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Dennis Collins: Hey there, a warm welcome back to Connect and Convert, the Sales Accelerator podcast where small business owners tune in to hear the insider secrets to help grow their sales faster than ever. Yes, isn’t that right, Leah Bumphrey?

Leah Bumphrey: That is what we do, and we have fun doing it. Absolutely, Dennis.

Dennis Collins: We have a lot of fun, but I’m going to tell you, we have had some amazing guests on this podcast. Have we not, Leah? In fact, we had you as a guest not long ago as a new author.

Leah Bumphrey: We did, and it was fun, and you were a great interviewer, although I kind of missed your sidekick on that one.

Dennis Collins: Yeah, I know, but you could play both roles easily. Anyway, today, I got to say to our listeners, our viewers, our small business owners, our sales leaders, our salespeople, please stay tuned to the entire episode. We have the real deal today. We have one of the best guests that we could ever hope to get. He’s kind enough to join us today. This dude is a multiple bestselling author, an internationally known and recognized authority in online marketing. He’s a featured media expert on CNN, New York Times, you name it, and he is often quoted in the marketing press. His name is Bryan Eisenberg. Hello, Bryan Eisenberg, and welcome to Connect and Convert.

Bryan Eisenberg: Thank you so much for having me today.

Dennis Collins: Hey, your credentials could go on and on. I love the fact that you and your brother, Jeffrey, have a number of New York Times, USA Today, Businessweek bestsellers – Call to Action, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark. That was one of my all-time favorites.

Leah Bumphrey: Yeah, that was a good one.

Dennis Collins: Always Be Testing, Buyer Legends, and the other all-time favorite was The Rice and Beans Millionaire. Could be billionaire, but for now, it’s millionaire. I think from what I know of you, I think you’re proudest of your accomplishments, the thousands of people, companies, students, clients that you have worked with. They’ve consistently had dramatic improvements in their conversion rates, their sales. Some of the most notable ones, Google, Chase, Hewlett-Packard, NBCUniversal, GE, WebEx, Dell. Couldn’t you get some big-name companies, Bryan? What’s the matter? You had a problem attracting the big guys?

Leah Bumphrey: Hey, we’re a positive podcast. None of that negativity.

Dennis Collins: Yeah, sorry.

Bryan Eisenberg: No, but it’s funny. All the main street heroes that we’ve worked with, no one would get excited by the impact that we’ve had on those lives. To us, those actually mean more where we’ve transformed people’s lives versus the big company that got a 10-digit optimization and then wiped it all clean because a new CMO came in town.

Dennis Collins: That’s a very interesting point, isn’t it? The big names grab the attention. Oh, work with NBC. But the real value, I think, to you is those individuals that we’ll never know, will never hear about them, but they know, and they know what you did to help them. Wonderful. Well, one of the reasons Bryan is here today, and by the way, Leah, shame on us for not having Bryan on this podcast sooner. I mean, clearly, we missed having him.

Leah Bumphrey: I think we blame Producer Paul. He’s not here. Oh, actually, he’s always here.

Dennis Collins: Don’t ever say that. He’ll make you look bad. He’ll turn your screen dark or something. He has that magic. Why are we here today? Because Bryan, with his brother Jeffrey, has written yet another book with a very interesting title. I love it. “I Think I Swallowed an Elephant. The stories we sell, the success we build.” How about that? What do you think, Leah? I think he gets an A plus for title. What do you think?

Leah Bumphrey: Oh, I love it because you instantly just in your head are going, what? You’re thinking of every elephant joke your kids have ever told you. You’re shaking your head, you’re wondering, and then you get sucked in. And isn’t that what a story is all about?

Dennis Collins: That’s what a story is all about. So, Bryan, my first question is, having been a fan of yours and Jeffrey’s for many, many decades, having also read your books, this one’s different. How is this book different?

Bryan Eisenberg: Well, first I want to hit on the title because we had a lot of pushback when we wrote the draft and we started sharing it among friends. We had a whole bunch of people who said, yeah, it’s not an immediate payoff and stuff like that. And I reminded them, I said, you know, our best-selling book by far in terms of volume, in terms of impact, in terms of people remembering the book we wrote was Waiting for Your Cat to Bark.

And it didn’t follow the same rules everyone was expecting. There was no immediate payoff, but it told you a story. And it’s the same thing with this title, right? The story, I want you to absorb whatever that story is for you because we all have our own elephant. Everybody in the world is dealing with an elephant that they swallowed. We’re all overstressed, overscheduled, overstimulated, overwhelmed, and there’s a way to get around it.

