138: Bring Your Marriage Back to Life with Entrepreneurs Tony and Alisa DiLorenzo

Robert Plank: On today's podcast we have Tony and Alisa DiLorenzo, the founders who are a leading source for couples on sex, love, and commitment on their number 1 marriage podcast where they have a bunch of bestselling authors and hosts, and they are our bestselling authors and hosts about entrepreneurship, marriage, and authorship. Welcome to the show. How are things, guys?

Tony DiLorenzo: Excellent, Robert. Thank you.

Alisa DiLorenzo: We're doing great today. Glad to be joining you.

Robert Plank: Cool. I think we're going to have a lot of fun today. Could you guys tell me, I know I mentioned a little bit, but can you tell me what it is that you guys do and what makes both of you different and special?

Alisa DiLorenzo: Oh my gosh. Well Tony and I are tasked. We know our mission is to transform a million marriages around the world. That is something that we've discovered over the last few years and we do that through a variety of ways. We do it through the podcast, the One Extraordinary Marriage Show. We do through it, you mentioned, the books that we've written. We've written books such as the 7 Days of Sex Challenge. We talk about trust, we talk about communication, we talk about all those topics that everybody wants to talk about but nobody is. We peel back all the layers for couples out there to go, you know what? You can have a conversation about this and the world isn't going to fall off its axis.

Robert Plank: Interesting. You guys get right to the good stuff.

Alisa DiLorenzo: Absolutely.

Tony DiLorenzo: Yeah. I mean, our fist show that we ever did was called the 60 Days of Sex Challenge.

Robert Plank: Nice. That's a great place to start off, right?

Tony DiLorenzo: Let's start big or go home.

Robert Plank: Hit the ground running. Kind of along those lines, I mean, what has you guys excited lately in this topic. Tell me something I haven't heard before.

Tony DiLorenzo: Wow. What are we excited about lately? Man, we're excited about just impacting people's lives. As One Extraordinary Marriage has grown over the last 6 and a half years, our reach has just taken off. From the early days of the podcast where we would hear from folks here in the United States. I remember and Alisa does too, when we heard from somebody from Alaska and it was like, "Oh my gosh. We have somebody listening in Alaska." Now we have listeners in 160 countries around the world.

Right now, what gets me excited and what gets me out of bed are the folks who come, hear us, start to implement, they're intentional about their marriage, and they take action, ad they have these amazing testimonies. They come and they're like, "You guys wouldn't believe what we did. We were listening to you share this. We picked up your book, connect like you did when you first met. We started asking each other questions. We started getting deep. We started being transparent with each other. Guess what? We had the best sex we've ever had in our 10 years of marriage." If that doesn't get me excited to wake up in the morning and impact more lives, I don't know what will.

Robert Plank: You guys are teaching what you know, it sounds like.

Alisa DiLorenzo: Well we are because our marriage the first 11 years was really nothing to write home about.

Tony DiLorenzo: Nope.

Alisa DiLorenzo: The fact that we're still together and we actually, as of this recording, are just under 2 months away from our 20th wedding anniversary. We look back at those first 11 years that were rocked with pornography, rocked with crazy financial debt with more zeros than I care to count about, rocked with the loss of our second child. All of these things tear marriages apart and we found ourselves at that 11 year mark going, "Which way to we go?" The reason the very first show that we ever recorded was the 60 Days of Sex Challenge is because that's what we decided to do in hopes that something would shift in our marriage, otherwise we were going to end up as roommates. As a result of that shift, I mean, our marriage, I get to tell people all the time that my marriage coming up on 20 years is better than it's ever been.

Robert Plank: What changed?

Alisa DiLorenzo: We got intentional.

Tony DiLorenzo: Yeah.

Alisa DiLorenzo: We stopped taking each other for granted. We realized that this relationship between the two of us had to be the first relationship that we work on every day instead of the last relationship.

