Author: AJ Vaden

Ep 132: YouTube Secrets Tips and Strategies with Sean Cannell

Hey, Brand Builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview. We are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming. From anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call, hope to talk to you soon on with the show.

So recently, one of my best keynote clients asked me the question. They said, who do you know, that does YouTube and video? And I said, easy question, easy answer, Sean. Is that so you’re, and that’s who you’re about to meet. Sean Cannell is one of his, he’s a best-selling author as well, but man, he is YouTube. He is all things video. He is an international speaker. He’s built seven figure business. His videos have been viewed over a hundred million times, which I think is incredible. His YouTube channels have over 1 million subscribers, Forbes listed him as one of the 20 must watched YouTube channels that will change your business. And him and his team. I mean, they produce some of the best content ever, and they’re just on this mission to help 10,000 people, you know, do what they love. And so he gives amazing advice and just had a baby with his wife, Sonia, which is exciting. And brother, thanks for carving out some time for us.

Yeah. Rory, I’m pumped to be here. Thanks for that introduction. Yeah, I guess the other thing was you and I shared the stage also at Shaleen Johnson’s event. That was the first time that I was introduced to you. And then again at social media marketing world, just shortly thereafter. And now, and now, you know, this other client that we won’t be there at the same time, but I hope hopefully they’ll book you. And I have to say, man, the more that we’ve done, these interviews, I have just become so convicted on YouTube and there I have missed the boat, my entire career. I don’t know how, but I have somehow just completely missed what it is and, you know, so can you just kind of talk about like, obviously everyone listened to his personal brands, how do you view YouTube in the landscape of everything going on with a personal brand? Like all the other social, you know, social media outlets, website blog, like podcasting, how do you think of YouTube?

Yeah. you know, I think of course from my perspective, but I’ll back it up. I mean, I think YouTube is, is the most important place to build your personal brand. It’s the number one video site in the world by far, far and away, you know, Amazon bought Amazontube.com and the URL and people thought, okay, what are they going to do? And even if they do something, they don’t have the content library. Of course there’s Twitch and that’s kind of gaming and live streaming there’s other things. But even if a competitor was to start, it’s going to be so difficult for them to build the backlog of YouTube, let alone the technological infrastructure of distribution to mobile around the world, over 2 billion, monthly active users, the best feature set and it’s free. So I think it’s irresponsible for any serious personal brand, serious online entrepreneur, business owner, anybody that wants to share their thoughts, their wisdom, their message with the world to not be on YouTube.

I am empathetic because I understand that what with YouTube, it’s kind of like maybe the hurdle of content creation podcast, you know, audio it’s its own challenge for sure. But it’s, it’s a little bit simpler. I think some of the other social media platforms also give you more of kind of that quicker dopamine hit you. They’re able to like post on Instagram today, or even write an article on LinkedIn or a medium post. And you get it done and you didn’t have to like pull out your suit jacket, take a shower, do your hair that day, set your mic up, plan the content, figure out how you’re going to edit it. I think there’s a level of that complexity, but that keeps a lot of people if you will, out of the game that are missing out on the opportunity that if you can create a simple system to create what we would encourage one significant upload per week on YouTube it can have massive dividends.

And I think the other thing about YouTube is it doesn’t give you as much immediate gratification like, like a Tik TOK does right now, or even some of the other platforms. You get a comment, you get a, like you upload a YouTube video, you got zero views. You know, a week later you got 10 views, but you’re like, well, that’s how many my IETV got, but that was a lot easier to create. And the YouTube video took more energy. But the thing with YouTube is it’s like a fine wine. It gets better with age. It’s a content library. It’s not a content feed. You build up your thought leadership there, a body of work there. And over time you can create so much passive momentum, passive traffic. And I think the last example of that I think is important to note is there’s a reason why some of the most influential online entrepreneurs and personal brands really invest a lot in YouTube, whether it’s a Brendon Burchard, a grant Cardone, Gary Vaynerchuk Billy Jean whether it’s just you know, a Marie Forleo whether it’s of course, a lot of the YouTube in foot, Jay Shetty, you think about these different people Lewis’ house.

Why are they investing also in YouTube, even if they’re doing a podcast as well or other things, because YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. There are so many people, there it is. It’s the town square of online video. And we are allowed to have our own shows all land the plane with this final analogy. What, what would it have been worth to buy? I looked it up a piece of land in Manhattan in New York. You can get a little lot, that’s an empty lot, so you could build on it. I looked it up just the other day. You know, real estate prices are going up. Maybe they’re going down, depends on the pandemic. But it was only 17 million, $900,000 to get that piece of real estate. And actually you can, we can connect later cause I got my license.

So I’m happy to flip that to you if you want. I wish. And, and so what, but what would that piece of real estate have costed 10 years ago? 20 years ago, especially 50 years ago. Nobody knows a future, but YouTube is such a dominant platform of where online video happens, where so much education and entertainment is consumed, where so many people are planting their flag. I think a lot of people are going to regret, not investing in YouTube even now and here. And we’re actually putting, we put an offer on a house today. Then the Vegas is a boom and bust market. We just need someplace to live. We didn’t really want to buy, but gotta live somewhere. And like, we don’t really want it. So we’re timing some things. Here’s the deal. It’s just continued to go up and up and up and up. And I looked at I’m like, it’s going to probably drop no, it keeps going up. And so I would rather get in today. It’s not too late to get into YouTube. I’d rather get in today because even if it dips a little, like if you play it out, it is where you want to really establish your voice as a personal brand in mind.

So the, the concept of getting in today. So just to talk about that, cause it’s, I think it’s a little bit overwhelming when you see exactly what you said, where it’s like, you don’t get the immediate gratification. I’m rebuilding my YouTube channel. You know, it’s taken a year to get to like 400 subscribers. I mean, it’s just like, or six, six months, it’s been like six months we’ve been doing it. And it’s just like, Oh my gosh, I’m just getting killed. Like w you know, putting energy into it. How do you get over that? How do you get over that mental block of like, I’m too late to the game? You know, it’s, it’s not worth it. I should be spending my time somewhere else. Cause I can get more traffic, you know, quicker, anything around how you think about that? Is it just what you’re saying? It’s just that long.

No, I think it’s two things. I think it’s mindset and systems and we’ll go systems first. I think the system is to just create a simple system to be consistent on YouTube. Even if you start really simple, let ask you will this episode go on YouTube? Yeah, it will. Yeah. Yeah. So you’ve already you’re this is what this is not, I mean, I’m not, I don’t want to belittle the process, but this is not that challenging. Like we’re on zoom right now. You know what I mean? Like we’re recording this interview. So, so I only have 400 subscribers. Yeah. But like also the show format, you’re doing a video podcast and that’s 400 subscribers. It’s like, it’s, if you can get this systematized and especially for those that are scaling out with a team, a virtual assistant, you just get a simple workflow going, by the way, I recommend everybody listening.

Here’s the model, a weekly video podcast. And if you are podcasting, especially during the pandemic, mostly just like this over zoom or something like stream yard or something else, like just flip the webcam on and have your guests flip the webcam on as well. That’s like the minimum viable product I think to get started with YouTube. Then you’re able to promise a weekly show. You’re able to leverage YouTube for the SEO properties. And if Amazon, if Apple podcast and Spotify and Google play is giving you more love, that’s just bonus on YouTube. And that becomes a foundational thing to get the algorithm seasoned. And then here’s your opportunity. Two things can happen if you were to layer the next strategy on top of that, the next strategy would be, well, this is 30 minutes. This is 45 minutes is you do a Joe Rogan. Does you cut out the three minutes or the five minutes?

That has more of a chance when we really touch on that, that hot button topic, that poll cause that’s the kind of stuff that gets clicked on. That’s why JRE clips, the Joe Rogan clips channel all the video podcasters that are smart, do this. They cut out the clips to go viral, to get awareness, to get more love. Because a lot of people that don’t know you yet, aren’t going to click on longer form content like this. And so that’s one way to evolve. And then the next one is not even necessarily weekly, but when you have the bandwidth, when you invest the time you study some of my work and you then actually create native YouTube videos, shorter that are meant to like pull or push all of YouTube buttons to blow up your awareness. So then cause you’re always one video away from changing your whole life in business with YouTube, you put out the right video at the right time with the right title, with the right thumbnail, with the right.

And again, maybe you don’t keep following up with that, but then they go, Oh, at least Roy has got a weekly show. So all of a sudden you go from four to 400 to 4,000 because of consistency. And because of having some smart systems because of potentially planning team and energy around when it is, you’re going to evolve into that. But in the meantime, Hey, in a year it’s 800 in another year at 1600 and YouTube does grow like a snowball, even if it is slow and steady, potentially with minimal effort, just with the videos you’re uploading here. So that’s systems, the mindset is simply that is really looking at it for the long haul, recognizing that you gotta level up with kind of the copywriting, the headline really good recommended book, Brendan Kane hook point. How do you write hooks? How do you grab people’s attention in a three-second world?

Those skill sets matter so much on YouTube, but you don’t want to get overwhelmed again. Even if you put out Sean Cannell was, you know, you’re already amazing at that, but if you just guessed, like it’s not the best title in the world, but you show up every week and keep leveling up. Then a year and a half from now, everything changes. And you’ve got a backlog and consistency for people that are like, man, now I want to go deep with this guy. Cause there was a short form star smart content that eventually kind of went viral. And in your case, my case as well, virals 10 K views, you know, it’s 25 K it’s a hundred K when you’re normally only getting 50 to a hundred and that’s so much more common when you just stick with it. And you know, I just got to pull this one on you. Then the mindset side is he got to take the stairs stairs on YouTube because there’s that moment when, when putting in the work pays off. And so that’s what I’d recommend.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I love the, I love the idea of, of your one video away from changing your life. I mean, my Ted talk is an example of that, right? It’s like, even though it’s not on my channel, I wish it was, but it’s like 4 million views later. I don’t do any, I don’t have to do any other marketing for speaking. It’s like people just email it. Hey, will you come do your Ted talk? People hire me to do a 25 minute version of the 18 minute Ted talk that’s available for free. But it’s, I mean, so I love that. And the, the other thing that this is part of why I’ve bought into YouTube finally, is what you were talking about, about how it gets better, like a fine wine, all the other social platforms. It’s like the, the longer it’s been around, the less valuable the content is YouTube is the opposite.

Just like Google, because they’re the same. So, you know, you mentioned the SEO part of the video, the, are there some basic things like you’re saying, okay, yeah. Just throw up some video content. That’s basically what we’ve been doing. We’re just now starting to you know, so we put these on brand builders channel and then I do a weekly video blog on Rory vaden.com, which is the, you know, we’re just starting to like put more into that or there’s some basic things because of the relationship between Google and YouTube and how SEO works that we need to know in terms of like, don’t, don’t miss this, right? Like if you’re not gonna take an hour to optimize every video, but if there’s two things you’re going to do when you post a video, my gosh, like don’t forget to do this on YouTube specifically. That makes it, you know, more find-able absolutely.

So there’s going to be two priorities, especially going into this next year that are critical for winning on YouTube. I’m going to share the lesser priority first, but it should be a given. It’s kind of like you, you like shouldn’t even have to mention the fundamentals because we should all assume you need to do the fundamentals, but it’s not the, the needle mover, but let’s address those first YouTube like Google needs to be optimized, like a great blog post. Your title should be attention grabbing and keyword rich still. And a keyword is what search term are you going after? You know what pain point or you’re solving? We teach ASQ answer specific questions. Just answer a specific question. And when I say answer specific questions, sometimes people think like a question, like what is personal branding? Well, that one’s probably been been touched on.

Here’s one of my favorite strategies. It’d be like how to upload a LinkedIn profile. That was a deep strategy, by the way, because when you answer like something super specific like that, if someone’s on LinkedIn, they want to build a personal brand. Maybe that question is not even answered. Well, the app was just updated. All of a sudden, those are the types of videos that have a quarter million views that are really practical and utility. And then you like it. And you’re like, and by the way, you know, I also help people with, with building their personal brands. And that’s why your other may be more personal development, softer topics actually get discovered because you get noticed cause you teach people how to install a WordPress plugin. So there’s something about answering specific questions and priority number two. Yes. The title, yes. The description should be filled out.

Like with enough words, like a good blog, post keywords, the tags YouTube has let us know these things carry less weight, but that is what’s called metadata. And it’s important. You just don’t want to cut corners there, especially when you’re just starting your YouTube channel. Youtube really doesn’t know what your video is about. So you’re giving it metadata. And that means you’ve architected the content to be actually tackling something very specific. And then of course the thumbnail, because that’s, what’s going to be what people click on or not. And so it’s like title thumbnail, tags description. And then the topic itself, that’s really the needle mover because if you’re not talking about the right things at the right time, especially, let’s say you were to talk about news, like there’s, this is what we would call trend surfing. It’s a good strategy. And that would be like related to personal branding.

You put, you extrapolate some principles out of pop culture and you commentate on somebody. They don’t know you, but they know something that’s happening in pop culture collection. We talked about how we didn’t do it, but with like we’d recognized, we totally could have personal branding mistakes from it and whatnot. And it brings awareness. So that’s actually a topic thing. That’s actually the content strategy, but all of that, I would cluster under important, but the lesser priority, the way to optimize your content going into this next year is the content itself. And what I mean is here’s how YouTube ranks videos now AVD and CTR, Oh, say those in reverse CTR click through rate. And then the second one’s average view duration. So almost all the other stuff is so much lesser important than does someone click on it. And what would determine if someone clicks on it?

Well, a great title that kind of like opens up a loop and curiosity, a thumbnail that’s also great and gets attention, but the topics almost more important because you might see it. You’re like that’s the best thumbnail I’ve ever seen. Well, I’ve never seen such a what Mark Twain couldn’t have written. And as PO Shakespeare, couldn’t have written a title as good as this. What does it matter if they’re not actually interested in the content? So your choice of topic, knowing and understanding your audience’s problems and ambitions their mindset, what keeps them up at night? What would actually get them to stop scrolling? Because that’s what they want to learn about. That’s what they want to hear about what gets you to click. You actually have to get the click, but getting the click. It’s not enough. They call it click bait. Wow, you got the click, but you trick me.

I don’t want to watch. So AVD average view duration, AKA watch time, right? Another way of putting it is just how long do people spend on the video? So then once you start the video, it’s actually the architecture of the content. So I would challenge you. I watched some of your stuff, this probably maybe a long time ago. Maybe you still need to do this in this next year. Quality over quantity matters. And it’s quick to be able to set your phone up and maybe just record real time for seven, five to seven minutes or 13 minutes on a topic. People who know you will endure that, but there’s so many people that are just putting more effort into at least editing out the breaks at any hour, ums, structuring their content, putting something powerful in the beginning. I’m not saying it needs fancy production value, but you’ve really optimize that content to hold viewer attention.

You’re really thinking about creating open loops, if possible, to have people go. You’re even more. So if you teach and you can have visuals, even if you do like kind of a webinar style and you share some things, you bring people from point a, B, C, D in the video. If you can hit an average view duration of eight minutes and a click through rate of over 10%, which your YouTube analytics will show you, YouTube will keep showing your video to more and more and more and more and more audiences through suggested 10% or higher 10 20, 30. And it’s crazy over eight minutes because if YouTube sees, so if you a couple of metrics and these are all taken with a grain of salt, but some good targets, a good target length of a video is 15 minutes. A good chance of a great 15 minute video will have an average view duration of about half that around eight minutes.

And if the topic has a wide enough reach that people click through it at 10%, meaning when YouTube shows and recommends it and impression someone clicks through and then stays on it at that percentage, then that’s what could potentially spread throughout the algorithm. And if you don’t hit those numbers, but you raise those numbers, people dwell and watch your videos longer. And then people are clicking through on your videos. More those priority. Number two, title, topic, covering a trend. All of that is very important. It’s like just the fundamentals, but those are the levers, which how do you optimize those? The content itself it’s taken some time practically editing. Like I don’t care if you shoot your video on your phone, get it to an editor that can actually make it more interesting, more poppy and like, think about, about faster, because everyone’s rushed. You know, everyone wants it.

It makes me think sometimes we’ll do something like this. That’s, you know, 30 minutes. But a lot of times we bond YouTube. If you took you 10 minutes to record the video on your phone, chances are a good editor could make that five and a half. And the difference between that 10 minute, just like free flowing train of thought versus just edited down is everything on YouTube. You know, this isn’t unlike English and there’s the English teacher story who had the class write a paper on a topic. And they had them write a six page paper. So he had to write a six page paper. And they were like, all right. So just choose a topic, six page paper, then they turn it in and then you send it all in. And then he handed it back to him and he said, look, I want you to cut this in half. And they were like, what?

You want us to cut 50%

Of this paper? Then he said, yeah, I want you to cut it in half because I want it to be stronger, more punchy, better. And they’re like, that’s insane. There’s no way. Okay, fine. So then they go to work and the class goes back to work, cuts their six page papers into three page papers. Then they turn them all in and then the teacher goes awesome. Great job. Hey, before actually we finished this out. I’m going to hand these back to you. I want you to cut these in half again.

What a page and a half are you kidding? Like from six to eight,

This is insane. He said, I want you to do it. And so then they cut it all the way down to a page and a half. Well, how strong was that content? By the time it got down to a page and a half, it’s what probably any great journalists would learn when they have to fit a complex thoughts into just an article in the New York times. So how can you make your content half short and twice strong? That’s sort of the idea of optimizing the content, grabbing attention, creating a story that has tension, a climax conflict resolution and holds attention. If you, I’m not saying that’s easy, but that’s like the key of YouTube right now. And to alleviate some pressure, just upload your weekly video podcast. And when you want to take a shot at maybe editing something down more or apply some of that editing to the clips channel, you go, man, during that conversation, we hit a point that’s strong that’s that’s title that one point, let’s settle that.

And let’s make this three minute clip, five minute clip, seven minute clip that just really directly delivers that promise. Let’s do a good thumbnail. And for example, Joe Rogan does it all the time. Like of course celebrity meets topic, but like Elon Musk shares opinion on Corona virus. And you know, you’re like what? And you see it. And of course you just clicked through all they’re doing is sitting there and talking, but it’s delivering like one idea. One question, one, answer, one video on sort of that you got to click on it. You want to think about how you can do that for your own content.

So if you’re saying a target length of 15 minutes and you’re trying to like cut it in half, does that mean you’re recording like a 25 minute and then trying to edit it down to 15? I mean, that’s interesting to hear you say 15 minutes and that’s low that’s long time. But you’re saying that that kind of, I mean, I don’t know if you would classify that as longer form content, but you know, like normally I am for five to seven and they end up being more like eight or 10, which then if we chopped it down, it would be like five or six. But you’re saying try that, that it’s good to have videos up there that are longer than 15 minutes because the, the AVD is higher.

The videos should be as long as they need to be, but as short as possible. So if you’re your eight should be fours and your thirties should be fifteens. And so, so I only put that out there because the average iteration of a 15 minute video, if it’s great will probably be eight minutes and YouTube loves videos that cross that eight minute threshold, but there’s no reason to try to inflate your content. Three’s great fours. Great. If you look at think media right now, our main channel, we spend a lot of time around six minutes, seven, but sometimes the content goes to 12 or 13 and it’s usually for a reason, doesn’t mean it holds attention. But if we’re we’re teaching somebody how to use a particular camera and walking them through all the settings, well, it takes 13 minutes to do that. My thought is, if you take 26 minutes to do that, when it could have been 13 a competitor, let’s say teaching on the same camera when you hold that viewer attention that YouTube is going to love you more.

