Archive 1: 2012-2016
127: Go From Idea to Finished Physical Product with Filip Valica
Filip Valica from The Product Startup is a mechanical engineer who runs a podcast where he interviews small business owners and Shark Tank winners about Do It Yourself product development. He discusses the path you need to take to go from an idea for a physical product, to selling it in a marketplace. (Test your idea quickly, make a prototype, validate the market, iterate, etc.) He also touches on different ways to make money with physical products, from Amazon FBA, to selling on your own website, tweaking existing products from suppliers, and even licensing.
Filip Valica: Awesome. Thanks for having me on the show, Robert.
Robert Plank: Cool, so in addition to what we just talked about, what is it exactly that you do?
Filip Valica: By day I'm a mechanical engineer and an engineering manager. I work for companies to help take their products to market. Then at night I turn into a superhero you've never heard of to help other people kind of do the same with their own personal ideas.
Robert Plank: Cool, so like with who and with what?
Filip Valica: In my day job I work with, most of the companies I work with are in oil and gas, and some are in utilities and emergency vehicles. When I first got out of school, I worked for IBM and then I worked for a really tiny company. I went from working with like a 300,000 person company to like a mom and pap with 20 people. That 20 person company developed these products for, they basically connected the engine of an emergency vehicle and create a ton of electrical power to power like the Jaws of Life or other types of tools that a firefighter might use to get you out of a car.
Robert Plank: That's cool. You take your mechanical engineering knowledge and someone has an idea, and you help them get it out there, get it patented, all that good stuff?
Filip Valica: In a way. I'm doing it on my website and I'm not working with individuals right now. It's just a site where I put a bunch of information. It was a labor of love, so you could say. Our daughter was born about 16 months ago and the day that she was born I realized that you know what? If I don't get off my rear end and follow my passion and do something, then I'm going to wake up one day and she'll be in college and I'll be regretful. That day I basically started working on creating a bunch of content for a site and I launched the site in January of this year. Then I created a podcast in March, where I interview people that have been able to turn their ideas into products themselves. Yeah, the rest is history, so to speak. It's really just a information based site and a place where you can go to find how to take the next step if that's what you're looking to do.
Robert Plank: Well, cool. Let's talk a little bit about that. As far as the site that you created and the content that you've created yourself plus the guests you have on, what's the most interesting, I guess, topic or case study that comes to mind right now?
Filip Valica: Yeah, so I think most people will write in and say, "Hey, I have this really cool idea and I don't know how to take it to market" or, "What's the next step that I need to take? I've got a sketch of something and maybe I need to go and patent it, but what do I do?" To them it's probably the same thing that you guys have talked about in your other episodes. It's you really want to test your idea as quickly as you can, creating a concept prototype and validating the market, validating the customers. There's a process of all of this on the site for free, for anyone to go up there and look, and then iterate, so you've got a bunch of ideas you do that to all your ideas and the ones with the most promise will float to the top.
Robert Plank: Is that something that you commonly recommend someone to do, to have multiple ideas going just all pushed up to that finish line or whatever? I guess that way they don't have all their eggs in one basket?
Filip Valica: In way. If we look at the process, so what I did ... I'm going to take one step back really quick so I can explain myself. When I worked for small companies and really big companies and corporations, I noticed that they were kind of taking the same path to market. Even though they used different names and they had different tools and different processes, they pretty much followed the same steps and so all this site is a place where you can find out what those steps are and what's typically done during that step. I go into some detail about how you can do that step yourself if you want and then you can also decide if you want to hire somebody. There's some links there, again, no affiliation to any of these companies, where you can get more information. Basically it's a roadmap.
You asked about is it better to have a whole lot of ideas so you don't have all your eggs in one basket? I think when you first start the process, you might have more than one idea and some people have tons of ideas. Others have problems coming up with maybe even one. You need to be able to taper it down so you're not spending all your time in five or 10, 15 directions. The way that companies do this is this systematic process where they add a little bit of value, a little bit of work and then reevaluate it. It's like a guess and check type method. It's interactive. Every couple of steps you're either validating something, you're validating the market, you're validating your customers or you're validating the product. That way you're not going off on a tangent by yourself and then all of a sudden you wake up and no one is there with you, your product has no audience.
Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. If you just created A in a vacuum and then, "No one understands me."
Filip Valica: Right, right.
Robert Plank: You mentioned a little bit there like there are steps. Are there a lot of steps or is it something that you're able to list out for us real quick here?
Filip Valica: Yes and yes. There are a lot of steps. There's about 14 steps, only because I believe in breaking things down into small bite-size pieces. It's kind of that age-old question, "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time."
Robert Plank: One bite at a time, yep.
Filip Valica: I'm not a fan of just people saying, "Hey, there's these only three steps to getting a product to market. All you have to do is design it, make it and sell it." I just gave you zero information, right?
Robert Plank: Right.
Filip Valica: Yeah. I don't want to necessarily bore the listeners here by listing out all 14 steps, but basically you go from getting the idea to creating prototypes to designing, to designing for manufacture, funding it, making it, marketing, selling and shipping. There's some intermediate steps there depending on if you want to get patents and how complicated the design is, but it's very logical, step by step so you know, when you ready it, "Hey, this is what step I'm on and this is what maybe I haven't done that I need to go back and do."
Robert Plank: Okay. That's cool, yeah. You know where you are at right now and what's the next step for you, or if you need to go back and go fix something.
Filip Valica: Yeah, absolutely.
Robert Plank: Have you gone through this process not just with working with other companies, but have you gone through this process for your own idea?
Filip Valica: Yes. I've got a couple of ideas that I'm working on now. Had some more time lately, where I've been able to invest them working on a side project and some products and so I'm testing it by going through that. Most of the small companies that I've worked for have followed this procedure, I guess, these types of steps, again, by different names. It's not anything that's necessarily new. People that read the blueprint or these processes should be able to pick up what it is just by looking at it. Now, of course, once you start diving into the detail, some of these steps can take a couple of days or a week, and some can take months to complete.
Robert Plank: Okay. You're in fact actually making a product that ... What's the goal with this product? What are you building towards?
Filip Valica: Yeah, so the goal for me is to create multiple products so I can have multiple revenue streams from the product themselves. Basically, many companies, if you will. A couple of products would be part of one company and maybe some others under another, so small brands that have something in common. For example, I have a furniture product that just launched on Amazon that I didn't really design or create myself. I just private labeled. I don't know if you know much about private labeling.
Robert Plank: A little bit. Like, go on Alibaba, go contact them, buy the minimum order, that kind of thing.
Filip Valica: Yeah, so something like that, except I tweak the design a bit and I took it a step further. I bought an entire 20 foot container of product that I had custom designed or tweaked, I should say, for what I was looking for. Then I shipped it to Amazon. That main goal of that was just to test the process of contacting a manufacturer and then having Amazon fulfill it because those are the parts of the process that were most foreign to me again, because most of the work that I've done was working in the US with small companies that have manufacturing based in the US. I've definitely done the cradle to grave here. I just didn't know how it fit into the Amazon model.
Robert Plank: That's pretty cool that you were able to tweak something because the only two avenues I'd heard about were, like you said, the private label where you just go in and find something that's already made or that other process, which it seems like it might take a while, for someone to design something, especially if patenting is involved. It seems like what you did there with the first part, that was a little bit of a shortcut there, right? You had an idea of what you wanted to make, but then instead of having to go one extreme or the other, you just got the parts and assembled it, I guess. Is that right?
Filip Valica: No, absolutely. That's the nice thing about this DIY product development blueprint that I throw up there, is that you can, if you feel that all of the other previous steps have been done for you, for example, a private labeled product that already has a market, that's been tested, you get to skip all those steps until you hit the part where you're designing for a manufacturer or whatever you need to go next. It's kind of flexible in that. I want to touch on another thing that you said, where I was able to tweak the design. In my opinion, you could do that with most products. I think you can back to the manufacturer and say, "Hey, listen. This is what I would like to change with it." Now, whether they'd come back to you with a number that you agree with is a different story, but there's always room for that change. You just need to have that conversation with them and see what the minimum upfront cost is in that type of thing.
Robert Plank: That's kind of interesting. That's a whole another world I didn't even know about. You mentioned on your site and then a few places that part of what you do, you can do at least with teaching people what to do this. You can teach people how to get on the TV show Shark Tank. Is that right?
Filip Valica: Yeah. I loosely say that just because a lot of the people that I have on my podcast have been previous Shark Tank winners and the process that they take to get there is similar to if you were launching your own product. Instead of looking for funding from friends and family, now you're looking for funding from the Sharks, so ...
The only thing I was going to say for that is the Sharks probably have the same or similar requirements to making sure that you're a product the ideas are vetted and that you validated your customers' needs and you've done some upfront design and maybe you've even pre-sold some orders or made some sales. They have those types of requirements just like maybe any other investor that you'd run into.
Robert Plank: In order for someone to, for example, get on a show like that, what would they have to do?
Filip Valica: Yeah, so I think Shark Tank is special just because it's also on TV so there's the added component. A lot of the people that you speak with that have been on the show will say that first few rounds, there's three last I talked to somebody, the first two or three rounds are based on your likability. The ability for other people to pick up the phone and call for you or to switch the channel on and watch you, your ability to connect to other people in the audience. It's a TV show, so it's a ratings game, right?
Robert Plank: Right.
Filip Valica: The other part of the equation is what happens when you get through that third round and now the producers signed off on your likability and you're sitting in front of the Sharks. Now you need to have a viable product/business. I say businesses because lately or many of the products that have been founded have been around existing businesses, have the capability to grow. Many of them, and again I hate to use generalities because there's definitely some products that don't follow this mold, many of the products aren't just one-hit wonders. They have the ability to create other product lines instead of just variations. In other words, it's not just a different size or color or a copy of that product that does something just slightly different. It's a whole another avenue or it's a line of type of product. It needs to be developed and they need to be able to see that it has legs. Usually what that means is that you've got money or revenue coming in.
Robert Plank: Okay, so they're looking for some very specific things there?
Filip Valica: As far as I can understand, it's really hard to say what idea will succeed or fail just based on looking at it because they definitely have their own numbers involved and you've got every Sharks' personal preference. They take certain types of products. I don't watch the show religiously, so I don't want to get caught in a lie here, but a lot of the people that I've had on that were successfully able to take money from the Sharks and partner with them were people that knew what they were doing, they understood their market. They had a really good product with an idea that just needed to be amplified, that you need to turn up the dial a little bit. That it's not necessarily a product or an idea that you need someone else to put in a ton of work to validate or to make, to become real. If you didn't listen to anything that I've said the entire episode, I will say that there's very few people that will give you money for an idea.
Robert Plank: That's huge right there. What you're saying is for someone to be on Shark Tank, for example, then aside from all the other things that there's been a certain amount of market research, a certain amount of likability, what you're saying is that if that was someone's goal or if they were looking for the right fit, then that would only be if they were just at the point where they're ready for more money, but most of the work is already done by the time they're on that show. Is that right?
Filip Valica: Yeah, that's pretty much. In other words, if money is holding you back from scaling, that's probably a good fit for you. If you need money to make you successful, then that's a whole other question and that's probably something that they don't want to get involved in.
Robert Plank: Okay. Fair enough. This whole Shark Tank thing, I guess that's one avenue. Then I guess another avenue, like you said, is someone can go on Amazon, someone can get a supplier and private label or re-engineer something and then put it on Amazon. Is there any other kind of avenue someone should be taking if they have a product or they're making a product and they're looking to sell it?
Filip Valica: Yeah, absolutely. The standard model is manufacturing it yourself or outsourcing the manufacturer and you're basically wrapping a business around it, where you're fulfilling it yourself, you're handling the customer service or, again, you're outsourcing it, depending on your skillset. That's the base model. Many of the people that I have on the show have gone that route. They've got one to five employees small businesses where they've been in business for three to five years or whatever. They go to the trade shows. They do the online marketing and they do the fulfillment through their website, and they ship wholesale as well as retail. I guess that's the bread and butter. That's what people assume is the normal path. I would say the Amazon private labeling or the Amazon fulfillment path is maybe a fringe. Then there's also licensing, where you don't want to deal with any of that. All you want to do is say, "Here's my idea. Who's going to give me a percent of the revenue for it?"
Robert Plank: That seems kind of cool. Tell us about that a little bit.
Filip Valica: Yeah, so I'm not going to get myself into trouble by getting into too much detail because I'm an engineer and I am not a licensing lawyer or attorney and I haven't been involved in a lot of these cases, but basically that involves taking your intellectual property to a company that's highly likely to make your product and make it real, that has these connections in retail and the supply chain that you're looking for. For example, if you have a special tool that helps somebody around the house to do a DIY project, you'd go into a Home Depot or a Lou's and look at other tools that are similar to yours, find the manufacturer of those tools and then contact those manufacturers to say, "Hey, look. I've got this great idea that you need to start making and here's the cell sheet" which is basically a sheet that has a concept of the idea and all the benefits for the consumer and any detail that you can offer, and hope that they bite.
Now the strength of your deal is determined by a lot of factors, including the market it's in, the industry, how much upfront work you've done, do you already have an audience for it or you're just putting something up in the air, that type of thing. It could be anywhere from 3% to 10% of the revenue.
Robert Plank: Okay. What's cool about everything I've been hearing today is that there are a lot more options that I've been previously thought as far as, like you said, even just the licensing part of it or the combining different things together to make your Amazon product or selling it on their own website. It seems like no one's really locked into just one single avenue to take with all this.
Filip Valica: Yeah. I'm heavily biased, right? I'm really hands-on. I love doing DIY stuff. That's why it's DIY product development. I just get in there. I roll up my sleeves, then I do it because I enjoy it. I understand that doesn't fit everybody, but the nice thing is, especially now in today's world, where you have all these technologies that enable to do all these things, funding is one step on that model. Crowdfunding hasn't been as big as it is today in forever. Crowdfunding is based on like a 1800s model where people got together when there weren't as many taxes and they built things that the community needed. There have been other advances in like prototyping and all sorts of other things to enable you to do things by yourself that we didn't have 10, 15 years ago. Ecommerce is just blown up in the last five or 10 years, not in terms of the market share only compared to retail, but I mean in terms of the tools that are available to you and me to be able to sell something without any experience.
Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. I agree. With all that stuff, all the tools and all the platforms and all of those things available to everyone, what's the big mistake you see everyone making everywhere still?
Filip Valica: Oh, gosh. Big mistake is that you never validate your market and your consumer. You skip a step and you go off into the design phase where you're starting to spend money or you go on to protecting your IP, like getting a patent. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not a lawyer, I'm not giving a legal advice, asterisk. There is something called a provisional patent, so you don't have to spend a whole tons of the money. It's a provisional patent application that you fill out that gives you a year to put patent pending on your idea so you can develop it. Don't spend a ton of money upfront, bottom line, to validate your idea before it has legs. The worst case you can get into is that now you owe all this money to manufacturers, to people that are creating your prototypes and there's nobody that wants to buy your baby, and you get so invested because you've rushed through all these steps before validating, that now it has to work and you get really desperate. It's tough to make decisions that are logical at that point.
Robert Plank: Oh, no, because you're just in a panic mode at that point. Do you think that's because maybe it's like a ego kind of thing? Maybe someone says, "My product has just got to work so I'm just going to go forward with that"?
Filip Valica: Gosh. There's so many things. People that are their own customers can get blinders. You know, if you develop something for yourself, which is by the way a really good way to get ideas, is if you see that there's a need for it, because you need it in your own life; chances are someone else might need it too. Those types of people usually make the mistake of not validating that or not getting other input, but it could be as [inaudible 00:22:24]. There's so many ideas that you could run with that you just picked one without bringing any data into it. It's not a more ego thing. You just haven't done the steps or the work.
Robert Plank: Okay. Fair enough. It's like if people want to have a business, then if it makes sense if they had logical business steps as opposed to just winging it, I guess.
Filip Valica: Well, because it's just so hard to make a decision if there's no roadmap or a game plan for you, that it's easy to skip a step because it's not fun. It's not fun to go out there and talk to people who'll tell you no, that your idea stinks. It's not fun to go research. One of the early steps is to validate your market. That's when you see you need, for example, do you need any type of certification or testing for your product? How big is the market? People sometimes skip that step and then six steps later you realize you need FDA approval and it's 25 grand and takes a year or two. That's a tough pill.
Robert Plank: Yeah, scary stuff.
Filip Valica: It's not the fun part though, because the fun part is making the prototype or it's contacting manufacturers or creating the logo or whatever you deem to be really fun, and so you skip some of the other steps because, "Whatever, I'll get back to it" and in reality, you're just compounding the problem because now you're just getting more invested into the idea. It becomes really hard to say no to it later.
Robert Plank: Right. Yeah. It seems like that's a pretty easy trap to fall into if they don't have the right advice and the right guidance and stuff. Could you tell us about your website and your podcast and about all that kind of stuff?
Filip Valica: Yeah. I really appreciate you having me on. I'm definitely not going to be one of those people that says, "Oh, well, if you don't follow my plan, you're doomed." There's so many ways of going about going to market. I present one way. It's worked for me. It's worked for the companies that I've worked. I have a certain type of, again, hands-on, just get into it. That may not be you. If you go on TheProductStartup.com, you can find a step by step blueprint that you can follow to help turn your ideas into physical products. I also have a podcast where I interview other successful people that have done this. You don't have to take my word for it as an engineer. There's people that haven't had that experience that have put 5,000 dollars in and they have physical product based businesses that you can just listen to them and learn and see what they did.
Robert Plank: Awesome. Sounds like lots of good advice and lots of good stories there at the TheProductStartup.com. Thanks so much, Filip, for stopping by the show and telling us all about making a product.
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126: Courses, Webinars and Funnels: Attract Customers and Clients with Brian Lofrumento
Brian Lofrumento, creator of The Ultimate Profit Model, tells us about his online system to not only develop an idea into an information product (or coaching program) that serves a hungry and specific crowd, he also explains his webinar model (shatter existing beliefs and rebuild them) as well as how he fills up his webinars with attendees using Facebook ads.
Brian Lofrumento: Thanks Robert. I'm super excited to be here and give your audience some awesome value here today.
Robert Plank: Awesome. What exactly is it that you do, and what makes you unique and special?
Brian Lofrumento: Yeah. Great question. That's a loaded question, Robert, to start this out, but I love it. The big thing that I do is I really take people from saying, "Okay. I really want to be an entrepreneur, but I don't know where to go," to packaging it up, whether it's a product or service for an online program. Something that can pull in some serious profits for them. High profit margins. I help them find a market of people who are looking to actually buy that product or service.
Robert Plank: Cool. Exactly how far do you take it? Have you dealt with clients who just have absolutely no idea what to do, or someone would have like a half written book. I mean, do you narrow down their niche? How far do you go with that?
Brian Lofrumento: Yeah. Actually, there's an easy way to answer that question. The first thing that I always do with people is I ask them, "Who the heck are you trying to serve?" A lot of people when they do come to me they say, "I want to be an entrepreneur, but I don't have a business idea." I always argue that you don't actually need a business idea. You just need to determine and decide on who it is that you want to serve. For example, one of my most successful students that I worked with, he's a high school soccer coach. He wanted to be an entrepreneur, but he didn't know exactly what to do. He had no business idea.
I asked him who does he want to serve, and he said he wanted to help other soccer coaches become better coaches. Once he decided who he wanted to serve, I simply asked him, "What's standing in between them and the result that they want, which is to become better coaches?" He started listing everything out. He said they don't know how to plan practices, they don't know how to deal with parents, they don't know what nutrition and fitness advice to give their players.
He went through all these things, and we packaged it up into a $997 inner circle. He sells that to coaches all around the country, so that they can learn from him. They can get weekly access to him and go through these training modules that he has. It literally is from idea to actual execution and launch. I love seeing my students go, while they're working with me, go from $0 to $10,000 a month.
Robert Plank: That's pretty cool. I think that what was packed in there a little bit is just the idea that you don't have to come up with a crazy, fancy idea, like you said. You just figure out who you want to serve and that kind of reminds me of early on for me, I was trying to think of what my next product or software program should be. One of my mentors at the time just said ... Something that's hot right at that moment was affiliate marketing, so he was like, "well, put together some set of tools that helps with affiliate marketing." I asked him, "Doesn't that kind of thing already exist?" He said, "Yeah, but it doesn't have to be something that's brand new and groundbreaking. It doesn't have to be like Uber or Facebook."
Then, there was something I saw maybe a few months ago from the creator of Alibaba, who said something like, "It doesn't matter if the thing you're creating is stupid. It matters if people use it." Instagram, Snapchat, PayPal, stuff like that. Well, it doesn't have to be this huge groundbreaking, mind blowing thing. It just has to be something that catches on.
Brian Lofrumento: Yeah. That's absolutely spot on, Robert. You had a few really good points in there. I love the argument, entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs they always have that argument of "Oh, there's somebody else doing it." Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg didn't start Facebook just, because MySpace was already doing it. Name any business book. Imagine if that was never written, because there are already other business books. No one can do exactly what it is that you want to do, exactly the way that you can do it. You are the only person on the planet that can do that thing in your unique way. Even if 50 million other people have done it, no one's ever done it like you. That's a great argument.
Robert Plank: Let's kind of unpack that a little bit. One thing I'm always curious about, especially in this kid of thing, where you're a coach to people. Is there a set of steps or a process you go through like if you have one of these people like that soccer dad? He has an idea, and you flush out his idea. Then, after that point, what's the next step? What do you set up for him?
Brian Lofrumento: Yeah. Good question. For me, specifically ... Well, actually I'll answer it more broadly, then we'll get into me more specifically. Once you've actually got your product flushed out or your service flushed out, there's really only one thing you need to focus on in order to have a business. That's to attract customers and clients. Anything else you're doing is totally superficial. If you spend your time getting a logo and doing all these surveys with your potential people, that's all great, but unless you actually have sales coming in you don't have a business. What I do, specifically with the soccer coach, for example, and thousands of my other students, is I helped them set up an online system that, one, attracts potential customers and, two, turns those customers into clients.
I'm a huge fan of the webinar model right now. I mean, the webinar model's grown in my business over the past two or three years. It's how I've helped countless students do the exact same thing. Webinars are great, because there's no quicker way online to find people totally from scratch through Facebook ads, is what I recommend. Warm them up, because you give them value over the course of a webinar, and then invite them to work with you. Even if only two percent of people ever work with you, that's the mechanics of a $10,000 per month business right there.
Robert Plank: Speaking of webinars and things like that, you running Facebook ads, I mean, how do you figure out the hook and the content for a webinar? How do you get some butts in seats for that kind of thing?
Brian Lofrumento: Yeah. Great questions. I'll answer the first question first, which is the content of the webinar. People always freak out about that. I've got a really simple formula that I share with my students. This is actually a great question, Robert. You pried this out of me. Usually I reserve this stuff for my students in my programs. The answer is that what you really need to do, it's very simple, you need to figure out what people's existing beliefs are when it comes to whatever your product or service is. I guess we'll keep running with the soccer coach example, because that's something tangible for a lot of people.
When a soccer coach approached me and said, "What am I going to put in a webinar?" You have to acknowledge what are their existing beliefs about coaching soccer. One of the existing beliefs is that, if my players aren't technically sound, there's no way that they can win. It's going to be really hard for me to get them to improve. That's an existing belief. On your webinar, you want to acknowledge the existing beliefs, shatter that belief, and rebuild those beliefs. If you can do that about three existing beliefs, you've got enough content for a webinar right there.
Robert Plank: That's pretty cool. That's as far as ... For this kind of thing, do you have your clients have a set amount of time, set length time, set number of slides, stuff like that?
Brian Lofrumento: I'm not a big fan of numbers or anything like that. I mean, thinking back to high school, how much did we all hate when teachers said, "Oh. It's got to be a four page paper." Something like that.
Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. I hated that too.
Brian Lofrumento: Oh, it's the worst. I really stick to, typically, about an hour, because people allot in their calendar for an hour to show up for a webinar. Hour long webinars are really successful. I've seen people succeed with shorter webinars, with longer webinars, but I never get into number of slides to anything like that with them.
Robert Plank: Okay. Fair enough, so you figure out all that existing belief, shatter, rebuild, and then if they don't have a list to fill up that webinar, then what's the plan?
Brian Lofrumento: Yeah. Facebook ads is an absolute gold mine right now. That's my overwhelming answer to pretty much most people's problems. If you can master Facebook ads, you can reach as many people as you want, and as you can afford as quickly as you want to. Facebook ads is really great, because you can target people based on anything. If you ran a business where your ideal customers were thirty-six year old females who live in the Upper East Side of New York, who drive a Toyota Prius and own a dog, you can target those exact people on Facebook ads. I don't know what kind of niche industry that would be that I just gave that example for, but you can get as fine or as broad as you want when it comes to Facebook ads.
Robert Plank: Have you noticed that with the Facebook ads that maybe it's easier to put those ads out there if you're outside of the internet marketing space, or is there a secret to that?
