Be Smartr with Jason Criddle

Episode 318: Be Smartr with Jason Criddle

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When people hear affiliate marketing, it is easy for them to associate it with Amazon. To clear the confusion, Jason Criddle shows how easy it is to start a business with affiliate marketing. He is an international best-selling author, investor, and CEO of SmartrHoldings. Together, Jason and host Mitch Stephen explain how simple and genius affiliate marketing is that you will wonder why you didn’t hop on it sooner. They also detail how technology makes it all possible and trustworthy through the Smartr App so you can take the first step right here in this episode.

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I’m here with Jason Criddle. We’re going to be talking about affiliate marketing, which is something that’s very dear to my heart because I started this show to engage with people, to learn from people, to expose myself and to maybe pick up some more students. I learned about affiliate marketing and it changed my entire income structure and not just by a little bit, by a lot. I’m excited to talk about this subject of affiliate marketing and how you can be going about your daily business and get paid for your recommendations or your referrals. Jason, tell us a little bit about you and your background and then we’ll jump into the affiliate marketing program that I think everyone in the world should be aware of, the concept itself.

Whenever people think of affiliate marketing, I think they automatically compartmentalize the word Amazon and people are always blogging and trying to sell these products. Whenever we look at the day-to-day interactions and conversations that we have with people, we’re always talking and recommending products. After years of consulting with businesses, teaching sales, which is what I do, I learned that your average small business, nine out of ten of their customers are referrals. I wanted to give people the ability to take advantage of what affiliate marketing has to offer, but still be accessible to the small business. This idea started out as a multilevel marketing company many years ago. We decided to work towards an affiliate model because after consulting with multilevel marketing companies for years, I didn’t like the fact that you had this asset-building structure but you had to pay to participate. I wanted to give your average small business owner the ability to increase sales, the ability to increase traffic through day-to-day interactions with people. That’s why we started Smartr Marketing to give businesses apps that would allow referrals to come in and get more products sold.

For those who are not familiar with affiliate marketing, the term or exactly what it means, tell me if I do a good job at this. I’m going to wing it here, but let’s say you have a friend who does roofs. You’re walking through town one day and this guy in this commercial building is complaining that he’s got to get a new roof and this new roof’s going to be worth a lot of money. It’s a commercial roof. You think to yourself, “I know a guy that’s perfect for doing this job.” You pick up the phone and you call your friend and say, “There’s this big job going down. Have you heard about this job at so-and-so building?” They say, “No,” and you say, “I think you need to call my friend. He owns this building and maybe you can throw me a bone if you get the job. I’ll call the guy. I’ll recommend you highly and see if I can help you get the job.” The guy with the roof says, “Yeah, I’ll give you some referral fee.” The guy puts on a $100,000 roof on this commercial building and he sends the man $10,000 or $5,000 for like, “Thanks for that lead. Without you, I’d never met this person. I’d never gotten this job.” The only difference is you can do this where that’s kind of a handshake, good-old-boy, we trust each other agreement.

What happens in the affiliate space is when your customer clicks on your affiliate link and Jason gets a sale, it’s right there for the world to see. Jason can’t deny or argue about whether there was a sale made or not because I got a portal to the back door to look into my sales in real-time and Jason has a portal to look at sales real-time. The magic of the software is that neither he nor I can go in and manipulate it. Those sales are self-evident. Someone can’t say, “No, we only got two sales,” when they got ten. You say, “No, you’ve got ten and they’re right here,” and a good affiliate marketing software will not allow any parties to manipulate the sales that come through so everybody knows what they’re supposed to get paid.

Mitch, that was awesome. You did a perfect job. That’s exactly what I write about and what I talk about. I’ve always thought it’s funny that a small business owner will tell somebody, “If you send me a friend, I’ll give them a discount.” That seems backward to me. It should be more like, “If you send me a friend, I should give you an incentive.” A lot of these deals are made on a handshake basis and small business owners are always willing to share 5%, 10%, 20% of a sale but there’s no real way to keep track of this. There’s no real way for it to be secure. If it’s all based on a transaction that’s being done inside a piece of software that nobody can manipulate, it’s safe, it’s secure, then that allows me to know exactly how many referrals I sent to you and exactly how much I’m getting paid from each one of those referrals.