Now, if both are pretty good and that person’s personality is so great and they do it in 30 minutes, we do it in 15, but they end up with 18 minutes of watch time. And we end up with like 12 minutes of watching that YouTube wants time on platform. Of course, there’s nuances to the algorithm period. End of story. How can you hold viewers attention longer? And so maybe the other way to attack this challenge is just definitely trimmed. The fluff, definitely think about dead spots. You know, I recently let me give you one example of, of actually how we practically do this. I do a show called coffee with Cannell. I livestream it. So I try to be pretty good as a communicator, but there nobody can be as good as a video editor on top of a community. There’s no way you could pause it.

Video editing is always going to make it stronger even to the point where a lot of people trim out ums and some breaths are long pauses because YouTube just likes people want that content. You know, there’s a reason we probably listened to audio books and podcasts sometimes on 1.2 or 1.5 or two X YouTube saying, Hey, just give it to me. And viewers are saying, just give it to me, you know, as fast as possible. So I don’t even have to turn it up to two X speed. And so I do, what’s called coffee with Cannell. I record the content. And then because we now have two channels, I almost have like a channel where I experiment it’s called think marketing. And then I’ll, I’ll put the hottest parts on think media that are like worthy of have taken off with. Great.

I want to ask you about that, about the channels. Okay. Well, where do you use the delineation between this should be its own channel versus like a, you know, you can, I think they’re called categories, right? You can go, I can have, I can just have several categories, like you know, like the, like you you’ve used this example a couple of times, the long form content is over here, but then the short edited clips live on a different channel. Like, is it by length? Is it topic? Like, how do you determine, Oh, I should move this to its own channel because then you’re also kind of fragmenting the viewers, but they’re getting a more focused experience.

Yeah. That’s a great question. I actually think it’s something you shouldn’t even worry about until your, you get to a hundred thousand subscribers. Yeah. So it’s kind of like, like if you’ve got your main channel, you could upload your video podcast there and also your clips there and also your one-off videos there. And also the seven week blog series when you’re touring on the road, because it’s all just building up momentum around the one channel for us, it was actually kind of creating two different brands. Think media was sort of my strategy as well as tech reviews and camera reviews combined. And this is a really powerful YouTube tip that the channel suffered for from is you never want to upload a video that subs the subscriber didn’t subscribe for. That’ll kill you on YouTube this year. You never want to upload a video that the subscribers didn’t subscribe for.

That’s how the trend strategy could backfire. Because if people thought you were always going to be political, I mean, you should do it anyways, potentially cause you want the growth and the reach, but it doesn’t make sense. Like I’ve learned this. If somebody is like, okay, Sean does camera reviews. And then I’m talking about social media strategy. They don’t want to watch that. Now. I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t do it. I’m suggesting that you should know the rules and then break them intentionally and understand that it’s like, well, that’s why because they clicked subscribe because they want more camera reviews. So they don’t click on your next video, which kills it in the algorithm. Like anybody that doesn’t engage with your most recent upload and scrolls past it on any platform signals to YouTube, Oh, we shouldn’t show this to any more people. So the dream is to have a clear value proposition of your channel and continually deliver on that value proposition.

It’s almost like a target where you could on the bulls-eye is great. Those are your best performing videos, but you don’t want to like completely miss the dartboard. You don’t want to completely miss the dartboard. You’re like, it’s kind of like it’s tied in if I go to the far outskirts, but that’s about as far away from my core promise, my core value proposition that I want to go. So we just were really steering our channel. Think media, really towards tech how to use cameras, how to use your light. What is the best light black Friday tech specials for creator gear. And then we started to think marketing. When we launched a video podcast and our minimum effective dose was at least our weekly Tuesday video podcast show on think marketing. And then it also gave us though a chance to just experiment. So especially when the pandemic happened, we started a show called coffee with candle.

Cause all my traveling got canceled and I started answering people’s questions, had their tourists on our team, started to think marketing live show. And they started to be like one hour, 90 minutes, even two hours. We’d bring people on and talk to them side by side on stream yard and answer questions. Just try to do community and try to build momentum. But what we now do is we teach for 15 to 30 minutes at the beginning and sometimes that content can be really dialed in. Great. So to land a plane on the strategy the other day I did it, it was 30 minutes long, about 28. And my editor, one of my editors did it, did an edit of it. And I went back to him and I said, we got a half short twice, twice. You know, I was like, I maybe like to hear myself talk, but like this whole story, that’s not essential.

Let’s take that thing out. And four minutes was gone. It was kind of like, it didn’t help the content. And I was like, this part right here, I took 10 seconds or 25 seconds to click around. Cause I was sharing my screen to show people. I’m like, you got to cut that down. And, and he’s typically on top of it, but I was sorta like, you know, it was maybe he’s like, he just did a quick intro, outro, whatever I’m like, bro, you need to like, this thing needs to be optimized because that’s, that’s the difference between it doing well. Let’s say with people who know you and trust you, right, as soon as you hit like a lull and you know this, cause you’re a master speaker and architect, you know, it’s like, you’ve tried different things. You’re like, okay, that story bombs. Like I lose the audience during that time.

I lose attention during that time. So masters of YouTube, which let me encourage you and everyone to that, if you can learn these types of skills, which I would argue is not an option. You have to learn how to master getting attention in a 20, 21 and beyond world. It’s just the name of the game. Janell, Elena is a great example. She went from zero subscribers to 1.3 million in three weeks with three videos. Whoa. So you don’t actually necessarily, it’s not like, Oh, if I did it, if you put out the right video with the right title, with the right thumbnail, with the right tie you know, tags and the whole deal, that’s on the right topic. And it’s a good optimized video. Youtube. It can just blow you up overnight. And maybe the strategy becomes not being so stressed. Like hope is not a strategy.

Just thinking that, like Sean said, I’m going to eventually hit it, but, but creating a system and having a mindset of taking the stairs, but leveling up those little tweaks little by little because you go okay. Once I feel that once I hit my moment and arguably, I like to encourage a lot of people use your season and obscurity to prepare you for popularity. Oftentimes people are not ready for a viral video. So if you’re building a backlog of a catalog in a backlog and you’re dialing in your YouTube strategy, you’ll be able to sustain it after you go viral and keep following up with, with a level, if you will. And again, viral could be a 33,000 viewed video that grows your channel 3000 subscribers. Now you have that core audience that really changes everything for your topic, your niche, how you not, how you help people.

And so I had Kyle edit that video down. So we took a 28 minute video out of a really long live stream. Cause I went into Q and a and knocked about nine minutes off it. So it went till about 18. It’s still like a longer teaching. I wasn’t, I’m not worried about the time if you will. I was like, it has to be 15 or it has to be, it just has to all count. As far as what’s left in there, we got to trim the fat trim, the fluff that was I, my bro, I, I repeated myself and stumbled all over my words. That whole part was unnecessary. I agree. Yes it was. And so then dialing that in and that might start with you as your own editor. It might start with you with the mindset as you’re maybe coaching somebody else. Zero, very unlikely that you’re just going to find somebody who just gets this unless you like connect them to our movement. And we just we’ll train them for you. But like, you know, you probably just keep coaching, keep tweaking. And those small tweaks eventually lead to giant peaks on YouTube.

I like it. Sean canal, kennel. I say it wrong every time Canales, how you actually say it, right? Sean Cannell rhymes with YouTube channel. Nice. That’s that’s it Sean Cannell. You guys check him out. I mean, we could go on and on. There is so much stuff. He’s one of my favorite people to follow that I actually follow. And I learned a ton from him and his team really, really, really great stuff. I love this. I think, you know, use your season of obscurity to prepare you for popularity. Isn’t that true in also a spiritual sense and a financial sense and the every other sense buddy, we just wish you the best. Thanks for pumping out such great content all the time and for sharing some of your secrets here and you know, keep it going brother. Appreciate you. Thanks for having me on

Ep 131: How To Get Rich in a Niche with Clint Salter | Recap Episode

Hey, welcome to the influential personal brand recap edition. We are breaking down the interview with my friend Clint Salter. I am rolling solo on this episode. AJ is momming hard and doing her thing as a CEO. So occasionally I have to step in and just do the debrief myself. But this interview is such a great interview to listen, to listen to. They all are. But specifically, if you have this thought that you say, I don’t want to limit my opportunity by serving a group that is too small and, and this for sure is my first take away from the interview because I’ve had this thought and there’s a good chance that you have had this thought, like, we all think I need a, you know, I need a bigger market. I need, I need, I need more, more, more people to serve. I don’t want to limit myself and really it’s the opposite, right?

You increase your opportunity by serving a smaller community in a deeper way. And I think that is specific and is really specific to personal brands, right? Like it’s different if you watch shark tank, you know, and, and a lot of, a lot of the people that do deals on shark tank, they’re not, they’re not service-based businesses, they’re not educational business. They’re not personal brands, right? The sharks are interested in like widgets and things that can just be produced on mass scale. And so when they talk about like, what’s the market for this, they need a big market because they’re selling a low dollar transactional item and it’s just like one item and that’s it. And that it’s like, how many people need this? And, and how do they need it on a recurring basis, but that’s very different, right? So like you might see that kind of thing or get that kind of counsel in, you know, say watching a show like shark tank or talking to other entrepreneurs.

But when you look at personal brands, it’s, it’s not so much, how can I create a product that has, you know, like an information product that has mass appeal to millions and millions of people? Not that that would be bad. I mean, you see books that sell millions of copies, but you don’t typically see video courses that sell millions of copies. I mean, even tens of thousands would be a lot. I mean, a 10,000 customers buying one video course would be a lot. You know, even, even the really big membership sites and stuff, they often, you know, have a couple thousand you know, members on some type of a re a recurring payment. So for most of us, for, for you, for most of you, Clint is such a great example of you increase your opportunity as a personal brand specifically in a service-based business or an information marketing type business and educational you know, type business offering of some type.

And whether that is, you have a small business service, but like when you’re carving out your niche, it’s who can I serve in the deepest way? So it’s a, it’s a small audience that you serve in a bigger way. I mean, he’s got a multi seven figure business here, dealing with dance studios. If you don’t own a dance studio, there’s a good chance. You’d never heard of Clint Salter before today, but if you do own a dance studio, or if you have a friend that does, they probably know him, he dominates the space, or they know someone who knows him because he’s, he’s owning an occupying and expanding and serving in this space. And you know, I think there’s, there’s always just such a draw to like, I need to have, you know, millions of followers and it’s all about just like volume, like the total number of people.

But, you know, keep in mind that one way to make a million dollars is to, is that you only need a thousand customers to buy a thousand dollar product. Right? Think about that for a second. Like why there’s, there’s multiple ways to get to a million dollars, right? You could have a million people buy something that’s $1, but for most personal brands, you’re probably much more likely to get there by having a thousand people buy something that’s a thousand dollars, right. A thousand. People’s not that many people and a thousand dollars is not that high, a price point, but it’s like, that’s how you get there and you go, I only need a FA I only need a thousand people. I don’t need to market to billions or hundreds of millions, or really even millions of people. Like I only need a couple thousand buyers.

And I’ll, I’ll share this with you transparently, right? So brand builders group are like part of our mission is what we call 1000 messengers. We’re on a mission to, we want to have 1000 messengers in our pro quarterly program, which is our flagship program. It’s our one-on-one coaching program that also includes access to events like four of our events a year supplemental. We only need a thousand customers in that program to like, achieve everything we want and be able to provide the level of income that we want for our team. And, and, you know, just having an extraordinary, extraordinary business, an eight figure business, a lifestyle business and we just need a thousand customers. So it’s like, we’re not trying to be everything to everyone to be all the places all the time. It’s like, we’re looking for a thousand personal that are serious about building monetize their personal brand that want to follow a process and want to have a roadmap and a proven checklist for that thing for, for building a personal brand.

That’s why it’s like, we don’t work with companies. It’s not that we couldn’t, it’s not that our expertise doesn’t apply to companies. It’s just that we we’ve narrowed our focus. Based on a couple things, first of all, we’ve, we’ve narrowed our model to one-on-one coaching and, and here’s, I’m going to give you a little framework. I’ve never shared this before, but if you’re trying to niche down, there’s, there’s kind of three different M’s here, okay. In terms of how you can niche down and, and some, and you can mix and match these combinations. So the first M is your market case. So that’s who you’re selling to. So Clint is a great example of niching down his market based on who, right. That is. He’s going after dance studio owners, very specific brand builders group is, is going after personal brands. You know, we’re going after coaches, trainers, authors, speakers, consultants entrepreneurs, and financial advisors, you know, service-based businesses, network marketers you know, fitness people, but, but they are they’re, it’s a face, right?

We’re helping people who are looking to like promote their own personal message. That is also a decision, a strategic decision to focus on a narrow market. So that’s the first step is market. The second M is model. Your business model is you can actually serve a narrow model. So brand builders is another thing that we do. Our model is unique. We offer one on one coaching, right? There’s a lot of people who teach video courses. There’s a lot of people who have events. There’s a lot of people who do masterminds. There’s a lot of people who do monthly membership sites. And part of when we came into the space is based this part of this based on our experience, also based on our passion to like really work in a deep way with, with people one-on-one is to do one-on-one coaching. One of our strategists talks to our, our clients have a strategist.

They talk to every single month. That’s a unique model. The business model is different, right? If you look at Uber, okay, Uber didn’t target a different market. W well, actually, so Uber, Uber, isn’t, isn’t a great example. There a better example of the next, the next M that I’ll talk about. So what is the model, in other words, what is the mechanism in which, you know, you, you make you make money and is there a different way of charging for something, you know, financial advisors had a big chant transition, or a lot of them are in a big transition of model where it used to be like a, you know, commission-based, or they would get paid per transaction. And now they move over to fee-based. That’s a, that’s a whole market of, of that’s a whole group of people, whole industry that is like migrating their business models.

So if you’re looking to differentiate, it’s could be who you serve. It also could be how you serve them, which is the business model. And then the third M is the method. The method is what you provide to them is actually different, right? So we also a brand builders group liked to think that our curriculum, I mean, our, it is unique. It is proprietary. The vast majority of the things that we teach in our curriculum are our own original frameworks, our proprietary IP, intellectual property, things that we have developed. But, you know, certainly some of it is principles that exist that lots of people talk about related to digital marketing, but again, we’re tailoring it to the personal brand. So, you know, there’s, those are three different FMS that would all help you. So you’re, the market is who you serve. The model is how you serve them making money.

And then the method is what you’re actually doing for those people. So, to me, I guess I would say you know, like Uber disrupted the taxi space, I would call that a different method. It was a different way of doing business. So it was still the same, the same model, which is that you’re charging writers per ride. So it’s the same business model as a taxi. It’s the same market. It’s people who take, you know, short-term transportation, but the model, but the, excuse me, the method was different was instead of taxi drivers of which there are a few, you take the entire, you know, pretty much anybody with a car and you turn them into the providers. So it, it created new providers as a different, a different model, or excuse me, a different method. A different model is like charging for a completely different type of delivery model.

So I would think about this as like all of these homemade meal plans, right? So you know, there’s people who are in the market for home cooked, ready to make meals. Okay. And so historically that would be like, you know, Domino’s pizza delivery and, you know, maybe Chinese food and delivery, but there weren’t like a lot of healthy options. And then nowadays you see all of these, these home delivery, health, healthy food being delivered to your home, you know, so hello, fresh and whatever fresh and fresh and lane is the one that we just tried. Our kids are on, we have our kids, our little kids on little spoon and we’ve used a number of them, but healthy food used to only be restaurant. And now there’s this new emergence of a new model, which is shipped healthy food.

Pre-Made shipped directly to your house. That’s a different model. It’s a, it’s a completely different mechanism, but you’re serving, you’re still serving the same. You’re still serving the same market. But in, in, in that scenario, I would say that the, the method is the same. It’s still health food. The thing you’re buying is still the, is still, you know, this kind of like the same, but it’s different in the, in terms of how you’re receiving, how you’re receiving that service. So anyways, the point here is for you, whether you’re differentiating, differentiating based on your market, based on your method and your message, or based on your business model, there’s a lot of ways to niche down. And we all think I don’t want to restrict myself, right? Like, I, I just, I don’t, I don’t want to, I don’t want to think too small, but, you know, serving a specific audience is not the same as thinking small.

And in many cases like Clint is, is demonstrating. It can be bigger. It’s the people say the riches are in the niches because you’re serving people in a deeper way, right? Like we are able to serve personal brands in a much deeper way than any just normal marketing advertising firm who services companies w just number one, we’re a strategy firm, right? So we’re advising on all the moving parts, digital marketing messaging, your audience like technology copywriting, you know, ads, speaking, books, publishing, launches, you know, funnels the whole, the whole thing just for personal brands. So if somebody just teaches, you know, those same things to everybody, they’ve got a lot more masters, whereas we can just go, man, we only serve personal brands. And if that’s you, we can serve you in a deep way. If it’s not, you, you’re not the fit for brand builders group doesn’t mean you can’t learn from us, right.

It doesn’t mean you might still not enjoy the podcast, but it means we’re not the best. We’re not the best fit for you. You know, now I’ve got books and stuff on my personal brand that, that people learn from, but, but don’t lose to the, to the idea that, Oh, by niching down too small, I’m limiting myself. It’s, it’s almost always the opposite cause you can serve them in a bigger way. All right. The second big idea, the second you know, takeaway or highlight for me from, from, from Clint was really something he said about the mentality and what he said was he used the word experiment. He said, I told myself, I would just, I would just treat this as a year long experiment. And I love that idea. I love the idea of taking the pressure off of yourself from like having to succeed or meet some expectation of like, this is only successful.

If whatever, and instead just going, let’s just treat this as a fun experiment. You know, it reminds me of one of our, our brand builders group clients. Who’s also a strategist. In fact, we’re going to have her on the show here Hillary, because Hillary experimented with tic tok and she did this little experiment with like, ah, maybe I’ll hop on Tik TOK and see if I can make some fun videos. And she generated over a half a million view, half a million followers, not views it’s, it’s hundreds of millions of views, a half tens of millions of views, but it is half a million followers in less than two months, two months, like 60 days, half a million followers just by an experiment. Clint was kind of like the same thing. It’s like, Oh, I’ll just, you know, I’ll treat this as an experiment. I’ll service this community. This sounds like it could be fun. And then maybe it turns, and then maybe it turns into something

And maybe like, maybe that’s you, maybe you have too

Much pressure on yourself right now.

