Small Business, Big Marketing: Secrets to High Performance in Business

Tim Reid and Chris Sparks talk about how to uncover your bottlenecks, get clear on your mission, and manage your time and attention more effectively.

Audio recording below (46m46s). Full transcript following.

Podcast Transcript

Note: Transcript slightly edited for clarity.

Tim: Chris Sparks made his mark in his tracky dacks on his couch by becoming a world online poker champion. These days he’s improved his fashion sense and started a successful New York business interestingly called “The Forcing Function.” Don’t worry. It’ll all become clear in this high stakes Episode 471 of the award-winning Small Business, Big Marketing show, thanks to Digital Marketing Agency Yellow and American Express.

And welcome back to your weekly dose of marketing celebrations. I’m your host, Timbo Reid. You, infinitely more importantly, you’re a motivated business owner and you are ready to crank out some great marketing to build that beautiful business of yours into the empire it absolutely deserves to be. And today’s episode, 471, is made possible thanks to Digital Marketing Agency Yellow and American Express business cards, which are designed for business owners just like you. A little bit more about those guys later. But right now, big show today. We catch up with high performer Chris Sparks whose job as a high-stakes online poker player required him, how’s this, to make decisions with tens of thousands of dollars every few seconds for eight hours. What’s that got to do with marketing your business? That’s a very good question. You’ll know the answer soon enough.

And another motivated listener wins big in this week’s monster prize draw, just for implementing some ideas from this show that I have, and I quote, “Made a measurable difference to her website”. And I’ve got some great news about next week’s guests, who I know you’re gonna love. As per usual, team, there is marketing G-O-L-D dripping from the ceiling over here at Small Business, Big Marketing’s HQ, so let’s get stuck right in.

New Yorker Chris Sparks was one of the top online poker players in the world, and is now a highly sought after performance coach for entrepreneurs. Now in order to become one of online poker’s most feared competitors, Chris developed a system for acquiring the mindset and habits necessary to become elite in any field. So guess what he does in this chat? You got it. He deconstructs what it takes to become a top performer, and demonstrates how to implement these lessons in your business and your life. Gotta love that. Now these strategies will allow you to uncover your bottlenecks, which I love. Anything that’s blocking you from moving forward, that’s a bottleneck. And he’s gonna help you get clear on your mission and manage your time and attention more effectively, and who doesn’t want a bit more of that?

I started off by asking Chris how he got into online poker in the first place.

Chris: Right place, right time, I suppose would be the short answer.

Tim: Well, I’m kind of thinking you’re a university student looking for something to do but doesn’t wanna work too hard and wants a job in his tracksuit pants on the couch.

Chris: That’s not too far off, yeah. The timing was very fortuitous. I entered university right when poker was on all of the stations. It’s like what we did for fun in our spare time. It was a really easy way to make friends and make social capital, and it was kind of a really good outlet for my natural competitive instincts, and not a bad way to, you know, pay off tuition without too much effort.

Tim: Sure. Why not real poker?

Chris: You mean online versus in person?

Tim: Correct.

Chris: Sure. So they’re two very different games. When I was first coming up, majority of my play was with friends in person. I generally shifted my play more towards online, primarily because I could multi-table. So in person you get about twenty to thirty hands per hour, depending on the dealer, whereas online I was playing  . . . Depending on the point in my career, I was playing anywhere from twelve to thirty games simultaneously, meaning that I’m getting a hundred to two hundred times per hands, per hour. Right? So I can presumably play one one-hundredth of the stakes and realize my expectation much faster, or I can play the stakes and make a hundred times as much.

Tim: Wow. I can’t even get my head around the pace of decision making. Am I speaking to Dustin Hoffman’s character in “Rain Man,” by any chance?

Chris: That would make it a lot easier, if there were no emotions involved. The innovations in machine learning in this area have been very interesting, where you know, a program or an algorithm is able to vary its decisions on a completely rational, statistical basis, while you know, us humans are kind of doomed to try to translate the noisy signals from our brain in the form of emotions.

Tim: No doubt. I imagine it’s vastly different. I don’t wanna have a long discussion . . . Hopefully our listeners aren’t going “Oh, this is gonna be a discussion about online poker.” It’s not. There’s some massive learnings that Chris is gonna share with us as to how we can apply them in our day to day running of our business around high performance. But I’m interested . . . Real poker. Face to face poker, Chris, you can see your competitors. Your competition. So if someone’s holding four aces, you know, they’re gonna look fairly excited I suppose, unless they’ve got no poker face, at all. Online poker’s different to that, right? You don’t see anyone.

