Ep. #705: Newsy News How: How to Win in 2023 and Not Suck at Business

Hi, I’m Mike Matthews. This is Muscle For Life. Welcome, welcome. Thank you for spending some time with me today. This episode is part of a series I’m calling Newsy News. How? Because it consists of news of what’s going on. Over here at Legion hq, which includes, of course, legion specific things like what new products and services we’re working on, as well as what else we might be up to that would be of interest to you.

And it’s also a way for me to tell you about what else I’m working on. For example, books. I’m always working on the next book, and I’m always working on the next big idea for spreading my brand of effect. And evidence-based fitness further and farther. So let’s get to today’s hose down of what’s going down.

Also, if you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my v i p. One-on-one coaching service because my team and I have helped people of all ages and all circumstances lose fat, build muscle, and get into the best shape of their life faster than they ever thought possible.

And we can do the same for you. We make getting fitter, leaner, and stronger, paint by numbers simple, by carefully managing every aspect of your training and your diet for you. Basically, we take out all of the guesswork, so all you have to do is follow the plan and watch your body change day after day, week after week, and month after month.

What’s more, we’ve found that people are often missing just one or two crucial pieces of the puzzle, and I’d bet a shiny sheckle, it’s the same with you. You’re probably doing a lot of things right, but dollars to donuts, there’s something you’re not doing correctly or at all. That’s giving you the most grief.

Maybe it’s your calories or your macros. Maybe it’s your exercise selection. Maybe it’s your food choices. Maybe you’re not progressively overloading your muscles, or maybe it’s something else, and whatever it is, here’s what’s important. Once you identify those one or two things you’re missing. Once you figure it out, that’s when everything finally clicks.

That’s when you start making serious progress. And that’s exactly what we do for our clients. To learn more, head over to www.buy legion.com. That’s B by legion.com/vip, and schedule your free consultation call, which by the way is not a high pressure sales call. It’s really just a discovery call where we get to know you better and see if you’re a good fit for the service.

And if you’re not for any reason, we will be able to share resources. That’ll point you in the right direction. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, and if you also want to finally stop spinning your wheels and make more progress in the next few months than you did in the last few years, check out my VIP coaching [email protected] legion.com/vip.

Well, well, well, 2021 is here. Orange Man is out. The great reset is in, and we are still waiting for this grinding fever dream to end. Can we leash this global tornado? Can we learn to ride this chaos like a horse maybe who can know? But here’s how we can do our part first. We can refuse to submit to calls for apathy and hysteria.

We can view any attempts to make us hopeless and afraid, especially the underhanded ones that are disguised as just good natured guidance as what they are emotional. Assaults on our wellbeing, we can fight back not only by cultivating the opposite mindset through action and optimism, but also by regarding such encroachments as repugnant.

We can protect our minds against these virulent pathogens as we would our body. We can also consume less media, and that is a natural follow up to the first point, of course, because there is a reason. Why much of the media specializes in creating outrage and despair? And it’s money. Shocker. And how does that work?

Well, it’s pretty simple. The scandalous and the sensational grabs a lot of eyes and it grabs a lot of ears and it stimulates a lot of word of mouth, and that makes media companies a lot of money. So a challenge for you. Stop watching the news and stop reading the rags for a couple of weeks and see what happens.

How do you feel? How is your product? Activity. How are your relationships? How much do you care to go back? We can also make our health and fitness a priority, and many people oppose many opinions these days, but only a wacky doodle would disagree that healthy is better than unwell. Strong is better than weak, and functional is better than defective.

The science truly is settled here. Eating well and exercising is just good for what ails you, and it doesn’t have to take much either with a little. Of the right things done often enough over the long term, you can achieve outstanding health, fitness, and functions. So if you are not on your way to healthy, strong, and functional yet, I’d love to see you start.

And if you need some help, email me [email protected] and let’s chat. And if you are already on your way, if you are already working to make your 2021 body fitter, leaner and stronger, then you’ll be happy to hear that my merry band of marauders and I will be getting up to quite a few things during these pandemonium quarantine to make your journey more rewarding.

For example, for the last few months, if you are a customer of legions, you’ve noticed that we have been running out of stock of some of our most popular flavors and even some of our most popular products. Very frustrating. I understand. And for that, I apologize if you are staring down empty bottles of your favorite Legion supplements.

Mea culpa, gentle listener. Really? Now what happened? Well, basically the whole international sports nutrition supply chain got absolutely keel, hauled by the cove, and now it’s wobbling around like a concussed squirrel. And so last year the production lead times. Doubled, tripled, even quadrupled, leaving me and many others in the proverbial lurch.