The great point too though. Let’s say that in that example that I used, the guy with the roofs says, “We’re going to put a patch on it for a year. I got to come up with this a $100,000. A year goes by, I forgot about this conversation. That conversation is over. The thought of me getting affiliate fee or a referral fee from that job is the furthest thing from my mind now. It’s been a year and all of a sudden the guy orders the job, it gets done. I get notified that there’s an order that happened for that $100,000 roof that we were talking about a year ago. You can set this affiliate marketing to stay with these leads for as long as you want but that’s an agreement. When people sell my stuff, if you bring them to my attention, I’ll give them a couple of years. If they buy something within a couple of years, you get paid, but there’s got to be some ending point. For me, I think a couple of years is good, but I don’t know what’s normal.

It could be forever. One year, two years is not something that anybody worries about. I understand the point. I think what it comes down to is the ability to stack those leads. I think that’s what’s strong about it because you’re not going to have that one conversation with that one roofer. If you have a friend that does roofs and that friend has a secure affiliate system that allows you to recommend and send him business, I’m going to go out and bird dog for that roof for all day long.

At first I probably threw it out there, but when I get that check for $10,000 on one day, there’s a surprise in the mail. Believe me, my ears are wide open and my eyes are wide open for people that need roofs and you know who I’m going to recommend. That’s the whole point of a good affiliate marketing system. Make it worth it for people to go out of their way to recommend you. It might be you’re sitting at a restaurant and you hear someone talking about a roof three tables down. If I didn’t get that check or I wasn’t promised or incentivized by that check, I’m going to go up and pay my tab and leave the restaurant. Since I know that I have a chance to make a little bit of money, I’m going to order a lot. I’m going to stop by and say, “I know this guy. Excuse me for overhearing a conversation I probably wasn’t supposed to be listening to, but I’m in the roofing business and I heard you talking about roofs and it perked me up. I want to give you my recommendation here. Here’s the guy to call and get a bid, please.”

Exactly, and the incentive to get paid is like that old saying, “If money doesn’t motivate you, are you still breathing?” I can’t remember how it goes, but it comes down to the small businesses, they need affiliates. That person that’s recommending that roof, they can make money from a roofer. They can make money from the pool guy, they can make money from their friend that has the nail salon, and they could make money from AC companies. Our system allows people the ability to promote any brands that they would normally use in their life and get paid. They download an app for whatever brand they want to promote, even if they were just promoting Mitch and every single time a sale comes through one of those pieces of software, one of those companies’ apps, they get paid. Once you get that $10,000 check in the mail or even that first $100 from the brand you’re promoting, it’s going to make you go, “I could do this more. I got three, four or five businesses that I want to promote.”

This is what happened to me. I was referring some people and someone volunteered to say, “If someone makes a sale, I’ll pay you an affiliate fee. I thought, “That’s interesting. How does that work?” I did my deal, we did the show or whatever and he made, six or seven or eight sales and I got a nice check. I wasn’t going to retire off of it, but it was a check from heaven, it was free money. I thought, “How does that work?” I looked at my own industry and there are many people out in this world that you could go out to.

All these businesses from insurance to home inspectors to roofers, to carpenters to everything, and people are always calling me, “Who do you recommend? Who can I get for this job?” I started thinking, “The best guy I know is this guy over here.” I make up a phone call and I say, “How much do you charge for carpet per square foot?” He says, “XXX amount.” I said, “Would you be willing to pay me 10% if I sent you some people?” He said, “Sure.” It didn’t cost my customer anymore or any less. I just got paid for going out on my way to pay attention to make sure that he got the deal. That’s the other thing. It does not cost the customer more in most cases.

Most of these small businesses are out there and they’re spending thousands of dollars on advertising. They’re trying to get business through Google, they’re trying to get business through any of these social media platforms. The thing about putting all this money into advertising is regardless of how successful your advertising campaign is, you still paid for it. To me, it makes a lot more sense to share that money with your customers instead of paying thousands of dollars into these platforms.