Chris: That’s true. I would say that when I’m playing against someone, there still exists another person on the other side of the screen, just that we have technology as mediator. And what I’m trying to do is translate the signals that are coming through . . . Timings of their bets, sizing, recent history . . . I’m able to do some pretty deep statistical analysis, if I’ve played with them enough. That allows me to build a very accurate baseline of their behavior, and with the internalized experience that comes from playing literally millions of hands over a decade, I’m able to sense very . . . I’m able to sense that change in state of mind that reflects that they’re deviating from their normal strategy. There’s a lot of nuance within what seems like not that much information.

Now, clearly when you’re sitting across from someone there’s a lot more information to take in. What they’re wearing, what their posture is, what their tone of voice is (if you’re lucky to get them to talk). But the same concepts apply in that you are trying to discern signal from noise, to see what is the person trying to get you to believe that they have? Right? What do they want you to do? Do they want you to call? Do they want you to fold? And then your job is to do the opposite.

Tim: Right. How far did you actually get, Chris, in terms of championships . . . How much wealth? Can you reveal numbers? How much wealth did you amass?

Chris: I’ve done well enough that I’m pretty flexible in my day to day, these days. I usually throw around the number “top twenty in the world.” That’s for online poker cash games. So I was playing in the highest stakes games that were offered. Particularly in my heyday, it was 2010, 2011, and so the toughest games online are generally considered the toughest games in the world. So these are by far the best players, and yeah, really thriving in those games at my peak. I’ve played quite a bit in person. Played all of the major televised tournaments, but the real money is in cash games, and I believe the biggest opportunities are online. Like I said before, there is always action, and you can play multiple games at a time.

Tim: What was your biggest win?

Chris: My biggest win in a day would be in a tournament. I bested seven thousand players to take first in a tournament called “The Sunday Million”. That was for 135,000.

Tim: Nice work. Biggest loss?

Chris: Biggest loss . . . You know, I try not to dwell on those too much. I believe the biggest hand that I’ve lost is in the $50,000 range. When I was at my peak I was playing in some pretty large games, and yeah. I . . . There was a few in that range, and I definitely did not sleep too well that night.

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We’re chatting with Chris Sparks, whose job as a high stakes online poker player required him to make decisions worth thousands of dollars every few seconds for many hours on end. Tell us about the mindset required to do that, Chris.

Chris: The huge differentiator here is what I like to refer to, “The Mental Game,” which is essentially mastery of one’s self. So the differentiator between a good player and a great player is essentially discipline. So discipline is both playing A Game a higher proportion of the time as well as recognizing the times that we are not playing our A-Game and immediately cutting ourselves off. It’s a key takeaway I have as far as entrepreneurship, that our earn rate is highly variable, right? That the hours in the day are not equal and in fact fall on a power-law distribution, where the most important thing we will do today is more important than everything else we will do combined. Right? Our most important hour, our most productive hour, we will get more done than the rest of the day combined.

And in the same way when you’re playing a poker game, and the poker game is really, really good, that’s why when you see guys play for twelve, twenty-four, thirty-six hours straight, because the type of game that they’re in, it’s so high-expectation that they might not see another game like that for weeks or months. And so you persevere as long as you can, because one hour in that game might be the equivalent of ten hours the next day.

Tim: But how do you . . . It sounds like you don’t know when that hour is. I had a high-performance coach on this show about six or seven years ago. Guy’s named was Mark McKeon. He wrote a book called “The Go Zone”. And The Go Zone . . . This guy was a high-performance coach at one of the leading football clubs in Australia, and he had got to the point where he realized that high performers have one hour, maybe two if you were really, really good, maybe two hours in a day where you did your best work. And you know when those one or two hours are, and you should allocate the most important decisions to that time. Do you subscribe to that, or are you saying that that one or two hours is going to come along, you just don’t know when?