Brian Lofrumento: Yes. No. Great question, Robert. My students, that's why I love working with students who are soccer coaches, who are health coaches, or who are travel agents. Those students are so much fun to work with, because if you're outside of the IM niche most of those markets have ever been marketed to properly. I mean, the soccer coaching industry, for example, I swear my student must be one of the few people in the world targeting these soccer coaches on Facebook. He's generating webinar sign ups for 75 cents a sign up. When he spends $500 on a Facebook ad campaign, he's getting 700 coaches signing up for his webinars. If you can talk to 700 people on a webinar, you can bet your bottom dollar that you're going to get at least a few sales. That way, if you've got a $1,000 product, you're looking at a pretty sizable business pretty easily.
Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. That amount for $500, that's a day no brainer.
Brian Lofrumento: Yeah. Exactly. It's insane. How else can you speak to 700 people for $500 and offer them your $1,000 product? You're right. It's a total no brainer.
Robert Plank: What do people actually see? Continuing with the soccer dad type of thing, so lets say some other soccer coach is on Facebook, and they see some kind of ad that's targeted to them. What do they kind of see in the ad and in the landing page they click over to more or less?
Brian Lofrumento: Yeah. Great question. Typically, the ads will just speak to the benefits. I mean so many marketers we know that you don't want to sell the drill, you want to sell the hole. People aren't actually interested in the drill. They're interested in making the hole in the wood, in the wall, or whatever they're looking to buy. You've got to speak to the results. For the soccer coach, his example, his ads typically speak to "Do you want to improve your players, your team, and your coaching? Sign up for this free webinar. I'm going to show you the three ways that you can make your team better this season." It's strictly results and benefits based.
When people actually click the ad, they get taken to a very simple page. It's just the picture of a soccer coach out on a practice field. It advertises the free webinar. Shows us the date and the time of the webinar, and they can sign up right then and there. It's literally nothing fancy. It's super effective, because it speaks to the results that people are actually looking for.
Robert Plank: Awesome. Again, it seems like even though you explain it, it's very go from the idea to having it in place very quickly and not a lot of fanciness. No thirty or fifty step process. Just whatever is the simplest thing to get it done.
Brian Lofrumento: Yeah. Exactly. No sixty-seven steps here, for sure. Robert, the one thing that I want to point out for people who are listening to this and saying, "This sounds cool. It sounds like a quick way to get started." You can even sell something from a webinar that you haven't even created yet. If you could come up with, for example, an eight week program that you want to sell online. You can sell it. Then, host those eight weeks live with your students, record those, and then turn it into a product afterwards. It really is a quick way to go from idea to $10,000.
Robert Plank: Is this all that you do? Is this your primary business? You find people who need online presence, who need a product, who need coaching, clients, and you set this system up for them. You get the Facebook ads and the webinar and all that stuff set up for them?
Brian Lofrumento: Yeah. The fun thing for me is that I stopped doing client-based work back in 2013, so I haven't done client-based work in over three years now which is great. I've really go this system honed in, in an eight week process that people can go through these eight weeks that I've laid out. Do the work. Take the action items that I've given to them, and roll this entire system out on their own. My real business, what I do on a week to week basis, is I welcome new students into the program. Then, I host Tuesday night group calls with my students, usually. Every Tuesday night, I'll get on. It kind of looks like the Brady Bunch, we're all on video interaction, and I answer their questions. I hop on their screens. I take control of their screens and help them out. Yeah, that's absolutely how my business is, and a lot of my students have set up their businesses in very similar ways.
Robert Plank: Awesome. We talked about the soccer dad. Can you give us one other cool niche or cool case study where you set some stuff up for them?
Brian Lofrumento: Yeah. Totally. One of my students, who is going through right now, she's got an awesome business that she's rolling out. She calls it the A-List Workforce Academy. She really targets people who are fresh out of undergraduate, so one to five years out of school. They're in an entry-level corporate position, and they're wondering, "How the heck do I climb this corporate ladder without butt kissing, without playing all these political games within an office setting?" She's teaching people who are right out of school how to climb the corporate ladder without all those other things that none of us really enjoy.
She's created this academy where people get that access to her. They get these pre-made training videos, where they learn how to communicate effectively over email, how they should present themselves at work. Even little things like, what are the items that they should have on their desk at work, at their cubicle, so no matter what happens ... She calls it the Office Survival Tool Kit. If you spill something on you, you should have a Tide-To-Go pen. All these things that you just wouldn't think of, and she's providing this awesome service and awesome value to people who have those problems.
Robert Plank: How to get ahead without sleeping with the boss, because that's my problem. I'm just kidding.
Brian Lofrumento: Yeah. No, you hit it right on the head, Robert. It's exactly that type of concept.
Robert Plank: Cool. I like that. I don't have as many coaching clients that like, it's always nice to kind of play around in someone else's space. Especially, how you and me, we have all these tools, but the problem is that it seems like a lot of our competitors have the same tools. It's really cool to go into a space where people don't even know that these things exist, right? Like the auto-responder, the funnel, the webinar, all that cool stuff.
Brian Lofrumento: Yeah. Exactly. It always gets a kick out of people when I say the F-word, because then I joke around that the F-word stands for funnel. Many people, you're right, don't know what a funnel is. It's easy within our little IM, or internet marketing, world to feel like everybody knows these things. You take one step outside, and they've got no clue.
Robert Plank: If someone wants to work with you or if someone is in one of those niches where no one else is doing anything like that, I mean, it's game over. They're the top dog, at least, until everyone else jumps on.
Brian Lofrumento: Yeah. Exactly. You nailed it.
Robert Plank: I know that you have a book, and that you have a program called "The Ultimate Profit Model." Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Brian Lofrumento: Yeah. Totally. The book is called Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur. It's targeted at the exactly people who we've talked about here today. They know that they want to be an entrepreneur, but they don't know what steps to take to go from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur. I'm actually giving a thousand copies of that book away for free. People can just go to ImetBrian.com now that they've met me here on your podcast. They could just go to ImetBrian.com, and that's a fun book. I walk them through the concept of what we talked about. How do you come up with an idea for your product or service? Where do you find your ideal person? How do you even know who your ideal person is? Then, how do you turn them from just a prospect into a new paying customer or client? That's the book.
The program, "The Ultimate Profit Model," is my flagship program, so that's the eight week program that we've talked about. It's really a group program where people get direct access to me. They can learn more information about that at UltimateProfitModel.com or the easiest way is to just get a free copy of my book at ImetBrian.com. Then, they can sign up for one of my webinars and see the entire system in play and in process, see how it all works, and they can sign up for "The Ultimate Profit Model" there. I will throw this little tip in, that's actually the most affordable way to get into "The Ultimate Profit Model" is to grab my book for free. Show up to my webinar, and I offer a special discount at the end of my webinar.
Robert Plank: Nice. You're not just a guy that teaches about webinars and funnels, but you actually do them.
Brian Lofrumento: Yes. You're right. That's the one thing that kills me. "Oh, the best way to get new leads and new customers is through quizzes," but they're not using quizzes to do that. That kills me when I see them doing webinars for that. Yeah. I practice what I preach. I'm always testing things and rolling out new, effective things to my students. Absolutely.
Robert Plank: Well, cool. Now, along those lines and as we're kind of winding this call down, do you have anything new and exciting coming up? Do you have some new idea or some new project that you're really pumped up about?
Brian Lofrumento: Yeah. I'm super pumped right now about developing more advanced master mind, because so many of my students are getting really crazy levels of success right now. They're just kind of chomping at the bit, and they're asking, "Brian, what's next? I've got these webinar funnels going. I'm making good money. What's next?" Right now, I'm putting together an all-in-one experience. It's going to be part in-person experience, where we're going to fly to cool places around the world and master mind as well as online stuff to really take them to the next level.
Robert Plank: Awesome. Isn't that a nice place to be where instead of you having to scramble around for idea, you have people telling you what they want you to make for them.
Brian Lofrumento: Yeah. It's the best. Definitely. No doubt about that.
Robert Plank: Awesome. Pretty good lifestyle to have. Lots of good ideas packed in here. Can you tell us, one last time, where people can get "The Ultimate Profit Model" and where they can get the book? That way we know they have the link.
Brian Lofrumento: Yeah. The best way to get both is now that they met me here on your show, just go to IMetBrian.com. They can pick up a free copy of my book. They just have to pay shipping and handling. I'll sign it, send it to them wherever they are. Once they get their hands on my free book, they can sign up for the webinar right there. It takes them straight to the webinar sign up page. From the webinar, they'll see the entire thing in play, and they can sign up for "The Ultimate Profit Model" there.
Robert Plank: Awesome. Works for me. Thanks, Brian, for coming on the show, and thanks for sharing all your little nuggets of gold wisdom. All these things, the things I liked the best, I know that even though you said you're not the Mr. Numbers guy, but still the way that you explained all this stuff. It's very straight forwarded. Very simple. Just follow the steps. Skip the steps that don't apply. I like that way of thinking.
Brian Lofrumento: Yeah. Thanks, Robert. It was a blast coming on the show today. I hope people got some value, and I'd love to do it again soon.
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125: Get Free TV and Radio Publicity For Your Business Today with Sharon Bolt
Sharon Bolt from Get Free Publicity Today, and author of the free report, "How To Write An Attention Grabbing Press Release" tells us how she was able to land a spot on BBC radio as well as a recurring segment where she appears on the radio regularly. She also tells us about press releases and what you may be missing from them.
Sharon Bolt: Thanks very much for having me, Robert. I'm really please to be here.
Robert Plank: Cool. I'm pleased that you are here. I understand that you talk about press releases and publicity, is that right?
Sharon Bolt: That's right.
Robert Plank: Cool, so could you tell us a little bit about that and how you got started with that, and what makes you different, and unique, and special?
Sharon Bolt: Yeah, sure. People are actually a little shocked when I tell them about my first media experience because what happened, Robert, was I got myself booked on BBC Radio 2, which is a national radio station in the UK. That was without any prior media exposure. Now people are a little bit shocked about that but what actually happened was that I was introduced as a dog-training expert, answering dog behavior questions, when I actually had a complimentary therapy business and not a dog-training business. Dog training was passion at the time and I went on to do for the next 9 years. What happened was I saw an opportunity, I believed I could make a difference so I went for it. It was the start of numerous media interviews.
Robert Plank: That's cool. You said that you had a therapy business and BBC Radio 2, they were looking for experts to talk about dog training so you were able to fit that in, is that right?
Sharon Bolt: Well that's right. I had recently got 2 puppies and had been told that it was the worst case scenario because they're brothers, litter mates. I was told that they would fight for the top dog position, and they'd take no notice of me, and that I would probably need to re-home one. I had been on a mission it had to be a natural way of communicating with them, and I looked at my 2 puppies and said, 'You two are not going anywhere." I had embarked on this mission to save my puppies and what had happened was is that I had started to introduce what I was discovering and what I was learning to my complimentary therapy clients who had dogs. We were all getting amazing results.
When I heard the DJ say on the national radio station that he was going to get somebody from the TV, a dog-training expert, on the show the following week, I thought to myself, "You know what? I can do that." What I did, Robert, is I sat down at the computer and I wrote to the host. It was just the normal email address. I didn't have his direct email address, it was just the general email address, and I said everything about dogs. Now I didn't make it about me at all. It was nothing about me, it was all about what I could do for him and his listeners. Then at the end I said to him, "You've got to give me a call because I'll be a great guest on your show." Naturally I told him I was a dog expert and that he should call me.
Well, nothing happened. I got no call back. A couple of days later he actually said that he was also going to include the following week on the show, and he called them podgy dogs. There I was, Robert, in the subject line now, of the email, I wrote, podgy :04:01] dogs. I'm your girl." Again, I wrote this email and I explained why dogs were overweight, what the answers were, what I could tell him, what I could tell his listeners and that he needed to get me on his show. Nothing happened.
Then it was the weekend and I went and did a dog-training consultation. It was about a dog that was eating the home from the inside out when the owners were going to work, had severe separation anxiety. I came home over the weekend, and I wrote about this consultation, and I sent that off to the show again. Monday morning I got a call from the reporters. On the Wednesday I was being interviewed as a dog-training expert live on the show and I was speaking to 4 million listeners.
Robert Plank: That's pretty cool. Would you say that the reason why that worked is because, number 1, you were listening to what the radio station needed, number 2, you kept on following up and even though you got ignored a few times you kept on doing it, then number 3, you sent over this blog post you had written kind of as proof that you're an authority on the subject?
Sharon Bolt: Well, that's right, Robert. It is. It's that persistence. I knew, it was the self-belief as well. I knew I could make a difference. I was seeing with my own eyes the difference that was being made with people's dogs when they did what I had developed. Although I hadn't been doing it for months, I had probably about 3 months or so at the time, or even years, naturally, I thought, "You know what? I've got a lot to offer here," so I claimed that expert slot and I went for it.
Robert Plank: That's pretty cool. Is that something where you've repeated that technique over and over? Maybe even like this same kind of informal thing where you happen to hear that some radio or TV station was looking for X subject and you kind of fit yourself in there?
Sharon Bolt: Well it's very important that when you do pitch or send a press release that you need to be relevant. Of course if you do hear something that they're saying that they're going to feature or you find that out on their website, then you match your pitch, your press release, so that you're ticking their boxes. The other way that's a good way to do it, Robert, is just keeping an eye on the general news. What's topical? What's coming up? What are they talking about? Of course, that's when your pitch, your story idea's in line with what they're looking for and this is where it becomes a win-win situation.
Robert Plank: How can someone duplicate that? It's one thing to be listening on the radio and you hear that they're looking for certain topics, but is there either some kind of database someone could and find out all the shows and all the subjects coming up? Or is it a matter of, like you said, looking at the news and kind of tailoring something to, I don't know, Brexit, or Donald Trump and then shopping that around? What's the strategy behind that?
Sharon Bolt: Well there are books and there are places that you can go to look for journalists but in my experience, Robert, is that what happens with journalists, they move around and change very quickly. For example, if it's a media book that's been published, and I've bought these in the past myself, and when I've come to use them, of course, there's no answer because those people are no longer working there or they've moved jobs and they've got different positions. The best thing to do is to really keep a check on what's going on locally, so read your local newspapers, watch the news, and then go to the specific websites of the particular shows, or newspapers, or radios, magazines that you'd like to appear in. That's really the very, very best way of doing it.
Robert Plank: Okay. How much of your current business would you say that is? Is it half? Is it the majority? Or are there other techniques that take up more of your time?
Sharon Bolt: As in the publicity? That's what I'm really focused on now, and to obviously teach other business owners, and startups, and entrepreneurs how they can grow their business, and increase sales, and position themselves as an authority in their niche by cleverly using free publicity. What I find is, Robert, is that so many people are not using publicity because either they don't know what to do or perhaps they're introverts and think, "Wow. I couldn't get involved in all the media things," but that's really not how it is when you're doing an interview.
For example, Robert, I've got a regular slot on BBC Radio, and I go down once a month, and I answer live phone-in questions. Now, people would think, "Oh, that's really scary," but the truth is is I turn up. I arrive, there's a receptionist, there's 1 producer and there's 1 host. You sit in a room and it's like a small dining room. As long as you can keep your mindset away from how many people are listening and keep out of the negative, "Wouldn't it be awful if it goes wrong," story, then you're on track because you're not talking to 500 people. This is not public speaking but you are reaching just thousands and sometimes millions of listeners.
Robert Plank: How did that weekly, that regular slot you have on BBC Radio, how did that come to be?
Sharon Bolt: Well that was when I was at a social event and a networking event, and where you obviously mingle with other business owners and talking to other people. There was a gentleman I met there who was a freelance radio host in the BBC. He was then going to be on the show as a one-off and he invited me on as a guest. Then they heard me and they liked me, and so it developed from there. Then when they came up with a slot, they call it the Sound Advice slot, where they experts on the show to answer questions, that's when they said would I do that. This is 8 years down the line now.
Robert Plank: You've been going in it for 8 years, is this like a once-a-week program?
Sharon Bolt: The program is on every day but the slot that I do is once a month. I go to the actual studios and do the phone-in once a month.
Robert Plank: That's cool. Do they let you promote your practice or anything like that?
Sharon Bolt: Yes, I mean with the BBC you have to be a bit careful because it's a publicly funded company so they don't have any advertisements on the show and they don't like to be seen to be endorsing people but, yes. I mean, at the end you give your website out, I might talk about consultations I've done because specifically what I'm doing there is about the dog training so I'll talk about different aspects about that. Then it's a case of not blatantly saying and plugging something but telling people in general. For example, "When I was doing a consultation this happened," so then people realize you do consultations. It's that type of thing that you weave into but you always do say your website at least at the very end.
Robert Plank: Even if that's all that's kind of allowed or all that's polite, it's still pretty cool. Just even that little mention to thousands of people.
Sharon Bolt: That's right. The thing is in the UK, the BBC, and I think it's worldwide, is very well-known. Of course you can imagine for your type of credibility and certainly your marketing, when you say, "As heard on BBC Radio," of course that opens doors for you. It's not always what you're saying on the show, it's just that credibility. The great thing is, Robert, is that when you are featured, whether it be a newspaper, a magazine. Whether it be a radio show or obviously a TV show, people think and see you straight away as an authority in your niche. It doesn't matter how long you've been in business. This is why this is great for start-ups as well as long-term business owners, because it can skyrocket your business literally overnight when you get featured in the press.
Robert Plank: What's cool is that so far you've told us 2 different ways to do it. One way is to listen to your local news and to see what subjects are coming up lately, or what keeps coming up, and then keep on, I guess, pitching them a little bit on what subject that you can cover. The other way that you've covered so far is that the way that you were able to get your regular radio gig was just by networking, just by knowing someone who was on the radio and just knowing to ask, I guess. Do you have another way of getting that free publicity and getting the word out?
Sharon Bolt: Yeah. What I like to do is come up with story ideas. For example, this is where it goes back to your marketing, where you ask yourself questions like what are my target market's pain points? You know, just your general market and what keeps them awake at night? What would they really like to change? What questions do they regularly ask me? For an example here, Robert, if, for example, you're a dentist and people are confused about the different teeth whitening products on the market, you could write a pitch or a press release explaining the different products, what the differences are between them and what you would recommend for different types of people.
Do you see how you can just tie it in to what you know is relevant and what your target market is asking for? The key then, Robert, is to find the exact publication or show that is then having your target market and is looking for the type of story ideas that you come up with.
Robert Plank: Is there a reliable way of finding those kinds of publications or shows? Or just kind of see what's local, see what's around?
Sharon Bolt: Well, I think the number 1 tool that we all have is Google. I mean, just to Google something like, if you're looking to get on Entrepreneur Magazine, for example, and say you were a health and fitness expert. Just Google in health and fitness magazines. You'll get a whole host of different magazines and then of course you can click on that. Then you need to do some detective work. Start finding what are the magazines and they usually have contact information there because they want you to come up with good story ideas because it is a win-win situation. When they have to constantly be coming up with features and finding people, that's hard work.
That's the key thing to remember here. Journalists and media people, they need us as much as we need them because otherwise it makes their job really difficult. If you show up with everything done for them, coming up with a great story idea that's relevant to your target market and to their audience, and you give them all the tools that they need, they're laughing.
Robert Plank: That's cool. You make it sound so simple. It seems like an easy way for people who, if they want more exposure or they just don't know what to do, I mean, even just that seems like a pretty easy list of things that someone could kind of go after. As we're kind of starting to wind down this call a little bit, you mentioned press releases, so could you kind of explain press releases a little bit? Because all I really know about press releases are I've seen people do them, I've hired some people to write some, and I kind of posted them and they didn't seem to really do much. Could you tell us about press releases and what people are doing wrong, to know what they should be doing instead?
Sharon Bolt: The number 1 thing that people do wrong with press releases, Robert, is that they send it to the wrong people. This isn't about just doing a general mailing and spamming people. There's nothing more annoying for the press, from a journalist's position, than receiving press releases that is nothing to do with their department and what they're interested in. That's what I find the number 1 thing is, sending press releases to the wrong people. The other thing that I find is that with a press release it is a particular format. Now, I have got that, I go into great detail on my website. There's a free report called How to Write An Attention-Grabbing Press Release That Creates Win-Win Situations in the Media, so people can download that free from my website because there is a specific formula to follow.
What happens with journalists, they are trained of how to read a press release. They know how to skim through it really quickly as to what the press release and what the story idea is about. Now if you don't do the right format, if you don't get that right, then of course that already says to the journalist that you don't know what you're doing and what you're talking about. I think they're 2 key things why press releases don't work for people.
Robert Plank: Get the press release to the right people and then use that format that way the journalists know how to read it quickly.
Sharon Bolt: That's right, and they know that you know what you're talking about. It gives them confidence. You can imagine, with a journalist they will often receive something like 100+ pitches and press releases every single day, so in order to get their attention really quickly so they don't hit that delete button, you need to come up with something very eye-catching and in that particular format, which is what I teach people in the press release report that I've written.
Robert Plank: Can you give us a little bit of a case study in a situation where you sent out a press release and what did that get you?
Sharon Bolt: I sent out a press release, in the UK we have something called Bonfire Night. It's November the 5th and it's a great celebration. People light bonfires and fireworks. I sent a press release out about the different ways that people can support their dogs during Bonfire Nights because obviously it's a frightening time for dogs because there's all the fireworks and the fire that's going. It's a nightmare time for a lot of dog owners. I wrote a press release around that, about how to make your dog comfortable when the fireworks are going off and what's the right information to give them. That actually landed me 2 slots on national TV on the Breakfast Morning show. They also came and they did some video footage, and then I was on twice explaining about different ways that we can best support dogs during firework night.
Robert Plank: That's pretty cool. It seems like one of those cases where you take 1 action and it leads to all these other cool things too.
Sharon Bolt: Well that's right, and of course what happens is, Robert, is people are listening. Other journalists, other media people are watching, and reading, and looking at the different media channels. If they see a good guest, this is how it can really catapult very, very quickly. That's it, so 1 appearance can really put you on different medias. Like, for example, if I'm interviewed on 1 radio show, I often get a call almost straight away from another radio show asking me to do an interview on their show about the same topic.
Robert Plank: Nice. It's not just a 1 shot deal and it sounds like a lot of what I'm hearing in these stories that you tell, a lot of it is in the follow-up. Where it's not like you're just doing all this work just for 1 appearance, it's for many.
Sharon Bolt: That's right. I mean, just 1 TV appearance. Obviously it's going to make a big, big difference to your business because you are elevated as to the top authority in your niche, so that is going to be fantastic. It's how to then really pay off that and get lots more leverage. Just that one appearance so that you keep getting asked back time and time again by different media outlets. Because that's where the goal is then, is to have different outlets contact you and obviously repeat interviews and features in both the press, and the radio, and TV.
Robert Plank: Right. I mean I could imagine once you've been on their show once, once you have a relationship with them it's easier to come back, I would imagine.
Sharon Bolt: Yeah, and that's a really good point you make there, Robert. Thank you for saying that because it is all about building relationships. All about that. This is why, another reason I would say with the press releases if they don't work, 1 thing I like to do is if I start to research and I have a particular reporter, for example, that I want to get into a particular publication, I'll start looking at them on social media. I will comment nicely, and favorably, and supportively to their posts, to their tweets, so they start to get to know who I am before I even pitch them or send them a press release. It's all about building relationships.
Robert Plank: I like that. That's a pretty cool tactic. Could you tell everyone about you, and your website, and where they can find out more about you and publicity, and especially that template you mentioned too?
Sharon Bolt:Yeah, they can download my free report, that How to Write An Attention-Grabbing Press Release on my website, which is getfreepublicitytoday.com. I'm in the process right now, Robert, very exciting, it's taken a year in the unfolding, but I'm creating and hopefully launch in about a month or two, free publicity courses where I explain and show people step-by-step exactly how to do it with templates, with everything that they will need. From media training to mindset, everything somebody would need in order to get featured in the press.
Robert Plank: Cool. That seems like something that people need. This whole media, TV and video thing, for me it's pretty unexplored but I like hearing your answers, and your stories, and all these little things about how we can all tap into this. It seems like this is something that every single business needs, I think.
Sharon Bolt: Well it's great as well because people that are not extroverts, who would shy away from this whole media thing, when you are doing an interview, say for the press, for your local newspaper, you sit at home on the telephone and you give an interview. That's all it is. Then that could be 10, 15 minutes and then they go off and write the article and now you become a local celebrity because you're the one that's featured in your industry in the news.
Robert Plank: I like it. You don't even have to put on pants to be in the paper.
Sharon Bolt: Exactly.
Robert Plank: Cool. Sharon, thanks for being on the show today and that link again is Get Free Publicity Today. Thanks for sharing everything you have to know about press releases in this short amount of time. I had a lot of fun. I hope you did too.
Sharon Bolt: Had a great time, Robert. Thanks so much for asking me on your show.
