Ep 572: Using Paid Virtual Events to Scale Your High Ticket Offer with Zach Hesterberg
AJV (00:34):
Everybody. Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand Podcast. AJ Vaden here. Super excited to have this conversation today, one, because I know Zach and I believe this is going to be of immense value to everyone. But two, I’m also super excited ’cause I shared this with him before I hit record. I’m so selfishly invested in learning this information that this to me is like, I’m just over here with like, like a, you know, a girl on the first day of school with her pen and notebook ready to take notes. And so should you as I always do here’s who this podcast is for, and this is why you should stick around. If you would like to know how to test and offer before you invest time, money, energy and resources into it, this is the episode for you, right? If you wanna know how to sell high ticket offers could be coaching, consulting masterminds, communities without taking one-on-one sales calls or big, or building a huge sales team.
AJV (01:34):
This is the episode for you. If you wanna know if you should be hosting paid events versus free events, this is the episode for you. And if you wanna know what the biggest mistakes are with hosting live events today, then this is an episode you do not want to miss. So let’s get right into it. Let me introduce you to the one, to the only. Zach Hesterberg. He is the founder of paid events, helping high ticket coaches, consultants, and course creators scale through paid virtual events with nearly a decade in marketing, Zach has helped generate six and seven figure paydays while selling over 15,000 event tickets. Y’all, that’s awesome. Unlike traditional funnels that rely on unreliable sales teams, his paid event method attracts high net worth premium clients, increases conversions, and creates predictable revenue without burnout. Who doesn’t want that? Zach, welcome to the show,
KH (02:33):
Aj. I am so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me, by the way. Fantastic intro. You are a fantastic podcaster,
AJV (02:40):
Well, you know, if all else fails, I could always go into MCing, you know,
KH (02:45):
That’s, that’s fair. That’s fair. I’ve always said, I’ve always said, if I had a, if I had a secondary life, I’d always wanna be like a radio DJ or an mc. So I’m, I’m right there with you.
AJV (02:53):
That’s never too late. Never too late. Yeah. All right, well, just to help our audience get to know you a little bit I’d love to just start with, how’d you get into this?
KH (03:04):
Yeah, so paid events specifically that came probably 2020 I was doing, so I already had a marketing agency. Been doing that since 2015. Started in college, just kinda working with some local businesses. And 2020 came around and I was working with a couple clients more so just optimizing their sales process. I was, people were coming into us for help with Facebook ads mm-hmm
KH (03:50):
It was called the Wedding Photography Summit. And he reached out, he said, Hey, I know that you do a lot of stuff with sales processes. I’m selling $7 tickets for this upcoming summit having a hard time scaling up ads. And I also have some like order bumps and, and one click upsells that have a really low take rate on, could you help me out with that? I said, yeah, no problem. So for the next eight weeks, help them scale up ad spend. Got the, the cost per ticket sold like the, the CPA down pretty low got the order bumps swapped out, and it started working really well. We sold over 8,000 tickets. That was my first ever virtual event. Wow. And a week before the event, well, actually it was the week of the event, it was our last call of our consulting engagement. I said, so Jai, what are you gonna pitch during your event? And he said, I wasn’t planning on pitching anything. What do you mean? Like, I was just, I’m hosting a, a paid event. Like I don’t, I don’t wanna pitch anything like these people have paid to be here. I said, brother, do you hate money
AJV (04:44):
I was like, you’ve got 8,000
KH (04:46):
Of your best customers coming to you to learn how to build up their business. You have a coaching program for 2K, you should at least offer that. Like, because an event is only a catalyst to get someone transformation after the event’s over. Like, there’s so many people that will go to a live event, whether it’s in person or virtual. They get all hyped up, they’re excited, and two days, five days, few weeks after the event’s over. Yeah. Nothing. Yeah. You’ve not taken action on anything. And typically that’s because there was not a real transformation that occurred during the event. You got excited, you got into a great emotional state, but there was no action that was taken to hold you accountable to seeing that transformation through after the event was over. So that’s what I pretty much told him. And he was like, all right, well, cool. I’ll give a quick pitch. And he made another quarter million dollars in the last second. And yeah, that’s, that’s how I got started with it. And so I’ve, I’ve taken on quite a
AJV (05:37):
Bit more. Well, that’s a good entry into the business, Zach. Yeah,
KH (06:34):
KH (07:23):
Most theologians would say there were probably 11 to 12,000 people in that crowd that day. And if you do the math and you say, well, if he was working eight hours a day and he had one hour appointments with people, eight, eight, yeah. Eight appointments per day nonstop back to back to back a hundred percent show rate. And you know, not taking any breaks, it would take him about five years and three months to have met with that many people. But he just did it in one afternoon. And it’s not, it’s not that like, it, it, it’s actually not impersonal to do that. It’s actually almost better because he, he’s doing a disservice if he has to have people meeting with him one-on-one. People want to hear from him. They don’t have to have a one-on-one with him. And so anyway, I was like, man, yeah, he used events to be able to start his ministry and even his disciples.
KH (08:16):
‘Cause Some people would say, well, you know, he had a disciple. So that’s his sales team. No, no, no. Most of his disciples were also doing sermons. It’s a far more efficient way to spread a message. And of course, you’re not gonna have a hundred percent conversion, but you could still have somewhere between a 10 to a 20% conversion pretty consistently when you’re speaking to a group of people at the same time, it’s kind of pitching in a one to many fashion. So that’s my, my inspiration behind some of this. I love that. But yeah I mean, happy to dive more into it. Like obviously there’s sales strategies that you have to deploy and you have to make sure that you’re pre handling objections and, and pre-framing people for the right reasons. But yeah, you could absolutely scale. Like I, we’ve seen the, the virtual events that we’ve hosted, we’ve seen them successfully sell anything from as low as a thousand dollars offers as high as $30,000 offers directly from virtual events where people are paying seven bucks for $9 for like really cheap. So it’s a loss leader model. You don’t, you don’t make money on the front end, typically you’ll lose money after the cost of acquisition, but you make all of your money in that backend sale.
AJV (09:17):
So this is so fascinating. So I would curious to hear from you, like, why do you think that these sales call funnels, like the call booking funnels, why do you think they’re becoming a little less effective as time goes on? Yeah.
KH (09:32):
I think it’s twofold what maybe threefold. In general, the, the reason I said twofold is because people are more sophisticated than ever before, and they’re also more skeptical than ever before. So sophistication is like they
KH (10:18):
People have made some investments that really weren’t the best fit for them, or maybe they didn’t get taken well or taken well care of. And so yeah, the, the skepticism and the, the sophistication, it’s like, it’s just really hard to sell to. And in the past you can, when those were both lower, you can easily have a quick 62nd ad that someone watches on Instagram, they watch it, they’re like, oh yeah, this is interesting. Then they click it, they opt in, they watch a quick 20 minute VSL or maybe a 90 minute webinar. They’re like, cool, yeah, I’m sold. I wanna book a call. They book a quick, a quick hour long sales call and they’re gonna buy no problem. But it’s just not happening at the rate that people would like to see at this point. And so, I, I, I always say that lead generation is easy. It’s really easy to get a lead or someone interested in working with you, but the conversion part is much harder. And that’s because most people skip the in-between step, which is the lead nurture. And so I’m finding that, and this is just my kind of hypothesis a virtual event or in-person event doesn’t really matter, is one of the most efficient ways to nurture a prospect and truly gain that know, like, and trust factor that they truly need before they’re ready to invest with you at a higher rate.
