Use the Tools, Don’t Be the Tool: Lawrence Tam’s Operator Model

Somewhere in the last few years you have probably talked yourself out of starting something because you weren’t technical enough. You didn’t know how to code, couldn’t build your own website from scratch, didn’t understand the plumbing behind the funnel everyone was telling you to build. Lawrence Tam, a retired engineer who built his income working around a full-time role as a stay-at-home dad, spends most of his talk dismantling that exact excuse, and the model he uses to do it applies well beyond any one platform.

Why should a beginner be an “operator,” not a builder?

Tam lays out three phases people move through with any tool: building it from scratch, operating it as it already exists, and eventually outsourcing the parts you don’t want to do yourself. He is direct about which phase almost everyone in the room should actually be in.

Use the tools. Use the tools. Don’t be a tool.

His argument rests on a comparison nearly everyone in the room already agrees with without realizing it. Almost nobody in that room designs cars for a living, yet almost everyone drives one every day without a second thought about the engineering underneath the hood. Nobody hesitates to use a car because they can’t build an engine. The same logic, he argues, applies to a capture page, an autoresponder, or a blogging platform. You do not need to know how it was built to use it well.

• Builders create the tool from scratch, hard-coding pages and systems from the ground up.
• Operators use an existing, working tool efficiently to get a specific result, without needing to understand its internals.
• Outsourcers eventually hand off the parts of the work they personally dislike to someone else, once they already know how the system runs.

The internal conflict he is naming directly is the quiet shame of not being technical enough, the belief that real business builders code their own systems from the ground up. He counters it plainly: until you’ve made your first real money in this industry, don’t try to recreate anything. Get good at operating what already exists.

What three tools actually run an online business?

Underneath the operator framing, Tam gets specific about what actually needs to exist for any of this to function, regardless of niche. A capture page to collect a lead. An autoresponder connected to it so a relationship can be built with that lead over time instead of a single email blast. And a blog, because people researching whether to trust you want more than a sales page, they want evidence you’re legitimate.

He is pointed about the alternative most beginners default to instead: mass-emailing contacts from a personal inbox, which gets flagged and burned fast by every major provider. The three-tool stack he describes isn’t a preference, it’s the minimum functional setup, and skipping any piece of it usually means quietly sabotaging the other two.

What’s the real difference between operating a system and knowing where you’re going?

Tam draws a sharp line between running the tools well and actually having direction, using his own driving as the comparison.

As Lawrence Tam puts it, “Operating is only one thing. Just because I know how to drive a car doesn’t mean I know where I’m going.” That is the challenge sitting underneath his entire talk. Being technically capable of running a capture page and an autoresponder is necessary, but it is not the same as knowing your niche, speaking the specific language your prospects already use, or understanding which one or two platforms deserve your actual focus.

The mechanism he lands on by the end ties both halves together: use existing tools instead of rebuilding them, and pair that efficiency with a clear sense of who you’re actually talking to and why. Skip the first and you burn months reinventing things that already work. Skip the second and you become extremely efficient at driving in a direction that goes nowhere.

The benefit worth naming plainly is what this actually frees up. Every hour not spent learning to code a capture page from scratch is an hour available for the part of the business that only you can do: finding your niche, writing in your own voice, and having the actual conversations that turn a stranger into a customer. That is the ultimate trade Tam is proposing. Trade the fantasy of technical mastery for the discipline of operating well and aiming carefully, and the results stop depending on how good a programmer you happen to be.

The full session goes further into how he picked his own niche and framework for connecting with it. Watch it in full, free, when you Create your free account.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

And stay on your feet, because we're about to welcome to the stage, Lawrence Tam! What's going on? Yes! It is Saturday!

Yes! Yes! Thank you! One, two, three!

Awesome! Awesome! Thank you very much for coming. Thank you for giving me your Saturday.

Hey, I know there's Disney World out there. I know you want to rather ride some rides. I would rather be eating a Mickey Mouse ice cream. I get it, but you're here because for a reason.

What that reason is. Everyone has a different reason for being here, right? Who here wants to just learn how to make some more money? Raise your hand.

Okay. Who here wants to learn how to drive more traffic to their website? Who wants to learn how to do that? All right.

Who here wants to learn how to pick up the opposite sex? I can't help you there. Sorry. Full disclosure, right?