Chris: I don’t think it’s an either/or. The research definitely supports Mark’s assertion. So if you look at peak performers across a number of fields, sports just being one of those, the sprint/rest paradigm holds true, where we want to be operating at a hundred percent capacity for the things that are very important, where we need to perform at the highest level, and then the rest of the time we should be doing things that recharge us and prepare us for that next sprint. I’m really big on planning and reflection as high-leverage activities, where we are trying to extract as much as we can from that really compressed period of learning, and then prepare ourselves so we can make the most of it next time. As far as your last question, I think we can definitely plan for that most important time, but there’s definitely an element of recognizing when the elements are in our favor.

This is a very kind of Western versus Eastern philosophy frame, where I think in the West we tend to think of things in terms of causes and effects. “I make this happen”, right? “I do this and this is the result.” A really big takeaway from poker is that most of our results aren’t really under our own control, and we need to extract elements of luck. I like the Eastern philosophy a little bit more, in that the future is inherently unknowable. We can make preparations, but where we find our edge is in recognizing the conditions that are most favorable to us, and being prepared to take decisive action when those conditions arise.

That’s certainly true as a professional poker player, where as the famous saying goes, ninety percent of success is showing up. The majority of days I show up and I play and the games are okay and profitable, but you know, nothing to write home about. But occasionally, and those days more often happen on a weekend, late at night, et cetera, you know, a really bad player shows up and you know, proceeds to lose a lot of money, and whoever happens to be there in the right position is able to take full advantage.

Tim: Yeah.

Chris: And so there’s a preparation in that I make sure that I’m operating at peak if and when that situation happens, and that I have the space to take full advantage, but on any given day it’s hard to know what’s going to happen.

Tim: You touched on the concept of planning and reflection, something that we talk a bit about on this show. I have had many guests. Some are real planners, and find time, or weigh days, weigh weeks, to plan and reflect on their business. Others don’t. They fly by the seat of their pants, making decisions on the go without any planning and reflection. Do you have a preference?

Chris: I would strongly, strongly fall on the former.

Tim: I thought so.

Chris: There’s lots of room for improvisation in life. I don’t think our business or how we choose to reach the next level should be in that area. I like to think that every minute that I spend planning has an ROI of a thousand percent, that I gain ten minutes. And that’s how I try to live, is whenever I’m not sure of what I need to do next, that becomes the most important thing to do, to figure that out. I think our largest bottleneck, as business owners, as people, is not being a hundred percent clear on what we want and what the inherent costs are, and by instituting a habit of planning and knowing what is important to us and how we’re going to achieve it, people will find that the path to success is a lot more direct than they had thought.

Tim: You say life is like poker, making decisions without complete information. It sounds like you had a fair bit of information with online poker, but do you think as business owners we should be seeking more information before we make decisions?

Chris: I think not, in general. So the concept here is called “the value of information”, right? Where information is only valuable to the point that it would cause us to make a different decision if we had it. Right? So this is called “the crux”. We want to identify what that piece of information is that if we had it would change our minds, right? Most people go about life trying to prove their previous beliefs. Right? The internet is just one giant confirmation bias machine. If we start with an assertion, it will be very easy to find evidence that proves that assertion. The thing we want to do is try to disprove our beliefs, look for information that will cause us to change our mind. Right? Lots of press on “How can we cultivate a filter bubble that contains beliefs that are the opposite of our own?”

I think that Jeff Bezos kind of summarized this very succinctly in that if you wait until you have more than seventy percent of the information, you have waited too long. I’m a strong, strong believer in learning through experience, and I think that the speed of our growth is proportional to the tightness of our feedback loops. That . . . Meaning the faster we can go out into the real world and test our invalidated assumptions, the faster we’ll be able to improve. That the difference between success and failure is the frequency with which we can fail.

Tim: There’s also the other side of that coin, where you know, you’ve got Jeff Bezos saying “Okay, seventy percent seems a good figure.” Malcolm Gladwell, the famous New Yorker journalist, wrote the book “Blink”, which basically said you know within the blink of an eye whether the decision is a good one or a bad one.

Chris: Yeah. I find that the research has really been abused. So the consensus is intuition is incredibly valuable, if someone has deep, deep knowledge and experience within that discipline, but that without that deep knowledge, essentially we do no better than chance. So I . . . When people ask, you know, “How can I make these decisions every second for hours on end? You know, how can I possibly take in all this information?” The short answer is chunking. Right? That I am able to see immediately what information is relevant and what information is irrelevant, and this accumulation of internalized experience allows me to make decisions very, very quickly, because essentially I’m just recognizing patterns. But if we get to a lot of different areas where I don’t have that experience, my first instincts aren’t going to be very good. And so that’s the key if we want to harness our intuition, is to be very aware of the areas in which we have that deep internalized experience, versus areas that we’d be better off just copying the experts.