AJV (11:29):
So I have a question for you. You mentioned like seven to $9. Why so cheap? Like why not $20? Why not $50? Yeah,
KH (11:38):
Great question. Great question. I haven’t seen a whole lot of data on the 20 to $50 range. I’ve tested all out a, a good few on like the 97 to 2 97 offers, and people still use those. And so I’m, I’m not gonna sit here and say like, one is better than the other. The only reason we’ve done seven to $9, and, and actually here in about three weeks, we’ll be hosting our own event. We’re actually gonna we have the hypothesis that we think a dollar will still work, so we’re gonna do a dollar ticket because I think there’s just something powerful in the 16 digits being exchanged of, of the credit card number. But yeah, the seven to $9 came up from, honestly, that first client, Ja, he was already selling it for seven. And then the very next week I had a client, her name was Christian Boss, and she said, Hey I I, I’m curious about hosting this upcoming three day virtual event.
KH (12:26):
I was gonna make it free. What are your thoughts? I’m like, I have another client we just sold 8,000 tickets for, for $7. Like, do you wanna do that? And she did it. And a month later she had 3,500 tickets sold at a $7 price range, and she made a quarter million dollars from that as well. And I was like, huh, yeah, maybe there’s something to it. And so my hypothesis, like I’ve, I’ve tested out once again, other price ranges, but my hypothesis is that the lower the price range or the, the, the lower the, the price for the ticket, the easier it is to make that quick impulse purchase. And we’re not in it for profit on the front end. We’re in it for buy-in. And there’s a significant difference from a free event versus a paid event of any sort on the show rate as well as the backend conversion rate, because these people
AJV (13:07):
Are sure you better have some skin in the game, right? Yeah. Something.
KH (13:09):
Yeah. So, yeah, I, I don’t know, the seven to nine I, I’m open to being proven wrong. Like, our motto is, we don’t care to be right. We just wanna make money. So that’s why we’re gonna try the dollar tickets. And then we’ve tried some $27 and $47 events, but they just, the sales page conversion rate quite literally just has not been as desirable as we’d prefer. And at the end of the day, we want that cost of acquisition as low as possible.
AJV (13:32):
So that leads me to another question then. So clearly you’re not doing it for profit. Are you trying to do it for break even? Or are you fully prepared to take a loss? Oh,
KH (13:40):
Yeah, yeah. Fully prepared to take a loss. So I’ve
KH (14:22):
Yeah. Yeah. Literally on the spot. So it’s, they’re like, okay, well we can, we can float that cash. So yeah, you can absolutely try to break even. You can add in some order bumps, some one click up sales. But most of the clients that we work with, they’re busy. Like, they’re usually multiple seven figures, oftentimes in the eight figure range. They don’t want to have to come up with new products to sell just for a funnel. Like they’re, like, at the end of the day, they, they only care about the backend profit. So as long as you have the cash to float, great do that. But if you’re really cash strapped, you could of course add in some extra one click up sales and you could try to increase the average order value.
AJV (14:57):
So then it’s Okay. So walking through this process, for anyone who’s listening to who, okay, if I had a little money to put some, you know, money into some ads, had this low ticket offering, what are you seeing is the most successful formula for the event itself? Is it a full day? You mentioned three days. Yeah. Is it a half day? Yeah.
KH (15:15):
Great question. So it does depend on your market a little bit. For example, myself, if
KH (16:08):
The reason why is, is honestly just because if you can deliver a really powerful shift on perspective in their mindset on, on day one, they’re sitting in that for another 24 hours before they get to hear from you again. And then they’re now eagerly waiting for day two, because as long as you kind of create some nice open loops that don’t totally get closed on day one, now they’re super excited for day two and you’re taking up their brain space and their mental bandwidth over the next 24 hours, and that’s only a two day event. If you wanna do a three day event, great. Now you’re, you’re kind of taking up mental bandwidth for about 72 hours of time, and they’re getting to spend in their mind, they’re getting to spend multiple days with you, but really it’s might only be an hour or two per day. So really it’s not much different than a quick little two hour session or a three hour session. But if you could break that up into multiple days, there’s a, in my opinion, a pretty strong correlation on the, just, just the experience that the customer’s having.
AJV (17:02):
So That’s so interesting. So you find that it’s better to have shorter sessions over multiple days than having all together on like a half day full day. Yep.
KH (17:11):
Yeah. By it. I guess my, my rationale behind this, and once again, I like, I could be wrong on this, but my rationale is that the bite size information is easier to digest for sure, as compared to making someone absolutely just drink through the fire hose.
AJV (17:26):
Yeah. And then their brain is so full they can’t think. Yeah.
KH (17:29):
Because if, if their brain is twofold, they can’t think, and they feel like they’ve just drank from the fire hose for four hours straight, the last thing they want to do is now go buy a multiple thousand dollar offer that you’re pitching them because they feel like they just got so much information they need to take action on that before they invest in your offer, because that would almost be poor stewardship of the information they just got. So give them bite-sized, digestible information and still, like, I would say more so radically change the way they look at whatever the area of life is that you’re helping them, whether it’s business or marketing or health or finance, whatever, like help them out with some mindset shifts. Don’t teach too, too much of the how’s. And it’s not manipulative. It’s just like if you teach too much of the how’s, they will then feel like they have to go implement all of that.
KH (18:13):
Yeah. And we all know, going back to what I just said earlier, if they are so focused on the how, and they’re focused on implementing all of that now, they’re not going to actually buy. And if they don’t buy now, they’re, they’re not actually gonna get that transformation and the accountability mm-hmm
AJV (18:44):
Fascinating. And so next question I’d have is for the person listening you know, I think this is a really, you know, a big deal because first of all, you gotta have, you know, if you’re listening, you gotta have some money, right? To put into paid traffic. So is that if they don’t have any money. Yep. So this model still work, what’s just trying Absolutely. Trying to drive it organically. Have you seen that work?
KH (19:05):
Absolutely. Yeah. There’s, we have kind of four core ways that we’ll drive traffic to any event, whether you have a big budget or not. Obviously yes, ads are probably the most scalable. However, you can also leverage your email list or SMS list if you have those. If not, no big deal. I’m sure you have a few emails you could still send send invites to. But then you can also leverage your organic traffic, obviously go post on some social media. Go let your, your word of mouth network know. And then lastly, any JVs or affiliates mm-hmm
KH (19:52):
And so they, they’re financially incentivized for a different reason. We have seen a fun little hack I guess you could call it on the thank you page. There’s some, there’s some extra real estate you could use after someone buys a ticket on the thank you page. Instead of just saying, cool, here’s a receipt. See you there. Check your emails for more information. You could put a video on that thank you page, and you can now actually leverage that as a way to get some new traffic immediately. We’ve seen this done in two ways. Number one, we’ve seen it done where that that video is actually inviting them there. You could have a form directly below that to sign up to be an affiliate. Yeah. And you could get an affiliate code and immediately you could actually start making money. You could maybe give them a hundred percent of ticket sales a hundred percent of the proceeds of the ticket sales that they generate before the event starts.
KH (20:39):
They can potentially even have a little bit of an ROI before they even get to your event. That’s kind of fun. But the other way is just simply leveraging the power of relationships and reminding them of, Hey, look, congratulations on taking this investment, getting your ticket. I just wanna be really clear, we’ve all been to events where nothing changes after the event’s over. Mm-Hmm
AJV (21:40):
Yeah. I love that. I, I love that. Thank you Paige. ’cause That could work, not just for this event, but for anything, anything you have
KH (22:29):
Okay. just wanna make sure that we’re super on the same page. You’re talking about the in event experience, or are you talking about leading up to the event?
AJV (22:38):
My, like the in event experience? Yeah.
KH (22:40):
Okay. In event experience. I think your first question was what’s some of the biggest wins or like, things that they’re doing well,
AJV (22:46):
Yeah. But what should we be doing? Yes. Okay. And then what could people stay away from? Yeah. Like biggest mistakes.
