I do with people. And that gives them the clarity that they need. And I tell them, you don't need to know anything else. Now notice, we didn't build a funnel.

Paul Povolni (40:20.45)
Yeah, that's awesome.

Chad Thibodeaux (40:32.657)
Notice we didn't do a webinar. Notice we didn't do Facebook ads. Notice we didn't write this fancy elaborate copy. We didn't do any of that, because we didn't have to do that. And that's part of launching businesses that you need to learn is 95% of the stuff that you read and buy out there, you don't have to do in order to launch. All you need is an idea, know what problem it solves, know how to solve it, and go. That's it.

Paul Povolni (41:01.23)
Yeah. Wow. That's some good head smacks right there. That's some good, good counsel right there.

Chad Thibodeaux (41:02.549)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (41:10.333)
We don't get bald like this, Paul, for no reason.

Paul Povolni (41:14.087)
Well, and I think, I think people do, they, they fail in overthinking. They fail in, um, in, in not taking those small victories, those small, small steps. Like you were saying is sometimes it's just find some small things to do and get done and move to the next thing. And they, they try and look at everything all at once and that can be paralyzing, uh, that can stop them. Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (41:38.077)
Well, can I correct your vocabulary just for a moment without insulting you? Um, what you just said is actually the problem. They, they categorize things as small things and big things. So they, they think that small things is easy to do and big things are hard to do. And just the opposite is true. It's the big things that are easy because they need the less clarity. It's always the small things that take a business down, never the big things that take a business down. So it's the small things that we ignore and overlook that ultimately take us down.

Paul Povolni (41:42.402)
No, no, go for it.

Paul Povolni (42:02.793)
Okay, good.

Chad Thibodeaux (42:08.785)
Okay, and so what I try to encourage people to do is just outline the three big things that you have to do that you can get done tonight. Because the big things are always easy. Okay, it's the little micro things that take time that ultimately will take you down if you don't fix them eventually. But so sometimes what we do is we have a fear of like, oh my God, I've gotta go do this big thing. And really that big thing is the easiest thing you can do.

Paul Povolni (42:19.272)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (42:37.19)
So what are some of those small things that people get stuck on?

Chad Thibodeaux (42:41.91)
Right, so like having a follow-up sequence. Right, so understanding that if 80% of your people, like if you close one out of five calls, that means 80% of the people are gonna tell you no.

Okay, but they're not saying no, they're saying not right now. And if you don't have follow up sequences in place and you don't have an entire follow up process in place, then what you're going to do is you're going to have to start from ground zero every single day. So what we learned is put it just simply putting some thought behind a follow up process makes things really easy. And what I do is I actually teach my clients how to use AI to do all of that.

Paul Povolni (43:18.792)
Wow.

Chad Thibodeaux (43:19.145)
And we use chat GPT to create all of our follow-up sequences, all of our onboarding sequences. I show them exactly how to make it think, act, write, behave just as if it were them. And so it can create all of that. And what it knows is it knows the psychology behind follow-up way better than I know the psychology behind follow-up. So I ask it those questions and it creates an entire psychologically driven follow-up process for me and my prospects. Okay, so when they say no, we understand it's not right now and we just follow up and help them. And then every once in a while,

into your thing. So one of the things I would say is follow. Another small thing is simple things like not showing up as an expert.

When you show up online, whether it be post or whatever, you need to show up as an authority and as an expert. And one of the things Paul, that so many people do is they'll show up as an authority as of an expert one day and they'll put all kinds of things that distract you the next seven days. Hit this thing politically or this thing controversially or whatever, and it confuses the heck out of your people. And so just stay focused on what you want to become known for. So a little thing is, is if I looked at your social media, I need to know what you want to become known for and nothing else.

Paul Povolni (44:17.329)
Hmm.

Paul Povolni (44:31.739)
Yeah, yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (44:32.613)
Okay, then let me come up with just one more for you, which is sort of simple. And that is not having a way for people to enter your hemisphere.

So if I want to work with you, okay, if I want to work with you, it shouldn't be hard. What does James, brother of Jesus tell people, right? You know, he goes, our job as a church is if it shouldn't, we should not make it difficult for those who want to come to Jesus, right? In the business world, the same is exact true. We should not make it difficult for people to want to work with us. And so you need to have a front end system in place, a nice simple one where you can put something in people's hands. So I teach people how to do that on their social media.

Paul Povolni (44:58.526)
Right.

