Why does one entrepreneur struggle through 80 hours a week just to make half as much as another working 20? You’ve always been told the secret to success is working hard and clawing your way to the top, but what if it isn’t?

Welcomed back to the Author Hour Podcast. I’m your host, Hussein Al-Baiaty, and my next guest is Charlie Gaudet, who is here with me today to talk about his new book, The Predictable Profits Playbook. Let’s get into it.

All right, everyone, welcome back. I’m here with my friend, Charlie Gaudet. I’m super excited about this conversation. His new book, Predictable Profits Playbook is amazing, and it’s an update to his original version. Charlie, thanks for joining me again, I really appreciate your time today.

Charlie Gaudet: Yeah, you are very welcome, thank you for having me.

An Entrepreneur in Training

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, absolutely. So Charlie, you know, I always like to give our audience a little bit of a personal background, sort of where you grew up, the people that sort of inspired you and moved you, all those good things before we get into your entrepreneurial story. Let’s talk a little bit about your background.

Charlie Gaudet: Sure, I’ve been an entrepreneur since the age of four, never had a traditional “real job.” After graduating from college, I started a business, nominated by Ernst Young as being one of the nation’s best seed stage companies. Twenty-four, created my first multi-million-dollar business and then from there, I continued to build and grow a number of different companies until 2010, that’s when somebody after they pay me to help them grow theirs, and I started Predictable Profits and over the years, we’ve taken many companies over the Inc 5000 Fastest Growing Companies list.

Recently, took an agency from a million to about 45 million in six years or so, thereabouts, and just with the work that we did in 2020, the International Business Times reached out. They called me the go-to business coach for seven- and eight-figure companies, disrupted their list of the top business coaches crushing 2022, and they put me at the top of the list, and then the LA Tribune did their list of the top experts to follow and during the recession and then listed me somewhere around three or four, and I do have a bone to pick with them because they put me behind Tony Robins and Grant Cardone.

So I guess, I still have more work to do. Nonetheless, I’m surrounded by good companies. The business owners, you know, typically, seven- to eight-figure CEOs that come to talk to us, and they’re usually asking one of three questions or maybe all three. They’re saying, “What’s it going to take to help my business grow faster where some months are feast, some months are famine, how do we bring more predictability into the revenue?” and the third one is, “Just, the company’s far too dependent on me, how do we scale?” and that’s my life.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, I love that people will come to you, see, you got so good at growing business, people come to you and pay you very well, handsomely, to help them sort of navigate those waters, especially in downtimes. But you came up with these ideas, and you grew your businesses, but they were based around some certain principles and ideals that I feel like you grew up with because growing up, you know, at the age of four and starting a business, it’s fairly young and you had your early, sort of taste and insight into that.

I read a little bit about your father and sort of the things that he embedded within you that I feel like, helped you throughout your journey. Can you reflect on those stories a little bit about your father and the things that he taught you?

Charlie Gaudet: Sure. So my dad’s been really successful throughout life and has done real well and there are things — the entrepreneurs come in two forms. You see the entrepreneurs that you want to be like and the entrepreneurs that maybe you don’t want to be like, and I think that, you know, with my dad, I definitely saw some things that I wanted to emulate and things that I just hope that I didn’t have to deal with as much on my business.

If we start with the things I hoped I didn’t have to deal with but ultimately, didn’t know any different so I followed in his footsteps originally was this concept of hard work. I mean, my dad would say, the secret to success is hard work. So I’d set my alarm for 3:30 in the morning, so I wouldn’t “oversleep.” I took that so seriously that if I got up at around midnight to go to the bathroom, I would just start work because I was up so I just fired up my computer and start working.

I would work every waking hour of every day, seven days a week, and I didn’t discriminate against holidays or whatnot. I worked the holidays, but then I realized that even though I worked harder, all of my competition, there were other people that still managed to work 40 hours a week and yet made 10 times more money than me.

So I had to figure out, what were they ultimately doing differently, and that story what they were doing differently is what I put in the book, but eventually, you know, it wasn’t that it was looking at these people making more money that had me curious, but it was being forced in the hospital from a stress-related condition that actually was causing my organs to shut down and literally was starting to kill me that forced me into that position.