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124: Discover Your Own Passion, Knowledge and Advantage with Agency Consultant Jason Swenk
Jason Swenk talks to us about creating the resource you "wish you had" that satisfies the criteria of: 1. something you're passionate about, 2. something you're knowledgeable in, 3. an area where you have a unique advantage, and 4. something that is helpful and educates people.
He tells us how he started, grew, and sold an agency, and shares some cutting edge techniques including the early bird list and progressive profiling with thank you pages.
We're in the right place. We're talking to the right guide. We're talking to Mr. Jason Swenk. How are things today Jason?
Jason Swenk: A man. How's it going?
Robert Plank: Super fantastic. This whole agency thing, or web agency, I've got to be honest. I've heard it thrown around. I've heard this term being used at live events. I've been to events where it's like these talks offer agencies only, but I have to admit after seeing it thrown around and seeing a few different, I guess, agencies, I'm still at a loss as to what an agency is. Could you fill us in a little bit?
Jason Swenk: Yeah. It's basically a professional service firm that does marketing or technology for their clients. There's so many forms of a digital agency. The traditional agency everybody thinks of Mad Men, right? I create the Super Bowl ads, commercials, that kind of stuff, but on the digital side there's so many agencies that actually creates websites or do just social media, or mobile apps, or email marketing, or whatever it is. That's what a digital agency is.
Robert Plank: Does it have to be a team?
Jason Swenk: Yes, because if it's just one person you're a freelancer.
Robert Plank: Oh, okay. You could have a 2 person agency technically.
Jason Swenk: Exactly.
Robert Plank: Well, cool. Now that were on the same page with that could you tell us about yourself and about your agency, and what it is that you do?
Jason Swenk: Yeah. Back in 1999, back when Al Gore invented the Internet, thank you Al, I worked for a company called Arthur Anderson who was the paper shredding company of Enron, and worked for them for about 6 months. At that time I was a computer programmer and I really hated what I was doing but I didn't know what I could do next. I was just lucky my friend looked like Justin Timberlake so I created a website making fun of of NSYNC back in the day when they were popular, and it was called NSHIT. It got really popular and started designing websites for people because people were like, "Hey, can you design me a website?" I was like, "Yeah, sure." I was like, "Five hundred dollars," and they were like, "Yes." I was like, "Oh. Cool," and then the next person comes along and I was like, "a thousdand dollars," and I just kept going up until someone said no, and just started doing websites for a lot of cool people.
I struggled for a couple years just because, we were always profitable, but for the first couple years I didn't know even what an invoice was. I didn't know how to run a business or really how to get it off the ground. I didn't have that clarity of where we were going, and then when I started focusing on that that's when we started making, crossing over the 7 figure mark and crossing over that mark, and all this kind of stuff going forward.
Robert Plank: How much of this do you do yourself? Do you just manage a team or how hands-on are you personally?
Jason Swenk: I sold my agency in 2012, so I ran it for 12 years and sold it. Now what I do, and I'll explain what I did in the past. In the very beginning I was doing everything myself. I was doing project management. I was doing design. I was doing development, hosting, everything, clean the toilets, wash the sinks, feed the birds, whatever it was. When I started getting smart I started hiring people for the things I didn't want to do, or hiring for the things that I wasn't good at, and just started expanding, and grew an amazing agency from that.
Since I've sold, that's why I work with digital agencies now, it's just to show them how I started, how I grew, how I sold, and just walk them through the path that I did, and create a resource that I wish I had.
Robert Plank: Is that what you do mostly is you get these agencies to the position where they can be sold, or do you also look at these agencies and maybe refine their system and figure out where they could be doing better?
Jason Swenk: It depends on what they ultimately want. Some people, they envision, they think that in order to be successful I have to get to a point to sell my business one day. I'll tell you that is farthest from the truth because if you truly love what you're doing, why would you sell it? Even after, when I sold my agency, great. I got a great big check. I thought cool, I'll go buy an island or whatever stupid people do, but you're so unfulfilled now because you had all the significance with all your employees that you had, all the contribution that you were helping them out, helping their clients out. That all goes away after you're sold.
If you're just looking for success then that's the perfect scenario but if you're looking for more, which everybody wants more, everybody needs to feel needed. I always tell people, "Look. If you don't like doing the particular business you're doing now you can sell it if you want, but you can also create it as an incubator and build other stuff, and you put the right people into place to do the stuff that you don't want to do," which probably leads you to the next question is, why did you sell it, because I loved what I did.
I had a business partner and we did it for 12 years. I knew I wanted to do something different. I just didn't know what it was. We had a 50-50 partner split and a bunch of companies wanted to buy us and we were like let's do it. We don't know what's next. We don't know what is through that door, but it was the best thing I've ever done as well.
Robert Plank: Did you know that void would be there? Like you said, you were glad to have the big payday but did you, even at that point, did you plan on just taking a break forever or for a year? What was happening at that time?
Jason Swenk: No. I'm a creator so I always got to be building something or creating something, like my wife sees a cool furniture piece and she'll be like, "Man, that's kind of cool," I'll be like, "I can build that. I'll go do it." I have to be building something so I couldn't just sit there. I mean yes, I could've. I guess I could've just do nothing but then I think that's when people die, when you just sit around. You know?
Robert Plank: Oh, yeah.
Jason Swenk: I don't truly believe in retiring. My dad tried to retire many, many years ago, played a year of golf and was just bored, went back to work. For a couple of years I struggled because I couldn't find my purpose of what I wanted to do, what I was really good at, what I was passionate about. You take outside the money. You're like I don't care if it makes money or not, I just want to enjoy it. That's why so many people get into philanthropy and all that kind of stuff, but I just couldn't figure it out until I was lucky to fall into it like I fall into everything else.
Robert Plank: What happened? You had the agency going and then you sold it off, and then at that point then you decided that you were going to build back up just some kind of training or some kind of coaching for other agencies?
Jason Swenk: Well, no. I thought the grass was greener on the other side because I wanted to build a product. I was always in the service-based business, right? I'd sell something. I'd have to deliver something. I would look at people building these technology products and getting huge accolades. I was like, all right, and that was at a time when Instagram just sold for a billion dollars. I was like, maybe I need to create an app.
I literally created a phone app on the iPhone where it takes pictures of everything that you ate, gives you a visualization, shares it out with your friends. It was going really well but I just didn't want to take pictures of my damn food anymore. I was like if I'm not doing it I can't be the hypocrite, and I didn't enjoy it. At that time I was just lucky enough that, I think I did that for about a year, and at that time I had a couple of my old competition reach out and say, "How'd you get clients like AFLAC, and AT&T, and Lotus Cars? How'd you get the best placed to work, and how'd you do this?"
I just started helping them out for free and truly loved it. From there I was like, well, what if I create this podcast and just interview other friends of mine at the time, and just tell war stories about running a business, and an agency, and that kind of stuff, and then it just took off from there. Now I just provide a resource where I help people get to the next level of wherever they're going within their business.
Robert Plank: That's cool. Could you unpack a little bit about that? You say some of your friends asked you how you booked a lot of these clients or, I see that on your speaking topics and things like that you talk about how to generate 25 leads every day, so could you give us a little bit of a taste of the agency, I guess, wizardry that you have? Even just a couple of little things you can do maybe for even any agency to help them out.
Jason Swenk: Yeah. The biggest thing that agencies are doing wrong is they're looking at the bigger guys and they're trying to be a me too agency. The biggest thing you need to do is pick your specialization. You can't be a jack of all trades. You got to pick down to one, do that extremely well, and put out amazing content for that particular audience in order for them to build up trust, and authority, and all that kind of stuff.
By doing that you can start eliminating your competition. I tell people there's other people that help out agency owners, but I don't have any competition. My competition is procrastination and cat videos because no one can be me. No one can produce the stuff or have the style behind my style, and I can be anybody else. It's all about picking that particular market that you want to serve, understanding their biggest challenges and desires, and obsessing over it, and creating valuable information that they can go to without you. That's the most important. Stop doing damn videos about your portfolio and how cool your people are, and your culture, and all that kind of stuff. No one cares other than the people working for you. Focus on them.
The other thing I'll tell you, and this works with any kind of business and my website's a good example of this, stop focusing on yourself. Going to your website rather than saying, "Hey, I've done this and look at all my accolades," and all that kind of BS, ask a question right off the bat. If you go to my website, and it depends on when this airs, there should be a question. Always there's a question and it should say, "Hey. Do you want to know how I started, grew, had fun, and sold an agency?" Then I say, "Hey. Start here." Even on my about page that intro that you read was all questions because that focuses on the person coming to your site and changes the conversation. That's probably one of the biggest things, if you don't take away from anything on this, think about what are the right questions to ask and how do I ask questions in order to focus on them?
Robert Plank: When you focus on them how do you reconcile between making fun videos or making podcast episodes where you help them out, how do you decide between what's just something that I'm going to give away for free, like what did you say? You said to make something that's valuable that they could do without you. How do you decide between that and something that's trade secret that you probably shouldn't give away?
Jason Swenk: I basically tell people everything. The cool thing about this particular market is people are lazy. They want to know how to do it but they don't want to do it themselves, right? You want to separate yourself from everybody else so why would you give away your worst tip? Then everybody's going to think that your best tip. If you put out the typical BS e-book saying, "Do you want to know how to get more customers? Download my boring e-book." That's not going to work but if I put out a video that said, "Hey. Do you want to know how I converted 80% of my marketing proposals from AT&T, LegalZoom, and Hitachi? I'm going to walk you through the 8 steps, the 8 strategies that we use so you can do that, and you can learn the number 1 tip for closing, and not having a prospect go completely silent after you send the proposal."
That's going to be valuable. They're going to watch that video. They're going to take away a lot of stuff. They're going to go execute it. It will work and then they're going to be like, "All right. What's next?" I'm in it for the long run, right? I want to help them out in the long run, which they'll come back to me.
Robert Plank: You give them a little bit of a taste you're saying.
Jason Swenk: Yeah. The cool thing about this particular market and this strategy, you got to know what you're actually doing. There's so many people out there that they're 15 years old, or 20 years old, and they've never run a business. They took a course and they figured out how to do Facebook marketing. Now they want to do their own Facebook marketing course. People are going to see through that so when people tell me, they go, "I don't want to give away my best stuff," it's because that's the only stuff they have, so that might be the wrong business to get into.
That's why I do what I do and it makes a huge difference. I mean this business now, it's taken me, I ran the agency for 12 years so factor this in, but in 11 months I built this particular business selling information and consulting to over 7 figure business in 11 months.
Robert Plank: Nice.
Jason Swenk: By doing this strategy.
Robert Plank: That's cool. I'm looking at some of the things that you have for sale like I see one thing that's a collection of documents that agencies could have. I see you have a course on how to generate some leads. Can you tell us about those products, and how they came into being and what they do?
Jason Swenk: Yeah. I really started out consulting first and I think that's where you need to go before you actually start developing information products or that kind of stuff because you really got to get a pulse and make sure that your assumptions were right. I was just lucky enough that I was my audience, right? The materials I was creating and the lessons I was walking my one-on-one clients through, I wanted to scale that up because coaching and consulting is just not scalable. You can only take on so many people and I didn't want to work all the time. I wanted to work less than 100 powers a month at that time. I work a lot more now because of love what I do, but that was the goal. That was what I wanted to prove to everybody that you don't have to work all the time.
By doing that I was able to take what I was using for my one-on-one clients and replicate that, so I started looking at what made our agencies successful, reverse engineering it, and then breaking out into systems. The only difference between where people are at now and where they want to go is the systems that they have, and systems outperform talent all day long. I just literally started thinking, all right. What systems do I need to put in place or walk my one-on-one clients through in order to get them to understand and be able to implement how to generate more leads? That's how I created the Generate Leads Every Day program where it's basically 5 systems and walks you through all that. It's not just Facebook and that kind of stuff. Yes, that's part of it but there's a lot of other stuff in there for agencies.
What I also started doing is looking at, all right, what are all the other stuff that people are struggling with? You mentioned the agency documents. I look back at all the documents we've created over the 12 years, there's some key ones that I wish I had in the very beginning, and so I was like, okay, how do I build this service ladder, or this offering latter, and saying I don't want to maybe possibly offer the top-of-the-line product right off the bat. Maybe I need to offer the proposal template, or the agency documents, to show them that I actually did run an agency, own an agency, and I was successful at it. You go use this and then you'll come back to me for all the other programs that we have.
Over time, I think this is almost the second year, or I think maybe I crossed over just a little over 2 years now, I just keep adding on based on what people need and how the market changes, and I just keep updating stuff. That's how I created those programs. Does that help?
Robert Plank: Yeah. It does. Looking at the things you have for sale and hearing the way that you position a lot of these things, I know that you had something where you said you're positioning this as you changed up to 80% of your lead generation. and stuff like that. All the things that you were talking about and selling, and even sharing for free, they all seem to be things that they all have a real case study, kind of like you said, you use the coaching to get the pulse of these people and uncover the questions and their problems, then you figure out what kind of solutions you personally ended up applying over and over again, so there's the case study, and the steps, and the proof.
I think that, like you said, the difference between taking a Facebook course and just watching some generic videos and making your own even more genericer videos is that with you, you go back and look at, well, reverse engineer you said, you go back and look at all the things that have worked and just put it into not just a step-by-step system but also things that have actually worked. There's something to that, right? There's something to not just, well this is it been proven to work or I've used this, but you say, "Okay, I use this for Lotus cars, or I use this for LegalZoom." I say, "Okay, eill not only do I have the real stuff to find the theory but I also have the belief, I guess, that it's worked for you, so now I'm going to go at it full speed as far as implementing it."
Jason Swenk: Yeah. You just look at yourself and say what am I passionate about? What do I have knowledge in that other people may not have, and what's my competitive advantage, and then how can I help? That's really the step I follow and the formula that I follow. I had to figure out, I could go after and do consulting for any kind of business, any kind of service company business, but I wanted to drill down, and so I drilled down into a particular market that I knew. Then I wanted to say in this particular market, how do I separate myself from all the other jokers out there and be my own joker, and say, "Well, all these other jokers ran business and to the ground or never worked for an agency before." Cool. Separator.
Then I also wanted to think how can I educate them? That's the reason why I put a cat video on my homepage and I do these goofy Darth Vader videos, or whatever. I'm trying to separate myself from everybody else to break that pattern that everybody's used to in their regular educational videos, and then by doing that, and then them actually getting value from it before they even give you anything, that's the secret sauce.
Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. That way it's almost like they feel that they owe you.
Jason Swenk: Yeah. I literally have a Facebook ad running right now that's been running for the past 8 months. I haven't really touched it. I literally recorded it on my iPad because I wanted it to look kind of raw. I didn't want it professional and I just waving my arms. I'm like, "Hey look at me. If you're an agency owner, and you struggle with sending out the proposal, and the client goes dark, let me tell you how to stop it," and I told them how to stop it right on the video, and then I said, "Cool. If you like this video you're probably struggling with getting the budget from people. If you want to know how to get the budget click the button below. I will ask you for your email so I can spam you later, and then do that." You're having fun with them.
Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. None of this old stuff where one step is left out, or no click baiting, or any of that. It's here's this little problem you have. I'm going to fix your little problem. Not here's problem number 2.
Jason Swenk: Yeah. Exactly. If you're using click bait Facebook's going to destroy you, and all these other media companies are going to destroy you.
Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. I've seen that. They're setting all the stuff down.
Jason Swenk: Which I'm glad. Yeah.
Robert Plank: Yeah. It cleans it up for the rest of us. It's one of those little fads I guess but now it's time to actually help people. I like that you broke it down right there into, once again, steps, right? Step number 1 is the thing that you're going after with your passion, and it sounded like with your app photographing your food, that was something you were like, okay, that was cool but not really your passion, and then number 2, something where you have knowledge. You had this previous knowledge from doing all of the agency stuff. Number 3, where you can get a unique advantage, and the number 4, be helpful and educate people instead of just showing off.
Jason Swenk: Yeah. Exactly, and then the other thing too, and this is really important, especially when you start out, you're going to have one thing. If it's not right for someone don't force it. The reason why I've created so many things is because there's so many different stages people are at. If someone's stuck in their business the agency playbook's good for them. If someone's trying to generate leads, it's perfect like that. Make recommendations on what's actually right for them, not what you want to sell them. When you actually start coming at it with that, and you literally tell someone, "Hey. This program is not right for you if you're trying to get," one of my friends, Frank, is really good at this. He's like, "If you're get rich person this is not the right program for you, but if you're willing to put in the hard work this is an amazing program."
It's like try to push more people away in order to attract more.
Robert Plank: Nice. Along those lines a little bit, do you have any plans with all the products that you have for sale? Do you have any plans for a bundle, maybe with all or some, or do you think that the strategy of just making a pick and choose kind of thing, is that what you're going to continue to do?
Jason Swenk: Oh, yeah. I'm always putting stuff together. The thing is is as you create these programs you've got to create urgency. It doesn't matter what the price is. People don't make a decision on price alone. They make a decision on urgency, and let me prove that point. If I'm about to have a heart attack and I'm going into the surgery, am I going to ask how much it is to save my life? Hell no. Urgency.
It's the same thing about when you're selling your products. You have to educate them enough and show them the value, but then also create urgency so you can use this based on, hey, the price is going up, but then you're selling on price. I usually do it by having people jump on an early bird list. All my programs, when they get on my list, look like an auto launch. It's basically everybody does these Jeff Walker launches and they say, "Hey. I just revised the program. Jump on the program and you'll also get my generate leads program for free," or whatever it is.
What I have found is when you actually do that you're going to increase your conversion dramatically. You'll see the playbook advertised for a certain amount. If you get on my list and you interact with the campaign a certain way, then you may get an early bird offer which comes with everything. Everything's a test and every market is different, so you just got to test it out, and you got to figure out ... Selling my products is just a gateway for me, for them to gain my knowledge, but then come to my live events, or work with me one on one, or join the live event mastermind that we have traveling around the country. You just got to think about what's the end goal. Where do we want to position people? Where are we trying to funnel people to?
Robert Plank: You're playing the long game it sounds like.
Jason Swenk: Big time. I am so happy at what I'm doing, I don't see myself doing anything different to the day I die. I absolutely truly never had a cooler job in the world, not even close enough to this. I'm definitely in it for the long haul because I know I can outlast and outwork anybody out there.
Robert Plank: That sounds like a perfect place to be. As were starting to wind down this called do you have any, aside from all the stuff that you already have set up, do you have any cool upcoming project or idea, or something that you are currently working on?
Jason Swenk: One of the things I'll tell you, especially that can help you out, especially when you're building your campaigns, it's a framework that I've developed on the thank you page. A lot of people talked about there's no dead thank you page. I truly believe in that but what I do on the thank you page is different from everybody else, and it's called progressive profiling thank you pages.
A lot of times when people get on your list, and you're just happy someone's on your list, and you treat them the same way, eventually you'll send them an email saying, "Hey, just tell me a little bit more about yourself so I can send you more relevant stuff." It's always like everybody else. I do the typical BS stuff and I get maybe like a 5 to 10% response rate on it, so literally there was 90% of my list that I didn't know who the hell they were or what I should be sending them.
What I started doing is immediately on the thank you page I'd asked him one question, and I'd say, "Tell me. Are you an agency owner, freelancer, entrepreneur, or agency employee?" Radio button. As soon as they do that I pass them to one other page. I'd ask them to save their revenue. Are you 300,000 and below, 500 to a million, a million and above, and so on.
Then based on their answers I would show them the appropriate thank you page for the offer because I'm not going to offer a marketing professional my proposal template. They could care less about that, and then also, they're not going to go into certain campaigns that I have. If they're under 300,000 in revenue they're not going to be able to get on the phone with me, so I'm not going to offer them my blueprint session, or they're not going to be able to jump to my live events until they're over 500,000. If they're a marketing professional I'm not going to push them into an agency campaign, so now I can deliver a lot more effective content, and the cool thing, you're probably thinking would be like, well what was your response rate of people going all the way through? 94%. It blew me away.
Robert Plank: Geez.
Jason Swenk: By doing that, and I started doing that maybe 8 months ago, my revenues gone up by 75%. My open rate and engagement on email has gone up, it used to be like, the open rate was the typical BS 20%, maybe 4% will click through. Now it's close to 50% open rate and I think the click through, or the clicks, is like 20% or something like that. Something sick, because now I'm serving more relevant content to that audience, and then a lot of people actually put in the survey with the lead magnet or the opt in. That's going to hurt your conversion because you are asking more. Do it after.
No one does this other than my clients and they're just crushing it from it.
Robert Plank: That's pretty cool and an easy way to get people to segment themselves a little bit, but like you said, if they opt in first they don't fill out a big long, page long survey as part of opting in, so if they don't want to fill that out they don't have to. You don't lose them but just over time you get them to slowly fill that in, that's pretty cool.
Jason Swenk: Yeah, and when I was measuring this over the month, I use confusion soft, I mean Infusionsoft, so their thank you pages were not responsive. That was 94%, and most of my opt-ins come from a mobile device, so that was 94% on a non responsive landing page. Now they're all responsive so if I measure it again it's probably almost at 98% I would think.
Robert Plank: Nice. That's pretty powerful stuff. I liked everything that you had to share with us today, not only just your story, but also the little tidbits of advice anyone can pick up and use right away. Can you tell everyone where they can find out all about you, what you do, and what you have coming out?
Jason Swenk: Yeah. Just go to JasonSwenk.com/wahoo and I have something special for you. It's links to all the shows and some cool special things for you.
Robert Plank: Awesome. I can't wait to check that link out for myself. Thanks for being on the show on everything Jason and have a good one.
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123: Setup Websites, Get Clients, and Create Funnels That Convert for Any Business with Damir Butkovic
Damir Butkovic tells us the amazing story of how he brought in 4 new recurring clients in 14 days just by sending a simple four sentence email to 20 prospects. He is an implementer for small business, quickly creating websites with WordPress, email marketing campaigns with Aweber and ActiveCampaign, payment solutions with PayPal and Stripe, as well as landing pages using ClickFunnels.
Damir Butkovic: Thank you. I'm glad to be here and of course thank you for the opportunity.
Robert Plank: Awesome. I think we're going to talk about a lot of fun stuff, have a good old time on the show. Could you tell us what it is that you do and what makes you special and different than everyone else out there?
Damir Butkovic: I realized kind of some years ago that I have this rare ability which I thought it's kind of a downfall. I have kind of, call it an analytical mind but what I can see when I talk to someone like the big picture, you know like people say oh I want to, I don't know sell stuff online, so I can see what they want, but I can also see all the moving parts and that's the part where people get confused so I can see, you know, I don't know from Facebook or I don't know website or landing page, or whatever, I can see all those parts which is usually, I can put them together and it makes sense to me. How to connect it all together while most people are too analytical they can't see, we call it, the big idea or they have the idea and they don't know how, it doesn't really exist and it's very complex for them.
For me it's just normal and logical and this is why I love internet marketing of course, is, you know, already it's a lot of moving parts. I say they're not hard but there is a lot of little things. If you go on, for example, and create a Facebook ad, you've got to worry about targeting, you've got to worry about headline, about copy, got to worry about images, and it can be I don't know 20 percent text and the image so little things like that, not hard, for some other people, for them it's already a problem so I can see that part in the targeting and there is PR blasts and partners and SEO and all these things so I can see it all together, put it all together and obviously make it work.
Basically from that part I can see the whole strategy and I can implement the strategy. A lot of people I guess have seen that. They see the strategy and their good at it but they don't even know how to implement it so I kind of have the tech background. I'm not the best quality in tech but I'm very good at it so I'll even know the best tools, which tools to use, to make it all work, or the budget or the easiest, I call it the easiest, and the simplest way so I kind of combine two things together so I would say that's the rare thing that a lot of guys and gals don't really have.
Robert Plank: Cool. I like that way of thinking and that's kind of the way that I think as well where it's frustrating to see, kind of like you said, a lot of people they'll have a lot of ideas or they'll be really philosophical about the marketing but it's one thing to say well you should have some Facebook ads, you should have a high converting landing page, and I'm thinking okay it's great that you said that but wouldn't it be more helpful if you showed it to me. Wouldn't it be helpful if you broke down the pieces and why things are in a certain way. Wouldn't it be more helpful to see someone go from scratch to creating something that's fully working and how it's all the pieces put together? Would you say, Damir, do you have any products or software or are you only a service provider?
Damir Butkovic: In terms of products I have my couple of products that I've done. One is called magic counter partnership program, where I actually teach people about online marketing. Actually give a free funnel with it which of course you've got to go in and do your own branding, put your own copy, but funnel is done. That's one product. I must say like that one a lot because it's kind of from A to Z. Everything's done for them, you know research marketing, copy, funnel tech part, and I do basic stuff on Facebook.
I have that program and the latest one I have is called how to get consulting clients in 14 days or less by sending out one call e-mail and that came out purely from experience. I was in a situation where I had no consulting clients and I need to get them fast and there was no advertising budget so I went, got educated, and I figured out one simple e-mail that you can send out and got a lot of response and I still have those consulting clients that I got. The best part is I learned the strategy from people who actually make millions of dollars. I have that.