Dennis Collins: There it is. And so that may lead to my next question. What is it that you hope the reader comes away with after experiencing this book?

Bryan Eisenberg: You know, one of the big surprising things for Jeffrey and I, who have been sharing the book early, I mean, I still don’t have an actual copy, I only have the author copy that says not for resale. So, it’s still fresh off the press. Is that we’ve almost seen it as a Rorschach test. Different people, depending on where they are, right, what issues they’re facing, where they’re stuck in their business, where they’re stuck in their lives, are taking different things from it.

Because part of what we did is, yes, it has a lot of wisdom that you may be familiar with if you’ve read some of our other books, but we’ve simplified it more so than ever before. And that’s all thanks to our friend Elmer Zubiate. If you’ve ever met Elmer at the Wizard Academy, you would know. He used to love to tell us, you know, he thought our stuff was brilliant. It just wasn’t speaking… I don’t know if we could use this on the podcast, but basically dumbass.

Dennis Collins: Of course, we can say it.

Leah Bumphrey: Real speed. Real speed.

Bryan Eisenberg: Real speed. But really just trying to make things so simple for people, right? Because simple also means mastery. And I think a lot of people mistake that simplicity. They think they’re talking down to kids. And I know you’re working on a kid’s book. It’s not. It’s actually way more difficult.

And so there’s also a lot we chose to leave out of the book, right. Trying to make bite sized chapters. Every chapter somewhere between 250 and 400 words. And that leaves a lot of the surface of what you’re going to get from the book coming from you exploring what those very few words mean to you and your life today or in your business today.

Dennis Collins: That’s a great answer. I want to also commend you for doing something that some authors find it difficult to do. But apparently you have come to grips with it. You’re very transparent. You tell a very personal story really throughout this book. You weave it into it. It’s not just one part. It’s woven into it. Would you mind sharing that story and maybe enticing, you know, in a way that hopefully gets people to say, I got to read this.

Bryan Eisenberg: Yeah. Let me spin it back a little bit because it’ll kind of set it up for the right place. About 18 years ago, Jeffrey and I left our agency. We had turned our agency into a software company, took it public through reverse merger, and the market crashed. And all the money that we were supposed to get as investments, you know, most of it dried up. They sent a little bit in good earnest money and all that. Anyway.

Leah Bumphrey: Wait a minute. That never happens. What?

Bryan Eisenberg: Yeah. Massive failure. Anyway, we were busting our you-know-whats to try to get the business working. And we turned it around despite some of the professional management that we had. They were resistant to really turning it into a software company, right? Services to software. And we took control back and we got it all back. We got it up to over 100 customers paying on a subscription model. And we asked the investors, hey, could we get some more of the stock now that we’ve got it live? And we weren’t taking money at that time. It was a big mess. Anyway, they said no. I said goodbye. A few weeks later, Jeffrey left.

And at that point, I did a real look at myself and I realized I had ballooned up to 277 pounds. I had two kids. My third was on the way. My middle one now, Sammy, was a baseball player. He had just finished T-Ball. And I already saw that I wasn’t able to keep up with him, let alone now a third child. And I spent the next 10 months losing over 100 pounds and getting my health in order. And I told myself a story back then that I needed to do this in order to keep up with my kids.

It wasn’t about my health. It wasn’t about business. It was just about keeping up with my kids because connecting with my family is the most important thing. Like at the end of the day, as much as I love impacting the world, obviously, I want to impact my kids more than anything. Right?

Dennis Collins: Of course. Yeah.

Bryan Eisenberg: And it allowed me to be present for them as an entrepreneur. And I’ve always loved that. That’s why I inspired my last book, The Rice and Beans Millionaire. It was to share those stories of being an entrepreneur for them that I could be there to play catch with my son for all these years. It meant so much to me. Spin forward now, a few more years, COVID hit. And of course, I was speaking all over the globe before that. You know, still doing a little consulting and stuff like that.

We had finished working with Google, had a huge success there and got frustrated at the end because, like I said, some of the management changes and some of the things got rolled back, even though it was billions of dollars in lift. And we got frustrated. So we said, OK, we’re going to start working more with small businesses. And so, you know, we were doing that. We were advising a couple of companies, doing a little consulting on their stuff. But my world shrunk and the weight slowly crept up. And those of you who know Jeffrey know that he also dealt with several health issues over the last few years.

Dennis Collins: He did. Unfortunately.