Thankfully, however, the industry is on the mend and the cavalry is coming. Legion will be back in stock of just about everything by the end of this month and the rest next month, probably 90% or so this month, and the remaining 10% will be back next month. We are also working to upgrade our inventory and logistics systems with enterprise level software and staff.

And we’ve also placed downright sphincter shrinking sized orders with several rock solid manufacturers. And so if it pleases your grace, I humbly request more of your Princely patients while we replenish our meager stores and ready ourselves once again to revel in your generous patronage. Now we also have a new mission.

And a new motto for 2021, and it goes like this, make Legion great at building back better again. And we can’t succeed in that mission without the support of psychopathic pedophile, plutocrat. No, I mean, hardworking, humble heroes like you. So please prepare. To give us all of your money, plus whatever you can borrow in exchange for several new products that we have in the Legion Hopper, including an all new Phoenix formulation that’ll come in two varieties with and without caffeine.

That’s new because currently Phoenix is only available. Without caffeine, and we also have a 30 serving recharge coming, a 15 serving way plus as well as a 10 serving pulse. So that means you’ll be able to switch up your flavors more often and maybe try some things that you haven’t tried because you haven’t wanted to commit.

To a full bottle. And we also have more flavors to like love and lay your lusty hands on, like blue raspberry and grape recharge and cocoa cereal, way plus, and all of those things should be out by summer. And then, Later this year, now we’re talking q3, q4, we will be releasing even more flavors of some of our popular products.

We will be releasing single serving sachets of pulse and weight, plus our all new protein bars. Protein bars 2.0. And I’m really excited to get these out because although I liked. Protein bars 1.0 and many customers did as well. They got a lot of good reviews. 2.0 is just better. We found a better manufacturer that just does a better job period.

The 2.0 bars taste better. They keep better so they can sit. On the shelf or in your pantry for longer and still be delicious. And I think the mouthfeel is better too. And so yeah, very excited to get those out later this year. We also have protein cookies on the way. The first samples are en route. I think we should be receiving them next week.

And it’s the same manufacturer of the bars, so they’re gonna be good. It’s not going to be an instant approval, obviously. I’m sure we’ll have to tweak some things, but I would guess that we are placing the order for the protein cookies within a month or so. We also have a prebiotic and probiotic combo supplement coming, which is unique.

Usually you have to buy one or the other, and many people buy both. And the probiotic in particular is something that we get asked about often. A lot of people, a lot of customers have requested a probiotic, and so we have that coming. We have a hydration drink coming, an electrolyte drink coming, an intra workout basically, and particularly for longer workouts and endurance workouts and more.

That’s not even everything. That’s just some of the things.

If you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, definitely check out my v i p. One-on-one coaching service because my team and I have helped people of all ages and circumstances lose fat, build muscle, and get into the best shape of their life faster than they ever thought possible. And we can do the same for you.

Now hard right? Turn here to talk, not about supplements, not about health, not about fitness, but business. Running a business. If you sell things to people, here’s some free advice. Treat them the way that you would like to be treated. Even when it costs you something. Because if you don’t, a podcast like this is what can happen, a podcast that goes out to tens of thousands of people and explains to all of them just how much of a jabi you are.

What am I chattering about? Well, a few months ago, my family and I were considering moving to Jackson, Wyoming because, well, it’s Jackson, Wyoming, if you’ve been there. You understand? We worked with a company called the Clear Creek Group to rent a house for a month to get a foretaste of what it might be like to live in the equality state.

Now, per usual, the scenery was stunning. Again, just Google, Jackson, Wyoming Mule, see what I’m talking about? And the house was no slouch either or. So I thought lo and behold, this wasn’t just any 10 million home in the Halon Hills of Teton County. And yes, Jackson real estate prices make about as much sense as PB and pickle sandwiches?

No, no. This house was teeming with a bunch of nature’s biggest assholes, bugs. So first there were ugly little raisin looking fly, buzzing around, lounging around, and rather, Curiously dying on window sills where their grubby corpses would pile up like a medieval charnel house. It gets better though because then there was one of nature’s super assholes.

The yellow jacket also buzzing, lounging, and inexplicably expiring on window sills. What’s more, do you know what happens to wasps as winter approaches? Well, when the heat of summer dissolves into the chill of autumn, their food becomes scarce. They realize they’re living on borrowed time and they get pissed and aggressive.

So I contacted the Clear Creek Group to compliment them on their lovely and Secar, but sadly, there was nothing they could do short of bathing the place in scathing hellfire. So I start vacuuming the little bastards up several times per day, but they just. Kept coming and by the end of week one of what was supposed to be a four week sojourn, my wife and I had had enough.