Maybe you are feeling like

You’re not successful because you’re not achieving some number, some income or whatever. And they be, you should just, maybe you need to hear that and go, you know what, I’m just going to treat this as an experiment. If it works out amazing. If it doesn’t, that’s totally fine, but I’m just going to do it for a year. I’m going to commit to, you know, some period of time, I’m not going to just like have one foot in one foot out, so to speak, but I’m going to just play and see what happens. And that’s so valuable. And I think that’s so important. And, you know, even when you get into, you know, in the brand builders group curriculum in phase phase one, we helped you create your positioning phase two. We help you build the infrastructure to support your personal brand. And phase three is where we really start to blow the brand up and really create exponential growth. And one of the, you know, one of our, one of our events there is called high traffic strategies and that’s paid traffic acquisition. Well, when we do paid ads,

Ads, we experiment it. We expect,

Right. Everything we do is like, we’re going to drop a few ads out there. We’re going to put a few dollars behind them. And I’m talking like it could be 10 bucks could be 50 bucks, like at the most, right. Probably never more than a hundred dollars, but it’s like, it could be 10 or 20 bucks. We just want to see which ads perform the best and then put more and then put more money behind the winners. It’s just an experiment, right? There’s not any pressure at that first phase. It’s just like, let’s see what happens. And you, if you are just kind of like bound by

This, this, this,

This demand for perfection, or if you’re creating the of expectations or someone else is putting expectations on you, maybe just let that release, right. Just like release that and let it go and say, what can I do as an experiment? What am I drawn to? That sounds kind of like, it would be fun and, and go with that and see what happens. In the case of Clint, you know, it became this one business that, that L that was then sold that led to another business that led to another business to now, you know, this multi seven figure recurring membership company. And, and he’s doing what he loves. He’s combined, you know, dance and business, and like pulled this together. And, you know, I just, I think that’s good permission. It was good for me to hear and be reminded like, Oh yeah, you know, I, it doesn’t all have to succeed. Like it’s fine for it to be an experiment. So that was my second thing. My, my third big takeaway which is, which is, you know, kind of related to the idea of, of saying, Hey, I’m going to make a business decision to serve a niche, which was, you know, kind of the very first takeaway is when he said, this is what he said. He said, I was able to deliver massive value

Because I knew them.

So on top of just the strategic kind of logical business decision to niche down there is this like emotional reason to do it, which is that, you know them. And if you’ve never heard me say this before, write this down, this is something that we see a lot at brand builders.

You are always most powerfully positioned to serve

The person you once were, You are

Our most powerfully positioned to serve the person that you once were. Why? Because you know them, it’s exactly what Clint said. You know, the space, you know, the fears, you know, the frustrations, you know, the roadblocks, you, you know, their worries, you know, the challenges. And if you’ve made it through that, you know, the solutions, you know, the shortcuts, you know, the hacks, you know, where there needs to be hard work. And, and if you know their challenges, then you can speak to people in such a profound and succinct and poignant way that they hear you. And you break through the noise because you’re speaking their language. It’s why we say that that calling on your heart is the result of a signal that’s being sent out by someone else is, is when we help you find your uniqueness in phase one, we’re helping you figure out who is the person out there sending that signal, and what are you feeling drawn to?

And when we can match those twos together, it’s like, even though, even though you could be in a room full of noise, right? And there could be just this like chatter at a party that you couldn’t hear, the moment that someone says your name, it’s like this precision, this level of precision of, of poignant clarity that cuts through all of this noise. And that’s what you want your marketing to do, specifically your positioning and your, and your messaging. And the words that you’re using is you want it to send out this, this very succinct, poignant, sharp, clear, precise signal that says, this is what I do. This is who I do it for, because this is who I am, because this is who I have been, because I have been you, I have been in your shoes. I have been in your seat. I have had your fears.

I have had your worries. I have had your concerns. I have overcome the roadblocks that you have overcome. That is the connection of a calling. It’s the, it’s the, it’s the power of a guide. Somebody who says, I know what it’s like to be you, because I have been you, that is transformational. It occurs almost as divine. And, and that is what you want to do. And it’s, and it’s just like that is serving people in a deeper way, both from a, a monetary business, empirical logical strategic standpoint, and from an emotional artistic profound passion standpoint, you are most powerfully positioned to serve the person that you once were. And if you haven’t figured that out, that is why we exist at brand builders group to serve personal brands, because we know what it is like to try to build and monetize your brand, to want, to make impact, to want to make a difference in the world, to want to do good, and to want to make more income, you know, like to make enough income, to like achieve your dreams, be able to give and tie the donate and, and support and invest in new or whatever it is, right?

Like it’s not that we don’t like making money. We do like making money. We believe in making money. It’s just that we know that you’re here because you are a mission-driven messenger that you want to make impact, and that you feel like you have some message inside of you. And because that’s you, that’s why we’re here. We’re here for you because of you to serve you because that is who we are and who we have been. So thanks for being here. Keep coming back. Hopefully you enjoyed the interview with Clint Salter, as well as this recap edition, and just keep tuning in. We’re going to be here to encourage you and educate you and occasionally entertain you. We wish you all the best for now. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.

Ep 130: How To Get Rich in a Niche with Clint Salter

Clint Salter Interview [Full Edit]
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Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview. We are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call, hope to talk to you soon on with the show.
It’s so fun over the course of my career, to look back at people that I’ve intersected with along the way. And I used to be the young guy like trying to like come up and meet people. And now I’m the old guy looking back. And Clint Salter, who you are about to meet is one of my favorite people I have met on this journey. He is such a cool guy, such a warm spirit. And I think I was interviewed on his podcast like six years ago when he was just kind of like coming into the online space and now he has built this empire. And here’s, here’s, what’s amazing about it. He’s done it in a very, very narrow niche, vertical. So he is the CEO of something called the dance studio owners association. And it is a community of dance studio owners worldwide.
So he, he is from Western Sydney Australia, and that’s where he grew up. He was involved in, you know, he was owning a studio. He owned a studio when he was like 16. He’s sold multiple businesses. He’d sold three companies by the time he was 28. And now the group that he runs, the DSOA dance, suitors dance studio owners association has 32,000. There’s like 32,000 members in this community that reach 800,000 kids every week through dance. And so I just, we, our paths crossed here again recently. I hadn’t seen him in years and I couldn’t believe the success that he was having. So Clint, thanks for being here, buddy.
Rory, it’s such a pleasure to reconnect and I’m so excited for our conversation today.
Yeah, totally mate. It’s going to be great. Okay. So buddy, can you just give us like a super quick history of your journey, you know, because you really are an example of you had a passion, turned it into a business, then turned it into a personal brand. So can you like, just give us the highlights of, of what that looked like? Yeah,
Totally. So as you mentioned, I was 16. I started a dance studio with a friend, cause like, that was my, that was my thing. I love dancing. I come from a family of teachers, I love teaching. And so I put those two things together and said to my friend, like, why don’t we, why don’t we start a dance studio? We were living at home, didn’t have to pay rent, like, like why not do it? There was no risk there and we started it and it just took off. And we actually grew a business. We weren’t making millions of dollars in our dance studio, but for, you know, 16, 17, 18 year old kid, like I was taking home a few hundred dollars every week. And I was really, I was really happy with that. Why was it school? And then sold that business. We both wanted different things in the business and sold that business and went on to do some different things. I was an agent for five years managing TV personalities. I worked in news.
I manage the Jersey boys at one point.
I was. Yeah. So it was touring in company manager for Jersey, boys, the musical managing a team of 56, highly creative people, which was a very interesting part of my journey. And then I started consulting and at the beginning I was consulting to every type of business, whether you were a gym or a lawyer, a graphic designer. I think I had a Gardner at one point I was helping, I was helping every service-based business owner on how to generate new clients into their business. And I had a dance studio come to me, a owner that I’d worked with previously. And they were like, Hey, can you help me? And I was like, yeah, sure. Like I know this space. Like I love this space. And I started helping Sarah and I was like, I love this. Like I get to blend business and my passion, which was dance and working with dance studios.
And I had my own dance studio. And I was having dinner with a friend one night and they were like, you know what? You need to go all in on this dance studio market. And I was so afraid cause I was like, there’s not enough of them. And I don’t know if they have enough money to pay me. And so I was this person that was working with everyone and I didn’t want to limit the opportunity by just working with dance studio owners, but I treated it as an experiment and six years ago, I said, you know what, I’m going to do it for a year, just for a year. If it doesn’t work out, I can go back to helping everyone. But for a year I’m going to become the dance studio owner guide that studios grow their business, get back their lives. And that was six years ago and I haven’t, I haven’t looked back. Wow.
Wow. So I just, I love this story because I think that’s what you know, so we, we, we teach a thing called she hands wall, which is like trying to break through this wall of, of becoming, from being unknown to becoming known. And in our minds we go, I don’t want to limit my opportunity. And so I want to talk to lots of people, but the real way you break through the wall is by becoming known for one thing and being the go-to person on that one thing. And then when you break through the wall, if you want, you have a much better opportunity to expand into various stuff after. So, so what happened? I like to just flat out ask you, did they have enough money? Like, I mean, clearly you’re, you’re living in a high rise, brand new high rise in Miami, like doing, you’re doing your thing. So you, you had enough to survive, but, but did that take a while or was it actually pretty quick? And, and, and did you, did you also have to charge really high prices? Cause when I think of, you know, dance studios and gym owners, they’re not, you know, it’s are people rolling around in Bentleys and living in mansions, they’re doing it for passion. So you probably were, were you charging high dollars or were you doing like lower dollar stuff?
Yeah. So at the great question at the beginning, I was selling a five 99. It was $599 for my 12 week course. And so that’s what I was selling at the very beginning. I was selling a 12 week course it was $599, or you could buy it for $399 plus $47 a month to get support. So I was selling like the subscription model on the back of the course where they could ask me questions, you know, inside a Facebook group. And after about doing that for nearly a year. And I was like doing a webinar every week and I was getting really good at the webinar and for selling the webinar exactly to sell the program, to sell the program. You know, I had one, I had like one funnel, one channel, you know, I had Facebook ads, I had a funnel tool webinar and I was just getting good, getting really, really good at delivering that webinar and enrolling people into the program.
And that’s how I started. And I did that literally for a year of just building, building getting better, better, better. And I’m so glad I did that because now when people come to me or they see what they’re, you know, what we’re achieving and they’re like, Oh, you know, I’m signing up and I want to create five courses and I want to be on Facebook and Instagram and doing all of these things. I’m like, no, have one great course or program Maso, one distribution channel and just stop by getting really good at that before you do too many things and don’t master any of them,
Preach it, brother preach it, preach it loud. That, I mean, that is so, like I said, you’re, you’re such a great example of this. So you not only did you have one product for one audience, you had one vehicle of selling it and one traffic source of getting people there and you just, so you just dominated that thing, like you just mastered it and you were running one webinar every week. Like a live one.
Yes. Sometimes I do too, but mostly it was one, one live one day of the week. Did you do it on, I’m pretty sure it was Wednesdays. And they think it was I think it was around like 10 or 12:00 PM Eastern. And I was in Australia and I was like staying up surface super late and be like 11 or 12:00 AM. I’d be like running these webinars or I’d wake up super early. Or I do something, you know, on a Monday to get them on a Sunday night. You know, I w I was, I was just like doing the work, you know, I was doing the work. I had the background with this audience, with this industry and I knew them. I think that’s the other thing is that I’d been a part of this industry for such a long time, that I, I knew what their challenges were. I knew what they wanted. I knew how to make their business achieve more success. And so my focus was really on delivering value. You know, that $599 program had like 35 videos in it, you know, with worksheets and check. And those videos went for like 30, 30 minutes to an hour, you know, like I wanted to just like give them like everything I knew. And, and that’s a reason I believe…
And you say 30 minutes, 30, like 30 minute 30 videos at like 30, 30 to 60 minutes.
So they were there, there was 35 videos and on average are about 30 minutes. But a lot of them, there was a few that went for an hour and I had the time
Talking about a thousand minutes of, Oh yeah,
It was, it was, it was a lot. And that program though, birth really kind of put our business, our DSOA on the map. And from day I was able to launch share, you know, we launched a $47 a month membership. So that, that piece that I was tacking onto the program actually became a standalone program itself, a standalone membership level. And so from that 47, then we created a, our inner circle, which is our, our main coaching offering that we have now for, you know, for studio owners. So, so,
So do you still have the course, or the course get absolved into the $47 membership?
I actually didn’t get put into the $47 membership. It got put into our inner circle membership is like the foundation, the baseline. So when you join us in the inner circle, the first thing that you do would be to go through our studio success formula program, which is our 12 week foundation covering every piece of the dance studio or our flagship program. Now that we sell, which I created, I think it’s going to be nearly three years ago is our student attraction intensive. And that is a program that is just focused on how to attract enroll and retain students, because that is our audience’s biggest challenge. And if we can get them doing that, we can really help them transform their business. And then we can look after them with their finances, their latest sheep and their operations.
So is that the student attraction intensive? That’s a course.
That’s a course. Yeah. That’s an eight week course that we sell. Okay. How much is that? That’s $2,000.
All right. So that’s kind of like your, you have that and the $47 membership as like the two entry points.
Exactly. Most people will come through the student attraction intensive. So if you’re looking at like the core business model, now it’s focused on the student attraction intensive and then the inner circle program, the coaching experience.
Oh, I got ya. Okay. So the membership isn’t so much like a main thing anymore. Okay.
We still have it. We have we have just over a thousand members in, in DSOA, but you know, for us, our focus is really on, we get the best results when we can work with people in a deeper, in a deeper way. And so yeah,
A thousand members at 47 bucks a month, I mean, that’s 50 grand of 50 grand a month to help.
Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s fantastic. But you know, for me, where we’re at now in the company is where looking at, we know which of our members get results the fastest and how can we continue to accelerate their growth and their progress. And we can do our best work at our inner circle level. You know, those people are paying anywhere from 500 to a thousand dollars a month, depending on which level they’re at in the inner circle whether they’re a launch member or their premier member. And then, you know, we get to do awesome work in our student attraction intensive in our eight week course. And so that’s, that’s where our focus is currently.
I love, I love how you took, you know, like your first course was 600 bucks. You gave away the goods, right. To get yourself out of the, out of the ground. And then as you started to scale, you realized the number one pain point that my audience has is blank, you know, attracting new students and just focused on that. So, and that’s now $2,000. So it’s like, yeah, he took one sliver of this thing, you know, of this whole big thing. And now that one thing is, is, is so focused upon it’s three times over three times the cost of what the whole thing used to be, because you just really honed in on what they need. And then from there you move them up into, so for 500, a thousand dollars a month, then do you guys have other coaches? Or is it,
Yeah, so it’s it’s awesome. So inside of the inner circle, we have studio growth coaches. So these are studio owners who are doing over a million dollars a year in their business. And so they come on board as coaches in the inner circle. So we have a few of those. We have a Facebook ads coach, a profit first coach, and in-classroom coach a website and tech coach. And then we bring guests coaches in every month as well. But yeah,
But the one on is they have one-on-one calls with these people.
So the one-on-one calls happen with the studio guardian.
Yeah. And then you have, so, and then you have like other resident experts that kind of teach like that
Coaching calls. Yeah. So, so our, our kind of like expert, expert coaches, they teach like the Facebook ads and the finance and the legal and that piece. They do a group call every single month. And then our studio growth coaches will take one-on-one calls. And we also provide virtual retreats in person retreats curriculum. We do round tables. We have squads where everyone’s in a group of eight to 12 studio owners. Like we’ve got a lot of, a lot of cool stuff inside of the inner circle for them.
I just, I love, it’s like you’re serving this one niche in such a deep way, because it’s all you’re focused on. It’s what, you know, it’s what you’re passionate about. And I just, I just absolutely love this man. So interesting. So, so, so looking back here now is that basically the essence of the advice you would give to somebody who is starting cause, you know, we’ve got some of our clients are celebrity mega superstars. A lot of our clients are intermediate, but we have a good portion of people probably who listened to the podcast who are not yet clients who are just like early in the journey. And I think it’s kind of like they’re struggling to go, you know, to figure out their positioning in the world and who they should serve. And are you, I mean, would you say like, would you just basically recommend that path that you followed and just figure out what it is for you? I would,
I would. And I think important thing with that is that you stick to something, you know, I see a lot of people who are chopping and changing, they’re chopping and changing their message they’re chopping and changing their audience. They’re chopping and changing the content that they’re teaching because they don’t get a million dollar launch, you know, three months out of the gate. And you know, for me it was persistence, it was resilient. It was making that commitment to an audience, you know, sharing my message with them for a year. And so I would, I would ask everyone and challenge everyone. Who’s he is to pick it, pick a niche, pick an audience, you know, decide on what you’re going to share, what wisdom, what insights, what teachings you’re going to share with that audience, make sure it’s in alignment with what their challenges and their struggles are.
And that what you’re teaching delivers value and gets them results and focus on them deeply for a year, commit to that market and that message for a year. And I think anyone can do extremely well if they’re, if they’re focused and they have clarity and they’re delivering value at the end of the day, why we’ve done well is because delivering value to our customers is absolutely, you know, at the core. And it’s never been more than, than this year with COVID. You know, when our studio owners had shut down, when we had to take them virtual in four days we were doing one or two calls every single day, you know, with our members for like four months you know, to get them through this and, and to support them. And that, that is why we’re still standing and we’re surviving and we’ve had a terrific year, but we’ve also been able to really make a huge impact on our, on our members this year as well.
That is what it’s all about. My friends, Clint Salter where should people go, man, if they wanna, if they wanna like follow you. And I mean, gosh, if you’re a dance studio owner, you, you, you gotta be plugged into this community.
Yes. If you’re a studio or a no, please come and visit [email protected]. If you’re not a studio owner, I still love to hear from you. I’m on Facebook, Clint Salta. You’ll find me there, shoot me through a message. Love to share anything that I, that I can with you, but you’re only in a really good hands with Rory and he’s amazing company. So yeah. I’d love to hear from you.
Well, thanks brother. Clint Salter, ladies and gentlemen send him some love if you can. And we wish you all the best. My friend. Thanks for [inaudible]

Ep 129: How To Get Your Product Found with John Jantsch | Recap Episode

Speaker 1: (00:06)

[Inaudible]

RV: (00:06)

Welcome to the recap edition of the influential personal brand podcast. We are breaking bad breaking down John Jantsch interview. And I’ve known him for a lot of years. And so it was a great, a great time to catch up with him. AJ is here with me. We’re going to give you our top three takeaways. I’m going to go first today. And as we were talking, you know, it wasn’t so much exactly something that John said, but it was something that he said that made me think about something that we have talked about. You know he mentioned our mutual friend, Mike Michalowitz and we were talking about writing books and it kind of dawned on me that when you write a book, your book shouldn’t be an initial hypothesis. It should be a final conclusion. In other words, you don’t publish a book when you have an idea about how something is, you publish it at the end, once you’ve kind of tested and tried out your concepts on your clients and yourself and your own business in your own life. And I guess that was just a simple takeaway, but it kind of edified in my mind. Oh, that is, that is worth realizing that it’s what happens at the end of a, of a career of research and testing. So that was my first.

AJV: (01:20)

Yeah. And honestly, mine is quite similar to that. And it just talked about, he talked a lot about when he has an idea I’m reading my notes here, so I don’t forget, but he has an idea. He immediately started writing about it and I thought that was really good. And it’s kind of seems like a duh aha moment, but it’s really more of like putting that writing out into the public. So, so as soon as I have an idea, I start writing about it and testing the content. And that’s where I get feedback and suggestions and ideas. It’s not that all of this content creation happens in a silo. It actually happens out in the open in the public with other people participating and help vet the idea. And that’s very similar to yours. I don’t publish an initial hypothesis. I publish the conclusion, but how I get there is I actually start putting the content out immediately. I put it out in blogs and podcasts and social media, and I use my community to give me the process of bedding through it, to figure out what really stuck. And I thought that was a really great quick takeaway.

RV: (02:22)

Yeah. And it’s kind of like, it gives you a lot more confidence that like this, these ideas have been tested

AJV: (02:27)

And people really like it and it’s valuable. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a very good, it’s creating your own built-in audience for the content.