Bryan Eisenberg: And he’s fine now and working on an exciting new project. And it was July of last year when I decided that I was going to get direct medical care for all the caregivers in my wife’s homecare business. We bought a franchise because I wanted her to be an entrepreneur and have those joys. The headaches as well, but the joys too.

Leah Bumphrey: Understand the headaches, have the joys.

Bryan Eisenberg: Correct. So we signed up for the direct care practice and we signed the whole family up just so we can all take advantage of it and have the minimum number to get the discount. And we all got our blood work. And here I am, I’m walking every day, 7,500 to 10,000 steps. I’m eating plant-based, minimally processed food. And yeah, I had put on a little bit of weight, but I didn’t realize it was bad. And then I got a blood test and my blood sugar showed I was 376. My A1C was I think 13.9 or something like that. It was insane. Blood pressure high, all kinds of issues. I had a painful bunion for years that I didn’t even realize how bad it was. Obviously, I was maintaining with some chiropractic, but these were all related. Within four months, I reversed everything.

Dennis Collins: That’s amazing.

Bryan Eisenberg: And we can talk a little bit more about how, but the main thing for me was I knew all those months while the weight was creeping up, while I was trying to lose weight, that even as I was taking my steps, the story wasn’t resonating anymore. My kids are grown up. My youngest is driving now. My middle one was off to college. He’s working right now. My oldest as well. And keeping up with my kids wasn’t the challenge anymore. So that story creates friction, right?

When it doesn’t align with who you are as a person, it’s not authentic anymore, your body reflects it. And so I ended up with brain fog and fatigue and I needed naps every day and I lacked clarity and lacked motivation. Sometimes even getting those 7,500 steps was because I was walking my dog in the morning. That’s where I got most of my steps. It was because my dog needed to walk too, right? And so I was doing it, but I wasn’t really living life and I was sitting on the couch most of the day trying to wait for the day to be over.

And when I got that blood work and the practitioner told me, you know, I want to put you on medication, I said, no, you got to give me three weeks. And I knew at that moment, I can either unfortunately follow the path of my brother, who’s been through a number of illnesses, and have to take all kinds of medication, or I can be that person who’s disciplined and change what I’m doing and change my life. And since then, I can’t even tell you the amount of change that’s happened.

Dennis Collins: That story alone to me is inspiring. And you weave that throughout this book. There’s one chapter in particular, chapter 86, building a persuasive system for health transformation. You even address it directly. Like you said, this book, you read into it as the reader what you want to read into it. The other cool thing is every chapter stands on its own. You don’t have to read chapter three to understand chapter 10.

Bryan Eisenberg: Yeah. I mean, there is some flow to it.

Dennis Collins: Yeah, there is.

Bryan Eisenberg: Some connect. But yes, you can pick up any chapter any day and be like, wow, there’s something there I need to chew on. No pun intended, or maybe a small pun intended, right? That you can apply to your life or to your business immediately.

Dennis Collins: I mean, I am now, truthful statement, I am now using this book as one of my day starters, one of my day starter rituals. I’ll pick a chapter. It doesn’t make a difference because every one of them has a nugget. Every one of them says, holy bleep, that’s something I need to think about or that’s something… Yeah, I’ve been doing that and I need to continue doing that.

Leah Bumphrey: And I think it reads like a conversation. It’s just like this podcast because I feel like I’ve never had the honor of meeting you in person, Bryan, but I’ve heard so much about you and I’ve read your other books and then I just feel like I was further down the rabbit hole of who this guy is. I related to the fact that you love your brother. Your brother had stuff going on. I worked with my sister for years and there’s wonderful parts of that. And then there’s also the challenging parts of that.

And you were true to that thread through the whole thing. You were true to the thread of having to make a choice because, yeah, anybody can decide to do, and I won’t even say the easier way, but it’s a path towards pharmaceuticals. And this is I’m going in this direction. I’ve made this decision or personal responsibility in a different way. And I just feel like I know you, I feel like I could sit down and have a decent cup of coffee with you and go, OK, this reminded me of this. And did you mean this when you said that? Or did I just think that?

Dennis Collins: That’s great. Great analysis, Leah. I mean, exactly. It’s very human. And that’s what’s missing, as you know, in so many stories. You know, we talk about storytelling and yet we leave out sometimes the most important factor, the person, the human, the feelings, the emotions that we all have. You’re not afraid to share those and they resonate.

Bryan Eisenberg: It’s deeper than that. There’s a chapter in the book about that. One of my friends keeps joking all the time. You’d have conversations. Yep, there’s a chapter in the book about that, too.

