Without Vision, You’ll Perish. Without Persistence, You’ll Quit w/Alex Thoric

In this conversation, Alex Thoric shares insights on the importance of vision and persistence in entrepreneurship, drawing parallels between his experiences as an athlete and a marketer. He discusses the challenges of staying focused in a noisy digital landscape, the evolving role of marketing funnels, and the transition from providing services to focusing on education. Alex emphasizes the significance of setting clear goals and investing in oneself, while also offering practical advice for aspiring podcasters.

Takeaways

• Vision is crucial for success in any endeavor.
• Persistence is key, like a river cutting through rock.
• Staying focused is increasingly challenging in today's world.
• Digital marketing requires understanding and utilizing the right tools.
• Funnels are evolving; direct conversations can be more effective.
• Transitioning from service-based to educational models can be challenging.
• Investing in personal development yields the best returns.
• Setting short-term and long-term goals is essential.
• Breaking down yearly goals into quarterly objectives enhances focus.
• Utilizing AI tools can provide valuable insights and guidance.

Connect with Alex: Website | Building Income on Demand podcast | LinkedIn

Bio: Alex Thoric founded a results-driven marketing agency and is a co-founder of Building Income on Demand. A seasoned digital marketer, he has boosted growth for spas, gyms, coaches, consultants, real-estate pros, and restaurants by building automated marketing systems and content “machines” that let owners hustle less and earn more. Outside the office, Alex is a devoted sports fan and a 2nd-degree black belt who has practiced Taekwondo for 15 years—including running his own school.

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Chapters

• 0:00 The Importance of Vision and Persistence
• 2:07 From Athlete to Entrepreneur: The Journey
• 6:22 Navigating the Digital Marketing Landscape
• 9:07 The Evolving Role of Funnels in Marketing
• 14:20 Transitioning from Services to Education

Transcript

J. Rosemarie Francis (00:00.047)
Without a vision, the people perish. That's taken from the Bible, Proverbs 29, 18, and was quoted by today's guest, Alex Thoric, who founded a result-driven marketing agency and is the co-founder of Building Income On Demand. Alex is a seasoned digital marketer working with businesses to build automated marketing systems and content machines. Now,

It's okay to have a vision. Actually, it's important to have a vision, but it's also extremely important to keep going, to not give up, to be persistent. A river doesn't run through a rock because it's strong, because it's powerful. It gets through the rock. It succeeds through that hard place because it's persistent. That's another quote given by Alex today. And so,

I'm encouraging you today podcasters, if you have a vision to spread your message via a podcast or if you are thinking or if you've started and it seems difficult because it seems everybody is doing it except you. Everybody's saying they're doing this except you. Don't give up. Keep going. Keep working on it day after day because the river doesn't give up.

The river doesn't have an option to give up because it has to keep flowing. And if that rock is in its way, the river is gonna find a way through that rock, through consistency, and but more importantly, through persistence. Keep going. And if you need some help starting your podcast or working through challenges, download my free guide, Start Your Podcast Now. The link is below.

reach out to me book a 30-minute quick call so we could talk about what's bugging you

J. Rosemarie Francis (02:07.884)
My guest today is Alex Thoric. Welcome, Alex. Thanks for having me on. Sure. Before we get into what you do, could you tell us who is Alex? Sure. Who's Alex? Good question. I'm a marketer. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a huge fan of different types of sports. I'm athlete. I've been practicing sports my entire life, different types of sports, and it kind of became part of my life.

And started my entrepreneurial journey seven years ago when I got into marketing, specifically digital marketing, working with local businesses and yeah, helping them grow their businesses using social media. Okay. All right. Thank you. And so you were an athlete before you were an entrepreneur. How has your experience as an athlete?

help you to become a better entrepreneur? Definitely helped me a lot with being consistent and making sure that I'm doing what I said that I'm going to do because that's one of the most important things being an athlete, whether you're preparing for a competition or as you're working out, you do need to work out. There is no other way for you to win during the competition than if you put in the work. So it's pretty much the same thing.

its consistency and putting in the work. And that's what really matters at the end of the day, especially in today's world of social media and people not having hard times to stay focused. And I still bottle with it myself, I would say on a daily basis, like even in my case, I have this wallpaper on my phone when I unlock my phone. So I have it as focused.