KH (22:51):
Yeah. I think it’s gonna be, what I tell you to do is also the opposite of it is the mistakes.
AJV (23:35):
What’s this leading up to? When’s it coming? Yeah. Yep.
KH (23:38):
And then the second type of
AJV (23:38):
Person that’s me. I’m always like that at the events. I’m like, when’s it coming? What is it? Hurry up.
KH (23:43):
Yep. Yeah, I’m, I’m right there with you. And then the second type of person, they’re there genuinely thinking that their life is about to be entirely changed over the next two hours. Whether it’s one hour per day or whatever. And you can address both of these people in the same statement. You open up and say something along the lines of, Hey guys, I’m so, so excited that you’re all here today, guys, as promised, we are going to teach A, B, and C over the next few days. Whether it’s today or over the next two days or three days, whatever. It’s gonna be extremely powerful. There’s gonna be a lot of shifts in thought that you might have never had before. There’s gonna be a lot of just kind of knowledge bombs that are getting dropped. Like make sure you’re ready to take notes.
KH (24:20):
But I wanna make sure that we’re all on the same page with something. We’ve all been to events and we got some you know, value and it was exciting and then you left and nothing else happened. And so to make sure that I’m not just leaving you hanging there, just, just to call what it is, I’m going to give you an offer at the end of this event. Not gonna sit here and try to say, I’m going to like, it’s not gonna be a bait and switch. I’m actually gonna give legitimate value. You guys paid to be here, unlike a webinar you have paid to be here. Mm-Hmm
KH (24:55):
You’re gonna be off to the races. You do not need to work with us. Fantastic. I’m so excited you’re here. The others of you, you know that you’d much rather have someone holding your hand or some sort of support after this event is over. ’cause You’re genuinely serious about seeing a transformation in this area of your life. Guys, I’m not just gonna leave you hanging. I will absolutely give you an offer if you’d like to continue working with us. I can tell you more about that on the last day. No big deal though right now. I just wanna let you know there will be an offer. So hope that doesn’t offend you all. Feel free if you I’ll even give you a heads up before I give the offer on the last day, if you guys would like to get out of the room, if that would offend you, you guys can go, go ahead and leave.
KH (25:30):
I I don’t wanna pitch anyone that, that doesn’t wanna hear our offer. Yeah. Is that cool with everyone? And you could actually have everyone say, yep, sounds good. They’ve, everyone’s, everyone’s guard just totally dropped. So that’s one big thing that you could do. And then now they’re not, they’re not like surprised when you give them the pitch. I think a lot of people will try so hard to give this incredible amount of value on the front end during their event, and then they try to switch into the pitch and people are like, oh, wait, I wasn’t expecting that. Or like, there’s just kinda an awkward gap. Oh yeah. But if you open up like
AJV (26:02):
That, it, it went on. I love you to, oh no, you’re just selling me. Yeah, yeah. Like that.
KH (26:06):
Yeah. But if you open up like that on the, whenever it comes time to do the pitch, it’s like also, I, I learned this specific from Russell Brunson in one of his 10 x 10 x growth con presentations. He gave an ask and he said, is it cool if I take the next 15 minutes or so to tell you tell you guys about a special offer I created for you all today? And so he actually had kind of a, a question saying, would you be willing to let me give the offer mm-hmm
KH (26:48):
And you actually wait for everyone to say yes. Like, drop in the comments Yes. Or whatnot. Cool. Now they’re literally giving you permission Yeah. To give an offer and pitch them. So that’s gonna be helpful. And then lastly, I would say there’s, I mean, I could continue talking on this, but I don’t wanna ramble. Lastly, I would say keep engagement high. There’s a lot of people that will focus so hard on just rambling as I’m doing right now. And they
KH (27:34):
You could even share like have people share wins or a ahas after a certain session before you jump into the next session. And that way people are now jumping in and they’re actually reminding everyone else in the room of what they just learned. And so like when you do that, people are actually much more engaged. They’re not just gonna be jumping up on Facebook on a, on a different tab of their computer and start scrolling because they see that they are engaged. They are a part of this event. They’re not just watching someone teach.
AJV (28:00):
Yeah. That’s good. Now in terms of the offer, you said that you’ve seen as low as $2,000 mm-hmm
KH (28:13):
Yeah, probably like low end $5,000 higher end 15 k is probably the sweet spot. Reason being, there’s a few ways that you could pitch on the how to actually get the conversion. So you could pitch direct to checkout. My personal favorite. You could technically pitch to, you know jumping on a sales call. I don’t like that because once again, that now puts man hours at the bottleneck of how many people you could serve. And then there’s a third option that I’ve seen work pretty well which is you could pitch a deposit and say, Hey, this is exactly how much it’s, you don’t owe that right now. You actually owe X amount instead. I’ll give a direct example. The client that I mentioned, they’re, they they spend about 30 K right now per day. They have a $6,000 offer and their offer, they could go straight to checkout on this with no problem.
KH (29:04):
But theirs is very specific to a type of individual and some financial criteria. It’s, it’s kind of a a credit based offer and that you have to have a certain amount of credit in order to be able to leverage what they help you with in the backend. And so they, to make sure that they’re not taking on the wrong clients, they’ll say, Hey, look, our offer is six K to you today. Normally it’s 10. Which is true if you go book a sales call with their team, it’s normally 10 K and they say it’s, it’s six K this week. However, you don’t owe that today. It’s on day two. They say, you don’t owe that today. You’d actually only owe $500 and it’s a totally refundable deposit by putting $500 down today. We’re gonna do a bonus q and a day tomorrow, answer all of your questions on whether or not this is truly the right fit for you or not, because not everyone is perfect for this strategy.
KH (29:50):
And they’ll tell you, like on the pitch, like, who, here’s who it’s fear, here’s, here’s who it’s for, here’s who it’s not for mm-hmm
AJV (30:48):
Yeah. So now this is so fascinating and, and so helpful. What, what, what do you think makes a good offer? Like if you’ve been doing this for a while? I listen to it. I’m fascinated with offers. I sign up for all kinds of funnels. ’cause I just wanna see how they work. ’em, I love listening and some are really great and compelling and others are like, I can’t believe anyone is buying this right now. Mm-Hmm
KH (31:14):
Okay, so I, I wanna make sure, I would imagine you’re asking the general question, but just to make sure I’m not misunderstanding. Are you asking about backend high ticket offers or the front end offers?
AJV (31:25):
Yes. It’s for a high ticket offer. Yeah.
KH (31:26):
Great. Okay. In general, it’s gotta be like, I would say categorized under a few different key transformations. So
KH (32:23):
People buy the masterminds because they want the networking. There’s also dating coaches or Sure. People like that. So there’s that. And then also if you could sell, like, anything that’s investment related, that’s you know, it’s going to be an appreciating asset or there is a certain value to it that, yeah, I mean, I’m, it’s like a, a a, just a super high quality or super high service, like a high quality service or high quality product. If you think I’ll, I’ll, I’ll give the best example. The best offers incorporate multiple of these all at the same time. So Rolex, for example technically high ticket offer, you don’t really think of it though. It’s not really a coaching space, but Rolex is a perfect example of a high ticket offer. They’re charging 10 to, I dunno, 50,000, probably more than that for certain watches and what they’re selling.