I have these two things online but I do provide a service where we do websites, funnels, and all that stuff for other people online but I think maybe you were asking do I have something proprietary, unique software or something like that. No I don't. We actually like to use other people's knowledge. Like for example we would use the tools that are simple to use but done by other people simply because I don't think it's worth it to do my own thing because there are teams, for example, that's support let's say a webber, and there's a whole team that have the support there and their really good at it. So I use a tool that has really good 24-hour, whatever, support, and then plug it into whatever I'm doing so not everything depends on me. It shouldn't. When I'm not around any of my clients can get support. It's one of the things I don't like to do, well we don't like to do, me and my partner, that everything depends on us then I don't have a life.
Robert Plank: Right.
Damir Butkovic: If we depend on others. For example a lot of, call it web designers out there, they'll do the website and they'll complicate the whole thing while we would do it on the WordPress and say look if you want to change the date, change the date, it's not a big problem or whatever, put a blog post. While a lot people will put in a contract oh it's all coded and now you have to pay me $170 just to change your date and all that. That's exactly the thing that we don't do.
We'll actually use simple tools because obviously we share. If you like. That's not a problem. To make it work and that basically 99 percent of people, even without technology, can quickly learn and do themselves or outsource because even if they don't want to learn because of millions of other people know, for example, how to use WordPress, it's easy to outsource. It's not a big problem. You don't need a senior web developer, coder, which are hard to get and expensive. It's very easy to hire someone for a few bucks an hour to maintain your site, for example. If they have WordPress, it's not that hard to do little updates and all that.
I hope that answers your question.
Robert Plank: Yeah, Yeah it does. What you're saying is that a lot of other people who either set up websites or maintain websites or do these things like for traffic to help other businesses, a lot of other people will, maybe, complicate the process either on accident or on purpose and the client will end up getting locked into something that maybe is not as good as a webber or is not as good as WordPress and what you do is, you instead just make it simple. You just say well there's already this infrastructure in place, I'm not going to use some weird otter responder, I'm not going to build my own otter responder, I'll just use the one that I know works.
Damir Butkovic: Yeah. You said it perfectly. For example, we have a client, my partner, let's say my client, she was locked into a deal where her domain reseller was buying her domain and charging her $200 a year for her domain name and we took it off and said basically it should cost you $10, so we transferred the domain name, right? I don't want to, for example, I consider myself a marketer, so yes please call me for strategy for funnels, for making complex stuff simple. For example, I don't see a value in putting people in such a contract and resell them something that's cheap and make money there and then they call me for minuscule things, that's not my thing and I've learned that a lot of people in this business, that I don't like, just simply overcharge clients for the things that shouldn't be overcharged.
I would say, for example, to anyone who's building a website, build it on WordPress, use active campaign as in e-mail marketing, which is I think by far the best out right now and most affordable for what it can do or a Webber, or I don't care, use Mail Chimp, use anything you like, right? Use the services that are already easy. Use a PayPal or Stripe for your payments. Use clip funnels for landing pages and funnels and whatever. Use the systems that are already there. They're all free or very cheap and very easy to use and everyone's happy. That's what my advice would always be. Use something that's already been built and has much better support. As I said, this is not my core business. I'll support them, that's why I don't like to complicate.
Also, we figure out where we fit in this business. We are not the cheapest, but we are also not the agency, right? We don't do websites that need to be coded from scratch and they cost $35,000 or something and they are very complex. I don't want that. You depend too much on the client or to bare a headache. We fit just in between where we can charge $1,000 to $5,000 or maybe $10,000 but still use all those systems and they are very simple. I would say whatever you're doing, simplified because you don't want to be spending time, losing time, while you can be making money. You don't want to be spending time on minuscule things like let's change an image and God knows what and then that takes two days just to contact your webmaster or something. I'd say take something simple you can do or a lot of other people can do for you.
Robert Plank: I like that and I like that way of thinking. Like you said, it's almost like you found the gap in the marketplace, right? A lot of people are priced too low where you're like I don't know why we'd price that low because it wouldn't be worth my while and other people are priced so high, which you said gets kind of scary or becomes very hands on if it's almost a full-time job or a team of programmers trying to make all this stuff, so you're just kind of somewhere in the middle where you use all these tools and you have somewhat of a machine where you can just kind of really quickly set up a site, like you said, plug them into the active campaign, plug them into Stripe, you just kind of have your process and I guess there's a little bit of thinking but not so much where you have to go back and forth with the client for a year or something.
Damir Butkovic: Exactly. Our, for example, we have a lot of clients now in fashion industry and we always offer two choices. We say look we'll build the whole thing for you, build a system, we can teach you how to maintain it or we can do it for you. That said. That's exactly how I want it. You know what I'm saying? I really don't want them to be calling me for little things, you know what I'm saying?
Robert Plank: Oh yeah.
Damir Butkovic: So, I'll simplify the whole thing and make it easy. It's just based on the end of day, the logic conduit, do it we'll find you someone and I'll help you with that. I'll find you the right person to maintain the system. That's how we like to do it. I think it's easy, well for us, it's easy of course. Not for everyone. As I said, I'm not that techy for some techy people other stuff is probably easier and things like that.
For example, I had a client who said I'll actually use infusion soft or should I use active campaign? I said, I had infusion soft for three years and it's called confusion soft for a reason. It's a great system but I said you'll need a person 24/7 to work on it. People who know how to use it are very expensive and the whole system is actually complex. It's not user friendly, like I lost my mind with it and it was either myself, really good with tech, and then move to active campaign and it's the best decision I've done recently. I'm saying, so why complicate. If you don't have to complicate that's always my rule.
Robert Plank: Right. I mean, if one effective campaign gets you a website online or gets the system that your client wants in place and infusion soft my have more features but it's such a mess that you can't even get a site in that same amount of time then what's the point? I'd rather have the one that gets the site in place, right?
Damir Butkovic: Yeah. At the end of the day most clients, if you look at it, and I believe you know that they just want actually their newsletter to go out. Infuse of these, for example, an awesome system, you can have a whole bunch of clients and complex funnels and sales people and all that, it's really great. You don't do it justice if you just send out a newsletter and it costs a lot of money. So I said well go with active campaign, it's much easier to do anything with it and it's much easier to maintain it, like it actually teach whoever you want real quickly, how to do that. Again, why spend money?
Active campaign so far, to be quite honest, I don't know what's happening. I think someone from infusion soft went to active campaign or that's their other thing because they have a lot of similar functions but much simpler. Things like tagging, right? What you can do right now, what we do for our clients, you can put a piece of code on the website and then that code it does a thing called side track, so anyone from, let's say Robert from your list, goes to your site, then the system will tell you hey this person was on product A 10 times and it will slap a tag, very interested, right?
You can go to system everyday or every week, or once a month and say hey who's very interested in this product and then call them up and say hey I've seen you've been interested in this how can I help you make the decision? Or you can actually automate a campaign automatically to go and ask them that. Or, for example, we can send out an e-mail, a newsletter call it, so called newsletter and put your product there and put the piece of content which it says get it at 20 percent discount for the next 48 hours and it's called a conditional content. It will only be shown to people who have very interested tag. It's a perfect automation that you can set up and you don't really have to think. All that, for example, I don't know if it was a little bit too complex or not, but all that you can do with the active campaign, which of course you can do in infusion soft, but it's much easier to do it in active campaign and it costs you like I don't know $9 a month or $50 if you have extra advanced features there.
For very little money you can automate so much of your marketing and it's easy to use, it's really easy to comprehend, which I haven't found yet, e-mail marketing provider that have it. Actually they do, but they don't slap tags, they do the go themes and whatever. I found it a little bit more complex to use.
Robert Plank: You're saying that this tool use active campaign it has all, or maybe most, of the features that you want but it's also simple enough where you can actually get it done?
Damir Butkovic: Yes. Yes. Very simple. Where a lot of people, just to tell you and your peeps, why infusion soft was really popular was this tag, right? If people click on a link you get a tag, clicked on a link, or you do whatever action, you get a tag, right? So when you go to your item, 8,000 people you know at least you click whatever tag you want and you can filter the people and then you can do with them whatever you want. That's exactly what active campaign does, right? Active campaign even has leads corning, meaning if you send out four newsletters out, you can give I don't know anyone that clicks on the link a score of either a 10. Anyone who scores a 40 will be considered as your fan, anyone who's your fan you can send them specific special offers and you know they'll buy your stuff.
Instead of inventing the offers and sending people out to 8,000 people and pray to God that someone will buy, with this you'll filter out and maybe get 150 super warm people and you know they'll be warm because the system just told you where you can send a better campaign out. That's why, for example, well me personally, I love the system active campaign because of little things like that. They're kind of little but they're mega and I can talk about some results but when it comes to, I can give you a real example, when it comes to fashion sites or any retail store online if you have let's say 200 products, when you set up a system which is not that hard if you can wrap your head around it then the system will automatically start to do all these up-sells which will result in a lot more sales because it's sending all these special offers to people that are hot. That's why I love it and it's simple enough to setup.
Robert Plank: That's cool. I like little things like that where it's like it's one of those things where before they found you, I mean, there were probably a lot of things missing in their business, right? Like, maybe they probably weren't doing e-mail marketing at all but now because of what you set up and what you connect for them, now they can send out e-mails but not just blind e-mails to the whole list but super targeted things because you use the right tool for the job it sounds like.
Damir Butkovic: Yeah. Like one client we have and I always say to my friend, he's a marketer also, I said yo these guys are not segmenting the list, and then the list and then he's like that's why they have you. They wouldn't need you. Anyway, it took me like four months. They would send the same e-mail to people on a newsletter list and buyers and I was like guys you can't, I mean you can do that, but I said you got to separate buyers. For example, if you look at open rates with buyers are 30, 35 percent. With non-buyers it's like 20, not bad but hey a lot more.
Anyway, so I was begging them, basically guys segment the list, segment the list, segment the list. Just to put it in perspective, before we started working, their good month would be I don't know $3,000, right? Then obviously they start to work with us then it went to $16,000, $18,000, $20,000, then last month was $30,000. Now, first 12 days they made $30,000, right? Just to give you some perspective from where they started to where they are now.
Anyway, point being is when they did one segmentation to just say hello guys, are you still with us on the list? We were kind of like reactivating people who are not that active. They saw, with one e-mail, $3,400. So with one e-mail they made $3,400 in one day that usually they do in a month. To make only because they segmented the list. I'm like guys do this every week.
Robert Plank: Right but now that you showed them the result, now that you showed them the little boost from doing it one time, now their going to repeat it because you showed them the way to do it. You didn't just talk some theory, you actually proved it.
Damir Butkovic: Yeah, exactly and you know how it is with clients is that it's mumble jumble for them and they don't believe it and some things take time but yeah, exactly, you said now it's easier. When you show someone the money everyone is listening like yeah yeah no problems. Now every suggestion I say is like yeah no problems, no problems, whatever, we'll do it.
Robert Plank: Right. If you say this is an extra $3,400 everyone understand more money. They might not understand segmenting or deliverability but more money, everyone in the world understands that.
Damir Butkovic: Yeah, of course, and there is, I don't know if you do any Facebook ads or any ads you'll have your dashboard and you can actually see the money you put in and get back out.
Let's scale this thing. Obviously you're in profits and the other thing where I teach obviously is like do not care about first sales, like 7 out of 10 people, and that's research done by Shoppingfly, right, and their a billion dollar company, so I take this advise seriously. 7 out of 10 people will buy again when they buy with you so I always say make a first sale, do not worry even if you lost money because 7 out of 10 of them will buy again and that's free money because their only a list. You'll spend no money to market to them. Just send them e-mails on a regular basis. Keep the relationship going. If we are breaking even and making a profit in start, that's great, of course awesome, but I'm more worried keeping contact because that's your real money.
It actually happened with this client. I said you'll get a critical mass and you'll start to sell more, which actually it happened in the last five months, it did happen.
Robert Plank: So, playing the long game, right?
Damir Butkovic: Yeah. Like you I guess, you constantly learn marketing and you probably got educated but you know the heavy weights, they can tell you any results they want but it didn't happen overnight. Maybe their latest campaign happened overnight but it's slowly scaling up because you want to be careful. If you put $20 you earn $40, then you put $40 you earn $80, and it takes time to get to the whatever, a million or I don't know how much they make, it doesn't really matter. There is no overnight call it. I mean, yes there are some campaigns that made really a lot of money real quickly but let's say in the normal world you want to take it slower.
Robert Plank: Right. Along those lines, I don't want to keep you too long.
Damir Butkovic: Oh, that's all right.
Robert Plank: Along the lines of starting a business from zero, I understand, and you mentioned this pretty early on in our discussion but you mentioned that in order to get your coaching clients or to get a bunch of coaching clients in a short amount of time, you send out this four-sentence e-mail to get all your coaching clients. Can you tell us about that?
Damir Butkovic: Yeah. I'll tell you the back story so you get how it all happened. I moved to Bali recently, well a year ago, and then things were well and I hired a guy and he said oh I'll do your campaign for whatever websites and all that, don't worry, I'll do it legit and I was like great I can pay him and all that. I said I'll do my stuff and that was a mistake because I came here three months after, I found myself no clients, he did nothing and what not so I was like okay great, how do I get new clients? I went and listened to some people. I listened to Dan Meredith and then he also mentioned the book from Chet Holmes, it's called the ultimate sales machine and he said what I do, he said I send out, of course you pick who you want to work with, right?
Let's say I want to work with John from I don't know veterinarian or some from whatever, you profile the person, you learn a little bit about them, and you send them something like this. It's a very simple e-mail, right, you said hey, hi John, I was poking around your website so I thought I'd drop you a line and then you put in some kind of a flattery or a compliment. You said I really love your site or I really love what you do, hey I've seen you've been to Hong Kong, I've been there too, something, find some commonality, and then I would actually see hey me and my partner, we specialize in online marketing and developing strategy that builds our clients brand awareness and helps them to sell more stuff online. Very simple, I call this non pitch. Keep it simple. I didn't say hey we specialize in strategy and brought our clients $37,000 while in less than $3,000, no, very simple introduction. Then I said this is the takeaway and I'll tell you why it works, the strategy. Then I say if you'll need anything in this particular niche please give me a shout out, I'll be happy to help. Cheers, Damir.
That's what I would send out. Actually, that's what I did send out and I got four paying clients in two weeks and $5,000 in my bank account. Not a lot of money but that was easily scalable but we had other stuff so I was like we can't have that many consulting clients but point being is it's just an e-mail, you don't need a website, you don't need a business card, you don't need to go out and talking, you don't need advertising budgets, you don't need funnels, you don't need world class call people, you don't need anything as long as you can deliver whatever you are selling.
Now, just to tell you this strategy, why it works, normal e-mail, which you probably get everyday, we all do, hey my name is Damir and I'm a marketer, online marketer, how about we do some work together and I'll do your campaign and let's do some business and make money, you know what I'm saying? You don't know me already, you're pitching to me, there's no connection, it sounds like bull shit. Sorry.
Robert Plank: That's okay.
Damir Butkovic: Yeah. It sounds too much. You want to do business, you don't really want to do business right now, so it's too pitchy I would say. With this e-mail it's literally, it's the opposite, it's like hey I was around, thought I'd introduce myself. You keep it cool and then you say a little bit of what you do and then you take it away. You said hey you tell me if you want help with it. I'm happy to help. Usually when people say hey let's meet, my name is Damir I help people make money online, let's meet next Tuesday, let's talk, let's go on skype, so I'm chasing them, right?
If we got back thousands of years we are actually used to chase food so naturally we will chase what's running away from us. With this e-mail then you say if you need something in this particular niche, it can be literally anything, please give me a shout out, I'll be happy to help. You move away so their human instinct will want to chase you. How can this? So this is what's happening in their mind, strike their ego, like I'm such a big business person and everyone pitches to me and who the hell is this guy, comes, introduces himself and just goes. It bothers them. How can he be so cool? Doesn't he know who I am, right? Then they realize this was actually so cool. This is the first person in a week that didn't really want anything from me or pitched anything to me, let's work. It was just a simple introduction and that's where you get, this is where you say hey why not or what do you got or let's have coffee or meet? Does this make sense?
Robert Plank: Yeah, it does. There's a lot of cool things about that strategy that you just mentioned and that technique there because first of all I like that ... Okay, how about this, you said you got four clients. How many e-mails did you send to get those four clients?
Damir Butkovic: I've sent around 20 e-mails.
Robert Plank: Even less than I thought. That's a pretty good close rate.
Damir Butkovic: Yeah.
Robert Plank: I was almost imaging that maybe he had to send 50, had to send 100, so wow, so only 20 e-mails and that probably took, what an hour, maybe two at the most?
Damir Butkovic: Two, three hours. I have no idea, I forgot.
Robert Plank: Cool, so not even an afternoon, but I what I like about what you mentioned about that is you didn't have to cold call, you didn't have to show up at their business, you just sent out one e-mail after another and what I like about that is, well first of all, aside from the fact that it was an e-mail, but you personalized it to the person, like in the stage where you kind of complimented them and stuff like that and found some common ground, and it didn't even take that long. You just customize one sentence out of the four sentences, just kind of making it where okay like I am writing this to this person, it's not just some spam e-mail going out to a hundred thousand people.
Then I liked also the part where you positioned it as I want to help you, right? You didn't say here's my site, here's where you can buy from me, here's all these packages, you just said where are you stuck and I want to help you so talk to me and then I'll customize what I can do for you. Lots of good stuff there and I'm blown away that it only took 20 e-mails to get those four clients. About that, how did you know who to contact? Did you just look up?
Damir Butkovic: I'll give you the full strategy. What I didn't do because I was such a lazy bum, before strategy would be that you actually follow back with actually letter, the same letter saying look I wrote you an e-mail a couple weeks ago and I don't know if you got it. People get very few letters these days so I didn't even do that. What I'm saying is for anyone who is listening this show, if you follow this strategy, send out the letter, you don't have full practice real quick, and also to mention I tried a couple niches and some niches didn't work out. Okay, I'm an internet marketing so you obviously can work with a lot of people but if it doesn't work out I found out two things. Ordination is not ready or good or I'm pitching too hard. If I don't get the response it's a pitch.
Just to give you an example, for example I was attacking speakers industry in Australia, what e-mail does, why I love it, even if people say no, they still replied, so I've sent out 10 e-mails and I got four responses no thanks we are good at it, which means I've started that relationship somehow. Anyway, remember that. So how it works, I would sit online and let's say you're a copywriter or whatever, pick a name, it doesn't really matter. Let's say you're a copywriter and you need copy writing clients so I would pick, again, some kind of a niche, let's say a copywriter in a weight loss nation, the easiest I could think of, then I would say who would be my ideal client? Who would I like to work for and always reach higher.
I always say if you think you're not good enough, give yourself that. Don't pitch to small business owners, mostly they won't have cash. Go higher, for someone you think they will never give you an answer, they probably will. I would find a company, or a person, or whatever online so I would check their website, I would check their Instagram, I would check their Facebook, and all I'm doing, LinkedIn, and all I'm doing there is two things. I'm looking for an e-mail.
Like if I would be checking you Robert, I would be looking where is an e-mail that it's not an info@ I don't know RobertPlank.com. I would look where is the e-mail of Robert@, you know what I'm saying? I would look to get an e-mail that's personalized if I can. The other thing I would look, what do I really love about them? What do I like? Where is that similarity that I can put in an e-mail that's genuine. You want to put something genuine otherwise it's just energetic, not good. So I would look just for two things and many times if you don't find an e-mail on a website, you go on Facebook, or some social media there will be that e-mail. Sometimes it won't be. Doesn't really matter, right, but if that happens I would even say attention to the business owner or attention to marketing manager, or something, you know? Please forward to person who can make decisions online and then I would just literally take that e-mail, save it perfectly, I would just change that complimentary sentence, and I would shoot off an e-mail. That's the only thing I would do.
If you're I don't know looking for clients, if you're business to business I would definitely attack LinkedIn and what not. I think there are even tools that will give you people's e-mails and what not. I didn't even go that deep into some tools and what not. I really took it easily with internet and everyone has one simple e-mail and it worked, and it still works. For example, I have a guy I know who, he's running Craigsbook ads, like automation, Facebook ads, I said bro you would kill it. If I were you I would just be doing that. I would go to companies, I would say hey man this is what I do, I run traffic through Facebook ads, you know if you need any help with it, which everyone basically does, give me a shout out, happy to help. I think people like that with some kind of services that you know you can do or whatever product, you can kill it real quick and it does matter.
Look, I did this Australian, Indonesia based, the guy I learned it from, he's in the UK. The guy he learned it from that's making gazillions of dollars, is in states. It doesn't really matter where you live. My English is shabby, as you can hear, I make grammar mistakes all the time, and it worked.
Robert Plank: Yes.
Damir Butkovic: You know, whatever you do, just follow the strategy and the strategy's simple. Give them a reason where sending an e-mail always get away with the sentence, I was poking around your website, or I was poking around your page, or I was poking your shop, it doesn't really matter, compliment them, introduce what you do, do not hard pitch, like man I help people sell more stuff online. I help people lose weight. Not I help people lose weight in 30 days and all that. No, no, no. I help people live healthy, something like that and then the take away's, if you need help with it please let me know, happy to help. Cheers, bye.
That's what I would do and that's what anyone can do is listening and I guarantee you you'll get some kind of a result. I say if you sent out 20 e-mails, you don't get the response, you're pitching too hard or the niche is not good, just move away to another niche. You don't have to send 50 e-mails, send 20. Tweak something. It's very easy. It's free, you know?
Robert Plank: Right.
Damir Butkovic: That's what I would do. Simple as that. You can literally in the next half an hour, an hour, if you follow that, you can send out some stuff and I would say you'll get the response, right? Then of course you've got to meet with people, whether it's in person or online, you got to sell them your stuff, obviously.
Robert Plank: Right.
Damir Butkovic: That's the selling part. This is the lead generation part. Yeah, that's how it works and anyone that's listening I urge you go and try it out. It works. I actually did not believe it when I heard. I said it can't be that simple. You got to put more. You got to put my USB and God was not, that's exactly what you don't put. Simple as that.
Robert Plank: That's pretty interesting. I like that not only does it work no matter who you are but it also works no matter where you are in the world and it works no matter what kind of service you provide. Like you said, it might be that you provide a certain service and it's not a good fit for some businesses but then change the kind of business that you're going at, right?
Damir Butkovic: Exactly. Look, it's really good I must say for people who are offering services, it's really good business to business. Where I got questions hey but I'm like I don't know a health coach, how do I do it? If I would be a health coach I would not be targeting, let's say you Robert, directly because it's just simply too many people. I would be targeting people who ... If I was targeting you I would be targeting you to say hey I've seen, I know you're an entrepreneur, I can see entrepreneurial, you probably have a group of people that are working hard and I'm a health coach or whatever, I'm happy to help, happy to share some tips, how to work from home and still stay healthy and not drink gallons of coffee and eating McDonald's or whatever, so if you need any help with that, please let me know, I'd be happy to help.
What I'm doing there I would target leaders in their own niches or industries because they have my group of people, right? Don't get stuck. What I'm trying to say oh I'm doing one to one or whatever, yeah target those people, like target entrepreneurs or someone who has a group of people you want. It works both ways. Business to business or I would say one to one, you just have to not go after each person individually, you go after someone who has a group of those people.
Robert Plank: Right. So they can plug into their network.
Damir Butkovic: Exactly.
Robert Plank: That's pretty cool and I like all the stuff that you've shared with us so far today. I would like to send people your way and if they like what they heard about all of your adventures and your thinking and your advise, where can people go to find out all about Damir and all about the things you do and your websites and all that good stuff?
Damir Butkovic: Yeah. Very simple. I'll spell out my name. I have a Facebook page. I wasn't there for awhile but you can contact me through Facebook or I have a website. Website is DamirButkovic.com.au. It's simple to shoot me an e-mail or whatever. There's something that's not working. I was actually making it look better yesterday and then I made some mistakes, it doesn't look that good anymore. Anyway, you can contact me there or just search me on Facebook or like my page, something, anyway you want to connect and I'm happy to share, answer questions and things like that. It's all there basically.
Robert Plank: Awesome. Well I'm really glad that you were on the show today and I mean, heck I got a lot of really cool stuff out of that and I'm glad that you were able to share all of your stories and your adventures and all the little tid bits that have helped you to get to where you are now. Thanks so much for that.
Damir Butkovic: Thanks. Glad to help. Please use this. I went to one boot camp, paid $10,000 and the guy said on the end of it, Todd Brown, he's awesome. Awesome, brilliant, marketer, he said looks it's worthless if you don't apply it. So it's like great advice. Go and apply it and you'll see how awesome it is.
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122: Use the Internet to Get More Customers, Leads, and Sales, No Matter What Your Business Is! with Charles Manuel
Charles Manuel from Berkshire SEO tells us the story of how we went from selling a speed reading course, to helping online businesses make money. Charles uses SEO, PPC, influencer marketing, and social media tactics to generate lots of new leads (and keep existing customers) for local businesses. He shares not only lots of common sense advice, but tells us about some creative ways he's used the internet to boost sales.