Yeah, I basically created a reminder for myself to stay focused on what I'm doing currently. Okay. Yeah. It's very important to stay focused. And yes, you're right in this day and age and for an entrepreneur, it's, it's very difficult to focus naturally. Oh, yeah. So what do you think about that today though? It's, uh, it's way harder and it's.

J. Rosemarie Francis (04:30.777)
It's important. the way I look at it is you need to know your end goal. You need to have the vision because without vision, people perish. And it's extremely important for you to know the vision and then know what actions you will be doing on a day to day basis and try to eliminate all the noise, even though sometimes might seem hard. Again, one of the things that I'm personally doing

I would say, so I downloaded this app called, I think it's called Productivity. And it's basically a timer that, sorry, like it looks like this. It's a timer and I can choose different tasks. For example, it could be content creation, personal development, what else is there? workouts, stuff like that. And whenever I start working on something, I turn on the timer, put the phone in front of me.

and I make sure that I turn off all the notifications. So that way I'm able to stay focused and I know that I'm working specifically on this current task. So it's important not only to stay focused, but also to be intentional about the things you do and block off time. Yep. Right. Yeah. 100%. Okay.

Okay. All right. I understand. You could be focused on the wrong thing too. True. True. I was interviewed a guest the other day and he was talking about how difficult it was to focus on what he was doing because he was in his happy place when he was creating. And I can totally relate to that, especially with so many interesting and innovative tools available to us.

as entrepreneur and especially as digital marketers. Yeah. you tell us about your work and how you help people? Sure. So in my case, I used to run a marketing agency working with service businesses. would say 90 % of clients would be service businesses and we would pretty much help them build out client acquisition systems. So the generation through funnels and ads and email marketing on the backend.

J. Rosemarie Francis (06:51.857)
with the goal to convert those people into customers and nurture them in the process as well. Because as you said, there are so many different tools out there in today's world. And for a business owner to know which tool they should use and what works and how, that feels overwhelming. I mean, even for me as a marketer, and now for us as we run the marketing consultancy company, there is a new tool each and every day.

especially these days with AI. And even for us sometimes, like my business partner would send me, he would see something on Instagram. There's a new tool, for example. And he sends it to me in the DMs. And I look at those tools, I save them, but at the same time it's like, how many are there? And how many of them will really, will be here for a while? So in our case, we try to focus on the main tools kind of that, that, that will a hundred percent be here or

more that are more likely to be here and tools that help us with all the fundamentals. I want to say fundamentals and referring to marketing, sales, as well as business fundamentals. So having like we can start with having a CRM. We had so many clients or let's say when we would start working with a client or even have a conversation with a potential prospect. One of the questions that I would ask them, what kind of type of CRM do you use or which CRM?

And a lot of times they would tell me, well, I use Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. Sometimes they tell me what's the CRM. And those people are, they've been in business for five or 10 years. Yeah. So it's not their first year. Yeah. So making sure that people have the right CRM. They have an email marketing platform to stay in touch with their either potential customers or even with the current as well as the previous customers, the past customers.

a platform that could help them book calls. So again, it could be an outside platform or it could be all in one. A place where they could build funnels, landing pages. Again, to create this, to build out this entire marketing machine.

J. Rosemarie Francis (09:07.334)
Okay. All right. Thanks. You mentioned funnels. I wanted to have you touch on that because I read something this morning. I don't believe it, but I read it and I thought it was interesting that the person said you should stop using funnels. They're done. They're over with. What is your thought on

Is there context to that post that you read or the article that you read? So the gentleman was saying, and I mean, it's someone I respect and he's used funnels in the past, but it seems like he was trying to say that there were better ways. So I would agree with you and with him on that in a way, in one way, I would agree with him.

because these days people already, most people, they went through a funnel one way or another. say they would see an ad that filled out the form. Like people know that the entire sequence of events, what happens after that. Excuse me. And then they get all the emails, maybe even retargeting ads. Well, you know how it all works. So that's why he might, it might seem that people are tired of

going through this process or they know what to expect. That's why he's saying it's not working. I wouldn't say it's not working. I mean, we're using it and it works well. People are coming in. If we will start talking about the cost per lead going up, yes, that's a real thing because again, the market is tired or it's not that they're tired. The market is saturated and majority of people already know the entire process.