KH (33:13):
Number one, it’s a high quality product. You know, that if you buy a Rolex, it’s not breaking a month later, it’s going to be around for decades and decades and decades. Also, high quality service, if you go on in, they’re gonna walk you back. Whenever you’re picking up your, your Rolex from your ad, they’re gonna walk you back into a private room. They’re gonna do a special unboxing thing, they’re gonna give you some drinks while you’re there. Like it’s a really nice prestigious service. Additionally, it’s an asset. You’re buying a watch maybe for 10 K that you can walk out if you really needed to. You could walk out and probably resell it to someone else for 15 to 20 K depending on which one that you’re buying. Additionally they’re selling ego
KH (33:59):
So like that’s a perfect example of a fantastic high ticket offer because they’re selling so many different benefits all at the same time. Correct. A bad offer would be something that is just hard to grasp. Like, I had a client not too long ago, incredible, incredible leadership consultant. He helps people with, you know, seeing leadership breakthroughs within their organization. And when I say that leadership breakthroughs, it’s like, why would I buy that? Like that’s, I don’t know, it sounds good, but I’m not ready to just go pay $20,000 for a leadership coach. I think I’m a fine leader. How do I know if I’m a bad leader? Like, you have to, you have to solve for specific pain points such as like, Hey, I’m going to help you get out of your day-to-day operations, or I’m going to help you hire a COO to, or Yeah, that would be even more specific.
KH (34:47):
I’m, I’ll help you hire a COO to get you out the day-to-day operations or a CEO if you get outta the day-to-day operations. Or I’m going to help you turn your team of task doers into business builders. Mm-Hmm. And they’re actually gonna start focusing on revenue driven activities. Or I’ll help you deploy systems that SOPs so that everyone can leave the office at 5:00 PM rather than working until nine or 10:00 PM every day. So like, you have to get way more specific there. So you can’t just say, I’m a leadership coach. You actually have to say, I help with X, Y, and z Kind of an esoteric high level conversation. But does that make sense? A few of those examples I’m giving.
AJV (35:23):
Yeah. I think that’s great. And I think for a lot of people, this comes back to do you know the benefits Yeah. Of your offer. Yeah. Right. This comes back to the fundamentals of what we do at Brand Builders Group with finding your brand DNA. It’s like, what problem do you solve? Mm-Hmm. Right? What’s the cause of that problem? What’s the unique way in which you solve it? That’s your message. Mm-Hmm
KH (36:08):
Yeah. It’s, it’s helpful. I, I love the way that you kind of reframed all of that, so it’s really helpful to understand Yeah. The pain points that you’re solving. ’cause I, I’m sure most of the people listening to this have already heard this before, but there’s only two core human motivators in life running away from pain or running towards pleasure. And so if you can understand your audiences, both of those, what specific pain points and symptoms are coming up in their life or in their business that they’re trying to solve for, and what specific desires are they trying to achieve? Mm-Hmm
KH (36:50):
You actually have to be able to point flaws or like kind of poke holes at Yeah. If you know them well enough, let’s say you’re a health coach and you help people, I dunno, lose the last 10 pounds of, of their little bit of belly fat, if you know that most of them are trying a certain solution and they’re not getting a result, you should also talk about that as well. So it’s like, Hey, I know you have the belly fat, you’re struggling to lose it. I know you want to have six packs, but here’s what you’ve keep. Like here’s what you continue trying to do, which is X, Y, and Z. Here’s why that’s not working. And now, and now you’re setting yourself up for why your specific solution is working well or why it can be the, the solve, like the, the true solution to their problem.
AJV (37:32):
Yeah. I think that’s so good. And that kind of comes back to one thing, and then I know that we’re almost outta time, and I have one really big question that I wanna hit before we do this, but before I get to that, it kind of comes back to a question that I meant to ask earlier. And I was just looking at my notes. It’s like, do you find that for these, you know, very low dollar paid events, that it is better to have a super niche specific targeted topic? Kind of like what we were just talking about? Yeah. Or do you think it’s better to Yeah. Okay.
KH (38:03):
Going broad is not the way to go get as specific as possible. And that’s where people actually make a, a lot of mistakes is that they’ll try to make their event or any of their marketing in general, in general, so broad to be all encompassing, but when you try to talk to everyone, you talk to no one. Yeah. So make it really specific to solve a very specific problem.
AJV (38:20):
Yes. Our favorites not our favorite. One of my, well, it’s my, maybe it’s my favorite, but one of our sayings at Brand Builders Group is so cheesy, but you’ll never forget it. It’s the more specific, the more terrific
AJV (39:04):
But if you’re one of those individuals who’s like, I don’t, I, it’s not that I don’t wanna build a team, I don’t have a team, right? I have to figure out something. I am the sales team. I think these are, these are the great options and why I wanted Zach to come on the show today. But he also has this awesome playbook called the paid events playbook. And you can go to paid events.com/playbook. And in that it’s gonna cover high level overview of how to plan for your event, how to fill your event, and how to convert attendees at your event. Zach, is there anything I’m missing with that?
KH (39:39):
Not really. I, I mean, you, you covered the high level overview for sure. Yeah. It’s, it’s more in depth than most people would think. And obviously if you have any further questions, you could either go jump on chat GBT and go find information, or if you want direct help, sure you can reach out. But that is a really good overview of yeah, how to plan for your event, make sure it’s actually gonna sell and attract the right people, how to host it, keep people engaged, and then how to make sure, you know, it’s, it’s not really helpful to have a hundred people there if no one buys in the end. So how to make sure you are getting those backend conversions.
AJV (40:08):
Yeah. So again, it’s go to paid events.com/playbook. Yep. Get it, read it, use it. All right. Now before our time runs out I have one last question that I think is universally applicable. And I mentioned this in the very beginning during my intro that we said we were gonna talk about how to test an offer Yes. Before you invest into or invest too much time, money, or resources in it to make sure that it’s an offer that will work. So Zach, how do we do that?
KH (40:40):
KH (41:24):
You could use it totally free. Everybody jump on there and you can make an account and it’s a, it’s an AI essentially presentation builder. And you can give a quick one sentence prompt and say, prompt and say, give me a presentation that, or like, give me a PDF that teaches X, Y, and Z. And so let’s say that you’re a health coach and you’re like, give me one that’s like, lose five pounds before your wedding. And then another one that’s like, how to gain five pounds of muscle in the next six months for bodybuilders or whatever. It’s all like, maybe you have a few different ideas, jump on there, create a PDF for all of them, and then we put together a quick Facebook lead form and Facebook lead forms. You can instantly have a download be given to the person, like without even having to set it up with your CRM.
KH (42:10):
And so we had a, we, we had the lead form for each PDF, we tested out a few different PDFs. And on the PDF, or I’m sorry, on the, on the lead form, we were asking name, number, email no, I’m sorry, not even number, just name an email company name. And then we wanted to know not just what was gonna get the lowest cost per lead, but what’s gonna be the highest quality lead. And so we had some custom qualifying questions in there, one of which I said, which of these describes you best? And that question changed depending on the lead magnet they were opting in for mm-hmm
KH (42:53):
And it was like, I’ve never hosted an event trying to create my first one. Second one was I’ve hosted them, struggled to convert. And third one is like, we crush events, we’re just looking at scale. And then I also asked, where’s your company revenue at? And I think that was it. And so I was asking the revenue question for all of our PDFs, and then I was asking a different kind of intention or sophistication level question for the other PDFs. And so what I did, I set it up for about a hundred dollars a day, and within 24 hours I had very crystal clear data.
KH (43:49):
So that way I was minimizing all variables except for the actual lead magnet. And then I was, I, I was like, well, I don’t care about the cost per lead. I wanna make sure these people are actually qualified
KH (44:25):
And they specifically had a, a, a unique experience with real estate investing. We’re like, okay, cool. That helps us out with the pain points and the desires. And anyway, you can do this. Literally go set it up for $300, go come up with two to three PDFs and I mean, you don’t have to spend much more time than two or three minutes on the PDF I beef mine up a little bit. But yeah, do that. Then go set up a lead form, ask some sort of questions for how qualified they are. I’d say like, a financial qualification is probably helpful. And secondly, what’s their sophistication level around what you’re helping them with? And now you’re gonna have way more intel of like, clearly our lowest cost per lead is coming from this type of offer, and here’s the majority of the leads. Here’s their core desire, core pain point, and we actually know they’re qualified. Great. Let’s actually start putting some bandwidth into creating a more robust offer around that.