Those are the negative parts or one of the big negatives, the other negative that I would say that I borrowed from my father that I didn’t like but then eventually found a way around it is that, he said, “Look, nobody can do it as well as me” and so, so much of the company was dependent on him, and when that’s the case, it does stifle your ability to grow and scale.

Now, the right systems, the right processes, and so forth will allow you to get beyond yourself because no company should be dependent on any one person, even the business owner himself but, you know, when I look at the different things that you know, my dad did give me, and one of the things that he always focused in on is making sure that you are the best.

When I say the best, like, there were people that delivered really, really good products and services, and then there were people who were clearly best in class and my dad always made sure. I mean, I started working with my dad when I was really young. I think third grade is when I actually started going to his office, but he would say, “Hey kid, you are a Gaudet, you know, you make sure that everything that you do is the best because people are going to be watching you” and that’s the case.

I mean, we really made sure to figure out what we have to do that was just that much better, and that was a good lesson that was passed to me and, you know, you mentioned earlier about me starting my first business at four years old. Well, I didn’t learn that lesson of being the best when I was four years old. I learned that lesson the hard way, and like many entrepreneurs today, they think that, you know, the purpose of the business is to make money.

I mean, that’s what they taught in B school, the purpose of business is to drive shareholder value, and so at four years old, I obviously didn’t know the shareholder value, but I thought the whole purpose was to make money and so, you know, I sat on the porch of my parent’s house and I just started drawing all these pictures, and I took all these pictures and then I went to my neighbor’s and I tried selling them for 25 to 50 cents apiece.

And here I am, a little kid to my neighbor’s house and, you know, who is going to say no to a cute smile, and so they were going into their change wallets and drawers and pulling out change and just handing them over to me. Until I came across Mrs. Hersey. I knocked on Mrs. Hersey’s door and I gave her my sales pitch and she said, “Okay, show me the artwork, Charlie.” I pulled out my artwork, and she stopped and she stared at it.

And then she looked at me straight in the eyes and she said, “Charlie, is this your best work?” And it was really nothing more than scribbles. It was a volume play for me, “How much artwork can I actually create so I could just sell it to all these people as fast as possible?” And I looked at her and I mean, I still remember, I was so embarrassed that I could feel my heart beat in my face, like, I could feel the blood in my face and the heartbeat.

I was so embarrassed by that question, but I answered honestly and I said, “No, it wasn’t my best.” And so she said, “Well, then I can’t pay you the money you’re asking for. In fact, I know you want 25 cents for this, but frankly, Charlie, these scribbles aren’t worth any more than two pennies.” And so I took the two pennies with my head hung low and that was the last house that I went to that day because I couldn’t go to any more houses selling scribbles.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Half-assed stuff.

Charlie Gaudet: Half-assed stuff.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: You have to level up your game, yeah.

Charlie Gaudet: Yeah, amen.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: It sounds like we get those people throughout life, right? They challenge you to your core. You know, though it’s a blow to your ego, to who you are, to your work, or whatever, sometimes it’s truthful and sometimes you need to hear it, and so what happened after? I want to know what happens next. How did you overcome this and come out to the other end?

Charlie Gaudet: You know, people think that entrepreneurs are, well, some entrepreneurs are born, especially when they hear the story that I was an entrepreneur since the age of four. This is just believed that, “Oh, you are born an entrepreneur.” But that was another, if you want to call it gift, I got from my dad so to speak, an indirect gift.

My dad, I actually didn’t really know my dad all that well until the third grade, and that’s because my dad got up before I was awake and he went to work, and he came home after I went to bed and did those seven days a week and so I didn’t really know him all that well but when I did see him, he would tell me, “Hey kid, if you ever want to make it in life, you got to be an entrepreneur.”

And so like most kids and still, here I am in my 40s, and I feel like to some extent I’m actually still, you know, trying to seek my dad’s approval, even though I know he’s proud of me, and the whole deal and whatnot. I don’t know that that feeling ever really leaves you to some extent. At that age, at four years old, when I hear that over and over again, “Man, I wanted to get my dad’s approval.” And so I started this business just so I could tell my dad, “Hey, I’m an entrepreneur too.”