Tim: Let’s see what else we can learn from one of the world’s leading online poker players, Chris Sparks. You talk about making sure you’re always at the right table in business. What do you mean by that?

Chris: Sure. I think there’s a lot of different ways that you could apply it. The first one that I usually mention . . . So in poker, assuming we’re playing in person, you can only play at one table at a time. Right? Instead of online, you can play many, but let’s assume we’re playing in person. Well, the biggest differentiator on how much money I make is the difference between my skill and the skill of the other players at the table. Right? So I’ll use an analogy. Like if I am a little leaguer and I go into the big leagues and I try to face a ninety mile per hour fastball, I’m not going to do very well. But if I go and play in, you know, my kid’s T-Ball league, then I’m gonna be the MVP. Right?

Tim: Yeah.

Chris: So a lot of poker is finding the games in that you are the best player at the table. And in the same way as an entrepreneur, I think we should obsess about this founder market fit. That we are choosing the market in which we can be the number one. Right? Nicheing down as many times as necessary. I think of this as “creating a monopoly of one”, in that in serving my specific audience, I am the only person in the world who can do exactly what I could do. And that makes it very easy to be the best. Right? The key to marketing is being referable. You wanna signal that you can do what you can say you can do, and you want to be the first person who comes to mind when someone is looking for that skill. Right? No one goes and says, “Here are the three people you should talk to who are good at X.” They’re like “Oh. You need X? You should talk to Chris.”

Tim: Hmm.

Chris: You’re the first person that comes to mind.

Tim: So that whole notion of . . . That ‘nicheing down’ is incredibly important. We talked about this a lot on the show, but some business owners find it scary, because they feel they’re gonna leave a whole lot of money on the table by you know, not appealing to the masses.

Chris: I think . . . I really like the original “thousand true fans” idea.

Tim: Oh yeah.

Chris: And I want to be the hero or the like absolute favorite person for one’s particular thing to a very specific audience rather than having a million people think I’m just okay. Right? It’s much easier to monetize as far as a business goes if you are indispensable to one person than if another . . . If a bunch of people can just take or leave you. You know, I would use a war metaphor here. It’s what we’re trying to do in the early stages of business is form a beachhead. Right? If you come very, very strong in one area, that becomes a very strong position to expand into adjacent areas.

Tim: Yeah, I like that. You say “life operates on the one-strike rule”, Chris, and you touch on reputation as your capital earlier. How did that apply to your poker playing days, in being referable? And how does it apply to business these days?

Chris: Sure. So what I call the one-strike rule is within poker, you get one shot not to screw up. As in . . . You can screw up by having a debt that you don’t pay it back, or doing something shady at the table, or doing something that, you know, you . . . Not doing something that you said you would. Right? Basically the same way that you screw up in life, that you don’t follow through with what people expect. You don’t act in a moral fashion, et cetera. And that reputation compounds, meaning the more that you continue to do right by people, your social capital continues to accrue, to the point you see that graph up and to the right, a few decades of this your social capital, your reputation is your largest asset. But if you mess up once, particularly if you mess up once publicly, right, as the stakes start to rise, everything is lost in a single moment. Right?

I love the saying in the poker world, is that the best con is the long con. That if you stay honest forever, you will always have opportunities that will find you rather than having to seek out opportunities where you don’t know who you are, character-wise. So I was able to expand in a lot of ways within poker just because I had this reputation of being someone who was helpful and trustworthy. You know, two of those notably, I did a lot of investing in other players. So knowing that I was someone who had a strong reputation who was going to do right, I had a lot of players come to me who would not have seeked investment otherwise. Right? It was my proprietary deal flow. I was able to then move into a cash transfer business where essentially I became a holder for people who wanted to increase their holdings on one site at the expense of the other. Right? You’re generally playing on multiple sites, just as like you have multiple income streams in a business. And so being that go-between allowed me to have a very nice arbitrage, just by people knowing that if they sent me money I wasn’t going to keep it.

And it’s really hard to underestimate the amount of opportunities that will come your way with just the baseline of people thinking of you as a good person, someone that they can trust. I think of this as, you know, maximizing the surface area of serendipity. That just by being someone who others want to work with, my optionality is maximized.