What some companies what some businesses are using these days are chatbots directly through Messenger so whether it's through Facebook or Instagram DM so it could be a DM ad Because that way you don't necessarily need to send the person through the entire funnel and Kind of lose them at each and every step because the conversion will drop So I'll say if somebody sees the ad or the post they come to the landing page to download an ebook

J. Rosemarie Francis (11:29.332)
You might have I don't know. Let's say 20 % conversion rate then on the next step if it's a sales funnel Yes, you might have some upsells, but then your conversions rate also might drop Or let's say if it's more of a VSL type of funnel our video sales letter Where people fill out the form to watch a short video that explains everything about your product or the service and then the goal is to book an appointment with you

So in that case, the conversions also drop. So in order for you to get like based on numbers that we were looking at, in order for you to get a client these days through a VSL, depends on the price point, of course, of the product or the service itself, but it's at about 500 to $1,000. So you need to invest about $1,000 into ads in order to get a customer on the backend.

So instead of going through this entire process, what companies are doing these days, they send people into DMs and then they just have a real conversation. Some people use automations. In our case, we decided, even though we do build automations and everything, we decided to kind of go back to start using a bit of, I guess, old school or be more human. And when somebody would send us a message, we would go in and start a conversation with them.

inside of Instagram DM ads, sorry, instead of Instagram DMs. So that way people can see, like even if somebody sends you a message and you don't reply right away, they can see it's a real person. Like they understand that you're not going to sit there and reply right away to each other message. Unless you have someone like an sales development rep who is doing it on their behalf.

Okay. All right. But that way, yeah, you can basically, get more conversions because it becomes more genuine compared to, say, sending people through the entire funnel. Right. Yeah. Okay. I appreciate you and I appreciate you breaking it down, but it highlights something I believe in not taking and taking all the advice you get online with a grain of salt, right? Because it depends. always depends. Right.

J. Rosemarie Francis (13:53.247)
Okay. So what have you been, you've transitioned from being an athlete to being an entrepreneur and now teaching people systems and ways to get their business to be more successful. What has been your biggest struggle in transitioning and also maintaining your focus in what you do? For me personally or for us as a company,

I think the biggest struggle is to move away from the services in a way and focus mostly on the educational part because people know that we are coming from the service, basically service and companies and helping them with marketing. And when we talk to them, they ask us, well, is that something that you could do for us as a service? And in the beginning we would, we would say no, sorry, we can't. That's not something that we're currently doing.

since our main focus again is trying to refocus and stay the course. Sometimes we do take on certain clients where we would provide it as a service, but we still try to stick to our main focus, which is the educational, which is the consulting part. OK. And we are doing that, again, based on the vision that we have. So in our case, our goal is to have a herd of mind valley.

Bandy chains. So our goal is to create something similar to what they were able to build. But in their case, they again, you know, you know what they're doing. They focus mostly on mindfulness, spirituality. I mean, they are starting to, they're doing some of the branding courses right now and certain social media things. But in our case, what we wanted to do, because when we started,

building our first business, we were buying courses here and there, trying to put it all together, which was fine because we wanted to be good at marketing and sales. But then there are also all these other things like branding, the positioning, right? How do you position yourself? Finances, accounting, how do you make sure that you pay taxes or maybe you don't necessarily overpay in taxes? How do you know your finances?

J. Rosemarie Francis (16:18.005)
So whether it's the company finance, but also your personal, how much should you put aside for the investments or how should you reinvest back into business, back into ads, or it's better to reinvest and let's say, get a coaching program. So grow personally, because what we've noticed, what we've realized, the best investment that you can make is in yourself and it will pay off.

5, 10, 50 or even 100 times more than any stock market would.

Okay, all right. Thank you. Okay, so what is Alex grateful for today?

On real for today, honestly, my health, my health and family. I believe that's the most important thing because if I mean, I have two hands, two legs and I have, I have my properly functioning brain and every day is a new opportunity as my dad likes to say, and anything is possible. So I'm

like every single morning, that's what I'm being reminded of. I'm grateful for the help that I have. Because everything else, all the material things, they will come eventually. And I guess I'm not that much of a material person. It's nice to have nice stuff. But the most important part for me is the family and health.