Chad Thibodeaux (45:13.591)
and disabled right now because I've got to not compete with a client that I'm working with. But you want people to be able to get into your hemisphere easily. So having something right on your social media, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, where they can click a button, download something of free help, get them into your hemisphere easily, that's the, I would say, the biggest small mistake that people make.

Paul Povolni (45:36.526)
Yeah. And so, so those are the smaller things that are important. What about the big things that you said are easier? What are some big things that somebody could, could start working on, um, from the get-go that are valuable as well.

Chad Thibodeaux (45:50.981)
Number one, identifying the problem yourself. Number two, figuring out what it is your prospects have tried. Number three, ask myself, do I have a skill set or superpower to solve that problem? And number four, can I make an offer to open up for business today? That's it. You don't need all those little things. You'll need them eventually, but you don't need them to start. Because here's what happens. When you go work on the small things first, those little things that we just mentioned.

Paul Povolni (46:06.578)
Boom. That's awesome.

Paul Povolni (46:11.834)
Right, right. Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (46:19.909)
By the time you get those done, the business you want to start is probably irrelevant. Or second, worst, there may not be a market for it. So you may have spent all this time, energy, effort, money creating something that nobody wants to buy. So we spend a lot of time teaching people how to create prototypes. Have you ever been to a car show?

Paul Povolni (46:25.638)
Hmm.

Paul Povolni (46:33.864)
Wow.

Paul Povolni (46:39.902)
Um, I've been to a gun show. I think I've been to a car show. Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (46:43.861)
Well, you should go to a car show. One of the cool things that car shows have is these automakers will bring out the car of tomorrow and they'll have it on display. Now, and it looks so cool, but it doesn't run. There's not an engine in it. There's no interior. There's nothing to make you go ooh and ah. It's just, it's a prototype, right? It's a resemblance of what the real thing could look like. And so we teach people how to launch businesses and prototype.

Paul Povolni (46:51.51)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (47:00.343)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (47:03.943)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (47:11.857)
Right? And so just, just launch the idea of your business, get people to pay for it from that idea of the business. Now you have money to go do everything you want to do with it. And, um, and so that's something that we, that we, we teach that if you can get right and, you know, and I think that you can, then some really cool things, really cool things would come, come out of it.

Paul Povolni (47:12.414)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (47:19.421)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (47:30.606)
Right. Yeah. Test and see if the market actually cares about what you're offering and do it as scrappy and as raw as you need to, uh, to give them a good taste of it.

Chad Thibodeaux (47:40.689)
Well, problem at taste solve offer. You don't need anything for it. You need a, you need a, that's not true, here's what you need. If you want to launch a business in prototype mode, you have to have Instagram or Facebook. There's the balloon. See it's like. You have to have Instagram or Facebook. Okay, so I like Facebook because I'm an old man. So what you have to do is if you have a Facebook account, you have the ability to tap into an audience and to create marketing.

Paul Povolni (47:51.846)
Yeah. This balloon's flying.

Chad Thibodeaux (48:08.149)
Okay, you have direct message on there where you can communicate with people directly. You can even take money on Facebook. You can send them a bill right on Facebook and they can pay it right on their Facebook messenger. Okay, and then you have guides in the Facebook group so you even have a membership site. So you don't need funnels, you don't need software, you don't need anything. All you need is Facebook, you can get started today. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (48:23.858)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (48:28.578)
Yeah. And do you think people get so easily distracted with the tools and the, and the tech stacks and the, the options and the, the funnels and the, you know, all of the, the email sequences that it paralyzes them. And so, so how do you, how do you, how do you smack people upside their head and say, get over that?

Chad Thibodeaux (48:49.037)
Yeah. So there is a scripture that says redeeming the time because the days are evil, right? You remember that scripture? Even in my secular world, I bring that up. And when you break that down, and you look at the heart of what the author was saying, he was saying buy back your time because everything in your way is designed to waste it.

Paul Povolni (48:58.514)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Povolni (49:14.974)
Well.

Chad Thibodeaux (49:15.413)
Okay, so he was saying do things to buy back your time, because everything that you are looking at is designed to waste your time. So when you look at reel, like how many hours a day do we spend doing this, like these muscles in my arm are built really well, because all we do is we scroll, okay, or we see a webinar. And we're like, whoo, let me go watch that. Are we hearing good idea or new ideas? So we go chase that particular rabbit. And rabbits are never caught, they're only chased.

Paul Povolni (49:30.17)
Right Ha ha ha.