You’ve made a great point. Let’s flip the tables. Let’s say you’re a small business. You can go gamble on pay-per-click or go through the learning curve that it takes to figure out which messages finally connects with your audience. By then you’ve spent thousands that didn’t produce or you could say, “It’s so much easier to pay a commission when the money hits the table than it is to gamble, that you’re going to pay for the advertising and pray that the money’s going to hit the table so that you can not only pay back the advertising, but make a profit.” Maybe the small businesses out there should listen to this, especially because you should have a referral program where you pay people to refer you because you only have to pay them when you collect. It’s easy to pay for advertising when you pay for it as the customer writes a check to you.

Exactly, and a lot of small businesses spend time, money, effort, and years trying to find good salespeople. They spend tons of money trying to educate people on how to sell their product or service. It makes it a lot easier if you give your existing clientele, anybody that does have access to you, give them the ability to be an affiliate for you. It makes more sense than any option that is out there. One of the beauties of our software is from a small business perspective. Let’s think about that small business person that’s trying to 1099 a bunch of salespeople. They don’t have to worry about that with our software. If they have 1,000 new people out there promoting their company, then our company, our software takes care of all their tax paperwork. All the business owners have to do is get the program going and share it with their audience.

Affiliate Marketing: Through affiliate marketing, small business owners will have the ability to increase sales and traffic through day to day interactions with people.

This is a brilliant idea. You’re offering companies the chance to set up their own affiliate marketing to give people that are habitual referrers or in the book, The Tipping Point, they were called mavens. There were people that were good at when they liked the product, they told the world about it, whether they got paid or not. I think they were called mavens. When you find a maven, someone who really loves your product, if you did a service for a customer that was so happy with you, you offer them the affiliate, “If you refer me to someone and your referral gets paid and takes advantage of my service, you’re going to get paid.” You’re offering to be the backend for my company so that I can give out referral links, which are specific links for Mrs. Jones. If someone clicks on this link, Mrs. Jones is getting paid. If someone clicks on this other link, it’s a little bit different customized, then Mr. Smith is going to get paid a commission and you’ve got the whole backend done. I don’t have to invent it or keep track of it or send out the 1099 or whatever it is for the IRS. Did I have that right?

Yeah, but I’ll take it a step further. Ours is based on apps and we took it even a step further. Somebody can have a branded app, a company can have its own app in the App Store. “Download my app,” and as soon as somebody registers for that app, then all of a sudden they are in the system and they’re a referee. They have their own referral code and the more people that register on this app, they have contact, they have your marketplace, and they have your website. They have full contact or the full ability to get in contact with you and your business but the small business owner also has an app out there on people’s phones. They can send push notifications to those affiliates. They can say, “We have these specials, we’re doing this contest, we’re having these coupons, these promotions.” All I do is share my referral code with whoever. They go and download the app. They make the purchase, I make money. It’s taking it a little bit further than what’s available out there on the web.

You’re a genius. That’s out of this world. What an idea. I’m going to give out this link and you are going to be able to take advantage. Tell the readers what they’re going to get when they go to this link.

Whenever people download the Smartr Marketing app, which is available in iOS or Android, and they register on the app, it’s going to ask them for a referral code. They’re going to put in the referral code, Mitch. The reason why they’re becoming an affiliate for Smartr Marketing is that Smartr Marketing is the platform that we use to sell the affiliate software. Once somebody earns $100, then they are on our regular payment schedule. They start getting paid week after week for sending us referrals, but their incentive is whenever they put in the word Mitch, they get $20 to start, $20 towards their first $100 in earnings.

I will be an affiliate for you and then it goes down the line?

Exactly, and it’s multigenerational. If a person sends a friend and a person sends a friend, then two or three purchases down the line, you’re still making a percentage of every purchase that goes through the app.

I may have a couple of companies that we need to do this with myself. I want to get in touch with you myself and ask you how to work for a couple of companies I have. I have no doubt that it works because every company in the world can use a referral.

Every company in the world needs an affiliate program. It’s that simple. If they sell a product or service to make income, which is pretty much every business in the world, then they need affiliates.

There are probably people sitting around right now, stay-at-home moms or somebody that needs something to do, this is one of those things I’d write down in my book. I have this list of things that if the fit ever hits the shan, my life goes upside down and I need to start completely over again, what are those ideas that I had? If I have to start over again, I’m going to look at this business or I’m going to look at this company. I’m probably pretty secure these days and I wouldn’t make this my full-time business because I have other things. I see people all around me all the time that need a home-based business or need part time or need a new start in life and I’m going to refer this business to them because this business could be huge. Do you have some case studies of what it’s possible to make?

