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Cut the tie to anything holding you back from success. Welcome to the Cut the Tie podcast. Hi. I'm your host, Thomas Helfrich. And in each episode, we bring you real entrepreneurs that really overcame challenges on their journey to become successful. We look at the impact, the moment, how it affected everything in their lives. Follow us on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. Now let's meet our guest on Cut The Tie podcast.
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Today, I'm joined by Eric Dingler, who is in Liverpool as a digital nomad. Eric, thanks for joining the show today. Hey. I'm excited to be here and unpack some stuff with you. Eric, why don't you introduce yourself and what you do? Sure. My name is Eric, like you said, and I have a digital marketing agency
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in The States. We serve US customers with that. And then I also do some coaching on the side because, like you said, we're digital nomads. My wife and I have lived in 15 countries, 39 Airbnbs in the last three and a half years with our four kids who are now teenagers, and a lot of people hear that we're living this location independent lifestyle, and they wanna know how to do it. And so I coach people to set up their business to be location independent. So I got that. And then the other thing I do was, like I said, my digital marketing agency. So what's your power statement? Like, why do people work with you for, let's say, the digital mark there's a lot of competition. Right? So what's the power statement that gets people hooked to you? We are perpetual first time customers for the last three years, and it's completely changed my approach to digital marketing. We realized very quickly that most people do way too much crap for their marketing. For a local business, it's really simple. So we just have a very simple approach that works. So you guys focus like a localized marketing piece to for Yeah. For my agent. Like local businesses who want people around them. Yeah. Brick and mortar shops, lot of barbers, dentists, but also service based businesses, HVAC, you know, things like that. And so but just a really nice simple marketing system, and we're not done for you. We handle the nerd geeky stuff. We do all the setup and API integrations and all that crap, and then we train you and your team to leverage the system. That's great. I like that model. That's fun. In your own journey, what was kind of the biggest tie you had to cut? For me, easily, it was realizing that real estate agents don't build the houses they sell. And I was spending too much time in the technician seat having myself a job, and so I was I was self employed. And I didn't wanna be self employed. I wanna be a business owner. So I had to stop thinking that I had to be the one that was building everything I was selling. I like that. That's a great analogy. Do you remember the moment when you're like Yeah. I am definitely gonna stop thinking that way or doing that? Yeah. I was in a coaching program with a guy, Mike Schmidt, as a agency coach is what it's called. And he said it one time in passing, and, I mean, I I had to come back to him later and go, hey. Wait a second. When you said and he was like, oh, I don't even think I even realized I said that. And I'm like, dude, that was like the biggest life changing analogy ever for me. And so, yeah, I was in a a Zoom call and just a passing comment that he made that just changed everything. But since that realization, right, there's a journey that happens. Can you talk a little about the journey and then what the impact ended up being for your relationship, your business, your family, or how it just transformed your life? Yeah. So I really started then at that point realizing, like, you know, it's okay to find people that can do this stuff. It's gonna be okay if they even do it better than me. And so started building a team. Luckily, at that point, I had had already been a student of leadership. At the time, this was a side hustle for me. I was pastoring a church and started building websites on the side because my wife wanted to she talked me into adopting. So we adopted two of our four children, and we needed to raise an additional $50 to cover the adoption. And now you can't do that on a pastor's salary. So I started building websites, and I was just I was running myself ragged, you know, selling a website then trying to build it and getting up early in the morning, staying, you know, up late at night working on the weekends. And when I learned that moment, I went out. I found somebody. I hired him to do it. Suddenly, I had more time to go sell more stuff, filled his plate, hired somebody else, had more time to go sell more stuff. And I just realized I just had this multiplication happening in my life of resources, of time and money, and I was able to start giving other people a way to support their fam. And I looked at my wife one day, and I was like, I just wanna keep doing this. And I loved pastoring the church, but I just you know? Well, this was the next thing we wanted to do when we had got to the end of the adoption, had raised plenty to fund our adoption. And so we decided to start a nonprofit to help other families fund their adoptions and run our business to fund our nonprofit. So 51% of our profit goes to our nonprofit. Then one day, we looked around and realized we were about to buy a house and do all these things with