Tony DiLorenzo: If you want to see anything grow and flourish, you need to water it, right? If you want to see a rose plant grow, you don't just plant it and let the sun wither it away. You water it. You put fertilizer on it. You trim it. You cut it back in those seasons when it has to be cut back to see it bloom and blossom. It's the same thing that we had to learn in our own marriage and we teach others is that if you want to grow, you got to do something. Alisa and I had to do something.

Robert Plank: That makes sense. Am I getting the math here right? Was this 9 years ago or was this more recent that ...

Alisa DiLorenzo: 9 years ago.

Tony DiLorenzo: 9, yep.

Robert Plank: That you started the podcast?

Alisa DiLorenzo: We started the podcast 6 and a half years ago. We started our journey towards transforming our marriage 9 years ago. It as after we did that, we'd been invited to speak, to share our story, and after we did that, here we are. I'm standing up in front of a room full, I think it was 80 folks, give or take.

Tony DiLorenzo: 80 couples.

Alisa DiLorenzo: We're sharing our story and talking about how Tony threw out this idea that we would have sex for 60 days in a row. My immediate reaction the first time he proposed it was absolutely not. Our kids were 2 and 5 and the time. Are you kidding me? I'm covered in baby stuff all day long and art projects. The last thing I'm going to do is have sex with you all day.

Robert Plank: My thought when I first heard that was, of course it's the guy's idea.

Alisa DiLorenzo: Well a lot of people say that. It's not always the case.

Tony DiLorenzo: Hey, Robert. It was the Hail Mary pass. It really was. Where we were in our marriage at that point, it was the Hail Mary pass. I got to go after something that's so big, so crazy that it's either we win it or we lose it here. That's just where I was after 11 years of marriage. Our goal is hopefully that folks who find us don't have to do the Hail Mary pass. They're starting to listen, they're starting to gain wisdom and knowledge and taking action so they don't have to get to that point in their marriage.

Robert Plank: What's the secret? What's the shortcut? What's the Cliff Notes on this?

Alisa DiLorenzo: The Cliff Notes, I love not. We haven't used that phrase before, but that might show up on the One Extraordinary Marriage Show.

Robert Plank: Awesome. You're welcome.

Alisa DiLorenzo: Thank you. Thank you. That's why we love doing interviews because somebody always gives us a little bit more information or material for our own show. The Hail Mary, the secret sauce, is saying, you know what? What you did to get to the I do, what you did to get to the wedding day, you actually need to keep going and keep doing that for the next 50, 60 years. You don't spend all this time like, "Oh, I'll talk to you for hours. Oh, I'll take you on dates. Oh, we'll plan trips together and do all this kind of stuff." Then you have the fancy dress and the big party and everybody's like, "Yay! Kiss, kiss, kiss." Then the next day you're like, "Yeah, well, we've got the same last name. We're done." Right? I don't have to do anything anymore.

Those couples that say, you know what? The wedding is just he beginning of our lives together, the wedding is where we start investing, those are the couples that see transformation because they're not waiting around for something else to happen. They're saying, "I'm going to take responsibility for what I can do in the marriage and that's showing up to the best of my ability every single day."

Robert Plank: How do you get back to that point? You guys mentioned that, well it was one thing to say that but you guys had the kids to deal with and I'm sure your own responsibilities. How do you do that with all of the everyday stuff in the way?

Tony DiLorenzo: Man. Honestly, it's going to depend on where you are in your marriage, right? That's one of the most difficult tasks we face because so many people are in so many different places of their marriage, right? Some people have just grown apart. It's nothing more than life has gotten in the way and they haven't been intentional. Maybe for them, doing the 7 Days of Sex Challenge is the best thing they could do right now. They need to reconnect.