Charles Manuel: Robert, thanks for having me.
Robert Plank: Awesome. Right before we started recording, you were telling me about how, I guess in college, you discovered The 4-Hour Work Week, and this whole internet marketing thing.
Charles Manuel: That's exactly right, yeah. I picked up a copy of the book. I always like to study different business methods, because I did go to college for accounting, and wanted to be a financial advisor. I actually was for a few years. In college, I started playing around with starting small online businesses, and doing them primarily online in my spare time. The first thing I did was a speed reading course, and I developed the course myself by kind of taking the best parts of a bunch of courses I had taken, and decided to make one for college students. It sold horribly. I realized, "Oh, there's a lot more to online marketing than just looking up some keywords that you think will do well, throwing $1,000 at paper click advertising, and hoping it all works out." It takes a lot of planning, and research, and everything.
I started digging into it little by little over the years, and I made another business, and had some success, and made another one. Eventually, I realized I could make a lot of money just helping out small business owners to do the same thing. To just use the internet to help them market themselves. I know so many plumbers, and contractors, and restaurateurs, and folks like that just in my area that still put an ad in the newspaper, and yet don't use their Facebook page. It just seemed really strange to me that they'd rather spend $300 or $400 a month instead of use something that's free. That's what I do. I help folks leverage a lot of stuff that's generally free, and oftentimes better than conventional methods.
Robert Plank: Interesting. I'm glad that you brought up and you started with the SEO, the search engine optimization kind of stuff, because I think that a lot of people kind of try to tell you, "Well, just build it and they will come," or, "Just put up a website, and just get some keywords, and put up some meta tags, and people will just magically find you." It seems like that's a good place to start I guess, but that's not all the traffic methods, and then I guess as you found from your early adventure with the speed reading courses, that even if you do have traffic, that doesn't necessarily mean that they will buy it. Do you know of a marketer named Onyx Singal?
Charles Manuel: Not familiar with the name.
Robert Plank: I forget what his website is, but early on, I think his first product was something about how to get better grades. In the same kind of vein as what you were selling. What's always stuck with me, years and years later, is that he did the same thing, put out a website, tried to get some buyers, and he noticed that, number one, that college kids and high school kids don't have any money and aren't willing to put money into buying this course, and the majority of his customers were the parents of kids. There would be, like, a parent of a kid with bad grades. They would buy this book as a last ditch kind of effort. It still wouldn't work, but I think there definitely is something to that. There definitely is something to getting to a finishing point with whatever project you have, put it out there, make those mistakes early, do those experiments. I'm glad that you started with that.
You started with the speed reading course, and now what you do is you help small businesses get online. Could you share with us an example or a case study of some business that maybe they were missing a few things, they were doing a few things wrong, and then you went in there and you worked your magic, and just made it work awesomely?
Charles Manuel: Yeah, absolutely. I think one of my favorite ones is a local real estate developer that I actually did some work for him when I was a younger guy. Cleaning up some lots that he would develop later, and everything else. We already had a rapport, and he called me up one day and said, "Charlie, I really want a rank for these five keywords." I said, "Okay. Let me take a look at them." He was adamant about having me rank for these five keywords. I see something like this all the time, where a client will want something very specific that doesn't get them to their end goal of sales. For this client, they were five words that literally had zero monthly searches when I looked them up in the keyword tool. The majority of my time, I spent redirecting his goals towards, "Well, how about we just make sure that your website ranks for homes being built in your area, so that you're actually getting people looking at your site. If we spend all this time ranking for words that don't get any searches, you aren't going to get any traffic."
That's really what I do first, is search for the goal. What I did with him is, I helped him develop an entirely new website from the ground up, based around log homes in Vermont, because what he does specifically is he builds log homes. We developed a website that had very nice picture galleries. They showed recent builds, and we keyword optimized it for a long list of keywords which weren't used very often, because not many log home developers in Vermont have SEO optimized websites. We found him an opportunity. I put in, you know, a good amount of work on my part, but far less than it would have taken to create traffic from nothing with his list of keywords. Because of that, he was able to bring in a bunch more business the coming year.
Robert Plank: That's pretty cool. What you're saying is that a lot of these small business owners, they've heard about Google ranking, and maybe they looked at what rankings there are, and what you're saying is that they'll choose completely the wrong thing to rank for, and it's like, like you said, not only are there no searches for this keyword, but even if there were searches, or even if they were able to rank for that, it's completely the wrong kind of key phrase. What you're saying is, this person, he builds log homes in Vermont, and so what he would be looking for is, instead of ranking for something like "luxury homes" or "cheap homes" he would be ranking for "log homes in name of city Vermont" or "log cabin homes in name of city Vermont"? Just by tweaking the goal a little bit, or not even the goal, but the goal is to rank highly for these keywords that are searched on, and to get the right leads into his business, so that's the goal, but then you change the methods from, "Well, let me just rank for this two word phrase," into these more long-term phrases with some search volume that actual buyers that he's looking for would be putting in a search engine.
Charles Manuel: Yeah, and that's really what it is nowadays, because as I'm sure you know, there's plenty of software out there that will search engine optimize for you. There's plenty of stuff you can upload to a WordPress page to make these things search engine optimized. That's not really where the work lies anymore, for a guy like me. What I spend a lot more time doing is, since the market is so saturated with these search engine optimized sites, I spend a lot of time looking for opportunities out there in the search engines, and sometimes there won't be some, so we'll look at other methods, because I do everything from SEO, to paper click marketing, to content creation, to influencer marketing. With SEOs specifically, a lot of the time, you're just looking for some keywords that some big companies haven't started to latch onto yet, or haven't ranked for yet. You're using those to help people out.
Also, with small businesses, since many of them work in a localized area like my contractors, my plumbers, my restaurateurs, those folks, you get the added benefit of doing the localized search engine optimization, where you're able to create Google business pages for them, which is kind of a new thing. I'm sure that some of the folks that listen to your podcast have them. Basically, you create a storefront for your website that then helps Google to list it, and if you ever, for instance, are looking for a restaurant when you're walking around town, Robert, I'm sure you've been, like, "Find me some Mexican food," or whatever. You'll find that you get four or five local listings in a little box before you get search engine terms. Those come from using a Google storefront page. It's the easiest way to start to get ranked. You do that, you do a little bit of meta tagging on your site, you link them together, and you're already starting to see real results.
Robert Plank: It sounds like what you do is you go to these local businesses, and you kind of look at their situation, and I guess it's some kind of combination of, like you said, search engine optimization, paper click, and combined with, I guess, the latest and greatest, for lack of a better term, like, ways to be compliant, right? How to get listed in Yelp, Facebook, Google business pages, all this kind of cool stuff.
Charles Manuel: That's exactly it.
Robert Plank: I would kind of like to go into sort of weird, cutting edge territory, because one thing that kind of- and I don't know how well-versed in this are you- I've heard just lately that there's this thing called Pokemon Go, that I guess some business owners have been using to bring people to their business, and I've also heard of something, and I don't know what the term is, where I guess Google is trying some new kind of program where, I guess if you're out and about near a business, some kind of thing will pop up on your phone. Have you heard of this?
Charles Manuel: Yes, absolutely. The second one I've heard of. The first one, I haven't played around with at all, I have to admit. I've been busy on other projects, but I have heard lightly about the Pokemon Go thing, how you can kind of set up your storefront as a Pokemon arena.
Robert Plank: A gym I guess, right? Where I guess people come together.
Charles Manuel: A gym. That's what it is. I don't know how to work with that specifically. The second item is actually really, really interesting. It's more on the consumer level, because that's really what makes Google so good, is it focuses on its consumers, even though the businesses kind of pay it. As just a guy walking down the street, you can be at a restaurant, at a gas station, and Google will pop up an indication on your phone, and it will say, "Oh, hey, have you been to this restaurant before? Can you take two minutes to tell us about it?" It's kind of helping to validate some of the information that the business owner may have put on their page, and it helps to give it a little bit more of a solid back-link. Not a back-link, but a solid ranking, as far as Google is concerned.
Robert Plank: It seems like every couple of days, there's some new sort of fad or service that either Google or Facebook or someone is trying out, some way to plug it in there. It seems like, especially with Google, where everything's connected, I guess the more you're listed, or the more you help Google, the better, right?
Charles Manuel: That's exactly it. When you're thinking about search engine optimization, you want to think of Google as just someone who's trying to learn a little bit more about what you're teaching online. A good way to think of it is if you're a construction company, and someone searches for "contractors in my area," you don't want to just show off as a business page, where it's like, "Call me here. Get a free quote." Et cetera, et cetera. The person probably also wants some information. Google has done a very good job using its spiders, which are the things that track your site and get a good idea of what's on there, to find out if your website also has a blog, and on that blog if you have information that's pertinent to that person when they're searching for a contractor. Maybe you have a how-to for finding a contractor. Maybe it's even more specific because you're localized, and it's about finding a contractor in the northeast, because that person would be more suited to help you if you own a home in the northeast.
If you're a restauranteur, then you might want to be linking to reviews to your restaurant. It goes on and on like that. You want to be sure that when Google looks at your website, you're not just giving a sales pitch, because the second Google sees you do that, it's going to hurt you on page rank. You want to be sure that you're also giving information to the people that are searching for your site, because that's really what they're there for.
Robert Plank: That's kind of cool, and I think back to ... We've all been in that situation where we have to find a doctor for blank. Where we had to get some kind of service provider for blank. I think back to the times that either if I've researched things like a plumber, or I've researched things like an accountant, every now and then I would find a collection of maybe five or ten YouTube videos from a plumber, on, "Here's how to these common things." "Here's how to turn the water main for your house off and on," or, from a tax accountant, "What's one way to minimize your taxes?" Just little tips and little bits of advice there, and it's kind of interesting, because I guess that, well, on one hand, if someone's looking, for example, for an accountant, but they're not in the area, well, fine. They still get their problem solved, and I guess Google will, to my understanding, will reward you a little bit with that.
Then, as a person looking to pay someone money, if I find, for example, a plumber, it's one thing if they have a business in my area, and if they have a couple of reviews, or a couple of good star ratings. If they also have even a short little blog, or a couple of videos, I'm thinking, "They must really know their stuff, if they're teaching it as well."
Charles Manuel: Exactly. It adds a comfort level, especially now when you look at just, on a very broad scale, the demographics of people now. Everybody still likes to believe that the baby boomers are the largest demographic and they don't use technology. Well, baby boomers actually do use technology, and the Gen Yers, the folks that are about our age, from mid 20s up to late 30s, that's actually now the largest population demographic in America, and they're all online. Those people now, when they're searching for a plumber, when they're searching for a restaurant, just like you said, they want to see that ten minute video of the guy working. Maybe not even because they want to learn how to do it, but because they want to see how the guy's going to work on their house. It might be posted as a how-to video, but more importantly, you're going to be like, "Oh, look at this guy. He's very competent. I can see that in this YouTube video."
It creates this whole new area where you can generate credibility for prospective clients before you're even shaking hands with them and starting work.
Robert Plank: That's kind of cool. I hadn't even thought of it in that way. That's like a soft selling, sort of.
Charles Manuel: Absolutely. That's really one of the best parts about, quote, "selling like this." I came from financial advice. I wanted to be a financial advisor since I was like 17 years old. Went to college for six years. Got all the degrees, got all the certifications, and I hated it, because it's hard selling, all the time. When you're doing stuff like this, all you're ever thinking about is, "How can I add value for the people that are coming to my site?" That's what you're trying to do all the time. You just want to give them more information, and you want to help them make a better decision. Obviously, ideally, you want the decision to be your company, but if you're doing your job and you're giving them good information, you more than likely will be.
Robert Plank: That's a pretty cool insight. I guess I'm looking for, like, do you have kind of a cool story where maybe you combined some of these techniques, or you just had some kind of clever way of boosting someone's business, aside from just the usual? Like, ranking for keywords or something? For example, one thing that kind of comes to mind is, years and years ago, I had heard of a consultant like yourself, and he went to some local mom and pop diner that was losing business because of Chilis and Applebees and all of the chains moved into their town. They did some kind of interesting stuff where they, the restaurant was like a Foursquare spot. Someone could come in and use this app to check in. They did something kind of crazy where, like, if you had become the mayor of that Foursquare location, like if you checked in the most number of times, then they would give you your own parking spot at the restaurant, and they would give you, like, one free drink, or 20% off your bill, or something crazy like that.
Do you have anything kind of interesting like that, where you went to some kind of local business, and used the power of the internet, maybe in not your usual way, to give them some extra customers and money and stuff like that?
Charles Manuel: I actually did something kind of like that, with a barbecue restaurant that I worked for. There was a very, very popular spot just up the road that did something called a beer card, and so this place that was a competitor had, like, 300 beers that you could choose from. If you drank 50 different beers inside of a 12 month period, you got to have a beer stein that was engraved. I told them, this barbecue joint I was working for, "You guys have 70 different types of bourbon. Why don't we do a bourbon card? Then all the folks who had fun doing the beer card at the place up the street, they're going to love doing the bourbon card down here."
We promoted that online with a mixture of Foursquare, because people would check in and say that they were using their card, and if they did that, they would get a free bourbon. When they finished their bourbon card, they would get a special spot on the blog. There was a whole long list of folks on the blog who had finished the bourbon card. I don't remember what we did. I think we gave everybody, like, an engraved shot glass or something when they finished it. That generated a lot of interest, and a lot of traffic, simply because I was riding on the coattails of a very simple idea that a place up the street had used, and I leveraged it a little bit more with some online marketing for it as well.
Oftentimes, Robert, you can do stuff just like that, where it's not like I'm trying to break the mold and do something crazy. I'm just like, "That's very simple. What if we just leveraged it a little bit more, just using the internet?"
Robert Plank: The trend that I'm hearing when I talk to guys like yourself, who are helping out these small businesses, is that it seems almost like a lot of these small business owners, they don't know what to do, or they've given up, or they think that the only thing that can be done is doing a discount, or dropping their price, or having a coupon or something. I just love those kinds of stories where you're actually using real marketing and plugging into some combination of these tried and true business techniques that have always been around, but then because of all this new technology and these new apps and things like that, that there's just new ways to plug in all of that.
Charles Manuel: That's exactly it. There's an internet equivalent for just about any marketing method that a small business has ever used. I did a really long write-up on it on my site, so I won't wax and wane about it now. That's probably one of the funnest things about working at this level, as opposed to working for, like, a Coca Cola or something. You get to be super creative and really do these little experiments, and it's really fun.
Robert Plank: It's always nice when the thing you do to make money is also a lot of fun, right?
Charles Manuel: Absolutely. That's the best part.
Robert Plank: As we're winding down today's call, out of all of the local businesses you've worked with, and the clients and things like that, what's the number one mistake you've seen them all making?
Charles Manuel: The number one mistake that every business that I've worked with makes, is they all just seem to not understand that the goal of online marketing is to get more customers. They all think that you want to stop at, like, the mid-level goal of, "I want to have 5,000 site views a month." Or, "I want to have 10,000 likes on my Facebook page," or whatever it is. I almost always hear that when I do my initial call with my clients, and I'll go, "Okay. Why do you want that?" They say, "Well, it's because if I have that many people, then that many more people will see my storefront, or come and call me for contracting services, whatever." I was like, "Oh, so you want more business. That's what you want. Let's not pigeonhole ourselves down into just site traffic, or just Facebook likes, or what have you."
A lot of the time, I spend a good amount of the initial setup with my clients just reminding them, "Hey, we're here to get you more business. Let's make sure that we're focusing on things that get people who want to buy to your site, and then buying." You can spend a lot of time getting your 100,000 Facebook likes, or your 5,000 page views a month, but if you're getting 4,950 people to your site that aren't a targeted market segment for you, then you're only getting 50 people there that even want to buy. It's costing you a ton of money, and it doesn't make a lot of sense.
Robert Plank: It sounds like a pretty expensive way to feel good. There are cheaper ways.
Charles Manuel: Exactly. Go buy yourself a beer. It's much easier.
Robert Plank: That's funny. Do you think that these businesses, they kind of fall into this trap of thinking in too technical terms, or in the jargon terms? Do you think that they end up doing it to themselves just by researching, or do you think that there are other SEO companies maybe that are kind of getting them off track?
Charles Manuel: Probably a mixture of the two. As all SEO companies do, you write blog posts to help potential clients, and these blog posts are necessarily stuffed with that jargon. "Get this many page views. You want to convert at this percentage. You want to get this many impressions on your paper click ads." Et cetera, et cetera, on and and on, forever. You can get really overwhelmed by it, or what more often happens is, like, a few of those trigger words kind of stick in your head, and then when I'm talking with a client, they'll say, "Oh. Well, I read this thing on MAS, and it says unless I'm getting 5,000 page views a month, I'll never rank on Google." It's like, "Well, why do you think that? Why do you need to rank on Google? Is that really what your company needs?" It really depends upon so many different factors, that I could have clients who will only get 1,000 page views a month, but those 1,000 page views convert at 10%, so they're getting 100 leads per month, and then 50% of them close. For a contractor, that's out of control.
When you look at things like that, you're like, "Oh, that guy is not working very hard getting a little bit of traffic, but he's getting pointed traffic that makes him money." That's really what's important, and what a lot of people miss out on. I think it really does come from a mixture of information overload, and probably just trying to make sure that I'm not going to pull the wool over their eyes, so they want to talk with some type of experience as well.
Robert Plank: I guess that's what you're there for. Like you said, if they're fixated on some kind of arbitrary goal just because maybe they found some kind of blanket statement like that, or they found a blog post that was talking about a small step, or the mechanism, and what they're really after for is the goal or the big picture. I guess that's what you're there for, to say, "Well, even though you've heard of this, but here's the corrected version of that," I guess.
Charles Manuel: "Here's some other things that we can look at, that might be easier, might work better." Sometimes, they're right, and I say, "Yeah, that is a good thing to look at." That happens all the time.
Robert Plank: If someone, like one of these small businesses, if they're looking to hire someone like you to either enhance their SEO or get more leads, or even just make more money from what they're doing, where can they find out about you, and hire you, and find out everything that it is that you do?
Charles Manuel: You can just head right over to my company's website, which is BerkshireSEO.com, and right now I'm actually doing a free three-month marketing plan for ... Well, depending upon how popular this gets, anyone that's interested, I'll try and fit you all in. That's just kind of my way of showing folks exactly what it's going to look like when you work with me, from soup to nuts.
Robert Plank: Awesome. BerkshireSEO. I almost said, "Berkshire CEO." That's something completely different I guess, right? Charles, thanks for being on the show, and thanks for sharing your wisdom, and everything you know about SEO and online marketing, and all that fun stuff.
Charles Manuel: Absolutely. Thanks a lot, Robert.
Robert Plank: Thank you.
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121: Twenty-First Century Publishing: Hook Into Social Media, Get Targeted Traffic, and Monetize a Podcast with Naresh Vissa
Naresh Vissa from Krish Media Marketing, a 21st century publisher who's fluent in web design, web development, and marketing -- author of "Fifty Shades of Marketing: Whip Your Business Into Shape & Dominate Your Competition" and "Podcastnomics: The Book of Podcasting... To Make You Millions" -- shares his best and craziest marketing techniques with us. He tells us about three ways to monetize a podcast (ads, existing products, and premium content), how to make money with porn sites, LinkedIn, Yelp, and more.
Naresh Vissa: Thanks so much. It's a pleasure to be on.
Robert Plank: Could you tell us what it is that you do and what makes you different and special.
Naresh Vissa: I am a publisher by background, and a lot of people Robert don't really quite understand what that means when I tell them I'm a financial publisher. It's like, what is that? Really what I do is I use the online and digital world to sell information, whether it's investment information, financial information, personal financial information, or even books. I have a book publishing division. That's what I do, so my skillset is very, very strong in the online and digital marketplace. My company, Krish Media & Marketing, it's one of the companies that I have. We provide an array of online and digital marketing, and just general digital services for small businesses.
This is what I call Robert the 21st century economy, because what I do, I'm a publisher, and as an online business person, this job wasn't around 15 years ago, or 20 years ago. It's a 21st century job.
Robert Plank: Okay, and what you do exactly. You said you have your books and you have products and things. Is that right? What exactly is it that you've been putting out recently?
Naresh Vissa: Yeah, so the the Krish Media Marketing side, we help existing businesses improve their bottom lines through the online and digital world. That could be we offer services as simple as web design, web development. Some more complex things like Google AdWords, pay per click, affiliate marketing, copyrighting, etc.
Now on the publishing side, I said I'm a publisher. What we do is we sell investment research to individuals, so let's say Robert, for example, you don't want to put your money with a financial advisor, or a money manager, who's going to manage all your money. Instead, you can subscribe to our services, and we'll tell you exactly what to do with your money. We'll tell you what companies to buy, when to buy, what to sell, when to sell, what to short, when to go long. We provide economic analysis, and other insights so that our subscribers have a very firm grasp, and also total control over their money. These are subscription products that we sell.
Two of my companies that do this, one is called Money Ball Economics, and the other one is called Normandy Investment Research. Normandy Investment Research focuses on options trading, and Money Ball Economics, is more for beginners, so beginner and intermediate type of traders and investors. Those are subscription products that we sell, and again, my skillset in the online and digital world helps me sell these products. It helps me find leads, market to them, and funnel them through our processes.
Robert Plank: Well cool, so you said that this is a job that didn't exist 20 years ago, so can you tell us how you came across this, and how you developed the skills? I mean, how your even discovered the need for this kind of thing?
Naresh Vissa: It happened completely by chance, Robert. I didn't grow up telling people I want to grow up to become a financial publisher. It kind of just fell in my lap, while I was in graduate school, actually, the leading financial publishing company in the world, at the time, contacted me because they found me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one social media platform that I've been, I don't want to say very active, but I've had a presence for almost 10 years now, and even though I'm not super active on it, LinkedIn is very similar to Yelp, where if people type in a few key words, they can find you, and find out all about you.
In the case of LinkedIn, I had a full profile, and this company was looking for someone who had a very similar skillset. That skillset happened to be someone with a media background, and someone with a financial background, all in one. They typed in a few key words, they found me, they contacted me, and they asked if I could consult to start a new project for them. This was while I was still in graduate school, and when I was a consultant to help launch a new project for them. Keep a long story short, the project went well. They wanted me to take over the project after I graduated which I did, and that was my entry into the financial publishing space, because of this company that recruited me. If that did not happen, then there's a very, very good chance I wouldn't be talking to you today, and I would be working in a corporate function.
Robert Plank: Interesting, and so it all happened because they made that one connection. They found you in that one place on LinkedIn from the key word search.
Naresh Vissa: Exactly.
Robert Plank: That's crazy, and that's one of those things, I mean even like five years ago, or so, I was trying to get a house sold over in Nevada, about a five hour drive away, and the realtor was doing all listings, like putting a video of the home on YouTube, and posts on Facebook, and there were four cash offers for the house, and one of the offers came from just posting on Facebook. Even though that was pretty recent, five years ago, I was pretty blown away, like with your story, just having something online, not even having it very well marketed, or having a lot of traffic, or even very well refined, but just having something online. It seems like if you just make this one connection, it can lead to all these extra things.
Naresh Vissa: Yes, absolutely. I tell people all the time some of my friends who are still trying to find their way in the corporate world, or trying to develop a career, they refuse to get on LinkedIn, because they say, oh it's not going to help me. But you can't look at it that way. You have to look at is it going to hurt you. You might think that it's not going to help you, but it's not going to hurt, either. I only see platforms like LinkedIn or Yelp if you're a small business, a brick and mortar type of retail business. Those only start to help you. They're really platforms for people to find you, and to give you business, or to give you opportunities. I lay out actually in my book Fifty Shades of Marketing, I lay out why LinkedIn, and Yelp and a few other platforms, why it's so important to have a presence on them.
Robert Plank: Let's unpack that a little bit. Could you tell us about your Fifty Shades of Marketing book.
Naresh Vissa: My book, it's called Fifty Shades of Marketing: Whip Your Business Into Shape and Dominate Your Competition. It was an Amazon number one best selling book. Sales have been pretty good. It's really a primer on 21st century online and digital marketing. The feedback has been really awesome, because it covers everything you need to know about marketing, step-by-step. Again, concepts as simple as what direct marketing is, what direct response marketing is, why email marketing is the most effective type of marketing, the importance of an email list. It also walks you through the basics, like how to build a simple website, how to set up an email list. What is affiliate marketing? How do you calculate customer lifetime value? How does mobile tie into 21st century marketing, and then social media? It covers anything and everything. I even have a chapter on advertising on porn sites is a cost effective ROI driven endeavor.
Robert Plank: We can't just mention that and just leave that hanging, so could you unpack that a little bit? Can you tell us, I'm really curious, I'm no sure how far we can go with it, but how the heck do you make money, get traffic from porn sites. I got to hear this one.