RV: (02:34)

Yeah. Yeah. And they’re all kind of like your audience is helping you, helping you write it. So all right. So my second takeaway was I think just, just a good reminder of, and this is a central premise of we have a phase three event called high traffic strategies where we talk all about like, you know, paid traffic and everything. And it was just this idea that your audience already exists somewhere. So you just got to figure out while you’re, while you’re building your own audience, you need to also be working to find an existing audience. And I think there’s so many opportunities for partnerships here. And that’s one thing that John has done really well with his whole community. But for you in your business, think about who serves the same client you serve, but in a different way. And at brand builders group, I think as we get more, you know, mature as a company, we’ve only been around for a couple of years, but I think over time, our team will get better at pairing up our own clients. And I was thinking we have this, you know, we have a client ed who has a marketing firm who does marketing for small business owners. And then we have lots of other clients that are financial advisors and they do wealth planning and they often manage 401k’s for small business owners. So they’re, they’re selling to the same person, but they’re selling to different services. They’re not competitive. And that’s a great place to look for partnerships is who is serving your same audience, but with a different product or service.

AJV: (04:09)

Yeah. That’s so good, simple, simple, but really important and strategic and something that quite often we overlook the simplest things. So I think that’s really, that’s really good. Okay. So my, my second thing, and this is not a new thing that we’ve heard from a ton of our guests, but again, it’s one of those things that I feel like out in the normal everyday world world, you don’t hear a lot about, which is the focus has to be on building your email list, not on your followers. And I think that’s just, that’s so huge. And it’s so repetitive with almost every single guest who comes on our show is yes, there’s tons of value when it comes to social media, but the focus has to be on building your email list. Do not forget the importance of your email list. And for all of you out there who don’t have a process or a plan of building your email list, get one, find one, what’s your lead capture. What’s the simple download what’s that ebook or video course or a webinar funnel, whatever it is, whatever you can get out there to drive all of your social media followers to a place where you can capture their email list. That is the priority. And again, once again, that as a, a huge part of the truth behind building a sustainable personal brand is having an email list that you can market to.

RV: (05:29)

Yeah. And you know, one thing that you did, you kind of spearheaded this internally for our new website, which I would have never even thought to do, but you guys did this, the whole team was you created a lead magnet for each different event that we have, or like each different product. So it’s like not only are we building an email list now, now we have a dedicated list, a segmented list for every product offering that we have that’s developing. And that’s kind of like, you know, if you already have an email list, that’s kind of like a next level version of it.

AJV: (06:00)

Well, it’s just like for any of you who already have content, you already have a lead capture. You just haven’t turned it into it. Or you have, and maybe you have several different products. Maybe you have a book and a course and a coaching program, well, you should have a lead magnet for each of those. Or maybe you have a coaching program with four different curriculum offerings while you should have a lead magnet for each of those. Like, if you already have the curriculum, you already have the lead magnet, you just haven’t turned it into it. And that was the beautiful thing about what we did on our new website. It’s like, no, we have 15 event curriculums, 15 different two day events that we do. So I already had the workbook and the PowerPoint I just had to go through and edit it and turn it into a simple lead capture. The content was already there. It just needed to be formulated into something that people would want as a free standalone product. Yeah.

RV: (06:51)

But like, literally what you’re saying, you already have it. Like, I never thought that, and it took another person like you to just go, Hey, we already have this. Let’s just, you know, make a shortened version and make it a lead magnet. So you, you step over this stuff, even, even when you do it all day, every day, like, like we do teamwork, teamwork makes the dream work Baden okay, awesome. So the third point for me is a total nerdy thing, a total tech thing. And you’ve probably heard me light up cause I light up about nerdy stuff like

AJV: (07:21)

This, just trying to get free consulting,

RV: (07:25)

Which is what I’m doing on every, every interview. That’s what I, that is what I’m doing. But you know, when we, when we teach even high traffic strategies and there’s a section on Google and we talk about search engine optimization and H one tags and H two tags and metatags but there’s this thing called structured data that I did not know about. Like, I literally, you know, with you listen to the interview, it’s like, what is this? Like, how do I not know this, this thing with structured data is just apparently like, you know, tables and, and just another way to signal to Google what this element is on your page, so that your page ranks for people searching for those terms. And I mean,

Ep 128: How To Get Your Product Found with John Jantsch

RV: (00:06)

Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview. We are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call, hope to talk to you soon on with the show

RV: (01:03)

You are about to meet someone. My friend, John Jantsch, who has a reputation for being one of the most practical marketing strategists in the world for small business owners. He and I actually met years ago. We shared the stage at an amazing event called social media marketing world, which we love our, our very close mutual friend, Jay Baer introduced us. And then over the years, we’ve just kind of known of each other. And John is the author of several books. I mean, duct tape marketing, I guess you would say has maybe his flagship book, duct tape marketing is been you know, it’s, it’s become a kind of like a main ubiquitous term in the marketing world, which we’ll talk a little bit about. And he also has an agency they do done for you work. They work with companies, you know, all over the place he’s been featured in all types of major media spoken at large events. You know, he’s spoken for Ted and he’s just a really amazing guy. And he also has one of the, the biggest marketing podcasts in, in the universe of iTunes. And so we connected recently at a an author mastermind group that joined up and I thought, ah, you gotta, you gotta meet John if you don’t know him. So welcome. Welcome to the show, my friend,

JJ: (02:27)

Hey, thanks for having me. And I’ll give my first personal branding tip you. You introduced me as one of the world’s most practical, small business marketing experts. That was actually a line I made up and started saying and saying, and saying, now obviously, you know, you kind of have to deliver on that. But you know, it was sort of a self-proclaimed title that, that overtime I sort of made happen, but that’s my first branding tip.

RV: (02:51)

I mean, I, I love that cause I think you know, do you know Sally Hogshead? Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. So Sally is amazing and you know, everyone’s always like try to be outside the box, outside the box, but you know, she taught me this lesson when you’re, when you’re trying to market your business, you actually want to put yourself inside a box, something that people can clearly define as like your, the person on this. And most of that, especially when you first start, you just make it up and then, and then it becomes real

JJ: (03:20)

Well again, I think you have to deliver on it, but, you know, you’re the one who gets to at least frame it and, and define it. I mean, it, you know, whether it’s true or not, it will be told by, you know, how the market perceives it. But, but, but framing it, defining it, you know, one of the things I think that’s, that’s beautiful about doing that too, is that, you know, a lot of people have come and gone with this platform or that platform and, and, you know, being like, Oh, I’m going to be the early mover on that. I think when you have a, a point of view, you know, about, here’s what I believe, you know, sometimes some of that stuff becomes, you know, not, not that relevant. I mean, conforms come and go. You know, for example, you know, I’ve basically, I’ve said marketing as a system and that you know, it starts with strategy before tactics. And I have, that’s been my mantra for 25 years now. And frankly, you know, it’s, it’s independent of any of the platforms coming and going because that’s, I believe that that that will never change when it comes to working with and consulting with small businesses.

RV: (04:25)

Totally. And so can you take us, can you take us to the, I know this is like kind of the original work, but duct tape marketing, can you just like tell us what the premise is and like what that’s, what that’s all about? Cause I think it’s super relevant.

JJ: (04:40)

Well, well, so I’ll just give you an, I can do this pretty quickly, but the whole backstory, you know, I started my own marketing consulting firm about 30 years ago. I right out of college, worked for a, an ad agency for about five years and said, you know, any dummy can do this. I’ll launch my own.

RV: (04:56)

However, the entrepreneurs, any idiot can do this on their own.

JJ: (05:01)

I had no plan, you know, I, I knew I could hustle work. And so I got projects, you know, big companies, big projects, little companies, little projects, and took whatever came along. And at some point I realized I really like working with small business owners and they just, you know, you’re working with the person, you know, not necessarily a department or a company. And I just really love that, but they’re also really frustrating because, you know, I’d had kind of agency training and I was like, well, this is how you do it. And you know, they don’t have the same budgets or attention spans or anything. And so one day I just said, look, I’m going to create a way where I can walk into somebody and say, here’s what I’m going to do. Here’s what you’re going to do here are the results we hope to get by the way, here’s what it costs you want it.

JJ: (05:44)

And, you know, after the first three people said, like, where have you been? You know, I realized that in trying to solve my frustration, I was actually tapping into what is still today. One of the greatest frustrations for entrepreneurs and owners, it’s very hard to buy marketing services because everybody’s selling someone a piece of it or, you know, this idea of the week or that idea of the weekend. And so they just kind of lose control of it. And so the fact that somebody was kind of bringing up a package called marketing, you know, made it, made a ton of sense because I was sort of productizing, if you will a service of marketing, I thought it had to have a name. It had to have a brand and, you know, John’s consulting service didn’t really cut it. And so I just on a whim, quite frankly, just started calling it duct tape marketing.

JJ: (06:32)

And, and it was, it was because of my years of working with small business owners it kind of was this idea of look, you know, you’re making it happen, you’re making it up every day. Some days it feels like, you know, it doesn’t have to be always have to be perfect. It doesn’t always have to be pretty, it just has to work. And I think a lot of people kind of associate that sort of practical idea, you know, with, with the, the actual tool of duct tape. So that was the metaphor that I was really, really trying to play off of. And it, and it just, you know, for a lot, I mean, there’s a strange affection in the U S at least maybe in Canada, too, with, with duct tape. So it kind of played on that sort of fondness that some people have even jokingly, but also really kind of hit home with the sort of practical nature of let’s just get this thing to work.

RV: (07:18)

Yeah. That’s why I love that. It also has kind of the like double entendre, if you will, of, of, of stickiness, which is like what you want your marketing to be, but you know, when you say it just has to work, I think there is like this myth, you know, cause we’ve been, we’ve been small business owners several times. We’ve been startups several times that it’s like, you think that, Oh, there’s there’s these, these, these large companies, or, you know, let’s say like a multi seven figure and eight figure company that, gosh, they just have all these beautiful marketing systems figured out and dialed in and it’s like, they fricking down, it’s a mess. I mean, we interviewed Amanda tress. Not that she’s not a mess at all, but, but she admitted, she’s got a $50 million business and she’s running on spreadsheets. Like it’s, it’s crazy of, of going. It doesn’t have to be pretty. It just has to work. So I, I love that. And I think that’s you know, that is duct tape, right? Just, just duct tape.

JJ: (08:18)

Right. And I’m not necessarily saying that’s the best way. I’m just tapping into reality that, that just, as you mentioned, that just is the reality of how so many people do it. I mean, I, there are definitely more beautiful ways in which to build a business. If you’ve got everything figured out, if you’ve got the funding, if you’ve got the, you know, the patients, if you’re not stressed out, you know, there’s a lot of beautiful ways to build a business. But what I was trying to tap into was the fact that people were saying, yeah, that, that is what we’re doing. Can we, can we actually take that and turn it into a system? So

RV: (08:52)

Relating this to personal brands, cause I know you work all different types of small businesses. But you know, you, you are an example of like, you know, the, the kind of people we serve, authors, speakers, consultants the, I feel like we have a lot, I’m gonna take advantage of a free coaching call here. Cause a lot of our members, what we’ve they’ve been doing is they’ve been building their product. Right. So they’re in that stage where it’s like, okay, they’ve been wrestling with building their product, whether it’s a physical product or it’s a video course or a coaching program or whatever. And then one day they go, Oh, I’m done building it. Now I actually have to do something to tell people that it’s here. And when you, can you talk a little bit about both the mindset and then also maybe some of the tactics, you know, tactical advice that you would give to somebody in that moment. It’s like, okay, I now have my widget. What’s the first thing I should go do to like create my first customer or my first lead from, from marketing. Wow.

JJ: (09:58)

So, so I will botch this, but there is a a Chinese proverb that goes something like when’s the best time to plant a tree. And the answer is 20 years ago. You know, but if you didn’t do it, then today is the best time to plan it. So, so my point in that is that, you know, and I know that a lot of things have changed in the world, you know, in the last 20 years. But you know, I started building a following before I had any idea what I was going to sell to them. You know, I started talking to people, I started educating, I loved sharing my ideas. I mean, I had clients. And so I talked about what might, what worked for my clients. But that’s, you know, that’s the first bit of advice, which doesn’t really answer your question, but I mean, that’s the first bit, you know, don’t, don’t wait until you have a perfect product, you know, go out and start talking to people, go out, go out and start seeing if it resonates, go out and get their advice.

JJ: (10:50)

I know some of the first couple of courses I’d built with potential customers you know, I said, Hey, come on in here. Here’s what I’m thinking. Oh, that doesn’t work for you. Okay. What if we did this? You know, and then it was like, okay, here’s round two. I mean, so, so start doing it with people as opposed. I mean, I, I, I know I had a couple products that I D you know, I sat in a room and launched. I said, Oh, no, the world needs us. You know? And then it was like, press go. And like, nothing, you know, nobody wanted it, it didn’t make sense. You know, it was, it was the wrong price. It was all those things. So so you know, that to me is, is what you have to do is you have to actually just go start talking to people. I mean, even if you’re not done, you know, here’s what it’s going to be. You know, here’s what it’s going to look like. Here’s what the problem is solves. Y you know that again, still, probably haven’t answered your question directly, but I mean,

RV: (11:44)

But I think it’s important cause it’s like a prelaunch, right. Is to go build, build the audience before you build the product. Like, that’s, that’s a great thing. It sounds like the way you built the audience was basically like, just teaching and talking about what you were interested in and asking questions and like sharing what, you know, and then people started following and then it was like, they were basically, they were there when you were ready to launch something. Yeah.

JJ: (12:09)

Th that’s right. But, but I think also you know, you get kind of, I mean, people talk about beta users. I mean, early adopters. I mean, you get people that actually help you improve it, what it is that you’re building. And that’s the part that I love. And then those people generally speaking, become evangelists to not just, not just buyers. There was a practice right when ad-words maybe kind of came around. And so this is, this is probably 20 years ago and I don’t think it’s taught anymore. But I think it’s, it’s instructional. You know, w when you could buy clicks back in the good old days for about 10 cents you know, on some things, a lot of marketers would actually put up landing pages and advertise products and courses and eBooks and all kinds of stuff that didn’t exist.

JJ: (12:59)

And then literally would you would, you know, take some of those early opt-ins and early buyers and, and create a product with, you know, they found out which one was the most popular. Again, probably shady, probably a bit unethical certainly not affordable today, you know, because of the, the, the online space has changed so much. But I think it’s instructional in that, that, you know, when I, when I start thinking of an idea, I start writing about it as though it is not like I have this course, but here’s the premise behind this idea, you know, here’s the problem I’m trying to solve. Here’s what I think is broken. And you start immediately getting feedback from people about, you know, not only is that a good idea or bad idea, but maybe, you know, how how to, to actually go about solving. Yeah.

RV: (13:48)

I, I hear that. You kind of saying that that’s kind of similar to what you did. You weren’t like launching landing pages for collecting money, for things that didn’t exist, but you were doing that early adaptive, like come in here, be a beta user and then test it out.

JJ: (14:04)

You and I have a mutual friend, Mike McCollough, which that I think just has done something brilliantly over the years, he gets an idea for a book. And in his mind, his product really is, is booked. He gets an idea for it, and he just starts talking about it get some group of people interested in the idea. And then he just holds a two day workshop and they actually come and they build, you know, how this idea would work, which ultimately turns into his book, which then ultimately turns into a course which ultimately then turns into a consulting or coaching licensing program. And he’s, he’s replicated that model about five times now, you know, and, and his, you know, what he’s personally selling is, is the book itself. And, you know, he’s selling hundreds of thousands of copies of books now using kind of proven method of, of actually having before he even writes one word, or maybe before he even pitches it to a publisher, he’s got a really good book written or, or outline created. And even some case studies, maybe a four for the book, which then again, his books exploded other things. But I think that’s a, I think it was a really informative model.

RV: (15:14)

Yeah. So, so let’s say you now, so let’s say you do that. Is there anything that you go, whether it’s a book or a course or whatever, I think that there’s this fear, you know, for every entrepreneur is going, Oh, crap. Like, what do I do? Cause there’s so many, like you said, there’s so many platforms, right? So it’s like, well, should I start a podcast? Should I do Google ads? Should I buy Facebook ads? Should I have a Facebook group? Should I send emails? Should I go knock on doors? Should I like, like, how do you navigate that list of a bazillion things you could do to figure out what you should do?

JJ: (15:49)

Sure. you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, if you’ve built a product and now you’re facing, like I’m not going to eat unless I sell some of this you know, go out. I mean, to me, the easiest thing is go out and find people who already have a list who already have a following and figure out a way to add value to their community. I mean, that’s the fastest way. You know, if I came to you or you’ve got a community and I came to you and I said, Hey, I’ve got this thing that would be great for your community. You know, we can, you know, we can revenue share or I’ll give it away or whatever it is. You know, that’s, that’s the fastest way to start building some things and

RV: (16:28)

Find an audience that’s that has that already exists. That has an appetite for what you’re offering.

JJ: (16:34)

Yeah. I mean, that’s the fastest way. You know, it doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody, you know, you go, Oh, I’m going to go talk to this person who I know has 2 million followers, and they’re going to put, you know, obviously it’s a relationship building. It’s, you know, I’ve got to have something of value for that person. It’s not just about the money. You know, it’s about serving their community. Hopefully. So, I mean, that’s the fastest way, but, but ultimately, you know what I believe still today, even though a lot of people talk about Facebook and communities and groups and all that stuff, focus on building the list, the email list is pretty much going to be everything for you. So if you’re going to be on Facebook, if you’re going to have a podcast, you know, if you’re going to be doing videos on YouTube, somehow connect those back to a reason why somebody would give you their email address because that’s you know, I’m not saying that just build an email list and it’s like minting money, you know, but that’s how you build the community, the long-term connection to the community that you own.

RV: (17:40)

Yeah. Well, I, I think that, I love this idea of, of the F the first, so the email lists certainly it’s like always really good reminder also though. I do think people were so consumed with the idea of building a following, which, you know, I don’t know for you, but for me every time we’ve done it, and we’ve now done it three times from scratch, it’s been slow and painful and hard, and it takes a long time and you it’s like, what else are you going to do? You got to do it. But there, if there is a shortcut it’s going, who has this? Who has my audience already? And what can I do for that community and that person to get in front of them? I mean, that’s, that is so profound. I think it’s, it’s simple, but it’s easy to overlook that, that this, your audience exists somewhere already.

JJ: (18:34)

Well, it doesn’t just have to be, cause a lot of times it’d be people immediately think of, you know, who are the A-listers, you know, that everybody knows and they want to go to those folks, but there are all these companies out there. You know, I started my, my first big sort of success in that realm of kind of partnering. And again, this was early on and you know, we’re not everybody was producing all kinds of educational content, but I produced a, an ebook for a software company. Well, I, they didn’t know I produced it for them, but I produced it. It reached out to them and said, Hey, all of your customers are small business owners. They’re all trying to learn how to market. If they’re better marketers, they’re going to buy more of your software. And so what if we did this thing where we co-branded this ebook and I probably got 30,000 subscribers, you know, over a five-year period from that relationship, you know, there are lots and lots of people that need you know, what you have to say and have an audience that, that, that if you can make it right for them, make it valuable for them.

JJ: (19:34)

Then, you know, you’ll be invited in, you know, as a friend and effectively, I mean, I did thousands, tens of thousands of dollars of business with those people that they’re resellers, you know, because I was shown, you know, seen as this expert. And, and it just, you know, it really launched a lot of ways that it really launched the commercial side of duct tape marketing from a consulting side.