Paul Povolni (49:45.682)
Hmm, well, yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (49:46.809)
Okay, and so we spend all of our time chasing the new idea that if we would just simply take that time and go all in on what we're doing and stay laser focused and put the blinders on, we redeem our time because we realize that everything that we see out there is designed to waste it. And there's no such thing as a good idea and there's no such thing as a bad idea. It's only a good idea if you take it, use it, implement it to its fullest, and it's only a bad idea if you start and don't finish. Okay, and that's what most of us do.

Paul Povolni (50:03.39)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (50:15.176)
Right.

Chad Thibodeaux (50:16.663)
What I try to do to help people realize that they don't need all that is we try to put things in buckets, okay? So bucket one is the launch bucket where you don't need anything but you.

in that launch bucket, you don't need any tools, you don't need any software, you just need you. Bucket two is the second phase that you know, if you're looking at a life cycle, okay, bucket two is just puberty. Okay. So there are certain things that you need to be able to allow your business to grow. Okay. And then so we just identify what are those things that we that we need. So for instance, like I've got an 11 year old son getting

Paul Povolni (50:31.112)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (50:59.991)
process in the in the real world. So what I realize is I'm not gonna buy him a hundred dollar pair of shoes because what's gonna happen to those shoes next week? They're probably gonna fit. I'm not gonna buy him expensive pants or expensive clothes okay and I'm gonna have a lot of food around the house because he's gonna eat he's gonna eat a ton okay but at 11 years old I'm probably not gonna teach him how to invest in the stock market.

Paul Povolni (51:08.274)
They probably won't fit. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (51:20.261)
Mm-hmm.

Chad Thibodeaux (51:25.973)
because he's not there yet. Does he need it? Yes, but he's not there yet. So what I'm gonna do is the pubescent phase is identify the exact needs of your business and fill those and remove anything else that doesn't fill those. So for instance, so when I'm brand new in the business and I'm making five grand a month in my business, okay, it would be really, really silly for me to go buy an expensive staff member to put in my business because my business isn't there yet.

Paul Povolni (51:53.565)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (51:54.453)
Okay, so I put that in a different bucket. So I just identify what are three things that, and the only three things that I have to do in my business right now, and here they are. Number one is traffic, okay? I need to figure out what am I going to do with traffic, and I'm probably not big enough to do paid traffic yet, so I'm gonna take an organic paid strategy on that, or I may put a little bit of money into Boosted Post. Okay, so I'm gonna have to figure out traffic. Second thing I'm gonna have to do is sales.

Paul Povolni (52:15.09)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (52:19.205)
Okay, so I'm going to perfect my sales process that when I get on the call with someone I know exactly how to sell and the third bucket is fulfillment. I want to make sure that my product is fulfilling on all cylinders. So in that second bucket, I just focus on those three things. Okay, traffic, sales, fulfillment. Then once I get to about the 10K per month mark, okay, now I'm a real business owner. I just broke the six figure mark. I'm on my way to break the six mark. Then we move to bucket number three, which is what we call...

what we call a, I'm sorry, which is what we call scaling. Okay, so bucket number three now, if I got bucket number two working, so now bucket number three is looking now I'm gonna scale. Now what do I mean by scale? So all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back to bucket number two, which was traffic, sales and fulfillment, and I'm gonna ask myself what can I do to make those three buckets bigger? So I'm gonna go to traffic, okay? Now instead of just doing organic traffic, now I may go to paid traffic. So now I have two sources of traffic coming in.

Paul Povolni (52:52.243)
Mm-hmm.

Paul Povolni (53:16.509)
Right.

Chad Thibodeaux (53:19.019)
Okay, so now I may instead of, I may now hire somebody to work with all my leads, to get them booked on my call. So now I have more sales calls done. So that's how I'm gonna make my bucket bigger and then fulfill instead of me doing all the fulfillment, I may go find someone that can do the fulfillment so I can spend all my time on sales calls.

Paul Povolni (53:43.59)
Now, do those need to scale evenly?

Chad Thibodeaux (53:47.861)
What do you mean by even life?

Paul Povolni (53:49.074)
Well, for example, if you put more attention into traffic and you get all this work or you get all these leads, the fulfillment, if you're not ready for that, you're not going to be able to fulfill. And so you probably need to scale those accordingly. Cause if you open up your bucket, you know, open up your leads and you're getting all this flow of customers, but you're not, not ready to fulfill, then you're going to lose those customers. Are they going to have a terrible experience?