Naresh Vissa: All right, so this has actually been a very, very popular chapter, because people are like, whoa. Let's face it, porn is a very, very popular niche, and to give you a statistic, 30% of all internet traffic goes to pornography, or other sexual material, so to put that number into context. Okay, 30%, what does that mean? It was actually the Huffington Post that reported that more people visit porn sites than they do Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined, so combined. That means there's a lot of traffic going to pron sites.
Now, what's the opportunity here? The opportunity is advertising on a porn site is 1/10th the cost, even though the traffic is a lot higher, it's still 1/10th the cost of advertising on mainstream channel, or mainstream online channels such as Google AdWords or Facebook, so this is a pretty good opportunity. You've got very high traffic, low cost. Now why don't people do this more? Because it's boring, and there's a stigma attached to advertising on porn sites. That's the gist of the chapter. In the book, I include a case sturdy of the a food delivery company, so again, this was not a company that had anything to do with sex or porn, but they found creative ways to tie their advertising campaigns, and give it a sexual twist. They were selling sandwiches, but they were able to be creative and advertise on porn sites, and it grew their business tremendously, and I lay out that case study in the book.
Robert Plank: That's pretty crazy, so are you talking about banners ads, or free rule ads, or all of the above?
Naresh Vissa: Yes, so to give you an idea, banners on individual video pages on porn sites, or sorry on individual video pages rather than the home page of a porn site, performed remarkably better than the home page, and that's largely because when people go to porn sites, they're not there to look up the home page, they're there to watch videos. The big take away is that banners on these sites have worked extremely well, even better than email marketing. Most cases email marketing is most effective, but in the case of porn, you have to remember people are there for a reason. They're there to essentially watch videos, and they're not going to waste their time reading any emails or grow in through the home page. People are strict business there.
Robert Plank: I mean, that's pretty crazy, but I always like stuff like that. I always like stuff that's a little different than the tired old traffic methods people are using. I like that, that's real, because how many times have we heard stuff like, well just make a website, just optimize for SCO, and that's pretty cool, and I like that it wasn't even anything sex related. They connected it like you said, but just a simple sandwich company getting traffic from that interesting new method that you have there.
Naresh Vissa: Right, exactly. And again, to talk about qualification, porn sites have very engaging users. They're not visiting them by accident, whereas you might accidentally click a Google ad, or a Facebook ad, and then you'll immediately bounce off the page. Instead, the people who visit porn sites, they're visiting there for a reason, and so the quality of the traffic is relatively high. Actually, probably higher than any other type of site on the internet. Bounce rates are low, and session lengths are a little over 15 minutes, so you know that when you advertise on such a medium, you know what you're getting. You're going to get a very attentives probably male, who's going to stick around for about 15 minutes, which is unheard of on the internet.
Robert Plank: Right, that's silly by also crazy. I really like that technique there, so you have that book. You have Firth Shades of Marketing, and then I understand you have another book about podcasting. Is that right?
Naresh Vissa: Yeah, so that was my first book that I came out with, called Podcastnomics: The Book Of Podcasting To Make You Millions, and it is again, another primer, this time on all about podcasting, from its history, what it is, how to start a podcast. The necessary software you need to start it, and most importantly, this is what most training courses and sessions don't do, but what my book does do, and that's how to monetize a podcast. How to actually make money from it.
Robert Plank: Can you walk us through that really quickly. What are the steps, or what are the ways that you listen in this book about how to monetize a podcast?
Naresh Vissa: There are three primary revenue drivers for monetizing a podcast, and to give people a background on why am I qualified to write a book on this or to talk about this. I mentioned earlier about the company that found me on LinkedIn, and asked me to start a new division for them. That division was actually an online radio podcasting network, and it consisted of just a bunch of business and financial shows. Now what we were able to accomplish there by the time it was all said and done, that station was called the Santeria Radio Network, and out of the sense of all to be called the Choose Yourself network. James Altuchera, if your listeners, are familiar with him, he's now running it.
Anyway, there are three primary revenue drivers in properly monetizing a podcast, and this is what I learned while I was starting up this division. The first revenue driver is the old school, 20th century advertising model. This is something that I don't recommend because advertising has changed so much. In the 20th century, you workday was very difficult to track the return that you were getting on advertising, but now you can track exactly how many times someone listens to an ad, or clicks or visits a website. You have all this data available to you and as a result, advertising has been going down, or advertising dollars have been going down. This is evidenced by mainstream media, and how much they're struggling, newspapers, and television stations, trust real radio, all struggling because they're ad based models.
When it comes to podcasting, you can certainly make money off advertising, and I'd say go for it, but that shouldn't be your primary source of revenue. You're going to be sadly disappointed if that's the case.
The second revenue driver is selling an existing product, so that means using the podcast as a lead generator to sell an existing product. In our case back when we got started, we were selling financial research, so we knew that okay, we're going to funnel people in, and our end goal is to sell them our research. We funneled people in by being on all the major podcast distributors, iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, our website. You name it, we grew our listenership. We ran campaigns. We ran discounted offers to our listeners so that they could subscribe to our research, and that ended up being the primary source of revenue, so it's just really another lead generating tactic.
The third way to monetize a podcast is through premium content, so that means creating a pay wall to offer your free stuff, which is available on iTunes, and your website, and all those other places, but coming out with a paid product, where people pay, in our case, they were paying something like $5 to $10 a month. It wasn't expensive at all. Again, because it's recurring, that comes out to about $60 to $120 a year, so let's just say $100 a year, which was more expensive than some or our products that we were offering for $39 a year, or $49 a year. Anyway, we came out with this premium content that people subscribed to, and what they got in return was special type of content that they could share with the listeners. It has to be worthwhile for the listener to get them to subscribe.
We have three different revenue drivers, and now when I consult with the various clients, and podcasts to get them started or to turn things around, those are the tree revenue drivers that I tell them to keep in mind, advertising, selling an existing product, and premium content.
Robert Plank: Awesome, and what I like about what you've shared with us today, is it seems like it's all based on your own experiences, and your own case studies, and you deleted the things that didn't work out of all the noise, and just taught just the proven methods that you know, whether you're talking about, like you said, LinkedIn, Yelp, podcasting, advertising on porn sites, just a whole family of different things. As we're winding this down, could you tell us, as far as the clients you've helped and businesses you've grown, and things like that, when people are trying to grow their business, get some traffic, get some eyeballs, what's the number one mistake you see these businesses making?
Naresh Vissa: The biggest mistake, biggest, biggest one, without a doubt, Robert, is failing to capture traffic, failing to capture traffic. They might get a good amount of traffic on their website, or podcast, or whatever it is, they might get lots of listeners, or hits, and all that. The problem is they're not capturing that traffic you need to capture it so that you can continue that dialog. You can continue that relationship moving forward, and it's not just a first date. It's not just a one and done thing, and the way to capture that traffic, there's no better way to do that, than by collecting their email address. That's a huge problem I've noticed. The podcasters, the media companies, the newspapers. People like their stuff, but they're not capturing that traffic. It's so, so important to do that because that opens up a world of endless possibilities, and opportunities.
Robert Plank: Everyone has an email address, right. I mean, as much as Facebook and Twitter, and all those social platforms are gaining all this traction, there's still more people with an email address, than people with a Facebook account, right?
Naresh Vissa: Yes, absolutely email, everyone has an email address. People say that email is dying. Right now it's still very prevalent. A lot of businesses don't do email. People don't like to be called anymore, so don't call them, instead you can email them. Ten years from now, things could be completely different, and my prediction is things will be completely different, just like ten years ago, there was no Facebook. There was but it wasn't as ubiquitous as it is today. There was not Uber. There weren't so many things around that are so prevalent today, but right now, email is still king.
Robert Plank: Cool, I mean the old tried and true stuff works, but there's still lots of exciting things coming up ahead in marketing, for sure. Could you share with us about where people can go and buy your books, and which websites of you're they can go to to find out more about you and buy a bunch of stuff from you hopefully.
Naresh Vissa: My name is Naresh Vissa, website, NareshVissa.com. People can subscribe to my free newsletter, there where I send out tips an tricks on online and digital business, the marketplace. You can also check out KrishMediaMarketing.com. That's my online business consultancy, and agency. We work with a variety of businesses, to help them with any online or digital need, and if you want to contact me, you can visit those sites, and get my email address or contact me through the pages there.
I thank you for your time Robert. It's been a great, great interview.
Robert Plank: Awesome, it's been an entertaining, and an educational conversation, so I'm really glad that you were able to drop some knowledge bumps with us. Thanks for doing that.
Naresh Vissa: No problem Robert, it was a pleasure.
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120: Stress is Just Adaptation: The Impact of the Human Stress Response with Mary Wingo
Dr. Mary Wingo is here to talk about stress and her new book, The Impact of the Human Stress Response: The Biological Origins and Solutions to Human Stress. She answers the tough questions, and explains how to understand stress (adaptation to people or an environment). Dr. Mary discusses the major causes of stress, as well as how we can all live happier and more fulfilled lives with purpose.
Lots of cool stuff. Welcome to the show Mary.
Mary Wingo: Thank you. Thank you for having me Robert.
Robert Plank: I understand that you talk about stress and stuff like that.
Mary Wingo: Yes. Absolutely. That is what I'm about.
Robert Plank: Cool. I work from home. I don't know about you but I get stressed about stuff all the time and I think it might feel like as I'm getting older either the stress is more, or maybe I'm just more aware of it. What's the answer? Is stress of thing that we need to manage, or minimize, or ignore, or can we direct it into something good? What's the answer to this whole stress problem?
Mary Wingo: First off is understanding the actual definition of stress Robert. The definition of stress, and it took a very long time to actually come up with a workable definition, but the definition is this. It's the rate of adjustment that you undergo in order to adapt to whatever an environment that you happen to find yourself in. The key is here, is that there's 2 aspects. There's 2 sides of stress. There's the actual, since we're talking about people, the human being, and the second component is the environment. It can actually be a matter of personal will or it can actually be something that's out of your reach, and that's a problem with the environment, and you just have to alter or change your environment.
Robert Plank: Okay. For example, if someone transitions from a day job to being a full-time entrepreneur, or they had a big life change or something like that. That is, I guess what stress is, so if someone goes through that stress and overcomes it versus the stress kind of hangs around or gets worse, what's happening there versus someone who's actually dealing with it?
Mary Wingo: Okay. You've touched on a really important point. Yes. Ultimately organisms, you are only supposed to be subjected to stress periodically, sporadically, but the way that modernized society is structured, a lot of us have, not necessarily horrible life-threatening stressors, it's not like a bear is chasing us every second of the day, but for most of us these nagging somewhat smaller stress, well there are some large stresses too, but that just go on day after day after day, and it's relentless.
Stress mechanisms are just that. They are how we adapt. They are our adaptive mechanisms. It's not just the adrenaline. It's not just cortisol. It is a whole cascade of physical responses. The key is to be able to do what you can call to try to resolve the stress and not keep a nagging, incessant exposure day after day after day to it because when that happens that is when we get stress related mental illness and physical disease. In fact it's an exploding phenomenon in our society.
Robert Plank: Could you walk us through an example or a case study of someone who you dealt with who had just a really bad problem with stress and you changed their ways and it fixed it up a little bit?
Mary Wingo: Oh, I can use myself.
Robert Plank: Perfect.
Mary Wingo: I'll use myself because ultimately, when I was researching, this was decades in the making. This isn't a book that I just came up with. This is something that I have cultivated over 20 years and because there's really not a lot of hardcore really good stuff out there I had to practice on myself a little and see how that worked just for me, and see if this was in relation to human beings in general.
For me it was all about simplicity. It was following probably the greatest American philosopher of our time, Henry David Thoreau, who was the guy who actually coined simplicity, or simple living., literally eliminating details and complications from one's life one, by one, by one, by one, by one. Ultimately, out of trial and error I found myself, especially when I left the US because I realized that my country, my culture, was causing me a lot of stress personally. I'm a very sensitive person. A lot of thinking nerdy types are.
I couldn't have finished this book living in the US, in the environment in the US. I had to get to a less stressful environment and that's here in Ecuador. Basically it was like another person wrote it. It just literally flowed out.
Robert Plank: Why Ecuador? Was this the kind of situation where, I'm just kind of wondering, you're from the US. You were in Texas. You're saying that moving to Ecuador was a result of your stress, you just didn't like the environment here and the environment there was better?
Mary Wingo: Yes. This is like 10, 12 years ago. I knew as a scientist back then that the structure of our environment was killing a lot of people early, and causing a lot of disability, taking a lot of breadwinners from families, causing a lot of family impoverishment. I saw this and I couldn't really put my finger on it. Like I said, this is been many, many years in the cultivation of this meta-analytic concept, but I realized that my country, for my particular sensitive constitution, was very, very toxic for me. I realized that it was stunting my growth.
10, 12 years ago I had ultimately made the decision to leave. I didn't know how or where but I had basically changed my life up to facilitate an easy transition. When a friend of mine retired down here, she's an older lady, about 3 years ago, I asked if I could come visit her over Christmas and I stayed for a month, and I realized that it was a very, very different place and I packed up, left Texas, came back 3 months later.
Robert Plank: Cool. It sounds like an exciting adventure. You have this book and I understand that you have a way of defining the type of stress. I guess there are 5 major causes of stress you say?
Mary Wingo: Yes. Absolutely. When you're talking about stress for yourself, you had mentioned that as you get older you felt like you were experiencing more and more stress. Basically our modernized society, and you don't see this to near the extent here in Ecuador, and this is where I was able to really formulate and crystalize some of my concepts, but there are 5 major causes of stress that come from living in a westernized society.
Number 1, and this is probably what affects you and your listeners a lot, it is simply complexity. Let me elaborate. It's undue pressure and taxation on our executive mental functioning, on our frontal lobes, on our ability to plan. It's called working memory and it's our frontal lobes, which is the part of the brain behind your forehead and your eyeballs, it's the newest part of our cortex, and it's very fragile, but it is our primary stress response organ believe it or not. How that's so is that it allows us to plan,strategize, and attenuate and eliminate stressors and our environment. It also allows us to alter our environment.
For instance, if we are cold and we have a cold stressor, we're in freezing temperatures, we don't sit there and freeze. We've created clothing. We've created fires. We've created elaborate shelters, stuff that other animals, to an extent, are limited in doing. With that, it's a very, very precious resource we have as people but unfortunately as we subject ourselves to increased levels of stressor over long periods of time, so high cortisol levels, a different set of receptors get activated in our frontal lobes, and basically it starts to shut everything down.
This is why stress, when we subject ourselves to stress, it's very, very bad for our emotional and mental regulation, our problem-solving ability. It's very important to take very good care of our cognitive resources because this is how all mental illness starts. This is how it all begins, when our frontal lobes start crapping out.
Robert Plank: In this case would this be like if, for example, if I'm so overwhelmed with putting out all the fires, have so many things going on, spread so thin that I can't even think, is that with this is describing?
Mary Wingo: Yes, and we Americans especially wear this type of overburden as a badge of honor, and honestly the thing is, ultimately what happens, and if you just want to look at it from an economic standpoint, this type of habit, which of course I was a typical overachiever, I got my PhD very young so I know all this, it ultimately costs you more. It's ultimately going to put a huge financial strain, well, other types of strains as well, on you, as well as on your health. This is not a good way to approach problem solving and adaptation.
Robert Plank: What is the good way? Is there a way to have my cake and eat it too? Is there a way to be a productivity machine, be an over achiever, but still be relaxed and not be overwhelmed all the time?
Mary Wingo: Let me tell you what has worked for me. Again, this is all extremely new developments that a plethora of stress researchers, scientists, investigators, social scientists, have come up collectively over the last 50, 60 years, but really over the last maybe, 5 or 10 years. For me, what works is if you're going to be an over achiever, if you're going to consume yourself with an activity like I do, like you do, of high-performance, you've got to treat yourself as an athlete preparing for the Olympics or a marathon.
Ultimately sports, we exercise stress on the body, and this has been very, very well studied and looked at. If you want to maintain high performance you've got to simplify other parts of your life, so you've got to watch what you eat like an athlete would. You've got to watch your sleeping. If you've got various toxic relationships you've got to do whatever you can to attenuate this.
The book that I wrote is basically, it's a meta-analysis of around 100 years of work. When I wrote this I knew it was going to take a big chunk out of me. I knew it was going to be a pound of flesh, so to speak, so yes, I had to be very, very immaculate in my habits in my other parts of my life in order to subsidize the adaptation of the very big demanding part.
Does that sound clear?
Robert Plank: Yeah. It does, and I like the whole analogy of the athlete and the marathon. I haven't been able to run for a few months because I broke my ankle a few months ago, but every morning I'd wake up and I'd go for a run, and I was almost like looking forward to it. I think back to, I only played sports for a few years as a kid but it was always the next game that we were leading up to and practicing for an stuff, it was this stressful event coming up, but it was good stress. There was always that element of nervousness and anticipation, but it was the good kind and not the dread kind, not like something that I was like, "Oh no. Only 4 days left, only 3 days left." It was almost like Christmas morning coming up. It was like it's a few days away, I wish it was right now.
Mary Wingo: Actually surprising, and this is something that I don't know, kind of flies in the face of what we've all been told about stress for the last 20, 30 years, is that stress is just adaptation. It's just a mechanism, just like breathing is a mechanism, or heart rate is a mechanism. It is a set of mechanisms that help us adapt, period. The difference is that often times good stressors are, like I said before, limited in scope. They're not chronic. It's not a grinding activity that you do all the time. It is sporadic so yes, okay, you're looking forward to getting a real good workout this Saturday, and you look forward to it, and it's good, and it ends. You're able to read the benefits of adaptation hopefully without the wear and tear of overuse from your mind and from the rest of your physiology.
Robert Plank: Would you say the secret is to do these things in short bursts? It's not like we're working out all day long. It's not a constant thing. It's like I'm looking forward to this little thing, now it comes up, now it's over, and then, I guess, the next event or the next milestone, I guess is what you're saying.
Mary Wingo: Yes, and like I said before, for me it was writing basically the benchmark book of medicine and physiology. That's ultimately what this book is. For me, it was again, treating it like a marathon, treating it like you're an elite athlete and really doing immaculate self-care, self-care that an athlete would do, and then just doing it periodically. With that you develop adaptation. You become stronger. It's like a muscle.
Robert Plank: Are you seeing a universal way that this is going wrong, or are you seeing a mistake that just everyone you come across who doesn't have your techniques, is there just a big mistake everyone's making as far as dealing with stress?
Mary Wingo: Yes, and we haven't gone over the other 4. I'm not sure if we have time in this episode. I might have to come back again.
Robert Plank: Might have to. You may come back one time per item, 5 times coming back.
Mary Wingo: Yes. Okay. This is the reason I ended up writing the book. I actually quit science 10 years ago. I mean I was still an academic. I fully kept up with every single major development, and this is a huge field. There's probably at minimum 100,000 refereed papers that have been published over the last 50, 75 years. This is a very, very well studied topic but it's not well understood.
I actually didn't want to write it but the way things are getting in our society, in westernized society, modernized society in general, with how we are in this point in history and basically are watching many, many folks in our culture die premature deaths, become disabled from preventable stress related diseases, become bankrupt from dealing with stress related diseases, nobody else was doing this and I figured, "God, is no one else going to, fine. Okay. I'll just do it."
That's what sort of propelled me to do this but yes, people don't have the vocabulary and with these 5 major causes of stress in modernized society, what it is, I wanted to nail down in a very easy to understand way that almost anybody in the world can understand. You don't have to have formal education. You don't have to be a medical professional. You don't even have to be all that's literate to be able to understand what stress actually is, and then when you understand what it is, and what the major classifications of stress that kill people, and make people sick and bankrupt people are, then you can actually make an itemized list and pick out, just like you would a food diary or a money spending diary if you're on a budget, and then just one by one pluck them out, just pick them out. That's the only way to do it. That's the only way to do it.
Robert Plank: What you're saying is instead of trying to conquer this huge giant problem of stress you instead break down the problem and then attack the little pieces that are left.
Mary Wingo: Yes, and for the average person living in modernized society this might be several hundred items. It might take several weeks. If you're really serious about this you might need to have help from your close family and friends because you may not even be fully aware of what you're doing.
Robert Plank: Interesting.
Mary Wingo: Yeah.
Robert Plank: We're starting to wind down. We're starting to run out of time but I want to make sure that we get the 5 major causes listed. I know that we don't have a lot of time to unpack them but I would feel bad if we left before you were able to explain all 5 of these really quick.
Mary Wingo: Okay. I'm going to try to run to these as fast as I can Robert.
Robert Plank: Awesome.
Mary Wingo: Okay, so number 1 is overloading our cognitive resources, overtaxing of working of memory. We already went over that one. Number 2 is living in an unequal society, the very, very strong correlation between living in a society that is unequal, and the proliferation of stress related diseases, especially in men. Again, where we have the .1% grabbing up all the resources and the rest of us are literally scrambling for breadcrumbs, in history this is basically the recipe for revolution. I mean this is just how human beings are put together socially.
Number 3 is loss of social capital, which that's social support. Actually since the industrial revolution our participation in social groups, whether it's religious, social, political, or just hanging out, family and friends, the actual time spent doing that has basically shriveled down to nothing, and because we are meant to be social creatures, and because when we deal in packs and herds, and in groups, we are less vulnerable individually to the ravages of society, so that's a very big one as well.
Changing gears a little bit, 4 is the derangement or loss of the human biome, which are all those little critters, little micro organisms of many, many different sorts that exist in our gut, on our skin, and in our orifices. What they do, they're actually extensions, functional extensions of our organ systems. They helped create vitamins. They function in cellular growth, in endocrine, in immune signaling, and they're implicated in many, many types of disease when these critters get deranged and they're not able to do their job. Basically you lose some of your functioning bodily systems when the biome gets deranged and a lot of us have this problem.
Then number 5, in general, is chemical stressors. 4 kind of segues into 5, so understand that a lot of just the chemicals that we have in our household, at our work, the processed food that we eat, the pharmaceuticals we take, a lot of these didn't exist 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago, so we don't have the metabolic machinery, especially in our liver, to be able to break these things down efficiently. What happens is we're exposed to it and we go into a stress response to try to deal with it. We have that and then the other part of the chemical stress aspect is actual exposure to pollution, to the air, soil, and water. That's a very, very potent stressor as well and results in many, many deaths.
Those are the major 5 and a lot of people don't think of these. They may think of reason 1 as stress, but reasons 2, 3, 4, and 5, a lot of people, they just don't know. They don't have the vocabulary, and so that's one thing I'm really trying to set out to do is be able to give people some real actionable vocabulary to work with.
Robert Plank: Dang. It sounds like there's all these different sources of stress that I had no idea that they were coming from. I like the idea of your book and the things you have to say in it so could you tell everyone about your book, what it is, where to get it, and any other websites where people can find out about you?
Mary Wingo: Absolutely. Your listeners can go to my website, MaryWingo.com. They can download some actionable steps for free with the training video to just get started. They don't have to buy anything, and then there's tons of free learning materials and information. My book is the first book, basically, I guess in modern history, that is a meta-analysis, it's an analysis of the biological, psychological, sociological, and political, and economic aspects regarding the human stress experience.
If people want to pick up a copy, and it's a very inexpensive book, I've priced it to where all most anybody in the world can afford this, so this isn't something that if someone doesn't have a lot that they're going to be cut off from. They can get lots of information from me. They can pick it up off my website, MaryWingo.com, or from Amazon.com.
Robert Plank: One more time, what is the title of the book so everyone knows to get it?
Mary Wingo: The Impact of the Human Stress Response.
Robert Plank: Awesome. This whole subject of stress, I think at least for me, it's one of those things where I forget it's there, and the times that I forget it's there, then I end up having problems. I think this is a really important subject. I think you have a lot of good things to say and I'm really glad that you came on the show today Mary.
Mary Wingo: Totally my pleasure. I look forward to talking to you again Robert.
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119: Get What You Want, Become a High Achiever and Overcome Procrastination with Dr. Chris Friesen
Dr. Chris Friesen, Ph.D from Friesen Performance, and author of the book, ACHIEVE: Find Out Who You Are, What You Really Want, And How To Make It Happen, tells us how to find our life's purpose with small changes and a number of easy techniques. He talks about the 5 minute rule to instantly overcome procrastination, the 10 minute rule to stop bad habits, the structure of your environment (great for finishing that "big" task you've been avoiding) and why it's so important to have your "why" (values, purpose, and mission).
Chris Friesen: They're very good. Thanks for having me on your show.
Robert Plank: Cool. I'm glad to have you here. Tell me about yourself and tell me about this book and what you do and about all the cool things you can do to help people here.
Chris Friesen: Sure, sure. I'm a psychologist. I'm trained as a clinical, forensic, and neuropsychological. These are fancy ways of saying trained to diagnose and assess people with emotional problems, criminal problems (of course that's forensic), and neuropsychological is brain problems like Azheimers, brain injury, stroke. That kind of thing. A lot of my work these days is really focused on what I call high achievers. These are just people a lot of them are athletes, professional. Some Olympic, but also entrepreneurs, writers, academics. People who just want to take their game, their life, to the next level.