RV: (19:58)

See, I love that because, because everyone goes, yeah, I want Tony Robbins to send an email blast for me. Well, okay. It might like, it might take a minute right for that to happen, but these companies or the other one would be like associations, right? Associations are desperate for content and training for their members. And if you can show up and do a free training, now it’s like their email list became your email list. And then, and it actually could become that way if you capture those, those emails. I mean that’s, and when you do it with a company they’re not trying to sell the same thing you are, there’s just trying to serve the same people.

JJ: (20:39)

That’s right. And in a lot of ways, the way they’re going to look at it is, Hey, this is, this is work. We don’t have to do, it’s a value add for our customers, you know, whereas the other influencers, like I got only so many times I can send to my list. Right. And so, so the, so the, the calculus for them is, you know, it’s going to be much more what’s in it for me that whereas the company is going to be much more theoretically, you know, is this is, well, it’s still going to be what’s in it for me. But, but the, the math is different. What’s in it for me is I don’t have to do it now. And my

RV: (21:16)

Trying to get at the same thing, they’re both going for different things. Yeah. And I, I think I mean, that’s a, that’s a, that’s amazing. Every, every company has a database of customers and you might have a zero email lists, but you go, somebody is servicing small businesses. Someone is servicing, you know, single moms, someone is servicing, you know, gym owners in some way. And, you know, you just figure out who you get in front of. So I really love, I really love that if like, if there is a shortcut, you know, that, that would be, that would be it. Yeah.

JJ: (21:51)

Yeah. Everybody’s starting a business. Should, that should be their first marketing. I mean, they’ve got to build all the other stuff, but that’s the, that’s the jumpstart.

RV: (22:00)

So what about paid? Can we talk about, well, actually, before we get to paid, let’s talk SEO because you actually have a book on, on this you know, you know, something about SEO. And I, I, what do you think small business owners need to know about SEO? Because it’s kind of like this, Oh, this Ninja tactic, like high-level tech thing, but you know, there’s a lot of simplicity to it too, you know? And I, I thought it was interesting when I found out you had written a book on SEO because I was like, gosh, you know, I, in my mind, I almost think of it as like a big business strategy. And, and yet, you know, you obviously see the, the application for first, for super small businesses.

JJ: (22:48)

Well, absolutely. I mean, if you think about the services that you buy or, you know, you travel a lot back when people used to do that the you know, you’d come into a town, it’s like, eh, I want to find a restaurant and I want to get my hair cut. I want to, you know, whatever. I mean, we turned to a search, right. For that. And, you know, because you’re holding the phone you know, Google says, Oh, you’re in that town. And that’s 3.4 miles. You can find this thing. Well, that’s all SEO. I mean, that’s your, if, if, if local businesses aren’t showing up in the maps pack or, you know, the, the various ways that they show up in search, I mean, they, they don’t exist in a lot of cases. So it is certainly you know, a big business strategy.

JJ: (23:30)

It’s an every business strategy just because of the buying behavior. You know, today we all, I, I, I would guess that, that, you know, 90% of, of purchases today start with some form of search. I mean, if, if somebody came to you and said, you need to, you need to hire this duct tape marketing company. I mean, they’re, they’re amazing, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re certainly gonna turn online. You’re not gonna pick up a phone and call me. I mean, you’re going to do a search and maybe if you’re trying to figure out if I’m, you know, if I’m legit or not, you’re going to deeply search and see what other people are saying and stuff. So any rate SEO is, is hyper hyper important for every business, probably more important for smaller businesses who don’t have, you know, budgets to, to blast over the airwaves.

RV: (24:16)

So when you talk, when you talk about the budget, so what do I need to do as a small business owner? Right? Like, I don’t have a bunch of money to do paid, like, what do I actually need to do when it comes to SEO?

JJ: (24:27)

So truthfully SEO is a long-term game. And a lot of people don’t want to tell you that a lot of people want to tell you, Oh, no, you just, you hire us to SEO this stuff. Well, what you have to realize is that as is that search engine optimization is a strategic combination of your website, your structure of your website, your content, and then some technical factors. It’s not like black magic. If you don’t have great content, if your website’s not set up the right way, you know, for that content to be structured and displayed. And then there’s some little off, you know, are there other signals out there in the world of other people saying your content is great? I mean, that’s, you know, that’s really the part that people miss. I mean, it, it begins and ends with good, relevant, useful content.

JJ: (25:13)

That’s structured in the right way. I can’t, if you hired me and you don’t have much content, or it’s a bunch of crap, I can’t help you from an SEO standpoint. And that’s the part that I think a lot of people misunderstand that the, the optimization part is to take good, useful content. That’s structured in a way that that makes sense to Google and to, to, to send more signals. That’s the optimized part. So there are on page things that you can do in terms of internal linking, you know, amount of keyword structure, those things goofy thing called structured data. And it a goofy thing called metadata, which we will get into, but it’s all pretty simple stuff. And it’s gotten simpler because Hey, people have written plugins that make all that stuff, you know, happen for you. So all of the on-page stuff is just a matter of paying attention.

JJ: (26:02)

And then there’s clearly some off foot what people call off page signals. And those are just do other people like you or other people linking to your content? Do you get mentioned in social media or does your content get mentioned in social media and shared and circulated? I mean, those, you know, that when it really comes down to it, it’s great content on your site. It’s it’s then, you know, content that’s linking back to your content on other people’s sites. I mean, that’s really it. And, and if you, but it, to me, it all begins and ends with a content that is useful, you know, based on what people are searching for.

RV: (26:39)

You mentioned something weird on the ongoing, back to the, you said there’s something weird called data, what structured data, what is structured data?

JJ: (26:49)

It’s just it’s just some HTML code that tells Google very specifically, what something is. This is a book, this is a person, you know, this is an address. This is a local business. This is a blog post. You know, this is a list of products. This is a list of reviews. I mean, so it’s a whole set of different types of data that that, that if you add, you know, the HTML code to the data that’s, that’s under the hood, you know, in your website structure it, it gives, it’s just another very potent round of information for Google.

RV: (27:30)

So it’s, it’s kind of similar to metadata. Although metadata can be visible like INSEARCH, but it’s, it’s just, like you’re saying, it’s a signal back to Google saying, this is what, this, this is what lives here on this page.

JJ: (27:44)

Well, and maybe this is what this specific item is, you know? So, so a lot of times, like if you do a search real easy examples, you do a search for you know, movie, a movie theater you know, or, or, you know, best new movies in 2020. And, and, you know, you’ll see a list that is basically structured data. You know, here’s all the movies, here’s the movie times, here’s the price, here’s the theaters, you know, so it’s a table, you know, that’s presented in your search results. Well that, you know, that table is constructed, you know, using structured data to tell Google, this is what this stuff is, because, you know, there could be something like, you know, duct tape market. Is that a book? Is that a podcast? Is that a blog, you know, is that a company name? And so a lot of what it’s do, you’re using structured data to is to not let, not, not leave Google to guess, you know, what it is that, that thing is that it’s you know, you’re saying, no, I’m talking about the book.

RV: (28:47)

Interesting. I didn’t know that. So when you see like the little tables that pop up, it’s just basically directly populating stuff, right. Off of sites, based on what the structure data like input is.

JJ: (28:59)

That’s right. And, and we’ve had structured data for a long time. If you think about lists, you know, lists are basically structured data, you know, you see, but whether it’s a numbered list or an unordered list with bullet points, that’s, you know, that’s structured data and the concept of structured data, but now we’re basically just putting HTML code around all that stuff to say in the, this is a list of books. This is, you know, these, this is a list of authors.

RV: (29:26)

Interesting. So and so it’s like for each element, almost on a page, you could have some structured data. Cause cause you would have like your H one tags, H two tags, meta-tags your TA the page title, like the, like the URL, those are all things that would, are signals, but then that, this is interesting. I’ve never, I’ve never heard this before. Like

JJ: (29:53)

He’s gotten very deep in the weeds here, but the good news is, as I said, there are some

RV: (29:58)

Practical, small business marketing. Excellent.

JJ: (30:02)

That’s right. That’s right. But the good news, is there a WordPress plugins, if your sites on WordPress that you add to the site and essentially then every page you’ll have the ability to fill in elements that you want. So you’re not actually having to get in there and write the HTML code yourself. Yeah. so, and it’s, you know, for local businesses, I mean, it, it actually, it actually brings in not only the address, but the law latitude and longitude, you know, their business. I mean, so it’s a very, very specific signal to Google. Yeah. This is a local business.

RV: (30:35)

Wow. yeah, that is, that is awesome. Well, so there you go. I mean, there’s, there’s a lot to learn here and you see like, there’s, there’s the strategy and then there is the tactics, but well, thanks for this, John, and for this, this introduction I mean, super, super interesting and useful stuff. Where should people go if they want to connect with you or learn more about duct tape marketing and the stuff that you do?

JJ: (31:01)

So the easiest place is just a pretty much everything I’ve written for the last couple of decades. You could find that duct tape marketing.com and that’s D U C T T a P E marketing.com

RV: (31:15)

Duck tape like D U C K tape marketing.com.

JJ: (31:19)

Well, just plug it into, plug it into a search engine and see what happens, but I bought pretty much every variation of this spelling. And so it all, they all just redirect to, to, to

RV: (31:32)

Right spot. So you get a spelling lesson, you get a bonus spelling lesson as well as fast,

JJ: (31:38)

Because more and more than one more than one time, you know, when I’ve been out there speaking in the world and whatnot, and they’ll have in the program, you know, like not, it didn’t happen in social media marketing world, but, but it has happened before you know, where we’re appropriate. We’ll put John Jansen, D U C K T a P E marketing.

RV: (31:57)

Yeah. Well, I, you know, the D and the F are also right next to each other on the keyboard. So that could be a bad mix up.

JJ: (32:04)

Yeah, that’s right. Well, that’s right. Well, the the the the, the, the, the confusing part is there actually is a brand of duct tape. That is Fran. Yeah. So do, do you want to, do you want a history lesson on where the name duct tape marketing or not duct tape marketing, but duct tape came from, we probably don’t have time for that. We might have to do that on another one.

RV: (32:26)

I mean, if it could go for it, if you, if you think it’s relevant, it’s not relevant at all, but, well then definitely.

JJ: (32:34)

I mean, that’s what we’re really interested is the irrelevant stuff. So, so world war II the, the, you know, the army commissioned the company to make some, some tape that would help them repair the tops of those canvas Jeeps. I had to be waterproof, you know, I had to really stick. And so it was called something like GP 47, you know, fix it or something. And all the GIS just called it duct tape because of the, you know, it was, it was waterproof, you know, so they, they were talking about Duc K after world war II ended we started putting air conditioning in homes. And so that was, you know, all the venting and every other thing that ran through those homes. And some of these ingenious GI said, Hey, you know what? This stuff actually seals the seams in the gaps between the UCT ducks in their air condition. And so it officially became duct tape because it was used in that fashion. Nobody uses it for that anymore, but now it’s sort of universally loved as a, as a fix it for, for everything. So I don’t know if that was interesting or not

RV: (33:45)

Super interesting. I mean, that is like, what that is it? Yeah. You just won somebody a hundred thousand dollars on a future episode of jeopardy or something like, and, you know, you remember John Jansen on the influential, personal brand podcast, when you, you know, you send us a little referral fee when you get that quiz question. Right. that’s, that’s not, I had never heard that. And I have actually wondered that before, like where in the heck, like where in the heck does this name come from? Well, we’ll put a link there to duct tape marketing dot com John Jantz, which is pronounced like pants, but spelled a little bit different. But if you search duct tape marketing, you, you, you will find John. And obviously we’ll link up to him, all of the social profiles on our, on our blog and stuff. Well, John, thank you for being here and just for your, your consistent commitment to marketing principles that have lasted, you know, outlasted all sorts of different platforms, you know, over, over a couple of decades. And you know, certainly your personal brand has stood the test of time, which is a, a great Testament. And we’re so glad to have you

Ep 127: How to Build a 9-Figure Personal Brand with Dr. Josh Axe | Recap Episode

Dr. Josh Axe perfectly embodies our strategic approach to building a personal brand. For Josh, this approach has been incredibly lucrative — he’s converted his personal brand into a 9-figure business.
Today we reflect on our previous episode with Josh, highlighting our top takeaways from the conversation. For our first takeaway, we discuss the importance of forming your brand around one core message that you’re passionate about.
While chatting about how Josh’s business evolved from a newsletter, we talk about why you should start creating your brand as soon as you can. After sharing the power of consistently adding value and having a desire to serve, we touch on why reaching only one audience member can still significantly impact your success.
Near the end of the episode, we dive into why you should build a strong website and why having a data dashboard allows you to better market your products. A master of following the formula, tune in to hear more takeaways from our fascinating and informative conversation with Dr. Josh Axe.

Ep 126: How to Build a 9-Figure Personal Brand with Dr. Josh Axe

Wow. It is an honor to introduce to you someone who’s become a friend of mine, Dr. Josh Axe. And we kind of live in different worlds in some regard, like we’ve built our companies and our brands in different worlds, but in some of the similar fashion and through, you know, we’ve got to share network, I got to meet, I got to really become friends with him at a dinner a few years ago with Michael Hyatt and Lewis Howes and Donald Miller, and, you know, it’s called Nashville mafia crew that came out of it and he’s extraordinary. And his team is extraordinary. So he is he’s the author of several different books, eat dirt, essential oils, a keto, diet. But he operates the number one natural health website in the world dr. Axe.Com. And I know he wouldn’t share these numbers, but I’m going to share them because it’ll give you a reference for the, the magnitude of what we’re talking about here.

RV: (02:05)

And I’m pretty sure this, this hasn’t been updated in a while, but 17 million unique visitors every single month to their website, 17 million they’ve got about two and a half million people on fate followers on Facebook, over half a million on Instagram, almost 2 million on YouTube. They are a nine figure business. So Josh represents one of the few nine figure. That’s North of a hundred million personal brands that started as a personal brand that he has scaled to this amazing team they’ve got over a hundred full-time employees. And it’s just incredible. So the, you know, the company is called ancient nutrition and his whole personal brand has been built around health and strength and vitality really based on whole food and the healthiest, whole food nutrients in and bringing that to the modern world. So anyways, I wanted to brag on you brother, cause I knew you wouldn’t say it. And I think it’s like, people don’t understand. There’s very few people that have been able to build what you all have built, which is it’s inspiring. It’s awesome.

Speaker 3: (03:14)

Well, thanks, Rory. You know, I think you know, for me, it’s, it’s really great to be able to do what I love every day. And also, you know, I have a great team, you know, they say teamwork makes the dream work. So yeah. Excited to chat today. I know it was, you know, it was great connecting with you recent. Cause I know we hadn’t seen each other, we ran into each other at true food kitchen and we have probably in the best place at our homes,

RV: (03:36)

I’ll find you, Oh yeah. The turf for our house. Yeah.

Speaker 3: (03:38)

Yeah. And so but man, yeah, it was so good to reconnect. And remember that dinner at Michael Hyatt’s house. That was a, that was a blast.

RV: (03:46)

It’s been years. It’s been years since that 0.5 years. Yeah. Although I think pretty much every time I see you is it’s either whole foods or true food kitchen. Like those are the two places. So man, I want to start with, where do you start? How did you start? I mean, I think the, the, the concept of a hundred full-time employees and, you know, nine figures, there’s very few people. I mean, you’re talking about the Dave, Ramsey’s the Tony Robbins, the Gary Vaynerchuks of the world, but you know, going back to, how did this start? Where did you start from? Can you just like paint a picture of those early days because you know, you’re a long way from there now.

Speaker 3: (04:30)

Yeah. I think it started with number one when I feel really passionate about. And so, and that’s that’s health, you know, for myself and I’m not going to go into the whole story. Somebody, somebody could search us online if they want dr. Ax and his mom, like, but my mom had a cancer growing up was very sick and we actually use natural protocols to help her heal. And so we started, you know, we, we, when I was even young, we had her start juicing vegetables and doing supplements. People had never heard of like reishi mushroom and frankincense essential oil and doing you know, meditation and visualization and prayer and all these things. And my mom beat cancer naturally. And she overcome came a number of health conditions. She lost about 30 pounds. She beat hypothyroidism, improved her gut health and also got off anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medications.

Speaker 3: (05:25)

And so, you know, that that’s, so for myself, you know, anyone that has a family member that they just love dealing like their mom, for me in seeing her heal using these natural health protocols, there’s just sort of solidified in me that, you know what, like I want to make a difference in people’s lives in this way. So I think for almost anybody, you really have to align whatever you do. Number one with your passion. And number two, I know this is basic stuff, but the number two is what can you, what are you great at? And so I looked at what I’m great at. And I was, I felt like I had a gift to be able to communicate, speak to people, move people. And so early on, I started doing nutrition workshops and teaching people how to get healthy. And then I looked at what I w and then the next thing was I started building out a strategy of, okay, if I was going to really impact the world in a big way, what do I need to do?

Speaker 3: (06:17)

Well, one, I need to educate them. Number two, I need to be able to give them what they need in order to get healthy. And so in doing that, I started saying, okay, well, supplements, help supplement people. So I’m going to teach people how to eat healthy, but then also I’m going to create super foods like collagen and probiotics and herbs, like tumeric. And I’m going to create the best in the world and then educate people on diet and then, and then offer them these supplements as well. And so I mapped out the strategy of, okay, how do I go from here to here over the period of five years, and then 10 years. And then I said, okay, I can do this part, but I’m not good at all these other things. And so then I started hiring other people and partnering with other people to help us achieve and reach those goals.

Speaker 3: (07:04)

Now that that might seem pretty simplistic. One other thing I’ll mention is I modeled other businesses that were successful. I looked at people in the nutrition industry, like a garden of life and my business partner now, Jordan Rubin, who actually founded that company. I, I looked at other companies in this space who are doing well and said, what was their recipe for success? And so a lot of it was reverse engineering and saying, okay, I want to go from here to here in 10 years, you know, number one, who do I need to partner with, or who do I need on my team in order to accomplish this? And I could go on and on, but again, that’s, I think those were some of the key pieces.

RV: (07:43)

Well, I love the, I love that. I mean, I, I think no matter how many times we tell somebody that like building a personal brand, like it’s these basic fundamentals, it’s like, all of us just think there’s some secret that we’re missing. That there’s some like, you know, magic thing or some advanced Ninja trick that, that people like, you know, that, that the rest of us don’t know. And yet it’s never that story. Like, it is never that story. It is always the fundamentals. And, and one thing that you said that I really love is that basically you started with your passion and then you kind of said, how could I serve these people in a deeper way? Which wasn’t just education, but providing them the stuff to get healthy. But at some point you, you must run into the mental block of going. Yeah. But I’m not a formulator. Like, I don’t know how to create ingredients. I’ve never, I’ve never made a supplement. I don’t, I don’t know how to bottle a vitamin. I don’t know how to ship. I’ve never, I don’t run a warehouse. Like you had to have run into all that stuff.

Speaker 3: (08:46)

I did. Absolutely. And so then from that point, I said, okay, but who do I know? And that’s what I started thinking through is who do I know? And so, and honestly, if that person didn’t know, I said, do you know a person? Do you know, a person? Do you know a person? And eventually over time I found that person and you and I both see this Rory it’s like, I think a lot of times people let that keep them from succeeding, or they’ll say, Oh, I asked one person. They didn’t know, it’s time to give up. Now, now I’ve found like in order to find somebody to manufacture, and then also like we source now ingredients from all over the world. We source organic herbs from Asia. We yeah. Yeah. Like it’s not, that was not easy, you know, but we found somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody, we developed a relationship there, and now we get these certified organic herbs from Asia. We get a lot from the United States as well. And, you know, we develop these partnerships over time, but, but you know, the thing is you just gotta keep keep keep seeking and knocking and going after it, you know, it’s just you, you have to do that. And I think almost any business though, if you’re going to scale it to you know, to, to, to a certain degree.