Yeah. As the year goes on, we’re launching directories of companies that use the software to break down exactly how much you can get paid from referring to those companies. We’re launching a couple of case studies. The thing that touched on what you said is every single person in the world knows a small business owner. Every single person in the world knows somebody who’s trying to build a brand. I’m a stay-at-home parent. I’m a full-time father to a little girl and I homeschool her. Whenever I think about my friends that own these brands, I could be sending them business now but I’m not sending them business because I don’t know if they’ll follow through on the handshake.

It is giving the small business owner the ability to have a tool that allows me to keep track of my referrals and that allows me to keep track of all the money that I’m being paid from those companies. That is a very cool tool and from the small business owner perspective, this doesn’t cost thousands of dollars. They can get their own app in the iOS and Android app stores starting at $50 a month, and then they range to $100 a month, $200 a month. To me, whenever I hear that I can have my own affiliate marketing app in the app stores, I think to myself, “How many brands can I launch? How many of these companies can I get off the ground now?” Because if someone’s willing to spend thousands of dollars a month on paying for ad impressions that they don’t know if it’s going to work, then why not have two, three, five different apps out there and use this small entry-level fee of $50 a month to test market and see which product or brand is going to work? It makes a lot more sense than paying for ad impressions to me.

We’re going to go to 1000houses.com/Smartr. Learn how you can start your own business setting up companies to get to be able to pay affiliates a fee. Learn how to set up your own company or your own product or service. Start collecting people that are going to refer you business and start paying for the business when you get it, instead of gambling in advance, whether or not you’re going to get on this billboard or this TV ad or this pay-per-click or whatever. Stop gambling and try out this form of advertising where you only pay when your customer purchases, paying for the referral when your customer purchases. It’s hard to go broke like that, isn’t it?

Exactly, because you’re not losing anything. The only thing that a small business owner is out is the monthly investment of the software, but they’re going to make that back with one to three sales. Instead of hiring that salesperson for a few dollars an hour, instead of spending that money on advertising, get your business started on an app and you pay the promoter fee whenever a purchase is made. You’re not losing anything. You have your marketplace, allow your customers to go around and shop and share their referral codes and it’s going to help increase your bottom line and your ability to reach out to more people. If you’re the small business owner, the single mom at home that’s trying to get her makeup brand off the ground and you get ten or so people using your app and sharing your app, it’s going to become serious for them when they do get paid. Once they see that payment that’s waiting for them in their wallet inside the app, they’re going to go out and promote.

Especially the women that are using your makeup, if they’re happy customers, they should automatically be one of your referral clients, one of your affiliates because they’re using it. They wouldn’t be using it if they didn’t enjoy it. When someone asked them about their makeup or when she’s got a good friend that she wants to volunteer, she’s going to volunteer her but she’s going to make it a little bit more of a point to volunteer the information because she’s been receiving checks in the mail for these referrals and that makes it exciting. I have five people, would you be interested in doing a little Zoom for me with five or six or maybe even ten people that I could put on a Zoom call? I know a lot of people that need a chance to make some money like this on their own, entrepreneurial. If they can take it big, if they can figure out how to parlay it or they get with it and they figure out how to make it turn, then they’re going to be 100% recipient of that increase in sales. That’s what entrepreneurialism is about.

Affiliate Marketing: Instead of spending thousands of dollars for ad impressions that are not sure to work, have one to three apps on an entry-level of $50 to start affiliate marketing.

If you work for another company and you figure out how to make them an extra $100,000 a month, what are they going to give you? A ten-day vacation and a $10,000 bonus and they are making an extra $1 million a year for life. When you’re an entrepreneur and you get involved with a production potential, you work when you want, you work how you want. Go smart and you get good at it. The sky is the limit on the pay and every time you come up with a great idea or another way to bring some more customers to your customers, you’re a 100% beneficiary of the increase. What I know about my own life is I would go months, sometimes years, and then I’d have this epiphany. I’d implement with this one little idea that I had that someone told me and all of a sudden my sales went up. It’s a $20,000 a month increase. I was the 100% recipient of that increase because I owned it. This is the opportunity that’s being offered now, entrepreneurialism.