I do work with people and long story short I wrote this book you just described which is the first part of the High Achievement handbook. There's going to be three actual books in the series. This one is really about exactly what you said, finding out who you are, what's really important to you, what you really want, and to make sure that what you do with your life on the day to day basis is actually the right thing for you. Then, how to make it happen on a day to day basis in terms of being productive, efficient, that kind of thing.
Robert Plank: That's cool. I think the people that we're making this show for are online entrepreneurs and I keep thinking back to when I had the day job mindset and now I have the entrepreneur mindset and it seems like, let me know your thoughts on this, but it feels like to me there's a lot of people who haven't quite woken up, yet. A lot of people are at their day job doing the nine to five kind of stuff and it seems like a lot of us have so many things holding us back, but we're not yet really awake.
I think that a few years ago when I made the jump from the day job lifestyle to the entrepreneur lifestyle I had to almost relearn everything and the big thing that all these things that have previously been holding me back, they were still there, but I didn't realize they were there and it seems almost like making the jump and quitting the day job and starting a business and taking bigger risks brought all these little things in hiding to light. Does that makes sense?
Chris Friesen: Yeah. For sure. When we have day jobs, and I'm actually just like you in a lot of ways. I worked in a hospital settings. I worked in a prison. That kind of thing. When I broke off and have been working on my own for about six years, now just completely on my own as a consultant I guess you would call it. It's just like an entrepreneur in the professional psychology coaching or sports psychology realm. When we're working for companies, their very structured. We have to be there at a particular time. We have very set duties to complete and tasks to do, but when we work for ourselves it's really us having to motivate ourselves, having to stay on task and to be efficient and productive.
As much as we often daydream when we're at our old jobs, when we were at our day jobs, about how great we could be if we worked on our own there's a whole bunch of challenges that come up because one of the main issues is self motivation. Also self doubt. There's anxiety over sometimes money comes in a lot. You get lots of work and sometimes you're not getting a lot of work so your income kind of goes up and down as well. There's a whole bunch of challenges associated with that and a whole bunch of things you can do as well to help yourself cope with those sorts of things.
Robert Plank: Like what?
Chris Friesen: One thing is... I'll give you one quick example of a strategy you can do. One thing that happens when you work from home, this has to do with everything. This has to do with the Olympic athletes I work with. This has to do with the... It doesn't matter. This applies across the board. Basically, when you have a hard time getting yourself to do something you know you should be doing, in other words you're procrastinating, you're getting up and you're looking at email and you're never really getting down to the project you wanted to work on. It's call the five minute rule. What you do is this.
You tell yourself, you make a deal. You say, "Listen. I'm going to do the activity or the project or whatever. I'm going to work on my website, whatever it may be for five minutes and then I'm going to decide if I really want to do it because we tend to have it backwards when it comes to writing. People who are writing books, for example. People who have to exercise. People who have to work on a project from home, for example. We often have these negative predictions about how annoying it's going to be when you actually start doing it, or that you have to be in the zone. You have to be in the right mindset to start working. It's actually the opposite.
You want to start doing something and then decide because our predictions of how difficult something is going to be are often way off base. The trick is simply this, you start the activity, put your timer on for five or ten minutes. Whatever you want to do. In the book I say five minutes. Then, you decide, "Is it as bad as I thought?" If it's anywhere near as bad as you thought, give yourself 100% permission to stop. The research shows that when you do this 98% of the time you basically continue and it's never as bad as you predicted. That's the hardest thing to do is to get started. That hump to get yourself to the desk to start working. That's one real quick example of one strategy you can do that will help you be more productive.
Robert Plank: I love that. What that reminds me of when my sister was in college, she would always procrastinate writing term papers. At one point I would see her sit at the computer and just start typing and open up a word document and she would literally just start typing anything, even like "I'm typing on the computer. I don't feel like writing my term paper, but I'm typing, typing, typing" and stream of consciousness out and then after about a minute or two, she would kind of get bored of it and start writing the actual term paper. Then minutes in, guess what? Now, she feels like doing it once she actually picked up that speed I guess.
Chris Friesen: Yes. That's exactly true. There's an interesting thing. There's something in my next book I might call it the ten minute rule, but it's the opposite problem when people have a hard time stopping themselves from doing things they know they shouldn't do. This could be like when I work with athletes trying to make weight for a sports competition. You have to stay to a strict diet. For example they'll see some sort of food that's off the list and they want to eat it. When there's something like that, what you do is you put your timer on for ten minutes. You don't indulge in the activity.
Wait five to ten minutes and then decide whether really need to eat that donut, or for example, you feel the urge to check your email and you say, "I'm going to put my timer on for ten minutes because I have this urge right now to check. I'm going to wait ten minutes to see if I really need to check email or check Facebook or something like that. These are very good strategies; there's research to back them up, that are really effective to helping you stay on task. In other words accomplish your actual goals because often we'll go at the end of the day and you'll feel like I didn't really do a lot of the things I thought I would do. I had the entire day to work and I was not as productive as I thought and strategies like this can be really helpful to keep you on track.
Robert Plank: I like a couple of things about that. I like that first of all it almost seems like you switched the usual behavior pattern. Usually the thing that I should be doing I keep putting off ten minutes, putting it off ten minutes. Things like that. Then, the thing that I shouldn't be doing, I end up just doing it on impulse, like a lot of these bad decisions. Eating the wrong thing or I'm just going to check my phone really quick. I'm just going to check my email really quick, but like you said if you waited ten minutes to do that bad thing, now you're properly configured, I guess.
Chris Friesen: Yeah. Yeah that's the biggest hurdle especially for people who work from home like writers and a lot of entrepreneurs, is just that productivity issue. A lot of it has to do with structuring our environment as well. There's examples of famous writers who basically disconnect their computer from the internet altogether or they may have a different computer in a different room, that the only thing they do actually work on their book. If you're doing an online business, you can't be disconnected from the internet, but having things open in your browser; having quick buttons for Facebook, Twitter, or your favorite newsfeed easily accessible is going to spell disaster when it comes to your productivity.
You want to actually have those things removed. Alerts on your smartphone or your tablets from social media or things that are not pertaining to work should be turned off. I know with myself the iPhone has a do not disturb function. I'm not sure if it's been there the whole time, but I only discovered it relatively recently. When I get down to work, for example I'm working on the second book of this series, I turn that thing off. If someone texts me, it'll still show the text, but it won't buzz. Even though it's on just vibrate because it doesn't matter if you can hear it or it's vibrating, it doesn't make any difference. If it vibrates, you're going to look over at it. We know from research that every time you get distracted from the task you're working on; let's say you're working on content of your website, you're productivity goes way down.
Any distractions whether it's your home phone ringing, your cell phone ringing, text alerts, anything popping up on your computer, they all distract you and as we all know, now there are just hundreds of possible things that will distract you. You've got to really get to know your phone and computer settings and turn all those alerts off. They are not helping you. They feel really good. In the brain, what happens, we have a dopamine response which makes you want to seek out rewards and basically you want to check it because it feels good. It feels like the right thing to do. That's why people have discovered that having these alerts and everything like that are really helpful for their products because it does distract you. It makes you think about their products and about Facebook or whatever it may be, but they're actually destroying your potential. They're actually holding you back. If people start to do these things, you're going to start to perform much closer to your real potential.
Robert Plank: It's so funny you bring that up about notifications and things like that because it's one of those things where at least with me it seems like it creeps in. With the phone, I for sure turn off the pop ups for email, but then sometimes I noticed everyday I'll just happen to have the Facebook tab left open and I think it might just be because I've slowly become addicted, not to drugs, but to Facebook. Is there a trick or a secret to that. I know that you mentioned a lot of people who work on their websites and things like that and I just noticed that it seems harmless until I see other people I know have a million tabs on or they can't even seem to hold a conversation or put together a complete sentence because halfway through the sentence, something else pops up. Is there a secret to just getting unaddicted to all the notifications or is it just a matter of having those rules and just sticking with it for a few days? What's the secret there?
Chris Friesen: Yeah, a couple of things. One thing is to control your environment. In other words use the do not disturb. Like you said you want to have rules. For example, I am going to be working from nine to noon, I'm making it up, and the rule is I am not checking my email. I am not checking Facebook. I'm putting the do not disturb on. You want to make it a rule. Once you make it a rule in your head, you're more likely to follow it. You want to have something pretty solid. It's not like, "I'm going to try not to look so much." That's not going to work. You have to get in touch, also with your values. What's your purpose? What's your mission? What's really important to you?
Is it really just to be entertained with Facebook and that kind of thing or is it to do the best work you can do? I'm not like a Luddite. I'm not suggesting you get rid of technology. I have all the gadgets and everything and I love it, but you want to control it because the reality is technology is now controlling us, but we need to control the technology. What we want to do is say, "Look. I love checking Facebook. I feel good. It's fun. It's interesting. I want to know what's going on," but use it as a reward. You say, "Actually, at noon I'm going to actually check Facebook, but I'm not allowed to check Facebook or any of these things until I've done a certain amount of work; one hour, two hours, three hours." You want to have that pretty solid as a rule in your mind.
It is definitely hurting our abilities. Lots of research how distractions hurt our ability to stay focused and be productive and how much we can achieve in a particular amount of time. There's some research. I'm forgetting all the details now, but basically just a quick little distraction takes you basically five minutes to get back to where you were in terms of the mindset or whatever you were working on. That on its own is just slowing you down. You're just wasting time. You can always check those things later. You want to control that. There's actually a strategy that can help you be better able to resist distractions.
It's actually mindfulness meditation. It sounds kind of strange. There's no religious connotations. This is really just a form of brain training. What you do is very simple. Between five and thirty minutes, so you start off low, per day. Five to thirty minutes per day you sit in a chair. Turn off all your gadgets. No distractions. You close your eyes and you focus all of your attention on your breathing. As soon as your mind wanders, "Oh. I've got to call Joe later today" or "This is so boring." You'll have these thoughts. You allow yourself to have these thoughts, but you do something called you diffuse from these thoughts. What you do is you say, "I'm having the thought that this is boring. I am not my thoughts. I have all kinds of thoughts." Then you return your attention back to your breathing. You don't control your breathing. You're just focusing on it.
For example, how it's a bit colder when it goes in your nose and a bit warmer when it comes out. How your stomach moves or your chest moves a little bit as you breathe. Your mind's going to constantly go all over the place, but there is FMRI research, which is a fancy imaging thing for your brain, research that shows the pre-frontal cortex (a part of the frontal lobe) actually thickens, measurably thickens after a few weeks of doing this and that part of the brain controls your ability to stay focused, to not get overwhelmed with negative emotions, and to stay on task and stay focused on whatever goal you're focusing on at the moment. That's an exercise you can do that'll improve your life in many different ways. There's a lot of research on that, now to help you be better able to resist distractions when you're trying to work. Those are a couple of examples. I have more, of course, but those are a couple of examples.
Robert Plank: Cool. I really like that. Out of all these things that there are to do to fix distractions, for example, like you said don't check email in the morning or do these things to train your brain to be better or do this mindful meditation. I keep thinking back to when I was a lot younger and I wrote a lot of that stuff off as hippie sort of stuff. Voodoo almost. Now, it's become... People who teach the self help or the mindset kind of stuff or from the little techniques that I do, it seems it's more scientifically accepted and even a lot of the examples that you gave there are not just made up stuff, but actually scientifically backed from studies and things like that.
What I like about the call so far and the things that you've shared with us so far is that there's lots of little exercises, so it seems like people who are only sort of off track or their whole time management or their whole life, their whole mindset is a disaster either way, they don't have to make any of these huge drastic changes if they don't want to. They can just apply some of your little exercises. So far what I like is you said that the five minute rule is great for procrastination. Instead of having to decide if you're in the moment or in the zone or whatever because you're not yet, just do it for five minutes and then after that five minute period decide if the thing that you imagined you were about to do if it was actually as bad as doing it and then the other thing.
The ten minute rule where if there's a bad habit you do that you shouldn't do then wait ten minutes and then decide when you actually are in a better mindset. It sounds like having a good structure for the things that you do is good. If you just have some sort of project you need to do where you're unplugged then have a special room or special computer or special area or something where you can just do it, and I liked also when you were talking about especially when people are just getting distracted in general, they're getting away from their purpose and their why and their mission and their values and stuff like that. So far lots of cool little helpful exercises that you can just plug in. Can we talk about something big and huge. Out of all the people you see that you're helping with your training and stuff, what do you see the number one mistake everyone's making that you can help them with?
Chris Friesen: If there is one tip or one thing that I've noticed and research supports this. There's one thing that differentiates the most successful people from the least successful people, whatever that means; in athletics, entrepreneurship, or whatever it is. The most successful people live their lives and make their day to day and moment to moment decisions based on their values, their purpose and goals, not based on their moods. Not based on their immediate circumstances. Not based on their energy levels. Obviously you can tell this is a summary statement of what we just talked about. That is the global thing. A lot of people get caught up in the moment with negative emotions and that kind of thing and they get thrown off. They start to live their lives in a reactionary mode as opposed to a proactive mode.
Once you figure out, and my book is all about figuring out your personality, your why, and your values. As you can tell I like to give tips and exercises that'll help people do this easily. Then, you basically plan your life around those things. One of the worst things people do is to make their to do list on the day of. The morning of they'll write down, "What have I got to do today?" You're actually better off making your to do list the night before. Of course, this is all informed. Your to do list is all informed by you're going to come up with your long term goals. In other words I call them retirement or old age goals, all the way down to your ten year goals, your five year goals, your one year goal. I have all these sheets in my book to fill these out.
You want to live your life based on trying to achieve those big goals. These are often, not necessarily making a million dollars, that could be a goal. It could also be a value based goal like being a good person. I want people to think I was a helpful, caring person and not a selfish person. There's a whole structure to do this in the book, but one thing you do is you make your to do list for tomorrow. First of all, you make a weekly thing. Every Sunday you think what is the goal for this week and you kind of figure out what can I focus on because you're going to have a better idea of what's happening in the week. On Tuesday I have a doctors appointment or I have to call my web designer on Wednesday.
You have those sort of things on your schedule. You have them planned in. They can't really be moved. You plan around that the stuff that actually... Steven Covey in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People talks about this. He calls them quadrant two activities. These are activities or things you need to do that are not urgent, but they're very important. For example, exercising is not urgent, but it's important. It's going to make you better at what you do. It's going to make you smarter. It's going to actually increase blood flow to the brain and all sorts of good things. It improves mood.
Let's say working on a new product that maybe you have an existing product that needs to be cared for, but the new product is not urgent, necessarily, but it is important. You've got to fit those not urgent, but important tasks into the week. Then, for example you don't make a to do list the morning of. You make it the night before. After you've done all of your work and you're about to close down for the day, you basically go and make your to do list for tomorrow and you use that to guide you. What happens is if you make a to do list in the morning after you've checked email all sorts of stuff is going to come and distract you from all sorts of emails that seem urgent, but they're not really important. Other things that are just going to pop up.
You want to have a little bit of perspective by making the to do list the night before. The feeling, there's a neurological response, there's a closure feeling when you check off things on your to do list. It makes you feel actually competent and productive. That helps you keep going because you feel like you've accomplished things. In my book I have a section called Is the To Do List Dead? I say it's not dead. It's actually really important. You want to still have to do lists. Having your global why always in perspective; knowing what you're bigger, longer term goals are and reviewing them regularly.
It's going to help you keep on track with what's important to you, what you should be working on, and not get distracted by the minutiae of the world. We've never had this problem to this extent in human history with like we said earlier, from text to people call you. Anyone can contact anyone at any point. We get hundreds of emails a day, now. It's complete distraction and it's making people unbelievable unproductive and not feeling fulfilled because they don't feel in control. Your life is being dictated by everyone else it seems.
Robert Plank: Right. It sounds like from everything you have to say it's nothing super crazy; nothing super ridiculous. It sounds like a new slant on a lot of things that people know they should be doing, but it maybe haven't been doing, but because you have all these tips and exercises it takes this thing that people know they should have a to do list. They should make better decisions as opposed to just making things impulsively. It's cool that everything you've talked to us about, today is that it's just a new slant on things that should work a certain way, but now because you have these little tidbits, now they're actually working the way they should. You're mentioning your book and there's some cool exercises and things like that in your Achieve Book. Could you tell us a little bit about that?
Chris Friesen: Yeah. A lot of the stuff I've talked about is in the book. Pretty much everything except the ten minute rule. That's going to go in the next book. I kind of discovered this after the fact; after I wrote the first book. It should have gone in the first book. Another thing that the book really focuses on that makes it different from a lot of other self help books is getting to know your personality. I have a big affinity to personality because my undergrad thesis, my masters thesis, my PhD thesis were all based about normal personality, what it predicts and that kind of thing. Long story short, personality psychologists from around the world have basically determined that there are five global personality dimensions that we all differ on and I can go through all of them, but I'll go through a key one that may be relevant to a lot of listeners.
They'll be familiar with this. One is extroversion versus introversion. We hear this. There's books about introversion. Unfortunately a lot of the books out there on introversion are actually mixing up a number of these global fiver personality dimensions into introversion which is not really in line with research. People who are extroverted are just like we think. They're more outgoing. They're more into exciting things. They're attracted to excitement. Let's see what else I can say about that. They tend to have higher levels of energy. They experience a lot more positive and enthusiastic emotions. People who are introverted tend to be a bit more reserved, a bit more serious. T
they're not as highly energetic. They're not too fond of focusing on a lot more excitement and stimulation. They like working alone or one one. Knowing where you fall on this dimension of extroversion versus introversion is very useful. For example, people who are introverted from a brain perspective, it really has to do with your tolerance for external stimulation. It's not just a social thing. People who are introverted, their brains are actually revving a little bit higher. EEG studies show this. Their brains are revving a little bit faster. It's not anxiety. It's just their brains rev faster. What this means is they hit their red line a bit more quickly than an extrovert who's brains are revving a lot slower.
What this means is when you have external stimulation and you're introverted, you're going to only be able to tolerate so much stimulation whether it's social, whether it's being in Las Vegas. It could be sounds or music. It could be working in an open concept office environment with all the noise and distractions. Think of like a newsroom environment. People who are introverted are going to get overstimulated very quickly and if you know that about yourself, what it means is you can still handle those, but you can only do it in short spurts and you have to have recovery times where you're alone or you're relaxing and are not being stimulated. People who are extroverted are they opposite.
They actually feed of all that stimulation and they feel really abnormal, which manifests in being bored when they're working alone. They need to seek out lots of stimulation whether it's social or otherwise. A lot of people work from home. It doesn't mean everyone who works from home is introverted. If you tend to be on the higher side of what I described, in other words you're extroverted, you're going to just have to make sure that you seek out experiences that are exciting or socially stimulating whether it's you do some hardcore rock climbing after work or during your lunch hour or you spend times with friends and talk to people and do that.
You have to think of this as a need and if you don't get that extroverted needs met, you're going to actually feel uncomfortable, unfulfilled, unhappy. Vice versa, if you're really introverted, working from home is usually ideal and you realize that you're going to need... If you have to do stuff where you have to meet lots of people and do lots of meeting, you're going to get really exhausted really quickly and knowing that about yourself is going to be helpful to be able to predict what you can handle and how to perform at your peak.
Robert Plank: That's kind of interesting because as opposed to just the natural tendency of people is to think in this situation I act this way or I tend to be more like this, but it sounds like once they figure out where do they actually fall in these tests and things like that, then they can actually make logic based decisions. They can say, "I need an exciting break. I need to go rock climbing, " or "I'm fine being in this environment." It's almost kind of spooky. It's almost like pulling under the hood and figuring out what type of engine you have or something.
Chris Friesen: Yeah. When I talk about these, this is the very first section I talk about when it comes to achieving your main goals for you. You've really got to know yourself. This is the hardware. Your personality is your hardware. Fifty percent, so 5-0 percent is genetically inherited. It's inherited from obviously your parents and the other 50% due to your environment or experiences you've had in life. More so in early life and the first twenty years of your life and less so as an adult. Your personality can still change. Something to keep in mind is you don't want to label yourself too much and say, "Well, I'm an introvert. I can't do those sorts of things," or "I'm an extrovert. I can't work alone or do those sorts of things."
The research doesn't really support that. It's really about how much you can handle of each of those things. People who are naturally, biologically introverted can still act extroverted and they still can have lots of good social skills. It's just that they can only handle it for certain amounts of time before they just feel over stimulated and it's just not fun. We do live in an extrovertedly biased world where extroverts are considered to be the ideal personality. The part where you fall on that personality dimension is supposed to be ideal, but of course the introvert books out there, which are not perfectly accurate unfortunately, but I do agree with the idea that introverts do have a lot to offer, but just knowing where you stand you can help predict where you're going to succeed and where you're going to potentially fail.
A lot of people learn this through work. They'll be like, "I worked in a library and I loved it," or "I worked in sales at a Best Buy where I had to talk to customers all day and it was loud and I loved that or I hated that." Often these have to do with our brain's hardware in terms of introversion and extroversion. Just knowing that about yourself is really important, but don't take it as suggesting that you can't do the opposite. You can do the opposite like an introvert can act like an extrovert for example. It's just that you can do it only for a limited amount of time before you start to feel burnt out. You want to live your life congruent with your natural personality and you've got to know that about yourself to be able to perform at your peak, basically perform at your best and be as productive as you can and just be happy and satisfied with what you're doing.
Robert Plank: That's what we all want, right?
Chris Friesen: Yeah.
Robert Plank: I think that's a really good message and I like everything you have to say. Could you tell everyone one more time what the name of the book is, where they can get the book, and where they can find out anything else you have for sale or anything else more about you?
Chris Friesen: The book is on Amazon in paperback. It's on Kindle and it's on Audible as well. The Audible came out relatively recently and I've gotten lots of good feedback on that. I didn't narrate it myself. I got a professional narrator, voice actor guy who does Fox commercials. He's really great. His name's Chris A. Bell. The book is called Achieve. The subtitle is Find out who you are, what you really want, and how to make it happen. My website is FriesenPerformance.com. I have a newsletter and I give tips.
One of my podcasts for example, I send it out. I'm on Twitter, @friesonperform and I'm on Facebook. Look up Frieson Sport and Performance Psychology. I believe you can find my Facebook page. I post a lot of articles either written by myself or podcasts I've been on or a lot of articles on things like I've talked about. Tips for being more productive, to be more successful. Stuff about personality. Stuff about the brain that are really applicable, that have an applied message, not just hardcore research science. It's more about articles about how to maximize your potential. Those are the best ways to get in contact with me. Yeah.
Robert Plank: Awesome. You shared a lot of good tips and I like a lot of it and I think that I'm going to be using the five minute rule and the ten minute rule in my own life. Lots of good stuff. Thanks for being on the show, Chris.
Chris Friesen: Yeah. Thanks for having me.
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118: Focus Until You Succeed: Perseverance, Forward Motion, Relationships, and The Invisible Organization with Mitch Russo
Mitch Russo, former President of Chet Holmes, co-creator of Business Breakthroughs with Tony Robbins, and author of the book The Invisible Organization: How Ingenious CEOs Are Creating Thriving, Virtual Companies, talks with us about what mindsets, skills, and actions you must take to become an entrepreneur who perseveres and succeeds.
Mitch Russo: Thank you, Robert. Great to be here.
Robert Plank: I'm glad to have you. Could you tell us about yourself and what it is that you do?
Mitch Russo: Sure. I'll give you a little bit of background first so you know who I am. I was born in Brooklyn, New York. I had a rock band up until the age of 17, and I probably learned more about business in my rock band than any other single thing as a kid. We booked gigs all over New York City. We probably were the highest paid bands under 18 years old in the entire state for a little while. Back in 1977, we were getting $500 a gig, which, in today's dollars, is actually ridiculous.
Robert Plank: Especially for an 18-year-old, yeah.
Mitch Russo: Exactly. We were so young, we weren't even able to drive our own van. We had to hire somebody to help us get to a gig because we were too young to drive, but I learned so much about marketing, about sales, about positioning, even about quality. It was really an incredible experience. Then I went on to... I moved to Massachusetts to take a job with a computer company, and I ended up in sales. I did a lot of cool stuff when I got to Massachusetts, but probably one of the most memorable things I did was I started a software company. I started it. Literally, as they say, it was a garage operation. I started it, literally, above my garage in the one room that nobody knew what to do with in my house.
My neighbor and I got together and we built a company out of an idea that I had, and that grew to 100 people, and we had moved the company 5 times over the course of the 9 years, until we eventually sold it for 8 figures to Sage Plc in the UK. Man, what an incredible experience that was. Again, there's no better way to learn than to make all of the mistakes that we made and have to fix them or die. It's correct your mistakes or die, so you've just got to step up and make it happen. There were nights that we would be looking at the payroll and thinking... My partner and I would look at each other and go, "You know, we don't have enough money in the account to cover payroll." The two of us go into our wallet, and we started making the rounds at cash machines and taking money off of our credit cards to make payroll. I mean, it was that bad at one point, but later, everything went right and we were able to finally make things happen.