See, the 7 Days of Sex Challenge, everybody is like, "Ooh, it's sex." Right. We get it. Alisa and I having done our 60 Days of Sex Challenge and then eight 7 Days of Sex Challenges now, it's more than just sex. It really is. It's about that emotional connection. For some couples, that's what they need. They need to get back to basics. For other couples, they've gone through the ringer. They've been in the valley. They've been stuck in the valley and they're wondering, "When are we going to get out of this?" For those folks, a 7 Days of Sex Challenge may be something that they could do and yet it's not going to have the profound effect that it would have for the first couple. For them, they may do a 7 Days of Sex Challenge or maybe they would check out our course, He Zigs, She Zags. Get your communication on the path and parlay that with coaching with Alisa because they need more accountability. They need somebody to come up beside them and go, are you guys doing your work? Are you guys doing what you're saying? Because Alisa will hold them to task and hold them accountable to what they said they were going to do each and every week.

Robert Plank: Could you explain that a little bit? Is there a course someone can buy where it's not just the training but Alisa will actually follow and make sure they do what they say they'll do, or is that the coaching part of it?

Alisa DiLorenzo: That's the coaching part and we have a number of programs because over the last 6 and a half years, we've identified some very particular areas that we hear time and time again, couples are struggling with. Communication is one of the top ones. Trust. We created a program all wrapped around restoring trust in your marriage. Then we know that sexual intimacy is an issue as well. These are the 3 big ones. Then you have those folks that want to just do it themselves. They just want to get plugged into a program. Then you have other folks that are like, "You know what? We've tried and tried and tried to talk ourselves through this. We've tried to do programs, we've tried to do all this kind of stuff, and we can't do it by ourselves." A lot of those folks have heard about us either on podcasts like yours or even on our own show and they're like, "Wait a minute. I resonate with what she's saying. She sounds like me."

That's what I tell people all the time. I tell my clients, "Look. I'm not perfect. You listen to my show for more than one week, you'll hear Tony and I have incidences where we go back and forth and we still fight over things. What we figured out is how to shorten the challenging times in our marriage. They're still going to happen. We're human. He's not perfect, I'm not perfect.

Coming alongside a couple, what I do is I give them additional resources. I give them tools and I say, "You know what? I'm going to talk to you next week so you don't just revert back to your old behavior, what hasn't been working. I'm going to hold you accountable and we're going to keep equipping you until you have the marriage and the relationship as functioning at the level that you desire."

Robert Plank: Interesting. What kind of though process goes into some of the stuff? You said that there's those 3 areas, there's the communication and the trust and the sex areas, but how do you decide if you guys have an idea, if something should be a podcast episode or an audio program or a book, or do you just not care about the overlap when you say that you can restate the same things in different ways, I guess? What's the thought process with that?

Tony DiLorenzo: That's a good question. When it comes to the podcast, because I want to start it there because that's basically like our home base. For anybody who's listening, you want to go check it out, go to the One Extraordinary Marriage Show. Find that on iTunes, Stitcher Radio for you Android folks. When if comes to the show, that honestly has been something we've done for 6 and half years week in and week out. It is our life. It is what we deal with in our own lives with kids who are growing up with 2 adults that, like Alisa said, aren't perfect. We have blow-ups, we have mess-ups, and we also have successes. Throughout the week, we're always looking for cues and thinking of, how can we share what's going on or what we've heard or if there's reoccurring themes from folks that we're getting emails from?

You get it once, you're like, "Okay." Get it twice, "Hmm. Wonder what's up?" Get it a 3rd, 4th, 5th time, you better believe we're going to start doing some research, thinking about it, and then bringing it to a show. When it comes to a workshop or a course, we've found that, like Alisa said, the 3 main areas, so we dive deeper into those. Those are more hands-on. We do an audio and video sessions. We add cheat sheets, worksheets, so people can dive in deeper in those areas and pull it apart. That's where that comes up and yeah, is there going to be overlap? Sure thing. Some people will be able to listen to the podcast, all good. Other people, they need to pick up our books, 7 Days of Sex Challenge. Other people want to pick up our book The Trust Factor. For them, they need to go a little deeper. They need to write notes in their book and dissect it and then apply it to their own marriage.