And I remember walking around with my friends, talking to my friends about, you know, all these companies that I was going to start and whatnot, and meanwhile, they’re more interested in what kind of ice cream they want to eat, you know?

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Well, that’s interesting is when you grow up around certain environments, certain people, how your mind is being developed at such an early age, obviously, matters, you know? Especially when we’re seeking love and approval at that stage in our life, right? And if there’s one way to do it is, “How do I get this person’s attention?” right?

And so you were on that path but ultimately, that serves you and, you know, it serves you to a certain degree until it ends you up in the hospital, and then you’re like, “Wow, okay, I got to reframe, I got to change some things to approach this in a healthy way” right?

There’s nothing wrong with that urge to be, you know, validated and seeking approval and all those things, but there’s a health boundary to that to where it’s not solely dependent on others, right? It’s also dependent on yourself, and there’s a healthy correlation that happens and that happens over time and for different people.

It happens in so many different ways, and so, for you, it sounds like, you know, throughout your book, it sounds like you were seeking this better version of yourself but also to, you know, this is something you were good at, obviously. You were really good at building businesses and helping others do the same thing, but it also drove you to the hospital.

So what happened in the hospital bed that lit up some lightbulbs to go a different direction to have a more healthy approach and then create this predictable profits methodology? What happened in those days?

Charlie Gaudet: So when my wife picked me up from the hospital, I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid. At that point, I was over a million dollars in debt, and here I am in my early 20s. Not just over a million dollars in debt, I’m paying double-digit interest rates on that debt. So I mean, every day that passed, it was thousands of dollars that I was now having to owe and so, and I didn’t know how to get out.

I mean, I just saw my primary strategy was hard work. So not to sound too cliché but the thing was we said, “Well, how do we work smarter?” And that’s when I really started paying attention to what some other people were doing, and I started asking myself different questions, and over time, I just obsessed for myself with studying and observing and researching, and I began to see a very similar type of playbook so to speak, that the most successful companies had and you know, that’s what I put inside the Predictable Profits Playbook.

Everything that you know, I have learned up into that point, but it was funny because so much of what I originally started learning was observing through others, but then as I stared to apply this stuff myself, other opportunities began to emerge, and I remember there was one time that we worked with an accountant at a big bust and accounting firm and the principal of this big firm came over to my house completely unexpected one day.

He just started knocking on my door, and I opened it. Look, when you’re an accountant, especially if the principal of a firm shows up unannounced, like, you know, you could feel that little ball in your throat going like, “Uh-oh, what the heck is happening right now?” And I opened the door and he says, “Can I come in?” And I’m like, “Oh damn, this can’t be good news.”

So he walked right in, and he sat down at the breakfast table and he said, “All right, Charlie, lay it on me. You paid fair market value for everything that you have here, and you’re selling it at a fair price, but the one thing I can’t figure out is that you have one of the highest profit margins in the entire industry, what are you doing differently?”

What he wanted to make sure is I wasn’t doing anything illegal, but the truth of the matter is, you know, at the time, I was building houses back in the day and when you’re building houses, most people turn around and they build one house and then they sell it to somebody and they move on and then that’s it.

But I looked at it, I was in all this debt and, you know, I had to make all this money and so forth, and I looked at it and I’m like, you know, “Man, but they’re buying so many other things. What if I forged a relationship with other people?” Like furniture companies and home theater companies and TV companies and home alarm companies and porch furniture and driveway seal coating and all these things that make a house a home.

What if I go to each one of them and I say, “Look, here’s the deal, if I could bring you qualified customers, would you give them a discount for doing business with you?” And most of them said yes and I said, “Now, in exchange for me bringing you this qualified clients, you don’t have to pay to acquire them. You don’t have to pay to, you know, for the advertising and marketing and whatnot. So would you give me a small percentage of sales?”

Now, some of these companies were big companies, and they said, “We’ve never seen this before.” This is way back before affiliate marketing was popular and all these other stuff, and they’re like, “We’ve never seen this before.” But they were willing to do it, and before long, I was just getting these checks, thousands of dollars that came in on their own and the funny thing is, I assumed everybody was doing this.