RV: (09:55)

Well, and I, I think it’s interesting because the, the nature of a personal brand, we all think of, Oh, it’s about me. And yet your whole mindset here is who do I know? Who do I know? Who do I know it’s like these other people that you, that you can pull, pull around thinking about scale. Okay. Can you just give us a rough, a rough journey of like, when did you start and like, how did the growth happen and, and how many years? And like, where were the big tipping points? Cause it’s like to go from, you know, if someone’s listening right now, like they might just literally be thinking, you know, they may not even be on social media or something going, okay. I, you know, I see the need for this and the next generation, but having millions of followers, there’s a lot between there. So map that out a bit.

Speaker 3: (10:44)

Yeah. So, you know, I started dr. Axe.Com a little over 10 years ago. And that’s the website. Now. I started off in a clinical practice. I ran it more of a functional medicine practice. We did nutrition, consult, blood work. We did some chiropractic, we did physical therapy, all that sort of stuff. And so I started there and about a year or so into practice, I started putting out a health newsletter and then I had a patient say, Hey, I’d love to send this to my, my aunt North Carolina, can you post it online? So I just started posting it online newsletter. And and that was probably about 11, a little over 11 years ago. I started doing that. And then after about five years in practice that just kept growing. Like I started a F one day, like a, a four hour work week on my website and the rest I worked, you know, my full-time business.

Speaker 3: (11:33)

So I took sort of Fridays for four hours and I would work on this dr. Axe.Com website business. And I would write an article and record a video. And I just started putting out, you know, those two pieces of content every single week. And then I got to the point where that kept growing. And then I had a friend of mine, Jordan Rubin, or a new friend who said, Hey, I’m starting a company. We are going to create the world’s healthiest food, grass, fed beef probiotic, rich foods, kale chips, kombucha. And so I said, so I actually had my associate at the time he bought my practice and I invested in this business with with Jordan Rubin. And so we started this, this company, it was called beyond organic, well, the company was not set up to succeed because our margins were too small shipping, frozen beef across the country in July and having it melt. And then the returns, like we were losing our shirts. So I did that for a couple years and ended up losing everything I invested in the company, which was pretty much everything. And so Chelsea and I were at a point, my wife and I, and I’m like, and we actually had at this point less than $10,000, like left in the bank. And like, and I just left that company because it was going under essentially. And I in dr. X.Com was actually losing money every month. And and so, yeah,

RV: (13:01)

The on all fronts, like it’s just going out, it’s not coming in.

Speaker 3: (13:05)

It was, the ship was sinking. And the first thing we didn’t listen, I know everybody isn’t religious, but Chelsea and I just, we got down on our hands and knees, we just prayed. And we said, God, would you just give us wisdom and direction and what we should do? And I really felt like I remembered a meeting I had with bill Hampton, you know, bell and with him six months before, and he said, Josh, what do you really want to do? He said, cause it seems like you’ve got a couple, you know, a few different businesses going on. And he said, I think you just need to focus fully on one thing. And I said, you know, I really want to build the world’s number one, natural health website. And I want to help people heal using food as medicine. And he said, well do just that.

Speaker 3: (13:40)

And I literally had those words sort of ring back into my head. And I literally then the next day started working on putting out a health program. Six weeks later, later I launched a health program. I called it the secret detox program. And it was essentially just my way of saying, Hey, we got to cleanse our, our diet cleanse. Our bodies launched it online and it became our best-selling product. And it was just a program somebody would buy for, let’s say like a, you know, $200 online all content and launched that a year later, we launched our first supplement. And by the way, this is only like seven little over seven years ago. I had less than $10,000 in the bank. We were like, what are we going to do? So focused on that,

RV: (14:24)

Launching a course here at two, you’re talking about a $200 course informational educational product. That’s what you started with.

Speaker 3: (14:32)

Right? And then I had an email list of about 30,000 people. And around this time I had a friend of mine. I do, you know, Isaac Jones. I don’t, okay. He’d be a good person. Cause he’s a great guy. And so we were doing lunch and he said, Hey, how’s your online business going? I said, well, it’s going okay. I have a cookbook out and a fitness, but I said, it’s really, I’m losing a few thousand dollars a month, not making it. And he said, I heard that. He said, I just came over from a seminar. And I heard that for every email you have, that’s what you should be making in dollars a month, a month. So he said, if you have an email list of 30,000, he said, I heard that you can maybe be making up to $30,000 a month. And I was like, man, I’m like spending 10 and making like seven.

Speaker 3: (15:19)

And I’m like, I’m must not be doing something right. And so I said, Hey, who do you? Who do, you know, who’s good at this? And so he’s like, Hey, I’m going to a seminar. In a few weeks, I went to the seminar and learned how to launch an online program. Brendan Bouchard was there and heard his whole thing. And then literally went back and I said, okay, I am launching a program as fast as I can to put all this content together. We launched it. And we ended up making more in that single launch that I had in the, in the three previous years combined. And me, you know, just doing, making up stuff as I go, you know? And so in any ways from there, I ended up partnering with my business partner now, Jordan Rubin. So we grew that business to probably, you know, just online just content to probably about 47 million and that we ended up merging comp companies and my company at the time, anyways, all that being said in emerging companies, AI was

RV: (16:13)

[Inaudible] up to that. So up to 47 million was, was information products that you were doing classic, like launches. Were you doing like a V? Is this like a, like a video style, like a three video launch kind of a thing, or just,

Speaker 3: (16:27)

But Jeff Walker launch formula, like, but, but, but by that time we launched supplements as well. I only had like six supplements. But that was probably doing still about 70% of the revenue where content was about 30% at that point in time. And then we launched in retail. This was about four, four and a half years ago. And that my company now is called ancient nutrition. I’ve co-founded that with Jordan and yeah, that company, we have an over a few hundred employees over a hundred employees and you know, continuing to scale and grow and it’s it’s been a lot of fun.

RV: (17:04)

Wow. Wild. So that was four years ago. So w so retail has been a big part of the growth in the revenue and the revenue numbers has been from getting your supplements distributed through retail.

Speaker 3: (17:16)

Yes, that’s correct. And I’ll say this, I mean, it’s actually almost it’s retail, but a lot of it’s online sales. I mean, our, our direct to consumer business, if you include Amazon with that, well, if you don’t include Amazon, it’s, it’s about 50% of our revenue. I mean, it’s still a significant portion.

RV: (17:34)

Wow. Oh, so this is just like, from the people coming to your site, reading your blogs, watching your videos, and then clicking on the shop button and then go into your, your store, your online store and saying, I want to buy some supplements. Boom. And then, and then that, that, that’s still about half of the revenue. That’s right. Amazing. That is so freaking cool. So you, you start with this passion. So the email was a big deal, I guess. So, so that was like a big, a big turning point. Was there, was there a specific lesson that you learned there related to email that you were like, Oh, once, once I realized this, that opened it, that that helped me go from losing three grand a month to like actually making some money.

Speaker 3: (18:22)

Yeah. I think one is just having a process in place and understanding people typically don’t buy with the first offer, people buy with multiple offers. And so, you know, w and the other thing is, you know, don’t try and make it up yourself, get coaching, or, or, or read a book like Jeff Walker’s launch formula and, and follow the formula. You know, so for me, like I always try and be as coachable as possible. So when I’ve had business cultures like Dan Sullivan or those sorts of people over the years and their coaching, they like, I just, I try and be as humble and as coachable as I can be. And so we did that essentially. It was like a 10 day to two week formula of, we did three training videos where I went through the benefits of detoxification, your top detox food, your top detox supplements, people opted in then to that email list where we then offered the program over to a two week period of time, I did a webinar.

Speaker 3: (19:12)

And on that webinar webinar, we would pitch a product and I would let them know, Hey, if you buy this program today, we’re also going to give you, you know, all of these free interviews for free or something like that, you know? And so that’s really what we followed is that formula and had a lot of success with it, but it wasn’t, you know, I, I think the biggest moments were a few things. One do it with excellence, but don’t take forever, okay. Do it with excellence, but don’t take forever. So again, when you’re putting out a piece of content, don’t ramble on and on, like I knew, Hey, in video one, I’m going to hit on these three topics, video two, these three topics. And I would go and watch other people doing webinars and say, what made this webinar great. And I would break it down and say, Oh, you know what? They did pay, they did testimonials. That was one of the key ingredients. Oh, they had additional officer offices and offers and bonuses at the end. And Hey, there’s a Q and a where you’re having, you know, hitting these key questions and doing a second close, you know? So I just, my number one moment was, Hey, if you follow the formula, you’re going to get better results. And if you make it up yourself. Yeah,

RV: (20:20)

Yeah. I love that. I mean, and, and it’s fun. Like, I mean, we’ve made a whole business out of just learning all these formulas. Right. And like pulling them together and testing them. And and I actually, so I wanted to ask you about data real quick because you know, I feel like one of the things that you guys do really well, that a lot of personal brands don’t do is data. Now that’s completely anecdotal and theoretical from where stand, but that’s kind of what I’ve just picked up from watching a far. Is that true? Is that something

Speaker 3: (20:54)

Game changer? Huge, huge. And so, you know, I can tell you, we’ve had sort of two times in our business where one was when we started getting into Facebook ads and doing that and email list, like I started realizing, okay, we’ve got to do beta testing and testing what works better than others. And so we started really looking a lot at data and analytics. When I moved into retail, I realized if you don’t have data, you are flying completely blind and you can not succeed, period. You won’t be able to succeed for a year, but you will eventually run out of cash at some point, if you ever have a downturn. And so if you want to succeed again, I can not overstate this. If you do not have good data in a retail business, you will not succeed. Long-Term there is no chance of it.

Speaker 3: (21:39)

You have to know, you ha you have to be able to forecast. And if you ever run into a point where, how you have a downturn, if not people just lose their shirts. And a lot of times, so for us, like we have a, we have a chief strategy officer, chief data officer, who’s one of the four like heads of our entire business, because data is so important. Her name is Kat, Katherine, and we were lying on her and she’s a wizard. She’s amazing. And like now when we go into a place like whole foods market or target, or some of our biggest, our biggest you know, clients that we, we retailers that we work with, you know, we go in there and we say, Hey, here’s the, we call it spins data. They, Hey, here’s the 52 weeks of spins or the last quarter of spins.

Speaker 3: (22:24)

And look at how our college in protein is increasing in beating these three other brands. When you go in there and you can show the retailer like, Hey, look on Amazon, online in this competitor of yours, we’re outperforming all of them. It’s kind of like, there’s PR there’s absolute proof. We’re going to bring you in now. And we’re going to, you know, w w we’re gonna work with you in this business when you have that absolute proof in data. So data. Yeah. I mean, data is a huge deal. The other thing is, if you want to scale, you asked that earlier, how do you like scaling data is crucial to scaling a business because you need to know what lever to pull, what not to pull and just being aware of, you know, all of those things. And so, yeah. Data, data is a big deal.

RV: (23:13)

And did you, did you did you like, is this all stuff that’s happening on spreadsheets? Did you have like one tool? Did you mind, have you used different tools along the way? Like, as the business has grown? Yeah,

Speaker 3: (23:25)

Exactly. I mean, that’s the one thing that I can tell you too, from going from, you know, we did 2 million, one year, then we went to 12 million, the following year, then 47, then a hundred and then, you know, other numbers. But that being said, like every year in the stage of growth, like a lot of times you, you, you have to move on to a new platform. You have to, you to do data differently. You have to do the business differently. You know, I think once you, here’s, the other thing, once you get up to a certain size people by law, I mean, and this is true, even at smaller brands, but people buy the brand, not just the product, right? It’s like, there are a thousand different brands of tumeric out there. Why is someone going to buy our tumeric? Or there are over about a hundred brands of college and why is somebody going to buy our college?

Speaker 3: (24:11)

And it’s because of our brand name and people knowing they can trust us that we own our own manufacturing facilities that we source almost exclusively, like loads of organic products is that we show you photos from our farms. It’s like, you know, building that brand. That’s what I love about what you guys do, brand builders. You know, it is so crucial that you’re building a brand that’s known for excellence and being trustworthy. You know, I think those are the two key elements we really try and focus on is, are, do people see us as being the top brand, the premier brand in terms of quality? And then do they trust us? I think those are really important aspects of building the brand as well. Wow.

RV: (24:52)

I mean, this has gone by fast. I knew that it would, and it’s like trying to like get this story, but it’s, it’s amazing. I mean, it’s just really, really, really cool. So dr. Axe, where, where would you tell people to go if they want to connect with you or, you know, to kind of like follow your journey? Yeah. So if you want to learn

Speaker 3: (25:11)

A lot of what I teach in business, you can go to my my leadership website, that’s leader leaders.com, L E a D E R S. So leaders.com. Also if you want to learn more about art, so nutrition, the stuff I’m doing there, you can follow me on Instagram at dr. Josh Axe or Facebook at dr. Josh Axe, or, Hey, if you’ve got a health condition, you’re looking to heal your body naturally, you can just Google search my name, dr. Axe hypothyroidism, dr. Axe, you know, low testosterone or whatever health problem you have. You can look up, I’ve got a plan for it. And I’m also, I got a new book coming out soon. It’s called ancient remedies where I go over the top remedies used throughout history to heal the body in different conditions and that sort of thing. But and then my nutritional companies, ancient nutrition, which you can find at whole foods, market and health food stores around the country. I know there’s a lot of places. Those are some of the, some of the different places.

RV: (26:07)

It’s awesome, man. Well, so cool. Thank you for sharing. So transparently so much of your journey, like what the end to end and you know, really 10 years, but it’s really a short amount of time for such a dramatic growth, but there’s been some ups and downs and man, we just really appreciate you being open booking and sharing all that with us.

Speaker 3: (26:28)

Awesome. Well, thanks for having me Rory love what you do, love brand builders and yeah, always, always excited to to share

Ep 124: How to Write Books from the Heart with Lysa TerKeurst

Hey Builder Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview, we are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand build

ers, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call. Hope to talk to you soon on with the show.

Oh my gosh. What an honor friends you know, that AJ doesn’t join me for every interview that we do, but for Lisa TerKeurst, she is here. Lisa is a new friend of ours. If you, if you’re not familiar with her, she’s the number one New York times bestselling author of it’s not supposed to be this way, which is a book that sold a million copies within its first two years. But Lisa’s 23 books together have sold over 6 million copies. She’s got 2 million followers on social media. She’s also the president of Proverbs 31 ministry, which has 5 million followers. They have a huge podcast. She’s been on the Oprah Winfrey show. Good morning America, the today show. And we met her because she got stuck on a dock, on a flight with the Vedas to go speak at the global leadership network a few months ago. And we were just, she was forced to be friends with us. There was no escape and we just really love her and art. And she has a new book out that just came out. It’s called forgiving what you can’t forget. And this is going to blow your mind when you hear this story. So anyways, Lisa, thank you. And welcome.

Thank you so much. I knew we were going to be fast friends when I first met you guys and you both had on matching monogrammed, masks. And I was like, that’s so impressive that a, they have their mask B, they actually coordinate with their outfits and c their monograms. I need to know these people.

Yes, that’s a problem we have.

Well, I try to match everyone in the family. I think it’s

An asset. I think that speaks volumes about how organized you are. And so I immediately wanted to lean in and listen to whatever you have to say. So it was an honor and a joy to meet you. And I loved our time together.

Yeah. Lisa didn’t know our, I don’t even know for ordinary, but I met at Bible study and have done several of Lisa’s books and I didn’t know that she was going to be on this airplane. And then I was like, Oh, I’ve got a, she stuck with me for an hour. I’m going to ask her every question I can. Well, it’s been great.

I think it was amazing. I mean, within a few minutes of you, I mean, just spending time together, you shared this story with us about your husband art, which is really what this book is about, or was the basis of this book. It was a, it was a betrayal that, that he made. And I was like, wow, this woman is opening up a very vulnerable part of her life very quickly. Do you mind just kind of catching everyone up on, on a little bit about what happened to you and, and how that kind of led to, you know, this new book

Sure thing. Yeah. And, and I always like to tell people to art is very okay with me sharing the story because we see that this is not only part of my redemption and healing, but it’s part of his as well. And so I don’t go into a lot of details about the story, but we share just enough to let people know that we’ve experienced the depth of pain that comes with the betrayal. And I think when people understand that that we’ve experienced the depth of just this horrific situation, you don’t have to go through the same situation that we did. But if you know that I’ve been through a lot of pain, you can trust that. The words that I write in my book are not going to be too neat, too tidy, too unrealistic for your pain. And I think when people know, I think my reader more, more than wanting to know my story.

I think people pick up my book not to be taught, not to be instructed, although all of that happens in the book as well, but I think they pick up my book to be understood. And I think I’m able to give voice to some very complicated emotions that people feel when they’ve been hurt, betrayed, rejected, wounded, wronged and all of those things certainly played into our story. But the basics of our stories that we’d been married for two and a half decades. And I found out my husband was being unfaithful and I wasn’t just broken hearted. I was completely shattered, shattered beyond what I could even describe because it wasn’t just the implosion of a relationship at the time. I felt like it could potentially be a devastation to our entire legacy. And I also, I was so worried about my kids, but I also felt the weight of the world on me because I was a Christian voice in a very tender space for a lot of women.

And there was honestly for me, a lot of shame around what happened. And I was just having such a hard time reconciling, like, do I continue to help other women? And do I even still have anything to say if, if this happened in my marriage, then what does that say about me? And I remember one of the most painful things that people would sometimes say to me is, well, you know, there’s two sides to every story. And it took me a while to figure out what do I say to that? But I finally just with all respect and kindness said back to them, this isn’t a spectator sport where you pick a side, this is the implosion of a family where you need to jump on the field and just offer to help in any way. But if you can’t be part of the solution, then don’t be part of the conversation.

Oh, that’s really, that’s really good. And I think, I think one of the things that I love most about you, isn’t just your writing because it’s incredible. And I think it’s very moving. But it’s also your natural vulnerability in all aspects. When we first met you on social media and in your books, and even in conversations like these, and, you know, we work with people who were trying to build their personal brand all the time that are really trying to tap into their message and that level of vulnerability that makes them appealing to other people, because then they feel like they know you and they can relate to you. And to know that I’ve got this commonality with you is it makes it so much easier to want to listen to you or to read your books or to follow you on social because you come from a place of not righteousness, but from, Oh, I’ve been in the depths and I know this, I come from a place of being there. So I’m curious, like how do you tap into that vulnerability and the willingness to be so open and bare and then create beautiful pieces of art that are helping people around the world? Like, how do you do that?

That’s a good question. You know, it’s, it’s kind of interesting. I’m a pretty private person which may surprise people. I’m an introvert who’s sort of at times forced to live the life of an extrovert. And but there’s a big difference between privacy and secrecy. So secrecy is when we withhold information for the purpose of hiding privacy is when we withhold details for the purpose of healing. And so I’m not a secret person, but I am a private person. And so when I write in my book, I don’t go into all the gory details of what happened, because that would do nothing but just satisfy people’s curiosity, but that’s like giving them sugar treats, you know, it’s like, it, it feels good going in, but it does nothing to nourish them at all. So instead I just let my story be a little bit of the backbone of a message so that people know what I’ve been through without giving them details. Because my focus isn’t the details of the scandal or the details of the betrayal and the hurt. What what’s a treasure to people is the transferable wisdom. It’s the life lessons. And it’s the experiences where I’ve gleaned insights and how to heal and how to move forward. That’s really, what’s important to get to, and that’s what will nourish a person’s soul.