Robert Plank: Okay. I mean, yeah, I like your thought process. It's almost like the podcast happens regardless, and then you might use some of these podcast episodes to kind of flesh out a bigger idea that ends up in a workshop or a book.

Alisa DiLorenzo: Absolutely. I mean, we are constantly interacting with folks who are telling us about their marriages. That's just ...

Tony DiLorenzo: Nature of the beast.

Alisa DiLorenzo: Really. People find out what we do and they're like, "Oh, let me tell you what's going on in my relationship." Which is great and we love having that interaction, be it with our listeners or with just people we meet anywhere. From that, we're able to go, "Okay, where are the needs?" Right? We know what the needs are in our own marriage. A lot of times the shows come straight out of, "Oh, Tony and I had this issue this past week." We know we did, but there's at least one other couple out there that's facing it. Let's bring these topics to the light. Then going across all of our platforms, because we're on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and all over, iTunes and Stitcher and whatnot. Taking it across the platforms allows us to reach people wherever they're at. They don't just have to come and find our website. We're out there, audio, video, tweets, and whatnot because we know that if you're having a crisis in your marriage, you're looking and we need to be where you're looking.

Tony DiLorenzo: Right.

Robert Plank: It makes a lot of sense. Be everywhere because otherwise, I mean, they're going to find someone else, if not, you guys, right?

Alisa DiLorenzo: True.

Robert Plank: Have you come across any of that? Have you come across having any difficulties differentiating yourselves or have you come across anyone else kind of doing something similar to you or even maybe someone who's kind of trying to ride your coattails, anything like that?

Tony DiLorenzo: No. You know what? We, having gone into the podcasting world when we did, we really were able to carve out our own niche. That has helped. Sure, have there been people who've like, "Hey, look what Tony and Alisa are doing so we're going to do the same thing." Sure. Go for it, man. Honestly, if you can touch marriages, by all means go for it. I know a lot of folks in the marriage niche. I try to reach out to many of them. I have some good friends in them so we do a lot of programs together or courses. If they're doing an online conference, we're usually speaking at them. In all honesty, it's a big world. Go after it. We're going to just continue to do what we know we do best and we're going to just continue to reach those couples and know that we're going to reach a million and we're going to reach more than that before our time comes to an end.

Robert Plank: Nice. Fair enough. Yeah, I'm scrolling through and I'm seeing you guys having all these TV appearances on all kinds of cool stuff like that.

Tony DiLorenzo: Yeah. Yeah, those are fun too because, especially here locally in San Diego, we've been featured on CW6 a few times now.

Alisa DiLorenzo: We've been on ESPN Radio.

Tony DiLorenzo: Right and they're all so great. For us it's, where can we reach people where they're at, right? I mean, not everybody's online. Not everybody's searching because their marriage is in a tough spot. Sometimes their just right there on CW6 and they want to get some fun, quick ideas about how to romance their spouse on Valentine's Day.

Robert Plank: Do you have any of those? You have either a really common problem everyone has that everyone should be aware that they can fix in their marriage or do you have just some really fun, quick tips anyone can use? Besides the 60 Days of Sex, besides the 7 Days of Sex, of course.

Tony DiLorenzo: Yeah. Yeah, here's a fun one that we found that a lot of couples, both male and female, husband and wife, have a hard time knowing how to initiate sex. It's something that we all think should just come naturally and yet we have difficulties with it. What does that look like? For a lot of us, media has really screwed us up at times and what that looks like, a typical 30 minute sitcom. If there's a sex scene happening would be a scantily clad woman coming in with high heels, maybe lingerie and the guy is in the bathroom shaving and she comes up behind him. Honestly, man, I've been married almost 20 years. I cannot think of a time when Alisa has come into our bedroom or our bathroom like that.

For most of us, we don't know what initiating looks like so we came up with a resource on how to initiate. If folks are interested, they can go to OneExtraordinaryMarriage.com/initiate and then get our free download there and it will help them to understand, okay, what does this look like for you? What does this look like for me? It gets that conversation started.