I have made as much as $62,000 in one month because of affiliate marketing. Net, after taxes. I’m just one guy and I’m not talking about Jason’s program, but I’m talking about he’s taken what I’ve done and put it on steroids. I did it the hard way and I’m still continuing to do it the hard way. I think I’m going to have a long conversation with Jason here because I didn’t plan on making it. The month that I made $62,000 net, I did plan on it but the first time it happened, I made a couple of $1,000 and it opened up my eyes and said, “Back up. What’s going on over here? Where did that $2,000 come from?” “That came from a couple of affiliate referral fees.” I said, “Affiliate what?” They said, “Referral fees.” I said, “Tell me more about that. How did that happen?” They told me and then I started going, “How do you make that happen again? How do I make that happen more?” I started figuring out ways and one month, call it maybe a little bit of luck, maybe a great product. Maybe the timing was right, but you can call it whatever you want to. The IRS called it $62,000 net that I got.

Being an entrepreneur and owning your own business can take you to places that you’ve never dreamt of or it can be a part-time job but I know a lot of people that need this, Jason. I want to recommend it. If you’re reading, go to 1000houses.com/Smartr. Maybe we can kill a bunch of birds with one stone. Would you like as many people as we can get so you can kill a bunch of guys with stone and explain?

That would be great. It turns into more income for you. The beauty of our software is since everybody needs this affiliate software and the fact that they can use this software to sell the software, it makes it even more powerful. We have a couple of programs in place where the more somebody earns with the company, it unlocks the potential to earn even more commissions. Completely unlike any other method of marketing where they have to pay a monthly fee in order to participate, the more they earn, the more they have the ability to earn. Instead of somebody earning 20% per sale, they get to the point to where they can earn 50% per sale. Instead of somebody’s earning an overall total of 30% throughout their multiple generations of transactions. People buying or people promoting the software can earn a total of up to 75% per transaction. Since we process the transactions that are going through all of these apps for these businesses, we have bonuses in place to whereas you sign up more and more of these businesses, you’re making a percentage of the transactions that are going through their apps, even if you’re not promoting those companies. It builds and builds.

It can be something huge. You’d be out promoting this company that company’s out promoting their company. It’s all running through your link. You put a lot of thought into this. You’re way out there.

It’s almost like a genius created this. This is years of experiences that I personally came across helping small businesses and big businesses and I thought to myself, “If there was what I would think is this perfect piece of software out there, then it can take that average small business owner or the average entrepreneur who’s thinking about a product and they could make $10,000 or $100,000 a year that they never thought about.” Whenever I look at what it is that we can do as a company, I believe Smartr can become a multibillion-dollar company very quickly. The reason why that is so important is that we’re willing to pay 75% of that money back to the people that help build the company. That’s exactly what we want to do. We want to take every piece of revenue that we make and feed it back to the affiliates that are building Smartr and that are building the companies that are out there.

It’s genius and it’s not a new concept. You’re taking a little bit from potentially millions of people doing work and giving them the lion’s share, but you’re taking a few millions there. They’re taking a big cut of the work that they can do individually so they need a bigger cut because they can only do so much work. You’re taking a little cut, but I’d rather make a dollar from a million than make $1 million from one person.

Exactly. It’s a lot easier to make a dollar from a million people. It really is.

You brand yourself and you help a lot more people. I don’t know about you and your life, but in my life I noticed when I’m helping people either on purpose or inadvertently, that portion of my life tends to start growing. When I’m helping people, that portion of my life gets bigger, bolder, better and everything. What you’re doing is you’re out there helping a lot of people who need an answer to a problem, which is, “How do I get more customers?” It might be the question, “How do I make some money from home? How do I get out of this dead-end job?” There are a lot of questions that this product might be the answer to and it’s not rocket science.

You don’t have to have a Bachelor’s degree in business to figure something this out. You just need to find great products that people want and then help spread the word about it. Introduce those companies that have those great products, that are about this kind of affiliate marketing, and that they should be taking advantage of where they only pay when they get a customer and the customer pays them. They only pay when they get paid. That’s the best advertising plan in the world if you can live off of it.

I’ve listened to quite a few of your podcasts and I appreciate you having me on and everything. One of the things that I try to help people understand is that the money that we make as business owners is a byproduct of doing what we love. It’s a byproduct of providing value to people. It’s not that we are intentionally going out to make money. It’s that we are doing something that we’re so passionate about that money happens to come in from doing that thing. Smartr is my way of giving back to the world, to all the small business owners that I’ve seen that have been struggling and that’s exactly why it was built.