Chad Thibodeaux (54:17.937)
Right, so that's where, I wouldn't look at scale there, I would look at cost. So what I would do is I would just raise my rates so I can handle less clients but yet make more money. Right, so that way the fulfillment bucket doesn't get out of bounds. So because like, you know, let's say that you're trying to make 10,000 bucks a month in your business and you have a $2,000 product. You have to ask yourself, can I handle five clients?

No, I can only handle three. Okay, well you're trying to make 10K and you can only handle three clients, what does my pricing need to be? Well now I need to raise my price to 3,500. Okay, so now I can fulfill and make the amount of money that I want and I'm not out of bounds. Okay, so I would do that based upon pricing, not based upon scaling. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (54:51.911)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (54:57.788)
Yeah, that's good.

Paul Povolni (55:01.57)
Yeah, that's good. And so that was bucket three.

Chad Thibodeaux (55:04.869)
Yes, I have a bucket and there's more buckets as you go. So bucket four, okay. So now this is the authority bucket, right? So you've got the launch bucket, you got the pubescent bucket, you got the scalability bucket, and the fourth one is authority bucket. Now, once we get here, I've broken about 10, 20 grand a month in my business. I know that my stuff works, I'm beginning to get my systems in line. Now what I have to do is I have to change my job description.

My job description shifts now. So now I go from working in my business to working on my business, okay? So I move the way that I show up in this world. Now I do things like this. Now I'm taking my intellectual property and I'm getting it out to the world. Getting it out through ongoing conversations on social media, getting it out through podcasts, maybe getting it out through events. Maybe I write a small book or whatever. I'm doing things to build my authority because there's only two things in this bucket

I'm on one is leads everything I do is designed to attract leads into my business and leadership develop leadership development I need to be working on and building up my team. So at that particular bucket at the authority bucket This is when you step out of fulfillment you step out of except for the high ticket You step out of fulfillment you step out of sales you step out of the conversations and you work on all building your authority So just the prep your presence generates leads. I remember when I was really good with this You know when my business was firing on cylinders

Paul Povolni (56:16.091)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (56:26.628)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (56:34.074)
and smoking hot, I would go and I would do a Facebook post that says, hey guys, I have an event coming up three weeks from Friday. We'd love to have you. Tickets would be two grand and I would sell out just with one Facebook post. Because as an authority, people wanted to work with me.

Paul Povolni (56:46.931)
BAM!

Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (56:50.393)
They knew that I had done this enough times with enough people that if they could just get in my presence and get my time and attention, that they would be really successful. That's when you get to that fourth bucket, that authority bucket, you've done the work to build your intellectual property, to build your presence, and to build your platform to the point where now people just want to work with you, just to work with you. That fifth bucket is what we call enterprise. Enterprise bucket is now, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this because the majority of your audience isn't going to be there, but the enterprise bucket you think of someone like a Tony Robbins.

Paul Povolni (57:10.835)
Hmm.

Chad Thibodeaux (57:20.687)
or whatever, and this is where you're gonna shift it from you to your brand. Okay, so at the authority bucket it's all about you. You are the brand. The enterprise, now your product is the brand. So think of Russell Brunson, right? Everybody loves Russell Brunson, but what's Russell Brunson known for? Honey Funnels, right? And so he gets to the enterprise level where now he has a brand that's a product brand that's bigger than the personal brand.

Paul Povolni (57:24.858)
Hmm.

Paul Povolni (57:29.296)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (57:36.317)
Right.

Click Funnels. Yeah.

Paul Povolni (57:47.208)
Hmm

Chad Thibodeaux (57:48.305)
Okay, and that's at that fifth bucket. There's all sorts of things that we do to teach you there. But I tell people to just focus on bucket one, two, and three. And if you focus on bucket one, two, and three, you're gonna be at 25, 30K a month. And most entrepreneurs, if they don't have a large team and they're putting 300K in their pocket every year, they're pretty happy.

Paul Povolni (57:51.995)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Paul Povolni (58:04.194)
Yeah. And I think, uh, bucket four, um, you had talked about, you know, the, the single post that you would do and you'd get, you know, you'd sell out. Um, I've seen people try to do that too early. I've seen them, you know, do a social media post and they have very little engagement, very little, uh, responses to it. And, uh, you know, they're probably affected by it saying, well, it's a failure of an idea, you know, it's, uh, you know, it's, it's not relevant.

Chad Thibodeaux (58:30.917)
Yeah, no. Yeah. Right. So you can't know whether the idea is effective or not unless you've had engagement. So lack of engagement is not proof that the idea doesn't work. It's actually what it is. It's proof that you have no idea how to use social media. So there's a little trick that we use to get engagement. So you'll see this in mind the other time. Did you see my post the other day where I put the thing about glasses?