Dennis Collins: There’s a chapter about everything, frankly.

Bryan Eisenberg: We talk in the Wizard world about brand diamonds, okay? And a good brand diamond, you know, obviously we have our core and our mission, our passion. Those are obvious. That’s like, okay, we know what these guys are doing. But where we really connect with people is in their quirks and idiosyncrasies and our vulnerabilities. That is what makes us uniquely human, right? We’re all flawed. We all have challenges.

And I think too many people are afraid to be authentic about what their pain is. And that’s part of what their origin story is, what got them to where they are today. And I was not afraid to share that. We’ve made plenty of mistakes in our career. We’ve had massive successes. But at the end of the day, it’s about being human and connecting with people at a much deeper level. And it’s only in the absence of it sometimes that you recognize that. Like I said, I didn’t realize how bad my brain fog was. I didn’t realize how bad the fatigue was. I didn’t realize the small aches and pains. I didn’t need to live that way. I thought it was just aging.

And we see a lot of that in communities, right after COVID too, right? We isolated. We preferred Zoom. We weren’t meeting in person. We weren’t connecting. We didn’t realize how much we ache, even those introverts of us, right, to connect with people on a real basis. And so, yeah, it became a priority to make sure that there wasn’t any persona, any mask showing up here. It was a real person.

Leah Bumphrey: I just want to ask you, at the beginning of that beautiful paragraph, you were very specific about you weren’t afraid to. But was there a moment where you paused and said, oh, should I? Because I’m thinking about our small business owners that are listening. There’s a moment when they’re going to change their business, when they’re going to do something different and they’re ready to go gung-ho, but it might be someone else. It might be the voice in the back of their head or a memory. And it’s just that. So did you experience that or was that not?

Bryan Eisenberg: Yes. When I first lost 100 pounds, I was very passionate about teaching people to do it. And there are a lot of digital marketers out there today who followed my path and journey. People like Lee Oden, a bunch of them, who decided they saw my weight loss transformation back then and they did the same thing. So it was inspiring. And I told Jeffrey, I want to go out there and talk about it more. And he was kind of resistant of us doing that because he didn’t know if he could keep up with that story. And we were partners. And when I told him about this book and what I wanted to do, and it’s why I decided to record the audio book as well, so it will be in my voice. It’s all recorded. It’s being edited now.

He said, yes, it’s your story. And you can share it with as much detail or as little detail as possible. I didn’t go into the specifics of his illness, but yes, he went through several things over the last few years. And those absolutely left an impact. I lost both my parents to cancer. So health is definitely at the forefront. My son over the last year had to stop playing baseball because he had an injury from sports and he was in chronic pain for the last year that we were just trying to figure out what it was. He’s now doing better. I think we’re all vulnerable and we all have our own pain points. And whether it’s, probably for most, okay. That is a warning sign. Something is going on with your body. It’s not that you just have to go take the chicken paws and go to the restroom. Your nervous system is telling you, Hey, there’s smoke here. Go take care of the fire.

And unfortunately we wave away the smoke. The smoke alarm goes off. We’re like, okay, I’m gonna go to the next thing. And we add more to the pile, more to the pile, more to the pile. And then it becomes this giant elephant sitting on your chest, on your neck, on your head, wherever the bigger issues are. And it’s a terrible spiral. And the deeper you dig into it, the harder it is. But I do want to remind people, look, it took me years to get where I was, took me four months to turn it all around.

Dennis Collins: That’s amazing. Amazing.

Bryan Eisenberg: My blood sugar hovers in the 70s and 80s now.

Dennis Collins: From the 370s to 70. And no medication.

Bryan Eisenberg: No medication.

Dennis Collins: That is unbelievable. I happen to believe, as obviously you do, that the body is a healing apparatus. It can heal itself if you let it heal itself, if you don’t interfere with its healing. And obviously you tapped into that. You found a way to do that.

Bryan Eisenberg: You hit it exactly. So when my practitioner told me about the blood sugar results and wanted me to come in and get medication, I’ve been mentoring a young entrepreneur here in Austin, Paul has met him as well, Dr. Matt Delgado from LifeSpring Chiropractic, who is not your typical chiropractor. And go into his origin story and everything afterwards. But on his wall for all these years are the words, we believe in miracles. And he talked about how the body, given the right environment, can heal itself. And it can.