Full disclosure, I do not know how to pick up chicks. I don't know. I think that's pretty funny. We have a disclaimer for everything because we make so much money here.

We have to tell you we make a lot of money here. I thought it was hilarious. But anywho, if you give me my slides, I have a short amount of time that I want to cram into your brain. Who here remembered cramming for college?

Anyone remember that? Yeah? Yeah? I mean, was it really beneficial?

Let's think about this. But did it achieve a goal? Interesting. Interesting.

Not beneficial, yet it achieved something like graduating. In my case, my parents beating me for not getting good grades. That was, you know, you have this pain and pleasure. Pleasure is like, ah, I graduated.

Pain is like, no, don't hit me. So that's just kind of those things. You figure out what your pain and pleasures are, right? As an Asian culture, you know, I said this in the last event, you know, you're Asian, not Bajan.

You get A's, not B's. I mean, that's just the way it is. But you can teach that at an ongoing age. You teach it very young.

We teach our kids, like, you got a 91? What? But inside, I'm like, that's not too bad, but you can't show that, right? But hopefully my kids aren't listening because they are in the corner.

But, you know. But that's just something you got to do, right? So some of you have to condition your mind. It's time to get to work, guys.

It is time to get to work. The only other way to make a lot of money like we did, and all the successful people in Empower is win the lottery. And if that's your method, congratulations. Go at it.

I personally like to engineer my success, right? I am a retired engineer, retired at the age of 33. I retired my lovely wife sitting over there. One day I will pull her on stage, but until then, she'll be in the shadows.

She is the mastermind over there. I retired her from accounting, and I've been a stay-at-home dad full time because that was my passion. I don't want to be told when I have to go to work. I don't want to be told, you know, you're only worth $60,000 a year.

I don't care how many hours you work, you're working to keep your job. That's painful, guys. I don't know about you, but someone tell me what I'm worth? I'm like, who told you what I'm worth?

No, I'm going to tell you what I'm worth, right? And we can do that here because the income potential is through the roof. There is no actual limit. There is no limit.

You can go to a salary website and look at how much people make in Empower Network, and, you know, you'll see people do like $100,000, $150,000, $200,000 a month. How is that possible? That does not make sense, right? But it also doesn't make sense that so many people love Mickey Mouse.

He's a rat. But it's what your mind perception, right? It's the perception of what it is, and we need to get you guys focused because even if I gave you the keys to my system and how I built my seven-figure income in Empower Network, if your brain tells you it's too hard, it's too complicated, you know, I don't like to read, I don't like to type, you will give you an excuse. You will tell yourself an excuse not to work.

So we have to get past that. So do I have permission that you will get to work tonight, at the break, tomorrow, every single day? Because this is your business. Do I have permission to tell you that, that you deserve to make some money in this business?

I have permission? So if I give you an exact process, of what I'm doing and what you should be looking at and focusing on, and maybe it'll open your ideas like, man, it's not that hard. It's actually pretty easy. Then we can have some real change in this world that you, instead of being an employee, you can be an employer.

Think about that. You can help give jobs, right? So if I have my slides, here we go. Increase your productivity without being techie.

Who here is not techie? Majority of the room? Cool. So then I'm speaking to you.

If you're techie, you should be able to do this with your left hand, watching TV, and rocking a baby, okay? Maybe not, maybe so, but we'll see how that goes, right? So here's what tools are of today. Back in the day, tools were like hammers, abacuses, slide rules, a pencil and a paper.

Who uses pencil and paper, right? But you should, right? Certain tools achieve certain things. iPhones, Androids, computers.

This is the age we live in. You can be the person who wants to use the tools, or you can be the tool of someone else, right? It's called, you know, payroll. It's called hiring someone to do something.

It's called outsourcing. But I want to focus on this because we have this now, right? I would say 99% of you have a smartphone or a computer. You can build your business today.

So that being the case, this is not the hurdle. You're here. You probably have a computer. You can work at the library if you wanted to.

You can write your article. You can write your paper. You can do your keyword research. You can do all of that.

So technology is not the issue, right? So, but I see people doing this. What is this a picture of? What is this?

So I was thinking about this. My wife was making dinner. I'm like, I'm going to go outside with some scissors. She's like, what the heck are you doing?

I said, but this is what I see online. People are trying to reinvent the wheel. People are using tools that are just not 2015 approved. Live viewers, are you doing this?