Paul Povolni (58:39.197)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (58:42.941)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (58:46.941)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (58:55.258)
Yes, I did. Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (58:56.549)
Okay, I've gotten a ton of engagement on that. Why did I do that? Do I care if people pick my glasses or not?

Paul Povolni (59:02.738)
Probably not. Ha ha ha.

Chad Thibodeaux (59:03.877)
Absolutely not, no, but I'm getting ready to tell people about an AI event that I'm hosting here in Phoenix and I need lots of engagement to be on my Facebook post when I put that post because my next post after engagement post gets a lot of views, okay?

Paul Povolni (59:16.286)
That's a good tip right there.

Chad Thibodeaux (59:17.989)
Yeah, so what I do is I try to figure out what are things that are going to engage people. So I'll put kids and me and Hawaii, me and my little kids, me and my mother, those get all kinds of engagement, right? When I put a really philosophical thing out there, like gets crickets, right? The reason is, is because it's social media. So social things get engagement, the other things do not. So what I'll do is I'll take an engagement post and then put what I want them to see very next. But I'm.

Paul Povolni (59:28.795)
Yeah.

Paul Povolni (59:32.66)
Right.

Paul Povolni (59:38.471)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (59:43.541)
clever with my post. So I'll do two different types of posts. One is called a who post. Okay. Something like this, like, hold on a second. So, so if let's say I'm going to be talking about this AI event that I got coming up, I could do a who post, it just simply says who followed by a sentence, and it's designed to get people to raise their hand. So like, for instance, if I want to get lots of engagement on my post, and I didn't care what it's about, I would say, who thinks Donald Trump is the greatest president in the history of the world?

Okay. And then you're going to, it's going to get engaged. Right. So the haters are going to say he's awful and his lovers who's always the greatest thing in the world. Right. If I wanted to create a who post that says, you know, that, that divides my camp, I can say, okay, who are you voting for Donald Trump or Joe Biden? Okay. Once he has designed that. So if you take that theory that, you know, that's going to get engaged, when it's going to create posts, you could say something like this, like, um, who do I know that has, uh, who do I know that has, uh, an online marketing business?

Paul Povolni (01:00:12.595)
That'll get you some engagement for sure, yeah. Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (01:00:42.233)
And what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to figure out who I need to speak to and who I need to target with, right? Because I want them to come to my AI event. I didn't say, who do I know that wants to use AI to do XYZ? And I didn't say, I was gonna ask who is my audience, right? So I could say something like, who do I know is a business coach?

Paul Povolni (01:00:52.379)
Yeah, yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (01:01:02.021)
Who do I know that has a podcast? Who do I know that whatever? And I ask a who followed by an audience and my audience raises their hands. So now what I can do is I can go back and I can talk with every single one of those people that said yes and I know that they're my hot audience. So I don't need a ton of engagement if I have my audience raising their hand. So I'll do a who post. The second type of post that I'll do is what we call a five guys post, okay? Hey, I'm looking for five online business coaches.

Paul Povolni (01:01:16.938)
That's brilliant.

Paul Povolni (01:01:21.629)
Yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (01:01:32.157)
who want to learn the same webinar process that I taught Tony Robbins where he did a million dollars in eight minutes. Yeah, that's a five guys project, okay? So there's the four, the freight, and I didn't come up with this, but the idea is, so I'm looking for five people who want this desire in this amount of time, and then you can tell them to call to action. Comment this word, or let me know who you are, or send me a DM, or whatever, right?

Paul Povolni (01:01:41.043)
Mm. Wow, that's good. Yeah, yeah.

Chad Thibodeaux (01:01:58.585)
And then once again, that qualifies your people. So I always start with a who post designed to get lots of, well, I first start with a personal post designed to get a lot of engagement. Thought I'm gonna go to a who post so I can identify my audience. And then I'll do a five guys post that takes that audience and breaks it down to five people. And then I can just reach out to them, engage them, get them on the phone, sell them into my program.

Paul Povolni (01:02:18.542)
Man, so good. I mean, so good. This is definitely a gifting that you have on you Chad I mean, you, you have just provided so much, uh, rich, uh, content, uh, practical tips, not even just up in the air. Whatever. I mean, these are just really practical tips that if somebody just executed on the 10 things that you shared today.

Chad Thibodeaux (01:02:21.637)
Yes.