So when my accountant told that to me, I looked at them like, “What are you talking about? I mean, doesn’t everybody do this?” And when I shared with them what I was doing, he said, “Wow, unbelievable, I never heard of that before.” But you know, that’s – so we take that philosophy, and then we’ve also used, you know, that among many others and applied them into, well, a multitude of different industries across the board from B2B services, to travel, to restaurants, agencies, you name it.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Right, so you just take this methodology and apply it to where it’s necessary?

Charlie Gaudet: Let’s think about this for a second. You know, the one guy who is making it on the news all the time is Elon Musk, right? Elon Musk is all over the news. Now you, whether you like him or hate him, it really doesn’t matter. The more important thing is, where did Elon Musk really cut his teeth? What’s the most famous business that he, you know, became CEO of back in the day? PayPal.

He went to PayPal but then used very similar business philosophies to take PayPal and then roll it into what company after that? Tesla. Then he did, you know, Tesla, he just focused on, you know, the boring companies coming next, but then he did Space X and then now, Twitter, right? You can’t talk about more different companies. I mean, we’re talking Twitter and Space X and, you know, electric cars and PayPal. Yet, he is the wealthiest man in the world.

I was talking to my brother the other day, and I said, just to put it in perspective, Elon Musk is a hundred billion dollars wealthier than Bill Gates. I mean, unbelievable. I guess, the important point is that if you can learn the foundational business principles that is a reason why companies succeed. If you have a playbook that helps companies succeed, you can take that same playbook, and it doesn’t matter if you’re in space or electric cars or social media, and you can still take that playbook and install that and find success.

Looking Both Near and Far

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Once you create your methodology, you can start to apply it accurately, but you talk about this in a very unique way, and you kind of introduce your book with this idea of positioning, and you say, you got to keep your eye on the market and keep your other eye on the niche.

Can you talk a little bit about those two ideologies? Because you know, having a business, starting a business and shifting gears as I’m trying to do, I’m learning a lot about, “Okay, you know, I got to really focus on niching down.” But what is this idea of keeping an eye on the market also meant o you?

Charlie Gaudet: So there’s this concept when it comes to corrective eye surgery. There’s a special type of Lasik surgery that gets performed, and what happens is they have one eye nearsighted and one eye farsighted, and all that means is that in business, you want to have a very similar approach. You want to be able to have that one eye nearsighted focused on the most important things that matter to a segment of a market, a niche of a market, but far-sighted, knowing how things need to change, adapt, and so forth in order to stay relevant.

An example that I like to give is Borders Bookstore. You know, Borders thought that they would niche into these specialty bookstores and so forth without realizing that people were going into digital readers, and they failed to adapt and went out of business, and there’s niching at a mass market level, but then there is niching at a more smaller market level and most of the people who are going to be listening here, most of the people in this world actually are on that smaller level.

In today’s more discerning market environment, if you think about it for a minute, let’s pretend for a second that you’re in sports; you sell sports products retail, right? Let’s pretend for a minute that’s your niche, you sell sports products, and you do it in retail. If you are going to go to an agency and you’re like, “I need a media buying agency.” And you look at your competitors and you see here’s one guy who says, “Hey, we’re a media buying agency, and we serve everybody. We serve this person, that person” blah-blah-blah.

“Anybody, any size, any budget, come to us,” and then you see another agency that says, “Hey, we specialize in retail companies, online retail companies, especially those who are selling sports goods.” Now, which one’s do you automatically going to assume have the solution to your offer or have the solution to your problem? Which one do you think is going to perform the best? The specialist, right?

The specialist, the one who, and naturally you are not only going to assume they’re going to perform the best, you’re going to expect to pay more money for specialty, and so when you look at today’s market, in today’s market there are so many because we don’t have the boundaries of needing to drive and do business within just 15 miles of our physical location anymore with the Internet. We can do business anywhere around the world.

There is so much opportunity everywhere, even the tightest niches within reason, but even the tightest niches give you the opportunity to create multi-eight-figured businesses. Simplification and niching down are opportunities for growth. I mean, it’s funny, I was sitting there at the TD Bank Garden in Boston, and I was watching a show and I just started gazing off and I am counting all the seats in the section in front of me and just the section.