Alisa DiLorenzo: Just to add onto that, that's really where most couples need to have the resources, right? They need to know what the first step is, right? With this list of top 10 ways to initiate sex tonight or today, because we talk about daytime sex a lot, it's just that first step. It's getting them over the hurdle of saying, okay, you know what? Maybe we can talk about this. Just because we've never talked about it doesn't mean we can't. It just means we need to take the first step and that's really where One Extraordinary Marriage comes through for so many people is giving them that first step.

Robert Plank: Well cool. It sounds like, hearing about that and just hearing about all the little things that you guys do that all add up to a lot, it sounds like you guys take this subject that either some people just don't want to talk about it or some people think it's not fun, and it sounds like, especially the way you guys talk, it sounds like you've taken this thing and you kind of made it fun and brought it to light again.

Alisa DiLorenzo: Absolutely. I mean, Tony and I both grew up in homes where sex wasn't talked about, where it wasn't kind of the birds and the bees was the one and only conversation that either one of us had with our parents and that was about it. We realize, you know what? There are a lot of folks out there, that was their experience too and nobody said this is, we give all of this book learning but nobody says this is how you have to deal with a spouse. This is how you have to deal with a husband or a wife and these are the challenges you're going to face. How do you talk about finances? How do you talk about sex? How do you get on the same page in regard to the kids? We just said, you know what? We looked for it and couldn't find it, and so we said, you know what? Somebody's got to step into this space. If it's not out there and we know we need it, we're going to step into that space and that's really how One Extraordinary Marriage started and what it's grown into is a resource for couples literally around the world who are like, "We've never had that conversation. Well Tony and Alisa just did. Let's do it ourselves. Let's see what happens when we do it."

Robert Plank: That's awesome. I think that anyone at any niche can kind of takeaway from that, not just in the save your marriage niche. If there's something out there where you have a problem and you can't find the solution that you guys have just made the solution that you wish existed.

Tony DiLorenzo: Exactly. For anybody who's out there, it takes time. You know what I mean? One Extraordinary Marriage didn't grow to where we are today overnight. Everybody likes to look at us now and go, "Oh my gosh. That was an overnight success." No. It's taken hard work. It's taken years of just learning our craft and our trade and who we serve and continuously coming to our podcast, coming to our site, reaching new people, each and everyday.

Robert Plank: Kind of along those lines. I'm looking at the stuff that you guys have setup. I know that you guys have the podcast, you have these courses, you have all these freebies. Do you have something upcoming or some kind of cool project or some kind of cool area you're excited to get into soon?

Alisa DiLorenzo: Right now we're working on building out some individual group coaching programs. We've done a lot of stuff in the past where it's been targeted for both husband and wife to work on together and what we're looking at right now, what we've come to recognize over the last, probably 3 to 6 months, there are a lot of times that either a husband needs to work in an area or work on himself or a wife needs to work on herself because the fact of the matter is that a relationship is only as healthy as the two people in the relationship. We're in the process right now designing some group coaching programs that will be coming out probably September, October. We're still working on the release date for those of just equipping husbands and wives with the tools that they need to be the best version of themselves in their marriages.

Robert Plank: I like it. Mostly the husband, but not just the husband, right? I know that he's usually wrong.

Alisa DiLorenzo: No. Not at all. My couples, they will tell you and we hear this time and time again when I'm doing individual coaching with couples is that one of the things that surprises them is the fact that I'm able to just come in and really be that 30,000 foot view. It's not all his fault, it's not all her fault. It takes 2 people, with whatever's going on in your relationship, it takes both of you to have gotten there and takes both of you to get to the next level. It's not, the husband has to do all the work or the wife has to do all the work. You both have to work to get to extraordinary.

Robert Plank: Interesting. I like that way of thinking and I like all the stuff that you guys have built and what's cool about this niche, especially that you guys are in is that there's always some kind of new area, right? There's always some kind of new thing that couples need to be working on. It's not just something where someone has back pain, they take a pill, it's over with. There's always new ways to improve, I guess, right?