AJV (45:15):
That’s awesome. Love that Gamma app.
KH (45:19):
Yes.
AJV (45:19):
Love it with Facebook forms, what AI saves the day.
KH (45:24):
It really does.
AJV (45:25):
Right. love it. So, so good. Zach, if people just wanna connect with you or follow you on social media, where should they find you?
KH (45:33):
Yeah Instagram’s good. Just my first and last name, Zach Hesterberg or YouTube. We’re starting to treat quite a bit more seriously. And YouTube a lot of it’s going to be biblical based content talking about events and selling high ticket. So if you want long form, go to YouTube. Short form, go to Instagram
AJV (45:49):
And we’ll put both of those handles in the show notes. Zach. So good. So many good insights. And I think also just a, a good reminder of like, Hey, just because everyone around you is doing it this way, doesn’t mean there can’t be another way. And I think this is a good reminder for all of us who’s like, you don’t have a sales team. You are the sales team, but there’s other ways to still reach the masses and help scale your business without having to scale your team. So this was such a worthwhile conversation. And everyone who’s listening, don’t forget to stick around for my recap episode, which will be coming up next. And Zach, thank you for being here, everyone else. We’ll see you next time on the influential personal brand.
Ep 571: Who to Hire to Build an 8-Figure Business | Jen Kem Episode Recap
RV (00:06):
Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is the place where we help mission-driven messengers, just like you learn how to build and monetize your personal brand. My name is Rory Vaden and I’m the co-founder of Brand Builders Group, a hall of fame speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. And this show is to help experts learn how to become more wealthy and well known. I know you’re gonna love it. Thanks for being here. Let’s get started. There’s an African proverb that says, if you wanna go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go with a team. And if you are an entrepreneur or you’re a small business owner and you’re trying to grow your business, you are definitely going to need a team. And in this video I’m gonna share with you exactly who should you hire first. As one of the most common questions that we hear from people is they say, I don’t know when to hire and who to hire first.
RV (01:08):
And what I’m gonna share with you may surprise you because I’m gonna say that the first people you should hire are gonna be people that support you in your personal life more than your professional life. So you’re gonna need people to work inside of your company too, but you’re likely gonna need to start at home first. Now here’s the high level concept. A high level concept is that you need to hire people who will take things off of your plate. So if you’ve ever felt like I’m doing so many jobs, or I’m doing four people’s full-time jobs, you probably are. That is what it means to be an entrepreneur, especially a solopreneur. And so, as fast as possible, you need to get those jobs off of your plate. But the simplest and most direct positions to hire for are the ones that I think we hear the least about, and that is hiring people in your personal life.
RV (02:02):
So who would you hire in your personal life? The very first hire that I would make is a house cleaner. These are easy to find. There’s a lot of people who offer this service. If you are still cleaning your house, then that means that’s time that you’re spending there instead of spending it on your business. And that’s the big idea here, is anything that’s taking your time, we have to get off of your plate. We have to outsource it, we have to delegate it to somebody else. So I’m looking for the most tangible and tactical and practical things to get off my plate first. So I would start with the house cleaner. It’s also something that you don’t have to be a millionaire to hire a house cleaner. And you can use platforms like care.com, which is one of our favorites. We use care.com to hire, uh, house cleaners, pet care, elderly care, and childcare.
RV (02:51):
Um, you can even get people to cook for you, right? So you go, what, how much time am I spending on mowing the yard? I need to get someone to do the landscaping. How much time am I spending doing handy work around the house? You can, you can use, uh, Thumbtack or, you know, there used to be tackle. I don’t think they’re around anymore. But there’s, there’s all sorts of, uh, platforms and apps you can use to hire these people locally. Not only do you free up your time, you get them a job and you’re providing income opportunities for the people around you. So anything that is taking time around the house, I would start with first. ’cause that’s gonna give you your peace of mind back. And many times those are some of the most tactical universal skills that are the easiest to hire for next inside of your business.
RV (03:38):
The very first thing that I would, the very first position that I would hire is an assistant. You need an assistant to do basic things for you. Like, um, schedule flights, you know, these are people who can do expense reports, they can filter your email, they can schedule appointments on your calendar and deal with the back and forth with that. They can take the, all the things that come into your inbox that don’t really need your attention, and they can start processing those. In my case, my assistants have access to my inbox. I’ve always done that. And you go, well, what about privacy? And I go, well, if it’s anything that’s super private, then, you know, set up a private email inbox for that or a text message. But, uh, your business email
RV (04:34):
Like, that’s an important part of the job, but it’s, it’s not rocket science to solve that problem. But you need an assistant, you need someone to filter out spam and, and just everything. And also a personal assistant. So this could be the same person, or it might be someone else, someone to do your grocery shopping for you, someone to run to the dry cleaner, someone to do go buy Christmas presents, somebody to wrap the presents, somebody to meet, meet the maintenance man, take the car to get an oil change. All of these things that suck up your time, that is time that you could be spending either on your business or with your family or doing hobbies. Those are the easiest things to hire. After you get your assistant, then typically the next person that you hire in a, in inside of your business, I think is someone who can do marketing for you.
RV (05:22):
So marketing is another tactical skillset that you, that takes time and it’s things that people can learn, right? It’s a very straight down the, the path. There’s things you need to learn how to do. Now as you get lar bigger and your brand grows, or your company grows, you may need multiple marketing people. Specifically, there’s three skill sets you need. You need someone who can write something, copywriter. You need someone who can graphically design something, and then you need a video editor, somebody who can edit videos. Those are really, really common roles. Um, but in the beginning, you might just have a marketing assistant if you’re posting on social media or they’re helping make updates to your web pages, or they might even just be a project manager who’s managing your vendors. When you’re first starting out in your business, chances are you can’t afford a bunch of a bunch of employees.
RV (06:11):
So what you do is you hire contractors, you hire vendors, but you try to have one person who is on your team who can project manage multiple vendors until you can scale up and afford to bring people on your team, which is expensive. And then they want raises, and you want to give ’em raises and they need benefits and like they have to provide for their families. But you, you grow together, but you don’t have to wait to be able to afford employees to start delegating and hiring things off of your, your plate. You can do that right away with all of these apps. You can do it with, uh, hiring contractors, but you kind of do need somebody at home. It’ll start as an assistant. Then maybe there is an, a marketing assistant. Um, another early role that you’re gonna hire in your company is gonna be an accountant, a bookkeeper, right?
RV (06:57):
You’re gonna need someone to deal with quick QuickBooks or whatever software tool you’re using to keep track of your expenses. A lot of times you can, you can find, uh, retired accountants to do that. You can find people who know QuickBooks. You can find people with, you know, basic level education, maybe not even a college diploma, but who have experience in accounts payable and accounts receivable. It’s a great side job. And you’ll notice that all of the jobs, all of the roles that you’re hiring early on are tactical, not strategic. Strategic roles tend to be more expensive. They tend to require more experience and they’re more artistic. The easier roles to hire are the ones where it’s like, it’s a task and here’s a task and here’s an instruction manual for how to do it. And you can just like put anyone in that, in that seat.