Just like one little square section, and I’m like, “Isn’t that funny?” TD Bank, there is multiple levels, there’s thousands and thousands of people here, and this is only this tiny little section of Boston, but if only I had one little section right there, just that one little section, is a multi-eight figure business alone for me. It’s just that one tiny little section, and I’m like, “It’s so funny in perspective, everybody thinks they need to go wider and so forth and try to attract to so many people.”

There won’t be enough customers, but you only really need a tiny, tiny little section and just be the best at it and be the best at marketing, be the best at delivering, you know, be the best at sales, and you could have enormously successful business.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, and I love how you’re just applying that truth that you came to know just from early childhood development, your father, all these things, and you are applying it to say, “Okay, look, just be the best at sales. Be the best at marketing,” you know? And if you just improve one little bit at a time, if you just think you are the best at that, well, what is the best deliver. You know, how do they deliver?

Where do they deliver? And all of these things, and it is just going a mile deep and an inch wide, I love that so much. What an amazing philosophy that it’s honestly carried you?

Charlie Gaudet: You know what? Being the best also means you can’t be the best unless you’re different.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Right, you got to be unique, standout.

Charlie Gaudet: You got to be unique, right, and so, so many people are sitting there and they’ll go, “I’m going to be the best. So I am going to pull up my competition, and I am going to copy the best of what my competition is doing.” We see this over and over again, and it’s like, “No, you are actually following your competition.” You are not being the best. To be the best actually means that you must be different.

In the book, we talk about the positioning and how are you going to create that unique advantage that is unique to you and nobody else, you know? So that’s a huge part of it, how are you different? How is your offer different? How is your company different? How is your experience different? All of that is really important.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, it is very profound. I mean, once I learned it was like 2013 or something, and somebody literally was like, “You have to reposition.” And it made me really understand. Like I went from like, you know, a manual press, doing everything myself, all that good stuff, and I read two books. It was like Positioning and The E-Myth, to accompany with from like, I don’t know, I think we’re making maybe 80 grand a year to like almost half a million the next year.

By just applying that principle, and I became one of the best print shops in Beaverton because I was heavily involved with the community and schools, and I just kept going deeper and deeper and saying like, “How can I serve the people that want this service in ways that no other person around me is doing so?” And like this is when I started speaking.

So I would just be like, I would hit up the school or schools I went to or whatever and just be like, “Hey, you know, I could come to your class and talk about entrepreneurship or my refugee experience,” or whatever it is to inspire the kids and, you know, the teachers love that and there is so many clubs within every school, every university, right? And they all get t-shirts at some point in the year, and it just dawned on me that if I could just give up what I’m good at naturally on the backend, I would build these relationships that, who else would they go to?

Obviously, we want to work with people that we trust. We want to work with people that are offering something unique. Even a fair price, it doesn’t have to necessarily be cheaper, and that is something else I realized too, and so like you said, man, like you know, growing a business and all of these things, it is really about finding out more of yourself, more of what you are leaning onto and how you can identify those things to bring the “best” thing forward.

You really sort of exemplify that throughout your book. Can we talk about a little bit of, you know, this idea of when upgrading the buyer’s experience, I feel like that is something you talk about in your book, but it is how people started identifying you as to hire you as a coach, to hire your consulting work. I want to bring you in, and I want to bring you in for a specific reason, but you really talk about how to upgrade this buyer’s experience. What does that mean to you, and where did you learn this philosophy?

Charlie Gaudet: I mean, there is two types of buying experiences. There is a transactional buying experience, and then there is a transformational buying experience. I think one of the best examples that I can think of is a company called Jordan’s Furniture and Jordan’s Furniture, they started off as I understand it like every other furniture company. You know, you walk through the doors, and you just pick and select what mattress and furniture and whatnot that you want, but they are also trying to find ways to differentiate themselves in the market.

What they did is they actually created an experience, an experience that is so compelling that I took my girlfriend, my now wife, there on our second date to Jordan’s Furniture. Can you imagine for a minute taking somebody you just met on a date at a furniture store? I mean, that just sounds, you know, crazy, but we went there and they had a band performing on stage. It was like Mardi Gras, they had a little town, a little street set up, and they had Mardi Gras.