I love that. I forget who said this, where you can tell me because I have mom brain 95% of the time, but there’s this great quote that we heard from someone at NSA that talks about how you take an eye focus story and turn it into a, you focused message. And

Craig Valentine everybody in 1999 world champion of public speaking, former, former professional speaking coach of Roy Baden.

But so much of that is like, you know, it’s like taking this very intimate story, but yet gleaming the insights and the wisdom that will apply to everyone around you.

So I liked that, that delineation of the privacy part of, of sharing. And yeah, I have to tell you like this, this, the power of this book, I mean, you can flip through and just read some of the lines. I mean, it is so moving and forgiving what you can’t forget again, is what the book is called. But I wanted to translate that also to social media. So I know we’re talking about this vulnerability and writing, and when we were at the global leadership summit, there was an after hours conversation that me, you and AIG had that I really loved, which was about as an author or even just as a person sharing some of my life and my views. How do you delineate what you should share and what you shouldn’t share, where it’s like, I want to be honest, I, I wanna you know, know that I have a voice in the world and that matters, but like, you know, maybe not everyone cares what I think about politics or this or that, or maybe not every wants to know the details of my marriage, but it’s also like people want you to be vulnerable and real, and you just seem to have a, I remember just feeling like this, just very centered place of truth of which you kind of communicate from.

And I personally really struggle with finding that balance. Is there anything you can share about that, but whether in the book books or on social?

Absolutely. So I think sometimes when we pick up a microphone to give a message, I think sometimes we misunderstand what we’re doing with that microphone. Sometimes I think we, we forget, we’re not speaking to a crowd because we see a crowd of people in front of us. We’re speaking to an individual. And that individual that we’re speaking to is really important that we determine who that individual is. So if that individual is the hurting person in that room, who thinks they probably shouldn’t even be there and your desire is to not share the facts of what happened to you as much as just connect with their pain, to say, I know exactly where you’re at different experiences, but the depth of the pain is in me too. And then you, instead of parking on the pain, you then move on to sharing wisdom in your journey that will be transferable to help them.

If that’s who you’re speaking to, then you’ll give the best message of your life. But sometimes people put the individual that they’re speaking to and they, it it’s really that there it’s that third grade teacher who told them that they weren’t good enough. And so the speaker then tries to prove to that teacher, that they have a place on that stage. And the problem is that if you are trying to prove something, that to that teacher, you may impress an audience, but impressing the audience is intimidating. It’s not inspiring. Or you may have that person that hurt you as that one person in the audience. And you may try, try to do some sort of payback, like I’ll show you, you know, and if you do that, though, everybody walks out of that audience, feeling a little more cynical about the world, then a little more hopeful about the world, or it may be that parent that was never there for you.

And if that’s that one person that you picture seated in the audience, that parent who was never there for you, then you may get up there and try to prove how, you know, you, you were worth it and you should have, you know, you should have shown up for me and, and you do so much to elevate yourself that you wind up depressing the rest of the audience. And so I think it’s really important that we remember, we don’t take the stage to prove something, to impress people, to posture ourselves as an expert. You know, sometimes when we try to impress other people, we wind up just depressing ourself. And so if we get up there and we take that stage for that one hurting person in the audience, and our whole perspective is I want to make that hopeless person hope again. And I want to make that person who hasn’t felt understood in a really long time.

I want them to feel like they have a comrade in this world. And I want to make that, that one person seated on the back row, who thinks they don’t belong. I want to tell them, I see you. And I recognize that you have a space in this place. And I want to honor you. If we take the microphone and we are using our voice, our platform, our opportunity to help the hurting person in the room, then it becomes so much less about us and so much more about the wisdom that we can transfer from our hurting places into hope in that person’s heart.

I tell you, that is why you sell millions of books right there. That’s also why you have millions of followers. You could even hear the genuineness. Even when you speak about that is so much of where you come from and for anyone who is trying to build a personal brand, it’s like, if you come from that authentic place like that, just naturally it comes across. Like it really, really does. Now there’s something that you kind of said that reminded me of something that’s in the book that I thought was just really interesting. And it’s this concept of marked moments. And I think that’s just something that regardless if there is a traumatic event or a tragedy or a deep hurt or a, you know, a deep wound, regardless, like we all have marked moments that we can look back and say, that was the moment. That was the comment. That was the person that was the experience that demarcated at change in my life, my attitude, my beliefs. And so like, I’m just really curious, like, share it, share a little bit about this concept of Mark moments and what that really means in the book, but then also just in life. Well, I talk

About in the very beginning of the book that we all have our own personal BC and a D moments. Now, of course, people usually Mark that, you know, that delineation of time using the life of Christ. But I think when we’ve been through something significant, some wounding, some accident, some betrayal, whatever it is, you know, we have our own personal before crisis and after devastation. And it’s almost like that line is drawn so sharply in our lives that we start to define our life well, before this happened. And after that happened, and it’s almost like it starts to define the very nature of our life and, you know, our I-phones don’t help because our I-phones are. So I don’t really understand how it happens, but they just put together these little memory movies. I don’t know if you’ve ever gotten one of these it’s like four years ago on this day.

And you see this picture of all these smiling people. And two of those people in that smiling picture, they were the ones that devastated your life. And you just think, what do I do with this? And it can almost be so stabbing that it takes your breath away and you think to yourself, I was authentic in that moment. I loved those two people. And so what do I do with this memory now, like we went on this trip or we had this birthday party together, or, you know, we took this Christmas card photo together and I really authentically loved this person, but then they went on to hurt me. So what do I do? Do I burn the pictures and throw the memories away? No. In the book for giving what you can’t forget. I say those are your memories. And if you were authentically loving that person in that moment, you get to decide if you want to keep that you weren’t being fake, you weren’t being false. You were authentically loving. And if that was a beautiful memory to you, then call it a beautiful memory and keep it. If it’s a painful memory, guess what? You can toss it away. You can burn it, you can delete it. It’s yours to keep it’s yours to toss away, but you get to decide what you do with your memories.

So good. I think from a a tactical perspective, one of the things that I saw is that you spent over a thousand hours in scripture preparing for this book. And obviously, you know, for those of you listening that know the story of Christ, it’s like the essential message of Christ is forgiveness. And I thought, you know, separate from the spiritual part of it, just the craft of an author saying even after I’ve written 23 books, I’m going to spend a thousand hours diving deep into this one study before, you know, I, I, I come to this book, how important is that? And, and was there anything, I mean, obviously you’ve been very into the Bible for a very long time, but you know, taking a thousand hours on one subject, was there anything that showed up for you specifically that you had never really noticed before, but with that intensity of a focus on, on such a specific concept that, that came out and then ended up making it way its way into forgiving, what you can’t forget.

Yes. I’m so glad you asked me this question. You know, and let me just be, I’m going to have true confession moment. Is that okay if I’ve true confession moment on your show, is that allowed wow. Loud. Okay. True confession. Part of the reason I spent a thousand hours studying forgiveness in the Bible because probably for the first hundred or so, I was looking for the exception I was looking for where God said, okay, everything’s forgivable, but not this because sometimes when something happens to you and it’s unchangeable, like you can’t ever fix what happened, the unchangeable can feel so unforgivable. And so really I don’t shine my halo that I spent a thousand hours studying. I kind of say, it just took me that long to start to really understand what forgiveness is and what it isn’t. And I brought so much resistance to it, and I felt like such a fraud.

You know, when my team would gather up to listen to me, you know, quote, teach on forgiveness. The first five times they showed up, all I could write was all the reasons why I wasn’t qualified to be a person to write this message, because I had so much resistance to forgiveness. And I honestly felt like a forgiveness failure because how many times that I forgiven and then I got triggered in my pain and all that anxiety and frustration and anger just came crashing back on me. And I just thought, what in the world, maybe forgiveness doesn’t work. So I spent a thousand hours because I desperately needed to learn for me, but probably two things that surprised me the most one is that I started to understand forgiveness. Isn’t something I muster up inside of me. It’s not like I boss my feelings around and get enough spiritual maturity that suddenly then forgiveness becomes easy for me.

And that I can like conjure it up. That’s not what forgiveness is. Forgiveness. Doesn’t even start with me. Forgiveness is a gift given to us by God. And so forgiveness is not based on my determination. Forgiveness is based on my cooperation with what God is providing for me. And forgiveness is not an unfair gift I have to give to this person who hurt me. That just sounds cruel, right? Forgiveness is God’s way of providing the hurting inside of the human heart to heal. And so as God’s forgiveness flows to me, I simply must just cooperate with it and let it flow through me. And as it passes through me, it’s like washing out all of that bitterness and anger and resentment. That turns me into someone I don’t want to be. And when we are bitter, because of what something, this thing that this other person has done to me, we’re letting that person hurt us twice.

They heard us when the devastation happened, but if we allowed them to turn us into somebody, that’s not a real representation of who we are. They heard us a second time by making us bitter. And I’m sorry, but I refuse to let that person that hurt me, hijack my healing. So I don’t have to wait for them to say, they’re sorry. I don’t have to wait for them to realize what they did was wrong. I don’t even have to wait for them to learn all the lessons that they should learn. I can detach my ability to heal from those choices that that other person may or may not ever make. And I can stand in the middle of my pain and I can say, I deserve to stop suffering because of what this other person has done to me. And I am participating with God’s gift of forgiveness for my heart, as much as anyone else’s heart.

So that’s a big thing that I learned, but in the scripture, here’s one of the most surprising things that I learned. If you look at the Lord’s prayer, you can find it a couple of places in the gospel, but in Matthew chapter six, starting in verse nine, Jesus says, this is then how you should pray. So imagine this, God has given Jesus, the assignment, teach the people how to pray. And Jesus says, okay, this is how you should pray. Now who thinks that prayer is a pretty stinking, big deal in the Bible, right? Raise your hand. Perfect. Prayer is a huge deal. This is a big assignment. And do you know, over half of the words that Jesus uses in the prayer, the ultimate prayer that we’re supposed to pray every day over half of the words are about confession and forgiveness. I was astounded by this.

Think of all the things that Jesus could have included in the Lord’s prayer, the ultimate prayer, and he uses the bulk of the word to tend to the humans need for forgiveness and confession. Why? Because though he was perfect divinity, also absolute humanity without sin, but he carried hurt. He knew what it was like to be brutalized by other people rejected, spit upon, turned against wounded. And so I think he was like, you know what? You guys need. Most of all in your prayers, you need to know how to heal. The daily hurts how to look at an offense of another person and refuse to pick it up because you already pre forgave that person. And when this world be such a better place, like if we truly woke up every day and said our father in heaven, hallowed, be your name, your kingdom, come your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread and forgive us our debts. As we have also forgiven our debtors, like forgiveness is not just for the heart and horrific in our life. Forgiveness is something we can do. First thing in the morning before we even enter into life. Like we can choose to pre forgive. We can send forgiveness ahead into that meeting into that coffee shop, into that doctor’s office, into that school, into, you know, the Jim that we’re going to go to later to might. And so when we’re walking into that coffee shop three hours later and some rude dude bumps into her happy, we can trade all that drama for an upgrade. And we can just say, Oh no. So actually I already forgave you this morning. So just because you’re laying down, this offense does not mean I’m going to pick it up and carry it with me and affect me all day long.

Like you do, you boo. I have already forgiven you and have a good day and we take our coffee, but we don’t take the offense. And we don’t weaponize the pain that they caused us and unleash it into every other person in this world. Like sometimes I’ll just have this moment where I think devil you have overplayed your freaking hand. You know why? Because you intended to multiply that hurt and pain in my heart so that I would carry it into this world. But that is not who I am. I am an evangelist of the gospel message. So the hurt stops here and you devil are shamed back to hell because I’m not going to pick up that offense. I’m not going to play your game and I’m not going to do the devil’s work for him. I’m going to be a gospel centered woman where I have loved to share, not crosses of a offense to bear.

Oh, we’re still having some church up in here. This is good. I love that. And having one of the things that I love so much about this book and your message and just you it’s that you’re standing as, like, I am not the perfect example. I’m quite, I failed at this quite often. And I set off on this research journey because I was looking for the wrong answers. And I think so, so many people in our audience are probably afraid to step into some of the things that they don’t think they’re an expert in, but instead it’s like actually lean into the fact that like, if, if you’re passionate about it, like lean into that. And even if you don’t start down the path with like the best of intentions, it’s like, no, I’m going to study this. And I’m going to find that exception, share that struggle and share that struggle. Because I think that’s where this authentic nature that draws you in and you come from this place of, I do not have this figured out and I was doing it all wrong. And that’s why I went on this journey to begin with. And I think there’s just, there’s, there’s this misconception that you have to be an expert or how it all figured out to be able to talk about it. And I think this is such a great example of no, like, no you don’t. It’s it’s not that at all.

I agree with that, you know, and I think sometimes authors shy away from people’s skepticism, but I say step into it because when you can speak to the skepticism and you can say me too, it disarms people for putting down a message thinking good for you, but it worked for me. And also we have to remember, we can’t start our books where we want people to be. We have to start our books where people are actually act. And so with forgiving, what you can’t forget, I knew I had to start with the pain and the resistance to forgiveness. I couldn’t come out swinging and say, you have to forgive. That’s not where I was at. When I started the message. I couldn’t expect my reader to be there either. And I think it’s really important that we remember people talk about two things. They talk about their problems and their questions. So the very best thing we can do is acknowledge the felt, need of the book. And it’s always a problem. Someone is having a question that they’re asking. So as an author, if we can acknowledge that felt need lean into it, then we can provide real value for people. When our author’s promise is presented as a question to answer or an answer to their question or a solution to their problem. And that’s where the magic happens.

Yeah. Forgiving, what you can’t forget is the book. Obviously you can hear directly the power coming through Lisa in what she talks about, what she believes in, just how she writes open, honest, authentic, vulnerable transparent, which is no doubt, a huge part of the reason for her extraordinary success. Lisa, thank you so much just for the honor of being here and opening up and sharing your story. And gosh, we just, we pray for you and art and we just wish you guys the very, very best,

Thank you so much. It’s such an honor to be with you and let’s do it again sometime

Ep 123: Becoming a Profit First Personal Brand with Mike Michalowicz | Recap Episode

Welcome to the recap edition of the Mike Michalowicz interview on the influential personal brand podcast. It’s your man, Rory Vaden here. Breaking it down for you. I’m rolling solo tonight. We have had craziness. We our three-year-old went to the emergency room to get stitches for the second time, I think in like six weeks. And we also had power without power for a few hours today. So it’s been a wild day, so momma’s not here and I’m rolling solo. And this interview with Mike, I I loved, and I’ll tell you, tell you right up, right up front. Oh, okay. Actually I have an important announcement. So before we dive into this with Mike, I want to let you know those of you that listen religiously every single week. Next week we’re not going to have episodes. All right.

RV: (01:03)

So we’re not disappearing, but just next week we are gone. And we’re not gonna publish an episode, but then we’ll pick up the schedule. So I wanted to let you know that in advance. Okay. So back to the topic at hand, which is the brilliant Mike Michalowicz, and I wanted to say right upfront that if, if you follow brand builders methodology, okay. If you’ve seen our various trainings been to one of our events, if you’re one of our clients, if you’re familiar with, you know, our overall structure we divide our training into four phases. Okay. And each phase has three different sections. Each, so we basically have 12 different sections of our curriculum. They all represent each of the 12 sections is a different two-day experience. So you, you know, people come to it as an event or they get it through one-on-one coaching or our private strategy sessions.

RV: (02:01)

But anyways, so our whole body of knowledge is organized into these four phases. And phase four is what we call eight figure entrepreneur. So that is where we talk about scaling a personal brand into a real business, which almost nobody does, and almost nobody has ever done. There’s so few people who have ever scaled something, you know, to eight figures, scaled a personal brand, eight figures, and then very few who have ever actually been able to sell that or exit that business. And that’s something that we love talking about because we’ve got a lot of entrepreneur, friends, and we, we love understanding like the real nature of small business. And it’s something that we have actually done grown a business to eight figures and then had an exit. Well, this interview with Mike, and then the another interview we did with Jim combi a while back, I would say are the two interviews of all the guests that we’ve had that have focused the most on phase four, which is, you know, eight figure entrepreneur, the concepts and ideas around how to build a truly scalable enterprise, something with, with equity value beyond just the income that it brings to the personal brand.

RV: (03:23)

So I just wanted to kind of give a quick shout out to that other interview with Jim Comey, that if you loved this and you love this concept of like, you know, building a real business as a real entrepreneur, then you should go back also and listened to the Jim combi interview where we talk about business valuation. And also the recap of course. So just a quick mention for that. All right. So my big, my three biggest takeaways here from Mike we’re just so good and so important and so relevant specifically to this concept of scaling a real business. And I, and I honestly think this episode transcends far beyond personal branding as, as a lot of them do, but, but this one definitely applies to, you know, all entrepreneurs in general. And so the first takeaway was sending that, here’s what he said. He said, the big fallacy

Speaker 3: (04:20)

Is top line thinking. The big, big fallacy is top-line thinking, and this is such, this

RV: (04:30)

Is such an important concept because It’s the wrong way of thinking. But it’s like the thing that people brag about is how much revenue do they do. And it’s really like, okay, it’s, it’s one thing to, to measure. But the real question is how much drops to the bottom line, what really shows up in your bank account, right? And it’s like, would you rather be the company that generated 5 million a year in revenue and you kept a hundred thousand or would you rather be the company that generated 1 million in revenue and you kept 500,000 and, and, and the, the, the obvious is the second, right. Specifically for personal brands where it’s like, usually a personal brand is not going to have much equity value because it’s built around the personality and thus, it makes it difficult to actually scale and not to scale necessarily, but to sell to someone else.

RV: (05:30)

Because if you pull that personality out of the business, it’s like, what is left? That’s, that’s challenging, which we’ll talk about, but this, just this concept of focusing on profit, right? And like, you hear this all the time too, of like, Oh, they did a seven figure launch and immediately we go, Whoa, seven figure launch, right? It’s not that seven figure launches are bad. Seven figure launches are great, but in your mind, it’s like this thing that brag about, and you go, well, okay, well, wait a minute. So if you did a seven figure launch and you had affiliates and you paid 50% to your affiliates, now you’re down automatically to half a million, and then you go, all right. And you look at all the vendors, you had to hire to pull it off. And maybe you had copywriters and video editors and video production crew and staging, and, you know, depends on everything that went into it.

RV: (06:18)

And it’s like, I don’t know, maybe, maybe you spent a hundred thousand dollars to make it, and then you go, all right, how much did you run in and paid traffic? Right. And so you go, well, I had to run a quarter million dollars in ads. And so now I got 250,000 there and a hundred thousand. And so it’s like, well, my million dollar launch, really one, I mean, it’s a million dollars in revenue, but 500,000 out the door to affiliates a quarter million out the door to Facebook, another a hundred thousand expenses. What I really had was $150,000. And then after I pay my team and, and my staff and my, all of my overhead, it’s like, what’s really left. So, you know, it just, it’s just a good reminder to, don’t be impressed by external sort of frivolous numbers. And don’t be intimidated by them.