RV (07:46):
As you grow, then you need to bring on more strategic people because there’s complexity that will be added to your organization, um, after you hire a bookkeeper and you get that in place, the next thing that I would be looking to hire is what we would call delivery. Somebody who can actually do client work for you so that you don’t have to do the work, right? In any type of business, even if I’m a, you know, if I’m a high school kid, starting a a, a, a mowing, a yard mowing business, there is delivering the service and then there is selling the service. And you have to separate those two tasks. You’ll make more money if you’re selling the service than if you’re delivering the service, right? So you go, I can make more money selling people $10, a $10 service to cut their yards, and then I can find people to mow the yard for $5 and then I’m gonna keep the five.
RV (08:40):
That’s how you really become an entrepreneur, and that’s how it starts. So in order for you to be able to sell more, you gotta open up your capacity, which means you need more people who can deliver. So you gotta get other people trained to do a good job. And that becomes a really hard part. The, the more people driven your business is, right. And so services like ours at Brand Builders Group, we do personal brand strategy. So the people that we hire are personal brand strategists. They have to learn our curriculum, our methodology, our philosophy. They have to hold our values and we spend a a lot of time training them. And, and we also look for people who come in with some experience so that they can work with clients at a lower rate of pay than somebody would have to work with me or my wife and our CEO my business partner aj.
RV (09:26):
Um, so you need to get delivery off of your plate, and that is where the business starts to become scalable because you can sell more and more and more as long as you can deliver that service and you have other people who can deliver it after that. The next thing that we typically start to outsource is sales. Because when you start the business, you are usually the top sales person, but sales is a tactical skillset and it is something that can be delegated and it can be farmed out. And this is something that we did in our past life, was train salespeople. We have inside of brand builders group curriculums for both how to sell and for how to recruit, train, hire, manage, and motivate salespeople. Um, the other thing that’s great about hiring salespeople, and sometimes salespeople you actually can hire earlier, is salespeople often can and want to be paid on commission.
RV (10:18):
If they’re good, they’d rather be paid for their results and they’d rather be paid a percentage of the business they bring in than a flat stable, um, stream of pay, like in a salary or an hourly rate. Well, when you’re starting a company, salespeople can really be great because you don’t have a lot of consistent revenue. You can’t take the risk of hiring employees. But if you find a salesperson who’s willing to work on commission, you can hire as many straight commission salespeople as you can keep up with because it’s on them to go out and sell and you wanna support them and help them. But commission-based salespeople can be one of the very first, uh, positions that you hire in the company. After that, it starts to get more strategic. Uh, in brand Builders group, we have a curriculum called Eight Figure Entrepreneur, and we talk about how do you grow your business from a six figure business to seven figures, multi seven figures, and ultimately eight figures.
RV (11:13):
That is something that my wife and I have done six times. Six times. We have started multi seven figure businesses and twice we have built eight figure companies completely from scratch, from zero, uh, with, you know, no, no venture backed money. We don’t use bank debt. We’ve built it from revenue, from customers in graduating the teams up. Now, when you get to that level, we talk about the eight departments of every business. Every single company, whether a small solopreneur or a Fortune 100 company has eight major functions. Marketing, sales, delivery, customer service, HR, operations, and IT administration and finance it. Every business has those functions. The reason you’re overwhelmed as an entrepreneur, as a solopreneur is ’cause you have to do all eight of those things. Marketing has to generate the lead, sales has to sell, the lead delivery has to fulfill on that, uh, promise and deliver to the customer.
RV (12:17):
Customer service has to deal with any customer service questions or cancellations. HR has to hire all of the people to do of those things, operations. And it has to create the tools and the systems to support all of those people doing those roles. Administration deals with the, the strategic, uh, parts of the business as well as the legal parts, um, and, you know, taxes and legal structure and filings and all that. And then, uh, finance deals with counting the money of all of those things. Those eight functions exist in every business. And as you start to scale, you’ll start with these early positions, and then over time, you’re gonna need someone to head up each of those departments. And then from there, the sky is the limit.
Ep 570: Building the Team to Launch Your Brand with Jen Kem
0:00
One of my favorite interviews we’ve ever had on this podcast is from a woman named Jen Kem, who we’re going to hear from again today.
0:09
0 minutes 9 seconds
Now, when she came on before, she was kind and generous enough to share a lot of secrets about how to monetize events and structure your events in a way to sell high dollar offers.
0:21
0 minutes 21 seconds
And it blew my mind.
0:22
0 minutes 22 seconds
Like literally things that are so significant and monumental.
0:27
0 minutes 27 seconds
So I was like, we have to have her back.
0:28
0 minutes 28 seconds
And part of what we’re having her back for is she has a new book that is coming out.
0:33
0 minutes 33 seconds
And so let me give you the full the full rundown on Jen.
0:36
0 minutes 36 seconds
So she has been named as a top brand strategist by Forbes and she specializes in sort of like just launching innovative ideas with high performing teams.
0:46
0 minutes 46 seconds
And she’s done that for big companies.
0:47
0 minutes 47 seconds
She’s done that for personal brands, but she has what she calls the Unicorn innovation model, and that’s been used by iconic brands like Oprah Winfrey Network, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Oracle, and a number of New York Times best selling authors and keynote speakers and other thought leaders.
1:04
1 minute 4 seconds
So she knows our space really well.
34:15
34 minutes 15 seconds
I love it.
34:16
34 minutes 16 seconds
So I got one last question for you before I ask you that.
34:21
34 minutes 21 seconds
Just where do people go if they want to learn about the book and keep up with you and, and you know, for more info on helping build their own Unicorn team?
34:31
34 minutes 31 seconds
Yeah.
34:31
34 minutes 31 seconds
So number one, I mean, obviously the easiest thing to do is go to Amazon.
34:35
34 minutes 35 seconds
Most of us like go there and the books available in all the booksellers online.
34:39
34 minutes 39 seconds
And if they’re not, if it’s not in your local bookstore, ask them to order it for you.
34:44
34 minutes 44 seconds
Like it.
34:44
34 minutes 44 seconds
It’s available wherever books are sold, Amazon being the easiest place to find it currently.
34:50
34 minutes 50 seconds
And then if you want to know more, you can go to unicornteambook.com.
34:53
34 minutes 53 seconds
It gives you a lot of like other things that I didn’t get to share here that tell you what the book and tells you also all the places you can get it.
35:01
35 minutes 1 second
And then my favorite places to hang out, if you will, to kind of chat and and talk anything Unicorn is LinkedIn and YouTube specifically, but on Instagram is definitely me in the DM.
35:15
35 minutes 15 seconds
So if you like, you know, find me over there and you want to ask a question, it’s actually me responding over there.
35:21
35 minutes 21 seconds
I love it.
35:22
35 minutes 22 seconds
I love it.
35:22
35 minutes 22 seconds
So my last question for you, Jen, is just to go like, if you think about personal brands applying this sort of leadership energy to their futures, what, you know, what’s the biggest mistake you see them make that you would encourage them not to do in this particular area around finding the right people, finding the right idea, activating, you know, their energy of all the people, Like what do you think is kind of the biggest mistake that you would just say like just don’t, just don’t do this.
35:55
35 minutes 55 seconds
I’d say don’t abandoned your identity in the relationship to team, especially as people are telling you to scale and grow, which you you probably want to do.
36:07
36 minutes 7 seconds
But scaling and growing, if you abandoned yourself in that, it’s going to be difficult for you to have the energy to go to the next level because as I like to say, you’re going to hit the next level.
36:19
36 minutes 19 seconds
You’re going to meet a new devil and when you meet that new devil, you need to know what to deal with.
36:23
36 minutes 23 seconds
You need to know how to face that devil, and it’s really about you feeling that energetic strength to push through the right heart thing for the next right thing.
36:31
36 minutes 31 seconds
And so don’t abandoned yourself.
36:34
36 minutes 34 seconds
A team includes you.
36:37
36 minutes 37 seconds
That’s the bottom line, and you are the core and the nucleus of the team as the personal brown and as the founder of the ideas that you’re bringing into the world.