It was built to help not just that small business get more customers and more referrals, but to help that person that’s sitting at home struggling, trying to figure it out. They might have been in a position where they need to start over. They might be in a position where they don’t know exactly what they are going to do or how they’re going to make that next dollar but with my solution, they can go into the App Store. They can download our app or any brand that’s using this software and they can start making money. When I look at myself right now, I’m wearing seven different brands of clothes. I should be getting paid to talk about clothes. If somebody says “Those are cool shorts,” I should get paid. If somebody says, “That’s a cool shirt,” I should get paid. If somebody says, “I like your tattoos,” then I should get paid and our software gives people the ability to do that.

You can also immerse yourself in the things that you love and you’re passionate about. If you’re passionate about tattoos and body piercing, promote all the products surrounding that, all the places that do that, the magazines, whatever. You can immerse yourself in what you love, which will make you a better salesperson to begin with because if you don’t like what you’re selling, that’s a long day. The cool thing about what you’re doing is you can pick anything you want. You’re into hemp sales and CBD oil or whatever. It doesn’t matter what you’re into. You could start right there, but then I wouldn’t ignore businesses that maybe I’m not that much into, but that are great benefits for people. When I see a business or a product that’s clever and smart, I will hone into that because that product has so much momentum.

Anybody that’s interested in promoting Smartr Marketing, they need to make sure that they put in the referral code, Mitch. Whenever they put in the referral code and they’re ready to get started promoting, then all they need to do is think about those brands and those companies that they love. Think about those companies that could send them a couple of more customers. It makes it an easier sell when you’re promoting the software. Whenever you’re talking to a small business owner and you say, “I’ve got a way to send you more customers, we can start now.” All of a sudden that small business owner is going to go, “I get it. I’ll do it.” You as a promoter of Smartr, you set yourself up for monthly recurring revenue, month after month, year after year as those businesses use the software, pay their monthly fee to use the software, as they’re making transactions.

Affiliate Marketing: Find great products that people want and then help spread the word about it.

Let me back up because it’s a subtle point and you could miss it real easy. You’re introducing a person to Jason’s software that if they instituted, they’re going to be able to hand out referral links to all their happy customers. If their happy customers refer them, then those customers are going to get paid and you’re going to get paid every time they get paid. Is that what I understood right?

That’s what you understood.

Instead of recommending a roof to your neighbor because he needs a roof and get paid on one roof, what Jason said is go to the roofer and show this roofer how this referral program can get him more business and where he only has to pay for the business that he gets a check for. He only has to pay for the advertising when he gets a check. Every time that referral service brings in business for that roofer, you get paid because it’s commission-based system. You get businesses to set up this affiliate program and you get paid per sale that comes through that system. Go to 1000houses.com/Smartr. Put in the promo code, Mitch, because you can do exactly what I’m doing. If you’ve got a show out there, get Jason on it and talk to your customers. Talk to your people, your businesses around you and your sphere of influence. I’m sure Jason will be happy to get on your show.

It’s perfect for podcasters.

I had a slow month. I only made $18,000 in affiliate sales. There are a lot of people in this world that could live two or three times on $18,000 and this is not something I do full-time. Please check it out. 1000houses.com/Smartr, promo code Mitch. Jason, thank you so much for taking the time. I’m really excited about this.

Thanks for having me on.

I want to thank you for taking time to get you some Jason Criddle and learn about this fantastic opportunity, even if it’s not for you, you know someone that needs to hear about this because they need to make some money and they need to change their life a little bit. Take note. Please help somebody. It’s not for you. Help somebody else. Talk to you in a bit. This is Mitch Stephen, we’re out of here.

Important Links:

• 1000houses.com/Smartr
• 1000houses.com/CiX
• 1000houses.com/VAHelp
• 1000houses.com/AOF
• 1000houses.com/Coaching
• Smartr Marketing
• The Tipping Point

About Jason Criddle

Mr. Criddle is a millennial business leader with a passion for helping entrepreneurs and individuals succeed, while focusing on the spiritual aspects of what it takes to achieve one’s goals.