They were handing out beads, there were food concession stands and ice cream, and it was a lot, a lot of fun. There is another Jordan’s Furniture where I used to live, and I took my kids there and we did a trapeze experience there, and we watched a water fountain show, and then we went to an IMAX movie, all part of buying furniture experience. Now, it was so compelling, and they did so well, here is this little company in Massachusetts and New Hampshire and Warren Buffett took notice and acquired the entire company.

It’s all because they did something different, they offered a different experience. They focused on the transformational part of the experience, and it doesn’t matter if you’re B2C or you’re B2B. You know, people come to you because of what it is that you are going to do for them, but people will stay with you based on how you feel. Now, I wish I could tell you that I was so ingenious that I came up with that, but it was actually a good friend of mine, Carrie Wilkerson, that told me that, and it just rang so true.

I’m like, “You summarized that so perfectly.” People come to you based on what you do, but they’ll stay based on how you’re feeling. That whole transformational customer experience is all based on how are you making your customers and your clients feel and do they feel like they are just a number. Do they feel like you genuinely care about them? I am going to tell you something that most people don’t know that I think you’ll find fascinating. Have you ever heard of Darwin’s survival of the fittest?

Hussein Al-Baiaty: I’ve heard of it, yes.

Charlie Gaudet: Yeah, and so Darwin’s survival of the fittest traditionally people think about it as meaning as you’re – as long as you are the biggest, baddest, toughest animal in the kingdom, then you are going to survive. Traditionally that is how that is interpreted. What if I told you that that’s actually not the real core fundamental reason why animals survive? That you don’t have to be the biggest, baddest, toughest animal out there. That surprise you?

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Well, you have my attention. Yeah, I am surprised, but you also have my attention. Yeah.

Charlie Gaudet: What you have to do, Darwin’s survival of the fittest, ultimately what it means is if you aid more to the survival of others, they will conspire to aid in your survival. So the same thing applies to business. If you help other people get a greater result, a greater experience, if you help them get more wealth, more money, save more time, feel sexier, find more love, lose more weight in a way that is easier, faster, quicker than anything that they’ve ever tried before, they will conspire to do whatever it takes to help you succeed.

That means they will refer other people to you. That means that they will stay loyal and buy more from you and so forth, and you could see this even with Apple computer. I have a friend of mine that said he moved out to Utah, and I asked him why he chose that location, that specific location in Utah, and he said because we don’t want to be further than, I think it was like 30 minutes away from the closest Apple store and because Apple from him was a big thing.

So the litmus test that I like to ask our clients and I would encourage our listeners to ask themselves this, if your company disappeared overnight, would you be missed? Now, if you think about it, if Apple computer disappeared overnight, some people would, you know, lose their minds. They wouldn’t know what to do. They don’t want to go back to PC. They are not going to go to Chrome books, they will lose their mind.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Nope, yeah.

Charlie Gaudet: But then there are other people, there are other companies out there, I mean, think about it, if Walmart disappeared overnight, I mean, it be shocking that a company that big disappeared overnight but do you think they’d be missed? No, you just do more business at Target or wherever.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Exactly, I would say probably not, but it depends on who you ask, I’m sure.

Charlie Gaudet: If CVS went out of business, you just go to Rite Aid. All these companies out there that are –

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Company experience is transactional, yeah.

Charlie Gaudet: Yeah, it is all transactional so –

Hussein Al-Baiaty: That’s very interesting how to identify and then understand where you are in that, you know, one of two ideas, right? If it is transactional, you make them feel good, and I think when I started speaking, and I really fell in love with it and sort of uncovered a new person inside of me that loves to do this and loves the engagement, especially with the youth, there was a part of me that really became free, right?

But with that, I had to learn the craft of speaking, the craft of storytelling. Again, this idea it’s like once, you know, like yes we can all be born entrepreneurs, but you still have to learn to be an entrepreneur. You still have to go through the trials and tribulations, right? I’ve had a gift like you are at three, four, five years old, I was in a refugee camp watching my father paint while I drew next to him. I drew Mickey Mouse and these things.