36:46
36 minutes 46 seconds
I love that.
36:46
36 minutes 46 seconds
I think I’ll that’s what will I, one of the things that will stick with me from this is just doing the things that give me energy and good permission to keep those things and embrace those things and not think, oh, as we grow, I I have to do these other types of things.
37:04
37 minutes 4 seconds
So that’s really, really powerful.
37:05
37 minutes 5 seconds
Well, you know, I’m a huge fan of you.
37:08
37 minutes 8 seconds
I’ve learned so much from you.
37:09
37 minutes 9 seconds
I’m so excited about this, the book, all the things that you’re up to.
37:13
37 minutes 13 seconds
And you know, when we get around to like doing our events and bigger events, it’s like you will be on that Unicorn team.
37:21
37 minutes 21 seconds
It’s like I got to call Jen because I know she she just knows how to activate, you know, an event.
37:27
37 minutes 27 seconds
So we wish you the best.
37:29
37 minutes 29 seconds
Thank you for letting us be a part of the journey.
37:31
37 minutes 31 seconds
Thanks for the time today and keep crushing it, friend.
37:35
37 minutes 35 seconds
Thanks, Rory.
37:36
37 minutes 36 seconds
I’m so grateful for you.
37:37
37 minutes 37 seconds
Thanks for being a Unicorn in my life too.
Ep 543: How To Find Where Your Ideal Clients are Gathering | Michael Mogill Episode Recap
RV (00:06):
Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is the place where we help Mission-driven messengers, just like you learn how to build and monetize your personal brand. My name is Rory Vaden and I’m the co-founder of Brand Builders Group, a hall of fame speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. And this show is to help experts learn how to become more wealthy and well known. I know you’re gonna love it. Thanks for being here. Let’s get started. Before you can sell to your clients, you have to find them
RV (01:01):
In this video, we’re gonna share with you the eight top ways to find where your perfect clients all hang out. Let’s dive in right away with number one. And the first one is, it should be where you hang out. It really should be, it should be all the places that you hang out. Why? One of our fundamental core beliefs at Brand Builders Group is that you are always most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. Which means that if you are building a personal brand, it should be built around people that you’re trying to help. The people that you are best suited to help and who you are most likely to make a lot of money from quickly are the people who are like you were a few years ago. That is who you’re most powerfully positioned to serve. It’s who you are most divinely equipped to help support, which means that those people should be you.
RV (02:00):
They should have been you maybe five or 10 years ago or something like that, right up front. If you’re having a hard time finding your ideal clients, then you might be serving the wrong avatar because that means you are trying to reach someone who you don’t fully understand. If you’ve done the rest of your personal brand strategy right, and you’ve had a good strategist from our team, or if you’re doing it yourself, you should be dialed in on these people because it should be you. So ask yourself that question. Where do you hang out? What are the, what are the magazines that you read? You know, what are the conferences that you go to? And, and you really should know those if you don’t. That brings us to number two, which is ask, ask your current clients where they hang out. Send them a survey, call them on the phone, shoot ’em a quick email, like when you see them at your, in your next encounter, just ask, Hey, what are the books that you read?
RV (02:59):
What are the magazines you subscribe to? What are the podcasts that you listen to? What are the conferences you go to? What associations are you involved with? Who do you follow? Like ask your current clients. Where are their favorite sources of media? And there’s lots of ways to ask. You could do that in person with a email, with a survey, et cetera, et cetera. But ask, it is one of the legitimate best ways to find new pockets where your clients might be hanging out that you’re just not aware of. So go ahead and ask. It’s super, super, super simple. Number three is follow other industry leaders. You should follow other industry leaders. One of the biggest mistakes that personal brands make is that they forget, in order to be a great teacher, you must first be a great student. So you should, again, you should be studying, you should be learning, you should be following other industry leaders or other leaders who are in your space, not ’cause you’re gonna copy them, not ’cause you’re gonna steal their stuff, because you’re gonna learn from them.
RV (04:02):
And because that’s gonna help shape you and, and, and help you understand your space. It’s gonna help you know what’s already been written. It’s gonna help you in order to forward the conversation, which is what a thought leader does. A thought leader forwards the conversation. You have to be in the conversation, right? You have to know what conversation is being had. So follow the other industry thought leaders, because they’re gonna point you to resources and talk about people and events and tools and media outlets and groups that you can be, you know, plugging into. And that’s gonna help, help you understand really quickly where those people are. Which brings us to number four, which is kind of related. It’s podcasts. You should be listening to the podcasts in your space, right? Like they’re going to interview and feature other guests who are world renowned leaders in, in your space.
RV (04:54):
Now, our goal here, right as we build your personal brand, is that one day we want you to be the guest, right? I mean, one day you’ll probably be the host first, and we want you to get interviews with those other people. And then one day we want you to become the guest where you are the expert thought leader. You are the most world renowned authority. You are, you know, the leading, recognized voice in your space, but you have to kind of know who those people are. And so listen to the podcast and this plugs into number five, which is search. Use the search, search for your topic, search for your space, search for your audience in each of the search functions, not just Google, but search in the YouTube search bar, search inside of Twitter, search inside of Facebook, search the terms on TikTok, search the actual terms, and that will introduce you to the leaders, the influencers, the movers and shakers.
RV (05:49):
And it’s gonna show you the groups, right? Search on LinkedIn and, and you search a topic like sales and all the top sales groups are gonna come up. They’re all right there, right? Someone has already gathered your audience. That’s the great thing is while you want, while you build an audience, you want to find existing audiences while you build your own audience, which is one of the things we’re super passionate about, is teaching you how to build your own audience while you’re building your own audience. You need to find existing audiences, and that’s what this whole video lesson is all about, right? So use the search feature. Relatedly is hashtags, which is number six. Hashtags are going to help you find your people. And, and if you’re following industry leaders pay attention when they use a hashtag, right? If you don’t know what a hashtag is, right, it’s just, it’s just the pound sign and then a word, right?
RV (06:42):
Like, you know, we sometimes use mis pound mission driven messengers. And so if you’re following brand builders group, that’s like one of the hashtags that our, our people youth, right? So you would, if you were following us, you would pay attention and go, oh, there’s other people who are following this, this type of a hashtag. You gotta know what are the top hashtags in your industry? Again, this tool that I’m gonna share with you at the end of this video is gonna do all of these for you. So make sure that you stick around. Number seven is Google Alerts. Google Alerts. Google Alerts is one of the oldest features of Google. A lot of people still don’t know about it, but it still works really, really well. You can actually take any term that you would ever type into a Google search bar, and you can set an alert for that term.
RV (07:29):
And what a Google Alert does is it automatically emails you anytime that term shows up in a new published article or in a new online mention somewhere. So Google is scraping the web and it’s, it’s basically like making Google an employee for you, like a virtual assistant or something that’s gonna go scour the internet every day for all the new articles and all the new websites and any new mention of the terms that matter most to you. By the way, you should at least have a Google alert for your name, because you definitely wanna know when people are talking about you and writing about you online. So make sure that you set up Google alerts. And then finally, number eight, the tool is called Spark Toro. This is my absolute favorite. This is a tool that we discovered maybe about a year ago, and it is incredibly powerful because it basically does all of these first seven things for you.
RV (08:25):
What Spark Toro allows you to do is basically type in a topic and then it will tell you all of the people who are sort of like the leading authorities on that topic, or basically it, it scrapes the web and says, people who follow this topic also follow all of these people. The other thing it will do is you can say, you can put in a person and say something like, you know, whoever Mel Robbins and you say, I wanna reach people like the people Mel Robbins reaches. And so you could say people you type in Mel Robbins and Spark Toro will tell you, here’s everybody who has followers that are similar to the people who follow Mel Robbins. It’s a tremendously powerful tool. It it’ll introduce you to you know, branded, like branded or themed accounts or company accounts or just like communities as well as other thought leaders who you’ll be like, I didn’t even, I’ve never even heard of that person, even though maybe you have been in the space for a long time.