Tim: You raise a really good point, and it seems so obvious, Chris. I do a lot of public speaking. I hang around with a lot of professional speakers. Some of them hold their cards very close to their chest when you seek information about how to improve, how to get more leads, how to get better client briefings, how to manage your stage presence, all those questions that we have as speakers. And they won’t reveal their secrets. Others openly reveal . . . In fact, I’ll name one of my mentors, Keith Abraham, openly just lets you inside his headquarters, if you like, and answers any question that you have about being a better speaker. And as a result, Keith’s one of the best speakers in Australia. One of the most popular, sought-after speakers in Australia. So there is clearly a direct relationship between, you know, being a business owner and doing a great job in what your niche is and being helpful to others who are also trying to do a great job.

Chris: Yeah. I’d love to touch on that. I mean that’s been an area that has been a huge personal shift to me. So historically your advantage in poker comes through information asymmetry, right? Where you know more than your opponent does. That’s where your profit comes from. And that’s been a major shift for me in . . . I would summarize with this with a line from the Tao Te Ching, in that the biggest winner doesn’t compete. Right? The biggest winner does not compete, as in those who I am in an industry with who I am going after the same customers, rather than fighting after each other and having a race to a bottom, if I can compete we ensure that we each work with who’s going to be the best fit.

And I have kind of oriented towards this perspective that all of my knowledge is open-source. I see my work with clients as an experimental training ground, for “I want to learn what generalizes across these peak performance, and I want to share everything that I learn so that everyone has the opportunity to put these things into practice.” That I work with the best, I try to deconstruct what makes them the best, and then I share that in a form that others can act upon. And nothing I hold close to the vest anymore, because all of these ideas are completely worthless on their own. Right? Ideas are only force multipliers. They require action in order to have value, and the value in becoming a great public speaker is applying these concepts over and over again with those tight feedback loops. The power of becoming a peak performer is taking these principles and applying them to your life, right? If knowledge was the bottleneck we’d all be achieving our dreams already. It’s the force multiplier.

Tim: And would you . . . So two things come to mind when you’re saying that, Chris. One is would you have taken that stance before you were successful, and do you not feel threatened by opening up . . . I kind of know the answer to this, but I’ll ask it anyway, by opening up your knowledge base to those who may one day compete against you?

Chris: Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say for me I don’t think I would have done that before, because I think my values were different. As I’ve been fortunate enough to enjoy a degree of success, you know, particularly in this one dimension, I’ve realized that it’s only one dimension of success, and that so many other areas of my life which I highly value now, which I didn’t place that level of value on, right? Being able to help others, being of value, having friendships where I can be completely open and vulnerable about what’s going on and not needing to worry about, you know, “Am I sharing too much?” All that sort of stuff that I highly value now was not my perspective in the past, and as I orient more towards a life of meaning and happiness, I find that the tradeoffs are worth it.

Now clearly, you know, there’s going to be times that I give away information to an opponent that they can use against me, but my suspicion is that the number of opportunities that will come to me is going to be much greater in the long run, and I’m very concerned about these compounding returns. Right? Anything worth doing is worth doing often and early, and my thought is that if . . . The more that I strengthen my friendships, the more that I build trust in a public forum, all of these things are only going to compound over the next few decades.

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We’re chatting with Chris Sparks whose job as a high stakes online poker player put him in all sorts of interesting positions, which he’s now sharing with other business owners as a hired performance coach. Chris, you told me previously that Michael Gerber’s book, The E-Myth, was a life-changer for you. How was that?

Chris: It’s a fantastic book. It’s . . . I give away a copy to all of my new clients. It is . . . I like to think of it as a red pill, in that I saw the world of business very differently after reading that book, and it actually kind of cast a mirror on what I was doing as a business owner, which was working very, very hard to maintain a job. So I wanted to be, in his words, a coach or a practitioner, right? But what I really needed to be was a coaching business owner, right? Moving more towards a CEO, and realizing that all of the things that I was avoiding doing were also the things that I needed to do in order to scale this beyond just trading time for money. And so that . . . Reading that book massively overhauled the way that I structure and plan for my business, as far as making sure that my time is going towards things that are high leverage, that are scalable, and that . . . You know, I’m setting myself in a position to be able to grow.