J. Rosemarie Francis (17:54.271)
Got you. Okay. Thank you. Appreciate you sharing that. Yeah, of course. Okay. So we are focused on mostly podcasters, new and aspiring podcasters. So I'm going to ask you to, from your perspective, give a couple of points, one to three points to an aspiring podcaster. As to... Based on your experience as an entrepreneur and...

anything to do with mindset or just anything. So the first thing first, what I would say is, make sure that you have a goal for yourself, and make sure that you have short term goals, as well as a long term. And when I say long term, create a one year goal, three year goal, five years and 10 years in advance. It's hard to predict

anything beyond 10 years, but you can at least break it down backwards. And that's the idea behind it. So when you have that vision, let's say, you achieving a certain thing in the next 10 years, because there are so many different things that can happen, or so many different things that you could achieve in the next five to 10 years. So it's important to have those goals. And what you could do is work them back.

That's what we like to do on a yearly basis. look at, I don't know if you've heard of the book, The 12-Week Year. It was written by Brian Moran. what they are basically doing is instead of setting, you know how at beginning of the year, you set a 12-month goal and then let's say January comes or let's say it's already February and people usually think, well, I'm not there yet.

but it's fine, I still have 11 months and then March comes and then you're thinking I still have 10 months. So instead of doing that and being stuck in that rot year over year, break your year into four different, four mini years. So basically focus on the quarter. So treat your quarter, the first quarter, second, third and fourth as an entire year. So now at this point, each and every week is like an entire month.

J. Rosemarie Francis (20:15.703)
So that way you will know, you'll make sure that you focus only on the most important things, on things that really move the needle. And that way you're not going to waste your time. And that's what we like to do with our clients as well. We look at the 12 year goal basically, we break it down to quarterly. And then based on the quarterly, now that's where we break them down into monthly, weekly as well as daily goals. Because if you know

what you need to do on a daily basis and you can pretty much track everything. You'll 100 % hit your 12 month goal. And I don't know if you've heard of the stats. I saw it about a year ago when I was doing one of the speeches. 83 % of people

they give up on their goals by February 1st.

Which is insane. I think it's like January 17th. Well, yeah, could be very much. Yeah. Yeah. But most people, yeah, they give up on their goals by February 1st, which is crazy because again, you still have 11 months to go. Yeah. And if you have the right plan and it can be created for yourself, honestly, like I like to use Chai GPT. I basically go in and create

Like even last night I was asking different questions based on different books that I've read and I'm reading right now. And I kind of I'm treating Chai GPT as my business advisor in a way because it knows it takes all the data, all the information from the internet, right? Everything is out there. Yeah. So you could literally take, let's say the people that you look up to, you could take them as an example, tell Chai GPT to

J. Rosemarie Francis (22:16.919)
act as that person and now start asking different questions. And I would even ask something like, tell me what I should know or what kind of questions I should ask you. And it gave me a huge list of questions that and I looked at them. I heard those type of questions before, but some of them I didn't even think about asking. Yeah, because at the end of the day, you don't know what you don't know.

And that's how you can pretty much do it. And it's Yeah. Yeah. Plus it reminds you of what you already know. So that's a good thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay. I appreciate you. Can you tell me, tell us how we can get in touch with you? Sure. Well, people can reach out on social media on any platform. It's at Alex Thorik.

Uh, more they can visit our website. It's building income on demand.com. We have a lot of free resources that they can download. have the nine step roadmap that our clients are using, um, which is again, it's a free resource. They can download it. There is an entire video explaining how to use it and, they can take that and start implementing in their business. Okay. All right. Building income on demand.com. put that in the show notes as well. Yeah.

Okay. Thank you, Alex Thorik for coming and speaking to us and tools at the podcast trade. really appreciate your time. Any parting shot? Any parting shot. There was a quote that I really like. I don't remember who said it, but it goes like this. A river cuts through rock, not because of its power, but because of its persistence. I love it. Thank you. I appreciate it. And if you've ever been to or if you'll go at some point to Niagara Falls,

Yeah, you will see exactly that because right under the right under the water when the water goes down, you can see the rock being super polished.