It was time to abort. Now this is where you’d expect to hear that we left and we got our money back, but I recorded this podcast because that’s not what happened. Instead, the owner of the Clear Up Shit Creek Group, a eunuch named Morgan, tried to hoodwink me into believing that he legally, Couldn’t offer a full refund because the owners of the house, maybe the bugs were only willing to refund two thirds of my money.

And no, you didn’t miss here. This planer claimed that the State of Wyoming forbade his business from writing me a check for the difference between what I paid to stay in the bug hotel and what the owners of it wanted to give back to me. Yeah, very fake news, but in the end, it wasn’t worth pursuing any sort of legal action, so I got shortchanged one third of my money.

And so here we are now, not because of the money per se, I’ll survive, but because of the principle. You suck Morgan, and now tens of thousands of people know that you suck. And actually hundreds of thousands because I emailed this story out to over 500,000 email subscribers as well, and this whole scenario, this situation.

Is one reason, by the way, that Legion’s policy is to do whatever it takes to make our customers happy. We give refunds, we reship products, we give other rewards and gifts. You name it, we do whatever it takes to end on a good note regardless of how bad things were to start out with. Now, fortunately, we don’t have.

Too many major problems, but sometimes shipments get messed up. Sometimes they don’t arrive. Sometimes people just don’t like what they bought and they would like something else. And again, my customer experience team knows that they’re authorized to do basically anything within reason. To make it right, even if the person has made it clear that they are not gonna shop with us anymore.

I still want to end on a positive note because who knows, maybe they will come back one day or if nothing else, maybe when somebody asks them about their Legion protein and what happened. They’ll have something good to say. If they didn’t like the product, they’ll say, you know, yeah, it wasn’t for me. I didn’t really like the taste or the mouth feel or whatever, but when I contacted their customer service, they gave me an immediate refund.

They didn’t ask me to even send the product back. They just gave me my money back. Who does that? And that approach to customer experience is good juju, first and foremost, it just is, but it’s also good business because it can generate word of mouth. Even when again, they didn’t like your product and they don’t plan on shopping with you anymore, they still can help you get customers by just mentioning how great your customer service was, despite them not liking the product.

And then the other point is you never know who might be on the other end of a transaction. For example, we have a number of celebrities and AF. Fleets, including some A-listers as regular customers. And in some cases you can find the orders under their names, but in other cases you wouldn’t know because they have an assistant doing the purchasing for them, for example.

And if one of these people who was purchasing for someone else was asking for some help or wanted to exchange something or refund something, and one of my people were to search their name and not find anything and be like, eh, whatever, peasant. Well, that could turn into some serious bad publicity, but because we’re not like that, because we just treat everyone like an Alister, we’ve never had to deal with any sort of scandal like that.

Anyway, I’ll hop off the soapbox now. And oh, by the way, I also want to give big ups to last month’s champion giveaway winner, Craig Kay, who won a legion. Center logo tea, a blender bottle, 100 reward points, and two products of his choice. He chose our multivitamin triumph, as well as our post-workout.

Recharge and winning stuff is cool, right? If you want to win stuff too, all you have to do is go over to legion athletics.com, join our rewards program. The link is on the menu. Unlock the champion tier and then you will be. Automatically entered to win every month. Something you should also know about our rewards program is it’s basically a 5% cashback program.

The points that you get are worth 5% of the money that you have to spend to get them. So for every dollar you get 5 cents back in points that you then can apply toward future orders of anything. And we have no weird limits or restrictions or gotchas, for example, if you have enough points to get your entire order for free.

Then you get it for free. And there are some other perks to the rewards program as well, and that’s something I’m gonna be beefing up even more this year. I wanna make our rewards program truly best in class. I would say it’s already one of the best rewards programs in the sports nutrition space, but I want to really set the standard for what a rewards program should look like.

So that’s probably gonna be one of my next big projects that I’m working on. I have a couple of things I have to wrap up and then I’m gonna dive into giving the rewards program a lot of love. But, um, anyways, you can learn more about it [email protected]. Again, it is on the menu rewards. All right.

Well, that’s it for today’s episode. I hope you found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and you don’t mind doing me a favor, could you please leave a quick review for the podcast on iTunes or wherever you are listening from? Because those reviews not only convince people that they should check out the show, they also increase the search visibility.

And help more people find their way to me and to the podcast and learn how to build their best body ever as well. And of course, if you wanna be notified when the next episode goes live, then simply subscribe to the podcast in whatever app you’re using to listen and you will not miss out on any of the.

New stuff that I have coming and last, if you didn’t like something about the show, then definitely shoot me an email at mike muscle for life.com and share your thoughts. Let me know how you think I could do this better. I read every email myself and I’m always looking for constructive feedback. All right, thanks again for listening to this episode, and I hope to hear from you soon.