And if you are, just put it down. Just put it down. No one sees you. Just put the scissors down.

You're using the wrong tool, right? You're using the wrong tool. We've got to use the right tools. If not, you will become the human tool.

Hand powered, right? You actually want something like this. Like, what is better? Technology has evolved, right?

If you have a big freaking lawn, why are you hand curing it? Unless you love it. Some of you love it. That's your passion.

Go do it. But if your objective is just to make some money, pay for college, retire your spouse, retire yourself. I retired at 33. No one believes me until I tell them, like, I'm never at work.

And then my neighbors are like, why are you never at work? I was like, well, my kids. It's my work. I'm a full-time dad.

And I run side businesses, right? And one of them pays me very well because I use the tool. Who here designs cars? No engineers that design cars?

But who here has a car? What? Get out of here. So you're telling me you actually interact with a tool that you have no clue how it works.

Huh? Interesting. Interesting. So if that makes sense, then why are you trying to recreate the wheel when we have something here you can plug into and just drive traffic, build an audience, generate leads, and make sense?

You guys don't like money? Who doesn't like money, right? Right? And if you don't, there's probably 5% of you who are like, money's gross.

Like, that's okay. You need to read some books. You need to get more of this. We need to see you at the next event.

Money is energy, and that energy can be transformed to many different things, wonderful things. But we've got to get you using the right tools because here are the three phases, okay? You create. You develop.

and you build it, right? You use current technology, you know, and focus on building it versus, you know, using. You want to be the operator. You want to be the operator, right?

I think one of my slides fell off. You have the person who wants to build everything, right? Now, some of you feel like I have to recreate a thing. I have to make my own blog.

I need to make my own capture page. I need to go from the ground up. I need to hard code it. That's fine.

But I say, if you're not good at marketing, you can't drive traffic yet, you need to focus on being an operator. Everyone here just told me you don't build cars, right? Maybe you remodel, but majority of you do not build Ford, GNC, Lexus, Tesla. None of y'all build it, but y'all operate it.

How novel is that? You actually use the technology today to do the things you want because you're not really worried about how it runs, but that it runs. Right? So you want to be an operator.

The third phase is someone who just outsources everything. So that's the next phase. But how can you outsource if you don't even know how it operates? How can I teach my kids how to drive if I don't know how to drive?

I probably have to outsource that. Go, you know, maybe have my wife teach them or I teach them. But you first got to learn how to operate systems. Not to say it'll be forever, right?

And then you figure out the things you really just dislike doing. Maybe you don't like writing. Maybe you don't like writing articles. Maybe you don't like shooting videos.

Maybe you don't like writing your copywriting. You can hire someone, which means you are a benefit to society because you are giving jobs. Do you understand that? You're not sucking it.

You're giving back, right? So I say if you're brand new, you haven't made your first 10,000 in our industry of internet marketing, advertising, right? Direct response. Be an operator.

Be really good at operating. Operator, all you do is you interact with the tools that work, and you make it work, right? Focus on efficient use of current tools of today. Be a great operator, right?

So can I have our show of hands that you'll be a great operator? Right? Until you made your first 10K, don't try to make everything, recreate everything. We have tools in place that kind of help you, move you along, right?

So I say this all the time to our kids, my wife, you know, use the tools. Don't be the tool. I tell this to my team all the time. Use the tools.

Use the tools. Don't be a tool. Y'all get that? Just don't do it, right?

Just don't do it. Just use it. Be okay with someone making you something that you can just use, a pencil or a calculator or a watch, right? Unless your passion is for it, fantastic.

But if it's not, the majority of the business tools that we're using today, blogs, social media, how we drive traffic, capture pages, autoresponders, it's not necessary to learn how to code. It's more necessary how do you use it in your daily functions or operation, right? So the basic tools you'll need for your online business, you need a capture page system, right? This generates leads.

Any business who wants success from now until forever, I believe, you will need leads. These are people who are potentially looking to buy from you. They haven't bought yet but looking potentially because sometimes it takes multiple exposures, right? You got to get a point where I want to drive traffic, I'm going to shoot a video, I'm going to write an article that will get me to a point where I can generate leads.

But that means you have to think about, okay, what do I need? You need a capture page. So be okay with that. And they call it a landing page or a squeeze page.

But essentially, you're generating emails to build an email list. You can be a car dealer. You can be a real estate agent. You can be in insurance.