Tim: Yeah. It’s wonderful when you find a book like that and it’s an absolute life-changer. Any other books on the shelf, Chris? You don’t need to go through them all, but was there another book that kind of really made you sort of sit up and take notice? I mean I’m gonna guess, the Tao . . . Is it the Tao? You’re referring to a lot of Eastern principles.

Chris: Yeah, I have been on a bit of a philosophy kick.

Tim: Have you?

Chris: That’s the Tao Te Ching that I was referencing.

Tim: Yeah.

Chris: The one that I recommend to every entrepreneur that’s very foundational to what we do here at The Forcing Function is called The Goal. And so what The Goal does is introduce the theory of constraints, which in terminology is a bottleneck. Essentially the bottleneck is the weakest link in any process. And the fundamental principle that I build my workshops and coaching around is that our job at all times is to be discovering our own personal bottlenecks. That there is one thing that is most preventing us from getting towards our goals that if removed, everything will work faster. And the obvious implication of that, right (we were talking about the power law of time before), is that most of the things we do to try to improve will actually have no effect because they don’t address the bottleneck. So that’s a very, very strong recommendation for anyone who has a process-oriented business. Right?

When you think about it, pretty much every business is taking raw materials, adding value, and translating them to a finished good that they can sell. Right? It’s buying quarters, adding a little bit of value, and selling them for fifty cents is essentially what every business boils down to, and so this framework is a very good way to identify what are these bottlenecks within one’s business, and to that extent one’s personal life.

Tim: Great question to ask. “What’s the bottleneck that I’ve got to work on today? That I’ve got to release today in order to move forward faster?” The Goal. That’s a book I will link to in the show notes. Chris, you’ve now started a business. You are a small business owner. You’ve got a business called The Forcing Function. Could you explain that name, please?

Chris: Yeah, I’d love to. So a forcing function comes from both mathematics and design, and it refers to a designer’s goal of drawing one’s attention to something. Right? It’s an attractor of consciousness. And so it has a double meaning as I use it, right, where my role as a coach, the Jedi mind trick that I play is shifting someone’s attention from things that aren’t important to things that are important. Usually putting some form of metric there so that they can track progress. That simply by being aware and tracking that goal, they will make progress on it.

The other side of The Forcing Function is on the drawing one’s attention to something as far as productivity and performance comes through constraints. Right? So by drawing someone’s attention to something, you are by definition drawing it away from the other things that aren’t as important. And so that’s what I try to do, is keep someone’s attention on the important things, and serve that role, that because they know we’re going to be having these conversations about the important things, they make sure that they move forward.

Tim: What’s it like being a business owner these days? You can’t sit in your tracky dacks on the couch anymore.

Chris: I mean for me, I get to work from anywhere, I get to talk with, you know, super smart and interesting people all day. I think it’s great. I actually just . . . I was working from home for a number of years, and now I have a full-time office here with my team in New York, which has been a huge win. I find that so much of our performance is deterministic, as in we can predict how we’re going to do based on the context we find ourselves in. So shifting my context from a place that was very mixed . . . Right? At home I sleep, I have friends over, I eat, et cetera. Lots of different things, a very mixed context. When I come here to this office with a very strong intention, I do find that I get a lot more done.

I mean, that being said, as we’ve been talking a lot about values today, I very highly value my freedom and autonomy, and that allows me to spend much of my time traveling, seeing the world, doing things that bring me great happiness and satisfaction. And I see what I’m doing here at The Forcing Function as incredibly important, but at the end of the day subservient to my larger mission.

Tim: What’s the best marketing that you do to attract clients into The Forcing Function?

Chris: Man, I’m probably . . . You’ve had so many talented marketers on this podcast. I’m probably the last person to give marketing advice. The one thing I will say is if you are a monopoly of one, right, if you are the person who is the only one who can do what you can do, and thus you’re naturally the best at doing what you do, people will naturally talk about it. Right? So I always like to say that my product is my marketing. That if my clients have amazing results, people will not be able to . . . Notice that they’re accelerating their growth, and they’ll ask ’em. “Hey, how were you able to do that?” And occasionally, you know, perhaps after a drink or two, they might drop my name and say “Hey, you guys should talk. I think you’ll hit it off, I think you’ll get a lot of value from the conversation.” That . . . Hopefully all I need to do is derive massive value from my clients, and everything else takes care of itself.