Tony DiLorenzo: There are many layers. It's just the way to think about it. Think of an onion. We're all so complex and there are many layers. Some people just live on the surface. All their lives, that's where they've lived and now they're married and they're like, "Oh my gosh. I can't live here anymore. I need to go deeper. How do I do that? How do I communicate in my emotional intimacy with my spouse?" Sexual intimacy, financial intimacy, spiritual intimacy. There are many different areas that we come in from and we look at it from different places and continue to just keep going around and looking at it and going, okay, how about this? How about that? How about this? Are you thinking about this?

Nothing is too small. We'll take and we'll dissect little areas and go, "Did you guys think about this?" It's amazing what can happen because that can actually have freedom for somebody. Somebody can break free of their thought process or where they've been or how they grew up, and that's what we just continue to go after.

Robert Plank: That's awesome and what's cool about what you guys have setup is if someone kind of has the personality of, they kind of want to go all-in, they could load up the truck with all your stuff, but even if someone is just kind of curious, like you said, just of solving a little problem now, they can just tune into one episode of the podcast or they can just grab one of the cheat sheets. That's pretty cool that people can just kind of pick and choose where they want to start with you guys and how deep they want to go with you guys, too.

Tony DiLorenzo: Right, exactly. I mean, I'm thinking about, you talk about that. We did a show and we have an article on it called The Ecotone Sound and Sleep Machine. Here is something that we introduced into our own marriage and it's a sound machine that we have in our bedroom that has like 10 different sounds and you can pick it up on Amazon for 99 bucks. We loved it because it allowed us, for us anyways, as our kids were getting older, it drowned out the sound in our room when we were having sex.

Alisa DiLorenzo: It's audio responsive so the louder you get the louder it gets.

Robert Plank: How funny.

Alisa DiLorenzo: Yeah, it's a nice thing.

Robert Plank: What'll they think of next?

Tony DiLorenzo: Right. You talk about just something simple. Something simple as that, Robert, can honestly shift a marriage like you would not believe and we've had testimonies after testimonies about that little machine that people were like, I had no clue. Well, Alisa and I didn't either and we got it, we tested it, we shared it, and now there are other couples and the one family who are like, "We use it all the time. Love it." There you go.

Robert Plank: Nice. They say we've somehow lived for decades without this and how do we even go one day without that thing, right?

Alisa DiLorenzo: That's kind of how we feel about it, yeah.

Robert Plank: Funny. Along those lines, along the lines of the things that you recommend and people finding out about you and buying from you, where can people tune into the podcast, get your videos, get your products, where should they go to find out all that stuff?

Tony DiLorenzo: Sure. Come to our hub, guys. OneExtraordinaryMarriage.com and you'll find everything there. You'll find the articles, you'll find the podcast. If you're on iTunes or you're on your iPhone, go to the podcast app. Just type in One Extraordinary Marriage Show. Subscribe right there and you can start listening. Our store is there. You can learn more about our products, our programs, and who Alisa and I are all about.

Robert Plank: Awesome. Well, I'm really glad that both of you, I got a 2 for 1 deal. I have both of you were able to stop by the show. I always like covering all those weird, random topics and it was really great hearing, not only about how you guys got your start and you were able to spread this message using the internet that you wouldn't have been able to without the internet and the thing is, on this show, a lot of time we talk to self-employed entrepreneurs. This is great for them too because if their marriage is in trouble then everything else suffers. A really great message you guys have. Could you tell us one last time, make sure everyone has it, that URL again.

Tony DiLorenzo: Yeah. It's OneExtraordinaryMarriage.com.

Robert Plank: Perfect. Thanks for being on the show, Tony and Alisa.

Alisa DiLorenzo: You're welcome. Thank you for having us.

Tony DiLorenzo: Yeah. Thanks a lot, Robert.