You can be in a restaurant business. You can be in the health business. You can be a life coach. You want to generate leads every single day.

Starts with a capture page. But that capture page then is connected to an email autoresponder. I still today see people emailing me from AOL from their address book and just mass spamming people. I just joined this business.

This is fantastic. No, that's not how business works today. You will get your email burned. Gmail will slap you.

AOL will slap you. Yahoo email will slap you. Use an email autoresponder. Basically, what this is is it's an ability to send recorded or prewritten emails in the future.

Like, didn't we just get past the anniversary of Back to the Future? Right? And we don't have, you know, self-tying shoes yet. But we have autoresponders.

30 years ago, they were like, auto what? It's an autoresponder. It will automate your business, right? So if you came to this event, and let's say you had 30 leads, you should be able to send broadcasts scheduled so that I'm here.

I can have a meal. I can go on a roller coaster. My email goes out. I make money.

How awesome is that? Right? I cut my last piece off. You got to be able to have a blog.

Right? Because people today, they need more information. They're researching you. They want to know more about you.

They want to know, are you legit? Are you serious? And this is where Kalatu Premium comes in. I mean, you got all these things.

We have training. We have plug-ins. We have themes. You can have the 10 blogs of your building niches of your consultant.

You can do that. We have live Q&A. So if you have a question, why are you not on these Q&As? You have to be on it.

Because if not, we don't know. The Empower support does not know what you are struggling with. You've got to be on there. It comes with media hosting.

Just FYI, from my personal blog before Empower started, I was paying $200 a month just for hosting. It's included in Kalatu Premium. So if you're thinking about building a business on the Internet, Kalatu Premium is where you want to get it at because it's all there, right? And this, as of October 2015, are all the cool plug-ins that it comes with.

And we're releasing new ones all the time. All the time. Testimonials, analytics, a light box, social media, domain mapping, Linkify, which is shortening email, shortening your actual link so it doesn't look like it's a really long link. You can shorten it.

These are all the technology of affiliate marketers that you need to be using. Pop-unders, content blasters, editorial, so you can send your blog post scheduled. Like we have Alicia Stringer in the house. She schedules like six of her blog posts in the future so when she's at the beach or when she's at lunch, her blog magically gets uploaded.

How awesome is that, right? You've got to leverage technology. But what I want to focus on is InstaBuilder. Did you know there's a hundred plus pages you have at the fingertips right now?

Do y'all know that? That thing is amazing, guys. That thing is amazing. A hundred plus pages.

Capture pages, thank you pages, sales pages, launch pages, webinar pages, coming soon pages. They're all built in right here with templates, right? With templates. Don't recreate the wheel.

You can just change a headline, connect it to your autoresponder, you are done, go have lunch. And then you have a business partner who's like, I don't know how to do all this stuff. I don't know how to code. I don't know how to change the color, blah, blah, blah.

It's all there. This is a capture page. I built an InstaBuilder. It took me a couple minutes.

I just uploaded an image, changed the title, and then I go, look, I don't want to collect leads. I said, just click here. Go ahead and see your contact, your empower staff to upgrade your Klaatu to premium today. So if you want to upgrade, it's as easy as getting your phone or contact someone at support at the desk.

Say, hey, how do I upgrade to Klaatu premium? It's as easy as that. I'm giving a straight call to action. I gave you value of why you should do it.

So it's like a no-brainer, right? So a lot of you are doing this. Don't do this. Putting a square peg into a circle, to a hole, right?

It's not going to work. Spend more time in operating systems. Refine your niche. Find your niche.

Speak the language. Prospects will turn into customers. Prospects will turn into customers. Because I have a great business partner I've known for five years.

Operating is only one thing. Just because I know how to drive a car doesn't mean I know where I'm going. I can stay in the lane. I can check my lights.

I have my seatbelt on. I know how to turn it on. But I still have no shape or form where I'm going. I need Nav.

I need Waze. I need Google Maps. I need Siri to tell me how to get to the grocery store. Because I need directions.

This is why I'm going to bring up a story. This is why I'm going to bring up a specialist on how she goes into a specific niche on how she talks to people using frameworks, using tools, so that she spends more time connecting than trying to recreate the wheel, right? So I want you guys to introduce Layla Black, one of our newest, very soon, million-dollar earners. She is crushing it.

Go ahead and give it to Layla Black.