our kids, not because we decided to do it. It's just what everybody was doing. It was just what was expected. Who says we have to live life this way? And so we took a three month test trip to Istanbul, Turkey, and all six of us by the end of it was said, we wanna do this for a a while. And so we went back to The States, sold almost everything, and we've been traveling full time for three and a half years and loving it. The business is growing. My kids are growing. My wife and I are having a great time, so it's been a fantastic journey. Did you guys just homeschool kids, or how does that work? Yeah. My wife, she's a rock star. We do what we call world schooling. So the kids, their curriculum changes up a bit based upon wherever we're gonna be in the world. So we leverage the places where the yep. Where they've been doing a little bit of music history and the Beatles and, you know, stuff why we're here in Liverpool. I mean, if you're gonna be in Liverpool, what a great place to have your kids do some some music theory and music theory. So we call it world schooling. You get life experience with it. If you were to kinda give some advice to a listener, to anybody, right, you know, from business or just life in general, how would you distill that down to a few sentences? Well, I think it would be when I was pastoring, I sat at the deathbed of people in hospice care and and sat with more than one person, and they were dying. And and I can't tell you how many stories I heard about all the dreams that were never chased. My wife and I both have this dash tattoo between the thumb and pointer finger of our right hand, and it's to remind us to make the most of our dash. Everybody one day, you're gonna have a birth date and a death date on your tombstone. And in between, that's gonna be a dash, and that dash is your life. So be intentional with it. Don't hold back. I I can't tell you how many people Tom is telling me. I can't live that way. I have kids.
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We're doing it. There's lots of ways to you don't have to homeschool your kids. There are schools everywhere. I know families that travel as a pod, and they travel with a teacher. They these families come together and and travel as a coop group, and they just take a teacher with them. So there's all kinds of ways to do it. And and leadership You're choosing the life you wanna live Yeah. And not the things in the life you wanna have. There you go. Absolutely. I love it. The romantic idea of it is from, like, a Dave Matthews song. It's like, you know, why we lie in our graves wondering what things we could have been. Right? You know, wishing we had done more, wishing we had we had done well. I love it. A % love it. And I applaud you for the courage and the criticism I'm sure you take from family or other people, and you're like, I don't care about that noise. I think that's one of the best entrepreneurial lessons is don't care what other people think. If you think and you know it to be right for you, go do it. So I and that's what you're doing. So I love I I applaud you for that. That's amazing, truly. Really big courage and and execution.
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The other the other thing is this. People talk to us all the time, and they're like, well, but but, you know, kids, you know, they gotta go to school and and and they gotta do this. You know? And we're like, wait a second. What was it like a hundred and fifty years ago, three hundred years ago, five hundred years ago? We made it a long way as a human race without our kids going to an organized public school. Okay? So the humans have the capacity to learn and not have to be, you know, locked into the experience you had growing up. Don't let your experience that you had growing up define your definition of what reality is. Reality
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can be a lot of what you make it. I look at systems and things, especially after starting to cut the tie podcast. I was like, what lies have been sold? Or what things don't aren't really true? Education's important. I think you need to know how to do math, and how to communicate, and read, and write. I think there's very fundamental things you need to do to survive and learn, so so you can set yourself up to learn in the future, leveraging technology and things like that. But and I throw the button there. It's not and, but education is designed to teach you to go work somewhere and repeat. It teaches you the processes to show up to work every day in the way that a corporation has been built. It does not teach you to be creative and survive on your own. It teaches you to be dependent on something else and then put yourself into a funnel of things that tie you to it longer, mortgages, car payments, credit cards, things you want. And there's there's a world for that, and you and there's a lot of people who love that. It's comfortable and whatever, but there's a lot who don't. There's nothing absolutely wrong with taking the other route, the the route, not less traveled, the route most traveled by humans over time, to be fair. And and I I applaud you I really do apologize if you do it because that's what you I'm sure you see is that that is just nothing more than a system that you're getting part of, and you don't have to be a part of it if you don't choose to. Yeah. Love it. A couple wrap rapid fire questions for you. I appreciate you sharing that, by the way. Who gives you inspiration?