Tim: Yeah, it’s that classic thing, I was speaking about it to last week’s guest, Melanie Perkins, from Canva, who just had her business go into 3.6 billion dollars. She’s a thirty-two year old entrepreneur in Australia, and it comes down to the best marketing is a great product. You know, she has a great product, you’ve got a great product. You’ve also got a hook, by the way. I mean top twenty online poker player in the world is a good hook. It puts you as a rather high-performing individual.

And you say you’re a bad marketer very humbly. Well, you’re not a bad marketer, but you say there’s better out there. Maybe there are, but I love the fact that you have got a new book coming out called “Experiment Without Limits”, and you are giving it away for free, which is the Brendon Burchard school of “give away your best stuff in its best form and build a database for which you can then market to”. Is that your thinking, there?

Chris: Hundred percent, yeah. We were talking about open-sourcing knowledge. I mean this is the best that I have learned in my last three years of doing this, compressed down to less than a hundred pages, with lots of exercises and prompts, so that everything I learned everyone can have the opportunity to immediately apply on their own. And my hope is that by giving it away, more people will have that opportunity. So this is a compilation of essentially what I give to all of my coaching clients, and it’s the best substitute to working one on one with me.

Tim: I love it. I look forward to getting it, and I do love a short book. A hundred pages or less, great for someone with a short attention span like myself. That’s great stuff. Chris, great story. Congrats on all the success you’ve had. I wish you great success with The Forcing Function going forward, and clearly work/life balance is high up on your agenda too, which I admire. I’ve never played poker for money. I think I’ll start. I would like to win a $135,000. One tip, please, as we farewell you.

Chris: Oh, one tip? I usually like to bring it around to what the theme was, and it seems like the theme for today was really knowing what you want, right? That our business is subservient to our lives, and if we are aware of what we do really well and what we enjoy, the saying that you never work a day in your life, I think, is very true. So you know, as marketers, as humans, I think we should continue to lean into our strengths, and to learn through experience. You know, everything’s an experiment. Everything we are just trying to learn and get a little bit better every day. And if every day we go to bed slightly better, we’re gonna really, really compound, and at the end of the day, you know, we’re gonna blow ourselves away with where we are.

I would just close by . . . I brought up The Goal as far as this idea that there’s something that is most blocking us right now. My challenge to you would be to take that step back and determine what is it that’s most holding you back? I do have a quiz on my website, which is similarly free, which I call The Performance Assessment, where I ask them questions which are designed to uncover that bottleneck for you, and if anyone on this podcast, you know, wants to take that quiz, I’d be happy to give feedback.

Tim: Oh, mate, that’s an awesome quiz. I’ll be taking that quiz. How do we access that?

Chris: Sure. So that’s at theforcingfunction.com, and that quiz would be at /assessment. You can also have the free download of the Experiment Without Limits workbook. That’s theforcingfunction.com/workbook.

Tim: That’s brilliant, buddy. I’m gonna go and find out what’s holding me back right this very minute. Chris Sparks, thanks for sharing, buddy.

Chris: It’s been a pleasure. I look forward to continuing this, Tim. Thank you so much.

Tim: Well, there you go, team. Online poker champion and now founder of The Forcing Function. We all know what that means now. Chris Sparks. You’ll find a link over at smallbusinessbigmarketing.com/471 to Chris’ “what’s holding you back” quiz. I encourage you to do that. Hey, thanks to American Express and Digital Marketing Agency Yellow.

Here’s what grabbed my attention from that chat with Chris. Attention grabber number one: I love Chris’ idea about obsessing over your market fit and nicheing down as much as necessary. Stop trying to be everything to everyone. Because you know what that means. You’ll be nothing to no one. And who wants that? Attention grabber number two: I love Chris’ idea that the biggest winner doesn’t compete. That being exceptionally helpful to others in your industry can only repay you in spades. Excuse the poker pun. I’ll put a link in the show notes to an interview I did previously with a jeweller in the UK that I mentioned who shares a street with thirty other jewellers and doesn’t worry about his competition. And attention grabber number three, I love the idea of finding time to identify your personal bottlenecks, and doing everything you can to remove them. You remove a bottleneck, and everything else moves smoothly through your business.

That’s what grabbed my attention. I would love to know what grabbed yours. Send me a tweet, smoke signal, a fax, telegram, or go to the show notes, smallbusinessbigmarketing.com/471.

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