I have this gift of drawing, but to learn how to actually use this ability in life and make it something that I can rely on and, you know, which led me again to t-shirts and printing and graphics and design and architecture. So it’s like this one thing, which is picking up a pencil and making a symbol like you did, right? Leads you down this path if you could just trust it enough that it will, once it gets good enough, well-rounded, it will pay off in the long run.

However, you still have to hone in, understand your craft, position your craft, who do you want to serve, what do you want to say with that, all of those things that led me to understand that buyer experience, and I love that you shared those stories because for me, they became like, the people I worked with, clients and everything, that I just always looked at them not as clients or customers, I wanted to become friends or family with them, right?

That is how I always treated people is like I want to turn these people not to just rely on me for this service, but they might call me to go have dinner with them, right? And talk about other things, other than – so how do you position your business to be able to do that, to get so emotional, and when I applied that to speaking, there is a famous quote, right? Like the people won’t remember what you say, but they will remember how you make them feel.

That will ever sit with me so well because it sort of defines how we can carry ourselves and how we can carry ourselves throughout business by making people feel good and helping them do their thing. Like you said, they will come together to make sure that you are still thriving, and when I close down my print shop, man, I got to be honest, there are so many people that reached out to me.

They were like, “Why would you do this? Well, now I have to go find someone else,” you know? And I am so grateful for that because it is missed in that neighborhood, but you know, for me, it was like growth and doing other things and all that good stuff, but you are 100% right. When you are missed, people will look forward to working with you, that’s when you can really drive the change, the impact, all those wonderful things you wish to create.

Charlie, I’ve had an amazing conversation. If there was one thing that you want people to walk away after reading the book, I want to walk away with this feeling, what is that thing, that concept, that feeling that you want people to walk away from your book?

Charlie Gaudet: Oh, the one concept, the one feeling. Well, I would –

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Yeah, you know I got to make it simple.

Charlie Gaudet: I like it.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: It’s not that simple, but I want to simplify it.

Charlie Gaudet: You know, in some cases, I would say confidence. In other words, so many people are sitting there asking themselves, what’s the most important thing that I should be focusing in on right now that’s going to be making the biggest difference in my business? If there is one thing I’d like people to do is be able to see this and, you know, the feedback I’ve gotten is it’s that it creates that aha moment for them.

It’s like, “Ah, this is what I’ve been looking for. This is what’s been missing.” And so yeah, that would be the big feeling that I am hoping people get from this.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Charlie, I learned so much today. Thank you for sharing your stories and your experiences. I feel like we can talk for hours, but I know you don’t have that kind of time. Again, I really appreciate you. I want to ask though, real quickly, if you are, you know, I know your book is very much targeting specific people. Who are those people? And if they are listening, I want them to reach out to you because, man, you have helped so many different types of people at that elite level I would call it, but if they are out there, they are listening to you, who are they?

Charlie Gaudet: We have worked with, you know, multiple different companies. We have clients who are startups, and we have companies, brand companies you would know that are worth hundreds or they’re worth billions, but they are doing, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, but our sweet spot really is that seven, eight-figure entrepreneur.

So if you’re a seven, eight-figure CEO that you’ve realized that most of your success right now has been primarily driven from hard work and you’re looking to scale the company to the next level by applying some real proven strategies, those are going to be our ideal client. That is our sweet spot, and I would encourage anybody to just reach out, and we’ll have a complimentary coaching session and just kind of see what kind of potential is there.

You know, whatever you decide beyond that point, well, you know that is completely up to you, but we believe that every interaction that somebody has with us should be an interaction where there’s, you know, where we can value. So yeah, that’s what I’m saying at, you know, predictableprofits.com is where we’d recommend people to come check us out, and yeah, then we’ll go from there.

Hussein Al-Baiaty: Beautiful. Charlie, thanks again for your time today. The book is called, The Predictable Profits Playbook: The Entrepreneur Guide to Dominating Any Market and Staying on Top. I appreciate your time today, brother. I know this book will impact many people, keep doing what you’re doing. Thanks again.

Charlie Gaudet: Thank you.