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Oh my gosh. Who gives me inspiration? That's a good question. And to be honest, my team, I love leading a team. I'm inspired by them and their accomplishments and their questions and their wonder and just I like I mean, that's a great thing. I absolutely love that. In your journey, what's the best business advice you've ever received? I don't wanna sound like a a broken record, but real estate agents don't build the houses they sell. Yeah. And I would say that onto that, somebody once told me, if you wanna know what somebody knows, read what they've read. That was a another useful piece of information. We'll give you the the last piece of Old time pastor many years ago. Just an old, old pastor. What do you think is the must read book for entrepreneurs? In a pit with a lion on a snowy day is a great book about overcoming your fears. You know, what a fear, f e a r, false evidence appearing real. And so many people were just held back by fear. That's nothing. It's not it's nothing. There's no realness to it. It's not necessarily a business book, but something that applies to business, marriage, parenting,
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all of life. It's a great book. You're a pastor. You get this. If you if you are living separate lives, you are living any lie. Yeah. And that's a I mean, you can get deep in the philosophical and theological pieces behind that, but the truth is they are very much so connected. And if you can't be yourself in both, you are not yourself in either. Well, I you don't need to be a pastor to spread the word. You can do that anywhere. Yeah. I love that. In the marketing world, what's kind of your favorite technology right now? You know, I love
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data for marketing, and so there's a tool we use that creates for again, I'm talking local businesses that creates a geogrid. It's called a geogrid report. It shows a business where they're ranking on Google Maps street by street. Because you may be ranking in first place at your office, but you go a quarter mile either direction in your twentieth place. That's why your phone's not ringing. Google Maps and Google Business is one of the greatest gifts given to businesses, and most businesses aren't leveraging it. It's free access to a billion dollars to a multibillion dollar system that will drive new customers to your local business on a regular basis, and it doesn't cost you a dime. And so it's just I really like the combination of that for marketing to business. People should get a hold of you to understand what you're talking about with that because
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it is an untapped market of what's freely available. And what happens is people get in the weeds with their business and they're like, they don't have time they don't make time for it, and they should make time for that kind of stuff because it's it's an accelerator. If you had to start over, when would you do that and what would you do for it? If I had to start anything over, it would be
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I would say when I got married, I would have said, babe, let's hit the open road. I started traveling sooner. And so to do that, I've always been a student of leadership, but I wish I would have started studying sales a long time ago. I would go back to the year we got married, and I'd go all in on studying, you know, leadership and sales. Because I think for an entrepreneur, leadership your leadership capacity is the capacity of your business. Your business will never go beyond your leadership capacity. Can't happen. I think those are the two most critical skills for an entrepreneur. If there's one question I should ask you today and I didn't, what's that question and how would you have answered it? I think that the question that, would have been great if you'd have asked is, what's the potential pitfall of the the hustle of an entrepreneur? Because it is a hustle, you know? And and especially, you know, if you're trying to pivot from a nine to five to, you know, having your own business. So what's a pitfall to be aware of? And how I would have answered that is don't lose your family in the hustle. What sense is there to get to your dream
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one day to get there and find out that you're all alone? So don't abandon the people that matter most as you're hustling and and going out there to win. The book I've written called Cut the Tie, that's at the core of that book is I wanted my kids I don't honestly, I don't care if anyone else reads it. If my long as my kids understand how I was thinking and feeling and explaining what will become when they're adults of what was going on while building a business. And I feel so much guilt sometimes and regret of things you miss, how you act because of stress and stuff. So you're spot on on that. Don't forget about those on the journey in the car with you. Don't don't leave them at the rest stop on the way to your on your, journey. That's a great reflection. I would tell you to write a book about it, but I already did. Alright. Shameless plug time for you. Who should get ahold of you, and how do they do it? If somebody is listening and they have a local type business, my agency, you know, I'd love to help them out. They can connect with them on that. And if somebody's wanting to set up their business or life to be location independent, I'd love to help them with that. Best thing to do is connect with me on LinkedIn. I actually have a my vanity URL, ericdengler.com,
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will forward you right to LinkedIn. So jump over LinkedIn, connect with me there, and let me know what you wanna talk about there. I got plenty of free resources. I mean, I'll, you know, I'll give you, you know, a a resource for free to help you out whichever one of those you want. But I just love to have you in my network and and start a conversation. Awesome. Fantastic. Eric, thank you so much for coming on today. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Cut the Time. Let's stay connected. Please hit that follow button on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube. And if you're ready to advance your entrepreneurial journey even further, join our free community at facebook.com/groups/cutthetie.
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Cut the tie to everything holding you back from success.