RV: (07:14)

You know, I, I think it’s, it’s kind of similar to social media followers is we can be so infatuated with how many followers that somebody has, right. And you go, Oh my gosh, they got, let’s just say a hundred thousand and go, they have a hundred thousand followers. That’s amazing. But when they post something on social, because of the algorithms, that hundred thousand followers might actually legitimately get viewed by two or 3000 people. So it’s not that that’s bad. Right. It’s w that’s why wouldn’t you want to have more, you, you, you would, I’m not saying that it’s, it’s not, I’m not saying that it’s bad at all, but I’m saying if you had a choice between a hundred thousand social media followers, followers of which two or 3000 of those might actually see your post versus building an email list of 20,000 followers, where you send an email and you get, let’s say a 20% open rate.

RV: (08:18)

So that means you’re reaching 4,000 people. Every time you send an email to 20,000 and you only quote, unquote only have 20,000 on your email list. So it’s like, what really matters at the end of the day, right? Is what’s the real impact we’re making? What, what is the, is the net result? The net gain, not just the, you know, fancy super superfluous kind of numbers. And, and, you know, the other thing is that I think personal brands are a lot like golfers, which is they lie about their score all the time. I mean, personal brands are, I mean, I, I, I don’t mean to like harp on our space too much, but I say this delicately, but man, there’s a lot of dishonesty in what people report. Right. People say crazy stuff. I mean, they they’ll say crazy things like, Oh yeah, I’ve sold a hundred thousand copies of my book.

RV: (09:20)

And it’s like, well, you know, and it’s like, Oh, I sold them in the back of the room. And it’s like, well, you know, by my count, that means, you know, even if you’re doing really great, you’ve gotta be in front of about a half, a million people in audiences to sell that much in the back of the room. So, you know, it’s maybe not that likely. And I, and I’m not harping on anybody. I’m just saying for you, don’t be impressed by fake numbers. Don’t be impressed by things that don’t matter. Focus on the things that really matter. It’s not revenue, it’s profit, it’s not followers, it’s engagement, right. It’s, it’s, it’s not like any of these, there’s so many of these, these indicators, it’s not what people are saying is what they’re actually doing. And be focused on real impact and real reach.

RV: (10:13)

And don’t, don’t be intimidated or impressed you know, too much by the external and don’t allow yourself to be caught up in like, Oh, we made a lot of revenue. And at the end of the day, it’s like I had no money left over. All right. So that’s the first thing, the big fallacy of top-line thinking, the second thing, which is very much related to an eight figure entrepreneur concept is he said, the number one driver of a healthy business is the removal of the dependency of that business on the founder. And this is true. This is the whole crux of our eight figure entrepreneur event, which is the, the problem is dependency. Now for if you’re early in your brand journey, you might want to just skip past this because it’s so advanced. It’s, it’s, it’s not like relevant to most people until much later, but it’s also not a bad thing to kind of be, be thinking about. You know, always kind of having the end in mind is as dr. Stephen Covey said, which is that, You know, you, if you want us, there’s two

RV: (11:23)

Things happening here with your business. One is the ability of the business to generate income, right? Income is super valuable. Income is super useful. It’s like the money that comes to you to pay your bills and do stuff with. And you know, there’s a lot of ways to do that. We talk about the five ways to earn income, what we call the paids. And then we help people look for the dares, D a R E S things that are digital automated, recurring, evergreen, and scalable, the digital automated, recurring evergreen and scalable. That’s a brand builders group, original concept about driving income, but income is different than equity. Income is, you know, like income value is different from equity value. Income is like how much money you bring in home at the end of the day, equity value is what does this business generate an income or, you know, or in profit, let’s just use the word profit, not to confuse things.

RV: (12:25)

What does this business generate and profit without you? If you are gone, if you went on vacation for a year, what would happen to that business? And if the revenues and the, and or the profit would, would go way down, then you don’t have much equity value, which can be okay, right. It’s not necessarily to say that OU equity value is better now in a true entrepreneurial sense. It is. If you’re a quote unquote, a real entrepreneur, and you’re trying to grow a business, then that business would operate without you. But when you’re building a personal brand, you’re not necessarily growing a business, you’re growing an income stream. Now it’s possible to do both. And if you, you know, if you work long-term with brand builders, we’ll talk about that. And we’ll show you how how we do it and what we do and how we delineate between a personal brand and a business.

RV: (13:28)

But they’re both good when they’re both important. And, and, and sometimes they compete against each other because sometimes the way that you build the equity value is to give up income and to reinvest money into the business, into hiring more staff and training and operations and policies and procedures and people, right. But if you, if you want income, it’s like, no, I’m just trying to throw off as much income as I can. So it’s not that one is better than the other. What matters is that, you know, the difference between the two and most of all that, you know, which one is most important to you. And that gets back to why we do one-on-one coaching, because there’s not a right answer. There is a right way and a wrong way to execute certain skills involved in running a business and in PR building a personal brand.

RV: (14:23)

But which skills you need, which strategy you deploy D is dependent entirely upon you. So you can’t necessarily just take blanket advice that is out there for everybody and apply it directly to you. If the answer is, it depends. Should you have a podcast? It depends. Should you launch a book? It depends. Should it be self published or commercially published? It depends. Now, do we know how to do all those? Yes. But path you take is dependent upon everything in your life. What you care about, what you love doing, how much money you have in the bank, how much money you need to make, what are your longterm goals? Like, what do you want to happen with the business one day when you die? I mean, all of those are, are individual factors, but you need to understand the difference of the two. And when you, when we take off the personal brand hat, which is really about income, most personal brands drive income.

RV: (15:20)

And we put on the true entrepreneur business hat, which is what Mike McCalla talks about and is really known for. And it’s what phase four of brand builders group is all about, which is building true equity value, not just income value, but equity value. Those are two different conversations. And when you talk about building equity value, it’s ironic that what got you here as a PR successful personal brand, won’t get you there as a thriving, scaling a business with true equity value, because the more the business is dependent upon you being there, the less equity value it has. Now there’s lots of things you can do to mitigate that, or, or, you know, or to maximize that. But you need to know the difference between income value and equity value. And when you’re talking equity value, it’s all about if it’s dependent on you, you don’t have equity value.

RV: (16:18)

So that was really a clear point for me, a reminder, a refresher and just something that was salient that I thought, you know, we need to make sure that that’s clear for everyone including myself, right. Just talking this out and going, yeah. Let’s, you know, let’s always be reminded of, of this long-term impact. And then the third thing that Mike said, which I’ve never heard him say, because it sounds like this is a subject of his, of his new book, but really hit me hard. And it hit AIG hard as well, even though AIG is not here during the debrief, she, she listened to the interview and she loved it. And here’s what he said. He said the biggest challenge that entrepreneurs face is knowing what the biggest challenge is that needs to be fixed. The biggest challenge that entrepreneurs face is knowing what the biggest challenge is that needs to be fixed.

RV: (17:16)

And I think that is fascinating. Right. I, I, and I think that as super, super interesting thought the, and, and I’m, I’m, I’m really interested to see what my, you know, Mike, how he lays this out in his, in his new book. And I think it is super important because if you don’t know, what is the next biggest challenge in your business, then what you do is you dilute all of your resources and your energy and your focus, trying to solve a lot of different things. A lot of insignificant things, a lot of trivial things. And this is where I think the focus funnel from my Ted talk, how to multiply time in my second book, procrastinate on purpose, where we, where we invented the focus funnel, and we presented it, the focus funnel is meant to help people figure out what is my next, most significant thing.

RV: (18:16)

What is the, the most important use of my time today? What is the thing that multiplies my time? And how do you multiply time? It’s very simple. And we invented this concept. Well, we, we, yeah, we invented the concept. We, we articulated it as you, and you multiply time by spending time on things today that create more time tomorrow. That’s it, that’s the subject of my whole second book, procrastinate on purpose. And, and the Ted talk had a multiply time, which, you know, are both based on this concept. So the focus funnel, which is the tool that we introduced in my Ted talk helps you identify what that is. And I haven’t read Mike’s new book. I’m really interested to see it. But, but I really think that that insight that he shared is super important, super powerful of going, not just solving every problem that exists in your business, but asking which problem is the most significant to solve, which is the next most significant thing, which problem do I need to solve that by solving that problem?

RV: (19:31)

I solve several others. Now I think for most people it has to do with, you know, lead generation and revenue generation. I mean, for most small businesses, that is their problem is their revenue isn’t high enough. They don’t know enough about marketing and sales, which, you know, I would say marketing sales and leadership influence is, is our area of expertise. It’s been our whole career. And that’s why we, we talk a lot about it, but you got to have some system in place now, for some of you, that’s not the case. Some of you have lots of revenue, right. But it’s, you’ve got more of that. The thing we talked about earlier, the top line thinking fallacy. And so your real problem is, is figuring out how do I keep it? And so it’s more about expense reduction and system systemization and, and optimization and reducing waste and things like that.

RV: (20:24)

But all of us need to have some process that we go through, even if it’s just thinking about what is the next most significant problem in my business to solve now inside of marketing specifically. And we’re not gonna have time to go through all this right now, but, but when we teach eight figure entrepreneur, we talk about the eight departments that every single business has, no matter how big or how small eight functions of every single business. And the reason it’s so hard to be a solo preneurs, cause you’re doing all eight of them by yourself, but in the marketing department specifically, which is one of the eight and really in all the departments, data is one of the best ways to know. And so for those of you that have funnels and you have traffic, but you’re not making profit, or you’re not keeping it, or you’re, you’re spending it all into ad spend.

RV: (21:30)

You need to become really, really good at tracking it and using data in what we use is digital dashboards that we set up to report on not only just our funnels, but all of our online traffic, all of our different traffic sources, including free traffic and paid traffic. And by the way, there’s a great interview. You can go listen to that we did with Aja Jaeger and Megan canal from Praxis metrics. We did an awesome interview, just talking about data, but, you know, I would say in terms of tools for you to use, to identify what is your next biggest challenge one, you know, it would just be thinking the second would be the focus funnel. So go watch my Ted talk. If you’ve never, if you’ve never watched it seriously, go watch it. Like it’s 18 minutes. It will. I mean, as humbly as I can say, this it’ll change your freaking life.

RV: (22:28)

I mean, it is, it’s, it is that powerful of a concept. And, and, you know, even though we kind of coined the term, we learned it from studying and profiling, lots of hype ultra performers, but go watch that. So the focus funnel would be your second tool. And then the third tool that ultimately you want to get to long term in every department of your business is using data to tell you what is broken and what needs to be fixed. And you know, so in our phase three experience, we have a phase three topic. One is called high traffic strategies. And that is where we teach digital dashboards. And we talk about breaking down every stage in the, in the funnel to identify where is the breakdown? You, we do a similar thing in that’s in the marketing department. We do a similar thing in the sales department when you create sales pipelines. And the reason you have to create a sales pipeline is again,

RV: (23:27)

So you have these stages, you have these, these checkpoints that you are measuring against and optimizing for. So that’s a lot, those were three, just big takeaways. You know, don’t get sucked into the fallacy of top-line thinking, make sure you, if you’re trying to build income or equity value. And if you’re trying to build equity value, that means that the business can’t be dependent upon you. And then number three, have a process and method for identifying what is your next biggest challenge that needs to be solved? Mike is a I’m in truly, I think one of the smartest guys that I’ve, I’ve met in this space, fabulous interview, make sure you listen to it. Of course, check out his new book that we talk about as well as, you know, profit first that is, is kind of his perennial long tail bestseller. And you can check out more with Mike. Thanks for being here as always keep going. We want to, we want to continue to support you. Thank you for tuning in we’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.

Ep 122: Becoming a Profit First Personal Brand with Mike Michalowicz

MM: (00:06)
[Inaudible]

RV: (00:09)
Hey, Brand Builder Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview, we are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit. Call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call, hope to talk to you soon on with the show.

RV: (01:03)
Mike Michalowicz is a new friend of mine, and he is a friend of friends. I actually met him at a mastermind group here in Nashville, and ever since we’ve, we’ve kind of been circling a couple different groups of, of authors and some mutual friends, Donald Miller, John Gordon, but he is the author of a huge best-selling book called profit first. And it is a long what we would call and referred to as a long tail bestseller, which are the books that I really, really respect the most. He also wrote a book called clockwork surge, the pumpkin plan, and then his newest books newest book is called fix this next. So he’s a writer, he’s a personal brand, but he also by age 35 had built and sold two companies. So one to private equity and another to a fortune 500.

RV: (01:59)
So he has the experience of being an entrepreneur and being a personal brand and writing about it. He used to also write for the wall street journal. He’s done a lot with business make-over special as a, as a business makeover specialist on MSNBC. And he’s just a great guy. So anyways, Mike, welcome to the show, Rory, thank you for doing this mask. It’s good to be here with you. So can I ask you about profit first because you know, I kind of, you know, tongue and cheek referred to myself as, as you know, a best-selling author, but I’m always been jealous of the people who sell, who have the books that sell week-in and week-out hundreds of thousands of copies every single week and profit first. It just, it is that book in, in the space of entrepreneurs. How did you, how did that happen?

MM: (02:54)
So, yeah, it’s a great question. I think what, how it happened. So first of all, let me qualify. You know, sellers become so bastardized. Like that’s the one thing I avoid. I got, well, I like now is a perennial popularity. Like, can you have something that’s perennially popular? And to do that when I was running profit first,uI wrote the book and I have this actually on my wall. I asked certain questions to myself. The first question is, will this concept be relevant 100 years from now? And because it’s for longevity, meaning if I wrote a book on like, you know how to advertise on Facebook, the longevity can be six months before they changed the engine again. And that would not qualify for what I’m looking to do. Uand then I put this, does this where on the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is this so financial security is, is right there at the base level, needs up there with a breathing air and drinking water and eating food.

MM: (03:49)
So I determined where it is on there. And then probably the most important thing is, do I have a concept that is as fresh or new and perspective? So it’s this it’s this, maybe it’s the same old story, but told in a way that hasn’t been told before, or maybe it’s a new application, something that’s established and profit first is the pay yourself first system. So it’s not a new concept, but that’s always been in personal finance. I think it’s the first book that translated to business finance. So what I saw as it had life address a core foundational need for humanity, and it was, it was something that was was foundational in its execution. It was something that would work and that I think contributes to why it continues to sell.

RV: (04:34)
So that, did you, so talking about that, so one of the things that we described as thought leadership is kind of forwarding the thinking that has been done now advancing the conversation, not just regurgitating it. And what you just said was interesting. You said, it’s the pay yourself first concept, which is a concept that’s existed in personal finance, but you kind of brought it to the entrepreneurial community. Did you do that deliberately? Like, did you actually have that thought of like, Oh, this is a great concept over here that I should bring over here or was there,

MM: (05:07)
You know, what’s so funny in hindsight, so clear it’s like, of course that’s I saw that and I didn’t think about it. Maybe. I didn’t, I’ll say I conceived it was, I needed it for myself. So I was an entrepreneur. You should, you know, you share all the highlights. Really there’s more low lights than highlights and that’s true forever entrepreneurial story. It was in the low lights. I’m like, I was so frustrated. I couldn’t consistently make money. I couldn’t retain it. And I built and sold a couple companies. Yeah, fine. But those companies were never fiscally healthy. I did a really job running those. I was lucky in hindsight to sell those companies really? Yeah. Oh totally. I’m right place, right. Time. Right. Need from the acquirers. But not that they’re like, Oh my God, this guy is a genius. Uthat, that, and other things woke me up to my gosh.

MM: (05:54)
I’ve got to figure this out for myself. So once I had it figured out, I for myself, I said, Oh, this may translate to serving other people. I base it for myself on the payer self source system. Like, you know, how do you make money? How do you save money? And all these methods came up with think and grow rich richest, man in Babylon, you know, books and concepts from hundreds of years ago. And I was like, Oh, I need this personally. But by income sources, my business, let me apply to my business. I started doing it there. Once it started becoming, once it start getting traction for myself, I wrote an article in the wall street journal. And that’s when people started saying, Oh my gosh, I’m doing this. Where’s the book. So that brought about the book. It wasn’t such a deliberate, Oh my gosh, I’m taking an idea here. I’m moving here. I get this kind of, kind of to forming clay. It became that.

RV: (06:43)
So talking about the company. So this is important too. So how do you think the profit first? So not, not the book, but the actual concepts in the book. How do you think those apply to personal brands? Or can you talk about that? Because you know, a personal brand is interesting. It’s like you are both a personal brand and you are an entrepreneur. And so that I think is something that, you know, it’s amazing people talk about how many followers they have or how much revenue they do in launches, how much their speaking fee is. But in reality, how much are they actually keeping can be very, very little shockingly little. Yeah.

MM: (07:18)
Yeah. And it does it, does it add stuff matter? I remember when Twitter was getting popular, a, a, a person of influence in the Twitter realm was bragging effectively about the number of followers they had. And this person said just referenced your Twitter handle. You’re about to get X number of followers dot, dot, dot you’re welcome or die. You’re welcome. And does it really matter? I think at the end of the day, when it comes to financial viability, it’s how much money you’re retaining. So I would say profit first absolutely applies, listen, you may have one follower on your Twitter handle and they send, they spend $50 million with you. Here are the winner

RV: (08:02)
Winner, the winner.

MM: (08:04)
So I don’t know if those numbers matter. I listen and I try to get over my big fat ego constantly. It gets to my eye. And so if I have X number of followers, I’m like I only got mad at God and I’m comparing myself. I fought that same stupid game by realize at the end of the day, only thing that matters is for my business to continue, it needs to be financially viable. And the only, the only factor for that is profitability. If there is no money to live by and the businesses done, it’s all done. So profit first applies. It’s a system of as all these different sources of influence you have, as it becomes monetized, how much are you retaining, which then supports the longterm viability of the company. And also by the way, financial freedom for ourselves, like a profitable company, supports a profitable lifestyle, a lifestyle where you don’t have to worry about bills and you can be very comfortable. And then, you know, when you have that confidence, you can be even of greater service to your clients and followers.

RV: (09:03)
And so what do you think are some of the big mistakes that, that entrepreneurs make, if you can specify them to personal brands like you know, but this is also financial advisors, professional services, direct sales, like these kind of like very micro entrepreneurs and solo preneurs. What are some of the financial mistakes they make that compromise that, that viability or that financial health?

MM: (09:28)
I think, I think the, the lead bait concept is, is misunderstood, are MIS poorly executed. I should say. I think people go too far with it. So I’m very biased toward books, you know, you and I, and a group of authors had a call yesterday, actually just exploring how books work and stuff. And like, that’s, I thirst to understand that stuff. And I think some people publish books as lead bait, but a book, at least from my purview is, is something that has a permanent as permanent as it sticks as a historical document. That for whatever reason, when you say something in the spoken word versus the written word, the written word is seen as gospel. And the spoken word is seen as, as you know, flighting or fleeting. And I think some people put books out there and say, this is my lead bank, you know, free bucks spend $7 for shipping and you get my book.

MM: (10:22)
And I don’t realize, I don’t know if they really appreciate that, that book when someone receives it, it’s going to sit on the shelf for a lifetime. And if it isn’t the best, if you didn’t put your, every blood, every drop of blood, sweat, and tears and soul into it, you’re compromising your brand on the longterm. So it’s a short-term window. I can plop a book on a table and say, look how knowledgeable I am. But when people start to consume this, you actually maybe compromise your brand longterm, short financial gain for long-term financial agony. Then you, then you gotta just keep on kind of popping. Like what’s the new lead bait I can do. I think we give away when we give away free stuff, we’re giving it.