Paul Povolni (01:02:42.526)
if not more, that they would actually see a lot of clarity in their business. They'd have some head smack moments that'll reset them. And that's what, for me, head smacks are about that. It's that one idea that can change everything. Sometimes it's just that one idea that could literally change your life if you execute it on it. And so, I think if people would just re-listen to this multiple times, take some notes and execute on

one of the ideas, two of the ideas, three of the ideas, the ones that they can do right now, an easy lift, that they would truly change the trajectory of their life. They would really change the direction of their business because that's what it takes. It takes listening to an idea and then executing on it. And something I'd shared recently was, a imperfect execution is better than a perfect plan. And so...

I think what you've shared is not only great plans and a great system and great process, but even just great ideas of things that they can move on pretty quickly. And I appreciate you doing that too.

Chad Thibodeaux (01:03:51.289)
Yeah, absolutely man. Well, appreciate the invite to come on and helping you and your guests. I've loved watching your journey and everything that you're about and everything that you do and you're quite the brilliant man. So I'm honored to be on here.

Paul Povolni (01:04:05.778)
Well, thanks man. And I'm sure we could, we could go on for another couple of hours. I've watched your videos. You're just full of wisdom and insight, not only from just experience, but I think it's, it's a gift. I think it's a gift that you have, where you're able to take this and, and formulate it into very actionable things. And so how do people get ahold of you? Like if they want to engage and listen to more or, or listen to, you know, be a part of your world, what are some ways they can do that?

Chad Thibodeaux (01:04:12.681)
Thank you.

Chad Thibodeaux (01:04:32.489)
Yeah, obviously just connect with me on social media. Instagram is my worst platform, so go over to Facebook. You can just look me up, Chad Thibodeaux on Facebook. I should be one of the first ones that pops up on that.

And then I've also got a little gift that I can give you guys if you're trying to start an online business. I just, you know, a lot of people want to know like, you know, what niche should I go with? Who should I target? So I just put together a little guide called the top 100 in-demand coaching niches and how to quickly start a successful coaching business. You can click on that. You're just going to go to launchit.online and you can click on that. It's going to give you a little PDF download and then I put together a training that you

on that basically tells you exactly how to pick a niche and how to jump in and get your business up and running today because that's what it's about is don't wait, get it up today. Also, if you guys would like to learn a little bit about the AI world, I have an online course that I typically charge a lot of money for but I will give you guys a complimentary access to the site. It's basically how to take ChatGPT and train it to think, act, write, behave, and coach just as if it's you.

and it'll save you a ton of time if you do this. And so all you have to do is go to teachaitome.com and that's teachaitome.com and we'll put it down in the show notes and just go fill it out. And when you get to the part where it asks you for your credit card, just simply put the code HEADSMACK and the number 24, all caps, HEADSMACK and the number 24, put that in there and it will give you complimentary access to the program.

Paul Povolni (01:06:11.942)
Well, man, thank you so much that it is extremely generous. And I do encourage you, if you'll listen to this, uh, to jump on this immediately, um, do it, execute on it and, and like, stop everything else for a moment as well, cause I think we could also get into this place of ever learning and never executing. And so I think if, if you implemented simply what Chad shared today, um, and just took a break from all the other things, I think you're going to have a solid foundation for growing your coaching business.

And really applies to any kind of business you might be doing. I think, I think what Chad has shared is a wisdom level that it crosses over, you know, industries and niches as well. And so thank you very much, Chad. You have an amazing day and guys don't forget to execute on those ideas. Cause ideas are everything and nothing at the same time.

Paul Povolni (01:07:02.502)
All right. Thank you, man. That was really good. Wow. I mean, just so, no, it was, it was so good. I think there's just a lot of value in there. And it's, it's exactly what this is all about. What HeadSmack is all about is just, you know, if people would just listen to it and just take those ideas and execute on them, they really would change their life. And so this, this is exactly what it's been all about. And, and just the, the

Chad Thibodeaux (01:07:04.329)
Good stuff, man. Yeah. I hope I didn't ramble too much for you.

Paul Povolni (01:07:30.53)
super value you provided is just phenomenal.

Chad Thibodeaux (01:07:33.701)
Thank you. I hope the video all worked out. I know you got a couple edit points in there, but

Paul Povolni (01:07:39.498)
Yeah, I'll see how it's doing because there were a couple of times you were pixelated, but from what I've, I did another episode with somebody else and the entire time they look like, you know, Minecraft, you know, just they were terribly pixelated. And then when I saw the video in the final upload, the quality was a lot better. And so hopefully