You know the story of The Hero's Journey, Robert?
Robert Plank: Joseph Campbell.
Mitch Russo: Exactly. There were so many points in time when we were on the brink of failure, and we didn't quite know what to do, and then we just persevered. We just kept going, and then boom. It just happened, and it worked. That was a great experience, and I finished up with that. After I sold the company, I then went and worked for the people who bought us, Sage, and I ended up running the entire U.S. division for Sage, and I was actually completely done, at the age of 44, with millions of dollars in my pocket and theoretically able to retire if I wanted to, but I couldn't. I absolutely would be bored out of my mind, so I started investing in other people's startups. I started working with the venture capital community, and I started building a portfolio of companies that I invested in and friends that I made throughout the entire process.
That went on until I got a call from a buddy of mine, Chet Holmes. Now, Chet and I had been friends since my Timeslips days, and he said to me, "Mitch, I need some help. It's time for you to get back into the business game," and I said, "Hmm, okay. What do you need?" Next thing I know, I'm building a sales force for him, and over the course of 6 weeks, I tripled the sales force, and we were now doubling revenue. After about 3 months, he said, "Look, I've got to have you as my president," and so I said, "Okay," and I joined the company. Within 90 days of becoming president of Chet's company, we began negotiation with Tony Robbins.
This was an ongoing process. We were on a late-night phone call every week for 4 or 5 months planning what the company was going to look like, planning how we were going to roll out into the marketplace, planning exactly what we were going to sell, and then going through a legal agreement and negotiating all the points of a legal agreement, until, finally, everything came to a head in Las Vegas in November of 2008. That was the Ultimate Business Mastery Success Event, The UBMS, and that's where we recorded over 50 hours of content, packaged it up, and that single event ended up generating over $20 million in revenue by selling the packaged videos with workbooks and coaching.
That was quite an experience, and we were growing at quite a pace. I mean, we had started at a relatively... just about as a startup, but we were generating over $25 million a year at the point when Chet, my partner in the business, got sick. Unfortunately, he passed away several months later. When Chet died, the family, of course, didn't know what to do. They thought maybe they should just sell the company. Really, I didn't fit there any longer. I mean, my friend was gone. I asked Tony what he thought, and Tony told me to do what I needed to do, which is what I would have expected of Tony, and so I decided to leave. The first thing I did when I left the company is I called a couple of friends and said, "Hey. I just want to let you know I'm going to be leaving BBI, and I'm going to be on my own. I just want you to know where I am. If you have anything interesting you want to talk to me about or want to show me or get me involved in, let me know."
I called Jay Abraham, and Jay and I had known each other for many years. We worked together on several projects together. I said to Jay, I said, "Jay, I just want to let you know I'm out of here," and he said to me, "Mitch, you cannot let what you know go to waste. You have to find a way to take what you know, and you've got to teach it to others." Tony used to say the same thing to me all the time. I said, "Okay. All right, Jay, I'm going to do something. I don't know what I'm going to do yet, but I'm going to do something," and that became the beginning of me writing my book, The Invisible Organization.
Robert Plank: Cool. I mean, lots of stuff to get from where you were to where you are now, and I'm hearing a lot of repeat lessons. There was the perseverance part of it, like when you and your business partner went to all of the ATM machines just to get to that point, get to the breakthrough point. There is the forward motion, where you could have quit, and you kept going. Then what I'm hearing a lot of, too, were all these relationships you built, like Tony Robbins and Chet Holmes and Jay Abraham, where it started a long time ago, but then, after a while, kind of paid off. With all of that, is there a big secret to all this? Do you have a big secret from having all these successes? Is there something, aside from those 3 things, that's just been responsible for getting you where you are?
Mitch Russo: You know, I wish I had something super profound to tell you, but it's very simple. You never actually fail until you stop doing what you're doing. Until you give up, you never actually fail. In my life, the lesson that I've learned is that it's best to focus on something until you succeed, and I generally don't stop until I do. Does that help?
Robert Plank: Yeah, and it's like... What is that quote? There's something, words like, "If it's not working, change your methods, not the goal," or something like that.
Mitch Russo: Yeah. Yeah, we ended up pivoting time after time, but we never lost sight of what the end goal was, and we never stopped pursing it. No matter what, I never do, because there's just... I mean, unless the world changes in such a dramatic way, and it never does. Business is business. People still have the same motivation everyday, and that's why your products are always out there doing so well, because people want to be in business.
Now, when I work with private clients, I see that in their eyes. I see that when I work with them. I hear it in their voice. They're discouraged, and they want to stop, and I don't let that happen with my clients. We push through, and we make it so that they end up getting what they want, because success comes not in a flash and not by luck. It comes from a lot of hard work, and you know this from your own experience. It takes a long time to be successful, but it looks easy. You can look at me now and go, "Oh, wow. Look at all the stuff he did," but it's taken me a long time to get here, and you know that.
Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. It only takes 20 years to become an overnight success. Is there a trick or is there a secret to knowing the difference between, like you said, having to push forward versus an idea that just won't work? If a company invented cell phones at the wrong period in time, it just wouldn't work, no matter how good of an idea. If someone had invented tablets at the wrong time, no matter what, it wouldn't have worked. How do you know the difference between you're just kind of hitting your head against the wall and this thing that's never going to happen versus you just need to get through the rough patch? How do you know the difference?
Mitch Russo: Okay. I have a story about an entrepreneur who went through this. I have a friend who, at a young age, achieved notoriety because he invented a cable drive mechanism for bicycles, and he was featured on news programs all over the country. This cable system was quite innovative. It didn't require gears and sprockets. All he did was use friction and a special shape of a hub, and he was able to create this very simple power transport system using cables. He went to try and market it to bicycle companies, and nobody wanted it. The bicycle companies, at first, thought it was a cool idea, but they realized that it would really make no impact to the end product. Sure, it might be cable-driven instead of gear-driven, but it didn't seem to change the end result of riding a bike.
Continued to do this, and he didn't stop. Finally, he said, "Well, they don't want it. Maybe I'll just start my own company, and maybe I'll just build a bicycle company," so he went and he spent all of his life savings and poured it into building this company. He built a manufacturing plant, and he sold like 60 bicycles total and shut the company down. He never recovered from that. Here's the way I look at it, I think, at some point, when the market tells you distinctly, "No. This is not good," then you don't necessarily have to give up, but you do have to at least pivot. You do have to find another way.
Here's a pivot he could have tried. He could have tried to figure out where else his patented cable drive system could have an application in another industry, but he never did this. He just accepted the fact, then he just persevered to death, if you will. It's hard to know, but you've got to get feedback from the market, and you've got to keep trying things, and that's when you finally know, "Hey. If it's not going to work, you just keep trying it and trying something else."
Robert Plank: I like that way of thinking, and especially how there was a little piece in there, near the beginning of that story, how it didn't catch on because, even though it was a really cool invention, it didn't actually help anyone, right? If only that invention had made it where you could ride the bike twice as fast, or it cost way less, or something like that, that would have been an improvement in someone's experience of using a bike, but it seems like it was on the right track, but not quite there, I guess, right?
Mitch Russo: Yeah, it was a solution looking for a problem. It was cool, and it was innovative and clever, but to build a life around a solution without solving a problem is just going to lead you down that path. By the way, lots of people start that way and ended up that way, but they don't get to the point of realizing, "Hey. You know something? I've created something of which there is no need for in the marketplace." There are some people who create stuff that's too advanced for the current marketplace. If you would have invented the internet in 1985, no one would have gotten it. There wasn't the systems in place to support it. Yeah, it might have been a great idea, but the time of it was completely wrong.
Robert Plank: I like that. I like that way of thinking. Yeah, the things going through my head when you mention that are stuff like Twitter, where it's super goofy, took a while to catch on, and so we pushed through a while and saw people were using it. I think Twitter, in fact, only kind of caught on because they started hooking it up with all the mobile apps and stuff like that. If cell phones had taken a little longer to develop, maybe Twitter wouldn't have caught on. On the other hand, you had to push through those tough years to actually give it a chance and see if people were using it, but if 5 more years had gone on, if 10 more years had gone on, and it was just not picking up, then I guess that's time to quit then.
Mitch Russo: Sure. Let's talk about Twitter just for a second because I think it's educational, at least, to take a look and... Now, Twitter is considered kind of a failure, when it comes to the market, because it doesn't really have... I mean, it's not Facebook, so anything that's not Facebook is kind of a failure. The problem with Twitter is that it just hasn't been adding a lot of new users. It hasn't been getting a lot more usage. What is the problem with Twitter? Well, the problem with Twitter is that they haven't found their pivot yet. They will. They're not giving up. I mean, they might be sold before they can, but they need to find their pivot.
Now, I wrote the CEO of Twitter and I said, "Here is what I think you should do. I think you should stream live events, and I think because people love to interact with each other during live events, why don't you stream concerts? Why don't you let people tweet throughout the entire process of watching that concert streaming through your network, and let them pay $1 for that, or something?" Of course, I never got a response from my suggestion, but that's the kind of pivots that you've got to keep thinking about when things are failing.
Robert Plank: Even recently, they've kind of tied into Periscope. They're definitely trying new things and seeing what will catch on.
Mitch Russo: Right, exactly.
Robert Plank: Even like you mentioned to me, I put out a WordPress plugin, and that's the same kind of thought process. I'll put out a backup plugin and membership plugin, stuff like that, and I'll put it out as, first of all, a thing that I need and a thing that other people need, but mostly just something that I need that does not exist. That way, even if it's a failure, I still get something out of it, but then also, I'll see these projects through the number of years they have to go through, but I'm not just putting all my eggs in one basket. I have this plugin and that plugin because I know that there's things I need, and people might end up picking them up, and they'll get traction, and then I can go back later and connect the dots and say, "Okay. Now I can combine all these things, and now you get this plugin. You're going to want these other plugins, or you get them all in a package together."
I think there's just something to that. When we're mentioning all these examples, there's something to just having these experiments, I guess is what we're talking about, these experiments, and just see what people use, how people use them, and then, like you said, get to the point where maybe you pivot, and then there's the real money from there.
Mitch Russo: Well, exactly. The other thing that you're doing is you're building a portfolio of products. One product... and I'm just going to use just make-believe numbers. If one product generates $10,000 or $20,000 a year and you say, "Well, that's fine. I mean, it was worth doing it, even if it's not a retirement fortune. We can generate another one, and then another one," and before you know it, you have 6 products generating $20K a year, and then maybe the seventh one will be a bit hit, you see? You never stop because something isn't working, but you find a way to pivot within that, and that simply means if that doesn't work, something like it will work. What was the brilliance of that first idea? What problem were you trying to solve that you found the solution to? Who else has that problem?
When we first created Timeslips, it was a popup time-tracking tool that we thought, "Oh, everybody's going to need this. Everybody needs to keep track of time." Like idiots, we advertised in PC Magazine and spent an entire... All of our savings for marketing went into 2 ads in PC Magazine, and we got 6 orders for $100 an order. I mean, clearly, not everybody needed it, but here was the cool thing about that. I was able to take the 500 bingo leads... which I don't know if you've ever heard that term before.
Robert Plank: No.
Mitch Russo: You know the cards that used to sit inside of magazines where you could circle the number of the ads that you were interested in? Have you ever seen those before?
Robert Plank: I think a long time ago, but yeah.
Mitch Russo: Right. What they would do is people would read the magazine, and instead of sending away for information from everyone, they would take it, and they would just circle the number of the ad. Most of those leads were worthless, but I got 500 of those leads, and I called every single one on the phone. I said, "Why did you circle that ad? What interested you about the product?" I found out that a third of the people who had circled my ad were lawyers. I said, "Hmm, lawyers seem to be attracted to this. Maybe I should market directly to lawyers."
That's how my product eventually took off. I found my market. I didn't know what it was at first. I thought it was everybody, which, clearly, I was inexperienced, but that's what I thought, but then I finally honed in on what would eventually become my true target market. Over the course of 18 months, I went from being completely unknown to being the number 1 selling product for lawyers, when it came to keeping track of their time.
Robert Plank: That's really cool. In that case, it was almost like the market found you.
Mitch Russo: Well, you might say that, but we uncovered a need. We had a cool solution to a problem, but we didn't quite know who needed the solution. We knew it was a problem that people had. We didn't know exactly who needed it. Even though I say it was a mistake to have run that ad in PC Magazine, if I hadn't have done it, I would have never found my true calling, my true market. Sometimes you do need... Screwing up is what gets you to learn how you get onto the right path.
Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. It's almost like if you're too lucky or if everything you do works out right away, it's almost a bad thing because the one time that something goes wrong, you're not going to know how to react. It's almost like, as entrepreneurs, we kind of have to get toughened up or something.
Mitch Russo: That's right. Since we're on this topic, I want to lead this into what I'm doing now, because I think it's important.
Robert Plank: Okay.
Mitch Russo: One of the things that happened to me at Timeslips Corporation is that we sold a lot of software, and we used to give away 30 days of free support with every copy of the software we sold. What ended up happening is that when we first got into the retail stores, our products sold like crazy. Now, our phone lines for support were getting overwhelmed, and I was struggling to keep up, in terms of hiring enough tech support people, of building the internal systems to make sure that those calls can get answered. With all of that, now I had customers, clients, who were asking for individual attention where we had to visit their office. I mean, when you deal with lawyers, sometimes you've got to go overboard in support because, you know, you don't want to get sued, and they're certainly litigious, as you know.
In this one situation, I had a woman who was the vice president of the technology division of the California Bar Association, and she was having a problem with my software. I said, "Geez, I've got to get out there somehow," so I did something unexpected. I called another client who happened to live in the area and I said, "Would you do me a favor and run over to this office and see if you could help this woman? She's having some difficulty," and she said, "Oh, yeah, sure. I'd love to," and I knew she was an expert at our software. I said, "Well, whatever it is, don't worry. I'll take care of you," and she goes, "Oh, no, no. For you, Mitch, it's a favor. I'd be happy to."
She goes over there, and I'm like on pins and needles now. I don't know if I did the right thing. Maybe that could explode in my face, but about 4 hours later, she called me back and she said, "Oh, yeah. She's all set, and I've got to tell you, something super happened to me." I said, "What was it?" She said, "She gave me a $100 bill." All of a sudden, the light bulb went off in my head, and then she said to me, "By the way, if anybody else you know needs help, let me know, because I'm happy to help them." Then I realized, "Well, maybe I could build a network of people that I could send to other people's offices as consultants and get them to help my clients. Maybe these people calling themselves certified consultants would be interested in even building a profession around supporting my software." That's how I designed and built the Timeslips Certified Consultant Network.
Now, the reason I disconnected to our earlier conversation is because I totally screwed it up. I did it simply by selling a test, and if you pass the test, you were certified, but at that point, I had about 60 of these people running around wreaking havoc with my clients. I had to actually call every client that had a problem with one of my certified consultants and figure out how to make them happy while literally shutting down the entire program and then reengineering it from scratch to make sure that the mistakes I uncovered would never happen again. When I did that, and it took me like 5 or 6 months to do it, and I relaunched the program, it was an incredible success, and it grew to 350 people paying us every year to be our third largest sales channel, to support all of our customers. My tech support dropped by 20%. My sales went up by $1 million, and the program generated another $1 million for me that same year.
That's-
Robert Plank: Freaking amazing.
Mitch Russo: Isn't that amazing? By the way, and the reason I say it is that's what I do now for clients. I build what I call power tribes for my clients, which are mobilizing their best clients as certified coaches, or certified consultants, and with that, we were able to generate 6 and 7 figures almost out of thin air.
Robert Plank: That's cool, and let's talk about that. Let's talk about what it is that you're doing now and this whole new idea you have about The Invisible Organization.
Mitch Russo: Sure. Well, like I said, it started from having solved the problem on my own. I wrote about it on my blog post, and someone came to me and said, "Would you do this for me?" I said, "Sure. I'd be happy to," and I didn't even really remember... I mean, I remembered having done it, of course, and I remembered all the stuff that went wrong and all the mistakes I made, but we didn't have the internet back then, so I literally was flying blind on this, but we did it together, my client and I. Amazingly, it worked perfectly. I mean, they were blown away. We launched that program from absolutely nothing. 10 weeks later, we launched that program, and it immediately generated 6 figures on their first launch. Now we're redoing the launch every quarter, and it's going to be generating between $300,000 and $500,000 per launch, and we're going to be now doing this ad infinitum every single quarter.
The way I do this is it's very much a "done with you/done for you" program. It's like I'm a business consultant, and I work with my clients side-by-side, and together we craft all the tools required to get people certified. I have a lot of the tools that I give my clients in advance. One of the things I do, and this is the most fun of the whole process, is we design a new business model around their company as to how they will use these multiple streams of income and generate them from their certified consultants, and more importantly, how the certified consultants will generate income from the services that we provide.
Unlike standard certification where you buy a certificate... like a digital marketer's program. Are you familiar with them?
Robert Plank: Yeah, a little bit.
Mitch Russo: Yeah. What happens is if you qualify, you can buy a program to become certified in one of their disciplines. The only thing you need to qualify is a credit card. I mean, anybody can become, quote-unquote, certified. Well, with my clients, we don't do that. We only work with people we already know have an intimate working knowledge of the fields, of the fields of business, and their product. At that point, we do very intensive training. We bring them to 100% competency through the guidance of building these courses that I had learned how to do.
I built Tony Robbins' virtual training environment with Tony. He taught me so much about what it takes to build a virtual training environment. We build those now for our clients, and these are amazing, because once someone goes through the program, they totally know what they're doing, and then we put them into an apprenticeship to make sure that they can totally do what they just learned, and then we work out a way so that they can make money right out of the gate. When they're making money, they will renew next year, they will attend our programs, and that's how we build multiple reoccurring streams of revenue.
Robert Plank: That's cool, and I think what I've been hearing a lot from you, Mitch, as far as the stories that you're telling, is that there's a lot of the little details and little bit of course correction, right? As opposed to just saying, like you said... Some people offer their certification, and it's like when you send in to buy a doctorate for like $500 or something.
Mitch Russo: Yeah.
Robert Plank: It's like, "Okay. Here's the money." "Thanks, you're certified," and that would be great for just a little one-off sale, but then that's not a real long-term business. It sounds like, with everything you do, you make sure that you understand... When someone buys from you, there's a clear reason why they're buying from you, what they're going to get from you, and then what that will lead to afterwards, so now they get certified, go through the apprenticeship to make sure that they're 100% there, but then now they have their own kind of business. I think that's pretty cool.
Mitch Russo: Yeah. If you think of everything as a progression... and by the way, you do a great job of this. I really love the way you guys do this, but you've got to think of business as, "Okay. Well, you could sell somebody something, and you can make some money, but what will they need next, and where should they go next, if they're successful with the last thing you sold them?" As long as you keep that in mind as you begin this path of product creation and of leading people through how to create something of value that you know how to do, then you're going to be successful, and you can have a sustained income from helping others all the time. That's how I see it.
Robert Plank: What will they need next? That's pretty good advice, just in general.
Mitch Russo: Exactly, exactly. In my case, when I enter a business contract with a client, I don't just sell them some consulting services, "Pay me some money, and I'll talk to you or work with you for 3 months until your program launches." When you sign a contract with me, we are together for a minimum of 3 years, and the reason I want it to be long-term is because there is going to be a series of changes as your tribe grows and develops. There will be problems and questions that come up that I know I can answer for you, that if I left you alone, you might choose the wrong path and destroy what we've just spent so much time and money to build.
My goal is to guide my clients to the point so that this isn't just a little itty-bitty 7-figure program at the end of 3 years. It's generating $3 to $5 million consistently year after year, and it does, so-
My end goal here is not to build a one-shot sale. It's to build lifetime relationships with everyone I come in contact with.
Robert Plank: Cool. Along those lines of what you were just mentioning about how some of these companies, they're at a certain point, and then as they mature or their size changes, they have a different set of needs. I understand that you have a book called The Invisible Organization, which is all about getting companies to go virtual. Is that right?
Mitch Russo: Yes. Yes, and the book that I wrote is really... At the time I wrote it, I poured everything that I learned about building Tony Robbins' and Chet Holmes' business breakthroughs. As a virtual company, we had 300 people attached to the company, and I ran the whole thing from my spare bedroom, and I traveled all over the world. I'm an award winning photographer as well, so I would sneak away, and I'd be in Iceland or Jordan or Morocco or any of the places that I do travel to all over the world, and I could still run the company from a laptop, which is just so thrilling to me, but not just a little solo company. I'm talking about a full-blown $25 million in sales a year company with 300 people.
Robert Plank: Crazy. How is it done from just you in your spare bedroom?
Mitch Russo: Well, first of all, like anything else, it takes some planning. I work with my maps. I love my mapping, and so I tend to do a bit of overplanning every single thing that I do. When I work with a client, the first thing I do is I start building mind maps of the entire business model and process that shows every step of the way, what's supposed to happen, and what should happen if what we expect doesn't happen. We're prepared with contingency plans across the board.
When you start with good plans and great thinking, the next thing you need are good people to execute. I surround myself with the best people that I can, and that's one of the great secrets of building a virtual organization, because I know other really smart people who want the same lifestyle as I do, who want great money, who want to be able to work from home or from wherever they tend to be. My VP of sales spent 2 months a year in Hawaii and ran the entire sales division and didn't miss a beat, because we were a virtual organization. She showed up for her sales meetings everyday, did her training everyday. Nothing was lost by the process.
In fact, Stanford University did a study, a landmark study, called Does Working from Home Work, and in that study, it showed that 13% productivity increases across the board were possible for people who would be working from home. If you interview these people, whether they're low-end telephone sales people or high-end executives, what we really find out is that they're even more productive working from home than working at a company. They save hours driving a car, burning gasoline, and wearing out an automobile, and they save frustration, that like-sucking commute that most people hate. You don't have that commute. I certainly don't. Why should half the world have to get into a car every morning and battle traffic in rain and sleet and snow and have accidents and spend money on gas and eat out for lunches that are unhealthy when you could have a life building a virtual company? That's what the book is about.
Robert Plank: That's cool. Yeah, in this day and age, with the Wi-Fi and the internet being so fast, there's no reason for anyone to deal with that commute. My mother used to wake up at 4:00 in the morning everyday just to get on the road by 5:00 or 6:00, just to drive 2 sometimes 3, 4 hours in traffic just to start the day at 8:00 or 9:00, once she got to work. I mean, ridiculous. Yeah, just to save that amount of time everyday, that's the dream, and especially that particular person that you mentioned, living in Hawaii. I mean, that's the life right there, right? You have your passion. You do what you love. You do the work stuff. You earn the money, but you're also living on the beach everyday. It's pretty cool.
Mitch Russo: Exactly. By the way, without disclosing names or numbers, that person made over $500,000 that particular year that they were in Hawaii. Their productivity actually went up. They were happier people, and they did a better job. Let's take it down to the base level. Next time you get on the phone to make an airline reservation, I know that you don't get on the phone a lot, you do it over the web, but if you ever call Southwest Airlines or JetBlue, ask the person on the other end of the phone how they like working from home, because their entire call center is home-based.
Robert Plank: Nice.
Mitch Russo: Thousands and thousands of people that could have been dragged into the city to sit in a miserable call center everyday are now working from home where they could eat the food that they like, walk the dog when they will like. One woman I interviewed got rid of a second car. They didn't need it anymore, and now she's there to make dinner for her husband, and then after dinner, she goes back into the den and gets on the phone with customers and helps them with reservations. She loved it.
Robert Plank: That's cool. It sounds like all these people who are working virtually, they don't have to give up anything. If anything, they're gaining something, and that's always the thing you always think, "Oh, if they're working from home, they must not be motivated," or, "They must be getting paid less," but it seems like why would you pay someone less? If you're a company and you're paying someone to work from home, why would you pay them less if you're saving money on their office space, on their parking spot, on all that stuff? It sounds like it's win-win for everybody.
This book is for people who want to transform their company into a virtual company, or who is this for exactly?
Mitch Russo: That is exactly who it's for. If you go to InvisibleOrganization.com, it's the book site, and it will say exactly who it's for. It's for CEOs who are running companies and who understand that saving money on things like real estate insurance, heat, air conditioning, telephone lines, internet service contracts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. If you're a CEO and you want to save that money, buy this book and see exactly how it's done.
Robert Plank: Cool. Well, I like the idea for that book. I think that's a pretty good message. Are there any other websites where people should go, other than InvisibleOrganization.com, to find out more about you, Mitch?
Mitch Russo: Yeah. Actually, the main website for me is simply mitchrusso.com. All my stuff is there. All my other training programs and business stuff is there.
Robert Plank: MitchRusso.com and InvisibleOrganization.com. Man, we talked about all kinds of cool stuff. It was such a pleasure having you on. Thanks for being here.
Mitch Russo: My pleasure, Robert.
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