And because of my relationship with him, I’d hear all of these people who’ve had issues with PCOS and anxiety and they needed surgery and all of a sudden not needing it. And so I know these miracles were possible. And I said, stop, no medication. I want three weeks. Three weeks, cut it in half. Then I got a continuous glucose monitor. And once I had the data, now, mind you, I founded a digital analytics association. People think I love data. No, data tells a story. And I wanted the story of what was going on. And once I knew the story, I was able to modify different behaviors.

And so one of the simplest behaviors, okay? And Dennis, this is, I’m sure, going to apply to you. How many meals a day do you eat?

Dennis Collins: Three.

Bryan Eisenberg: Great. How many walks after your meals do you take?

Dennis Collins: You got me.

Leah Bumphrey: Zippity-doo-dah.

Leah Bumphrey: Oh, Dennis, we’ve talked about this.

Dennis Collins: No, no, I do the gym, but I don’t walk after a meal.

Bryan Eisenberg: Right. So now all I’m going to ask you to do to change your life is 10 to 15 minutes. Give a friend a call while you’re walking after every meal. It’ll just stabilize your blood sugar. It’ll keep you healthier. That’s it. It’s not big commitments because you don’t eat an elephant with one massive bite at a time.

Dennis Collins: Therefore, the name of the book. I love it. It all ties together. You know, can I take now what you’ve been saying? I want to dive just quickly into a couple of the chapters.

Bryan Eisenberg: Sure.

Dennis Collins: One of your chapters is about data. And I am trying to remember it. I did make some notes on it. So let me look.

Bryan Eisenberg: There are a lot of chapters.

Leah Bumphrey: You’re starting to talk like a science nerd. You’re starting to talk about specifics. I just want to remind our listeners and remind Bryan that we’re about the story. We’re about the emotion. This is all about heart. Thank goodness you have me here. Otherwise, you know, this would be a dead point. And we’d have to fast forward to the chicken part.

Dennis Collins: Leah, you’ll be very pleased with how I will handle this. It relates to Bryan’s CGM. It’s a continuous glucose monitor. It’s new technology, as we know. Some of my relatives have these things. It gives you a minute by minute, second by second reading of your blood glucose, right?

Bryan Eisenberg: Yeah. And it’s been out for a while, but it’s now over the counter. You can purchase it. Right. Here’s the deal. It’s not a biosensor.

Dennis Collins: But here’s the deal. It gives a person with blood sugar problems either too low or too high, it gives them real-time advice on what happened. How did they get too low or how did they get too high? Am I correct on that?

Bryan Eisenberg: Yes. But I’m going to take it even further. So it’s not about the problems. So now I’m going to tell you something you probably never heard. And Leah, you’re going to appreciate this one. You know what the word “aging,” where it comes from?

Dennis Collins: I don’t.

Bryan Eisenberg: Aging stands for advanced glycation end products. Fancy name, Age.

Leah Bumphrey: Oh, I’m loving this.

Bryan Eisenberg: Okay. I just finished cooking the chicken. You know, when you put chicken, like raw, it’s got that pink cartilage and all of that. What happens as you cook it?

Dennis Collins: It turns tan or brown, doesn’t it?

Bryan Eisenberg: Correct. That’s the glycation happening. That’s the burning of the sugars. And every time your body spikes your sugar, you are glycating yourself from inside. You are cooking yourself like a chicken from inside.

Leah Bumphrey: Wow.

Bryan Eisenberg: The reason being so that blood sugar gets too high, right? That’s why you walk right after you eat. It just brings it right back to natural balance and you’re not going to glycate. So you’ll look younger. Your skin will look better. I actually have a friend who’s not into Botox or any of that lifestyle. And it’s all about understanding this core premise of glycation.

Dennis Collins: I never knew that. But you have now just given me… I have a wife who loves to walk and a dog who needs to walk. So you now have given me motivation. You’re going to make my wife very happy because I will now say, honey, let’s go take a walk tonight after dinner.

Bryan Eisenberg: I love it.

Dennis Collins: So you’ve just probably given my marriage 10 more years, you know, or something, you know. You didn’t know that.

Paul Boomer: Producer Paul Boomer here. And I want to let you know that this was an hour-long conversation, but we decided to split it into two parts because, A, an hour is a long time to listen to a podcast, but B, it is so powerful what Bryan has been saying that it’s better split into two. So we’ve done just that. Now, make sure you come back for part two because we dive deeper into the discipline and the few different rituals that he has and that he recommends that will transform not only your business but also your personal life. Plus, we also explore a hot topic, which is how AI helped him shape his book. So make sure you come back for part number two with Bryan Eisenberg.

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