RV (09:26):
So we’ll include an our affiliate link to Spark Toro, but it’s a free tool. You get so many free uses of it, or at, at least at the time of this video, it is a free tool and you can use a couple free searches a month, and then you pay some very nominal rate to have access to this. So check out spark Toro. You can click on our affiliate link or just check it out on your own. But there you have it. There you have it. Eight ways to find your ideal audience. You have to find your audience before you can sell to your audience. And remember, before you can be a great teacher, you must first be a great student. So make sure you’re plugged in to your area and to your space to that you are one of these people in and among the crowd, so that you can then rise and raise your personal brand to where you’ll become at the front of that crowd.
Ep 542: How to Build a 9-figure Personal Brand with Michael Mogill
RV (00:03):
You are about to meet someone that I admire dearly. Michael Mogul is someone who I think is the epitome of someone who is doing the things that we teach personal brands to do. Except he’s not a client of ours,
RV (00:56):
And Michael has been amazing. Let me give you a little bit of his formal bio. So he’s the founder and CEO of Crisp, which is the number one law firm growth company in America. So they advise law firms on how to grow their practice and do another number of things related to, you know, improving operational efficiency, increasing profits, marketing, sales, the whole thing. They, they curate a huge event many different events, but a, a, a huge event. And he is also the author of a book called The Game Changing Attorney, which is one of Amazon’s bestselling books in the legal category. He hosts the Game Changing Attorney podcast which again, is one of the top podcasts in his niche of legal market leaders. The, the, the conference they put on is called the Crisp Game Changer Summit.
RV (01:46):
It’s huge conference. They’ve had many of the biggest speakers in the world and they help thousands of attorneys that are from solo and small firms to large practices just to differentiate themselves and, and earn millions in revenue. And in the process of that, the Michael’s company, Chris, has become very, very well respected. One of the fastest growing companies in Atlanta, twice, has been on the Inc 5,000 in the top 10%. And he’s just a, a student of personal development and, and personal growth. And I just want you to hear the story of how somebody has built a massive business serving one very specific niche. And so here to tell us that story is Michael Mogul. Michael, welcome to the show, man. Thank you for having me. So tell us a little bit about how, how you got, so, first of all, did I say anything in inaccurate in what I just said? That, that, that was a mouthful of me trying to just recapture, but that, that, that’s it, right? Like you guys serve the, the just lawyers exclusively in a very, very deep way. You curate events just for them. You write books just for them. You create podcasts just for them, right? That’s right. And, and as you were saying it, I, I felt like you were talking about
MM (02:58):
Somebody, somebody else. So it’s a, it was amazing, right? Like the, you hear all these accolades and you know, it, it’s, it’s kinda like the feeling that I had when I released, you know, our first book and, you know, the day before. I wasn’t a bestselling author, but the day after I was. And it’s just, it’s amazing how, how life changes.
RV (03:13):
Yeah. Yeah. So give us a sense of the size of your business to whatever e extent you’re comfortable. The, the number of customers you see, the, the size of your, your employees, your, your, the size of your events, just like whatever, yeah. Whatever analytics or empirical stuff you can give us to give us a, I wanna, I want people to understand a sense of the scope of what you’ve been able to build, serving a, you know, a a very specific audience.
MM (03:39):
Yeah. Yeah. So at this point, we work with about a thousand law firms across the country. Okay. And then roughly, because we also work with I’d say probably close to about 2000 law firm team members. We have, you know, this point, I’d say probably between 120, you know, 120 to 130 employees, right? That are full-time in the company. We are high eight figures. We’ve gotten a nine figure valuation for the business. And the business is entirely bootstrapped, started with $500 to my name, no investors, no loans, no partners, you know, no funding. Nothing like that.
RV (04:07):
That’s incredible. And, and this is one of the first points I want to make for people who are listening. I’ve been saying a lot that too many people are chasing the, the width of their reach, that they’re forgetting about the depth of their impact. And everybody’s chasing millions of followers, millions of followers, millions of followers. You’ve got a business that’s valued at nine figures with 1000 customers. That’s it. One, one thou not tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands, not millions. 1000 customers, nine figures, for those of you mathematicians, that’s a hundred million dollars plus valuation from a thousand customers. Michael, that’s extraordinary. And I think that that represents the future of how monetization will be done for, for, for personal brands. So tell us about how you started it. ’cause I, you, I know when you and I talked before, you were like, yep, no investors and no partners. So, so how the heck did you start it? Because clearly if you didn’t have investors and a bunch of money, you must have started, you must have started fairly small, right?
MM (05:17):
Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, as, as as small as small gets. So I am a first generation immigrant. So my, my, my family and I, we immigrated here. They were, you know, refugees coming over from Eastern Europe. We came here, I was four years old and you know, this was in 1990. And at the time, you know, my, my parents, you know, being immigrant parents, my career path was either doctor or lawyer. And when I went to college, I actually went pre-med at, took the mcat, got into medical school, decided that that was not for me. I spent, you know, hundreds of hours shadowing doctors, but I was always very entrepreneurial in nature. Like, I had a, you know, a web design company when I was 16 years old. And, you know, there’s always like these entrepreneurial ventures. So at the time, you know, where, you know, when I finished college and, you know, I got into medical school, I put in for a deferral just essentially to say, well, I’m not sure I wanna go yet, but I wanna take a year to just kind of find out.
MM (06:05):
This was in 2008. For those that remember this was, you know, not a great time in the economy. So I go from, you know, seemingly about to go to medical school, to washing dishes at a dive bar. Nice. It’s called Taco Mac. And yeah, it was like the American dream. You can imagine how, you know, how proud my parents were at this point. And essentially I went from there to washing lab equipment at the CDC, so the Centers to Disease Control. And while I was there, I had an opportunity to do some of the web design and web development. But really I was trying to figure out like, what do I wanna do with my life? And how do I want to, you know, spend my time? Like, what, what skills do I have? I knew I didn’t wanna go to medical school, so, you know, I just, I started doing all sorts of stuff.
MM (06:43):
Like, I would try to use the time productively to develop skills, whether it was in understanding like money, or whether it was understanding marketing. And I bought a camera. ’cause I just figured this would be like a lifetime hobby to learn, like, just to, just to take pictures. Wow. And every day I had the goal of just like taking one great photo and it was like, you know, like taking photos of flowers and plants and, you know, that sort of thing. But for me, my hobbies, you know, tend to turn into businesses. So the, you know, getting the camera turned into a photography business. And this was originally in like, in the hospitality space, so like bars and restaurants and concerts. Okay. Photography became, you know, video. And we had a a company in Atlanta where we were just doing photography and video and, and nightclub promotions and just working with like Live Nation when there were concerts that came into town.
MM (07:26):
And eventually I started doing that full time. After I’d say four to five years, I started to realize that I think I’m sitting at the wrong table. Meaning that, you know, I’m, I’m going all in on this, but half of our clients go outta business every year. ’cause The bars and restaurants turn it over, and then when it rains outside that, you know, that affects our business. So who would be a better fit client? And at the time it was our corporate clients. So things like the W hotels, red Bull, Verizon, Coca-Cola. So that’s really how CRISP started. It was the pivot from, you know, one industry to focusing more on, on corporate clients. But at the same time, we had no focus, like, meaning that we would work, you know, doing videos for anyone. I mean, when I started the business, even originally in 2012, I had $500 to my name.
MM (08:06):
So it’s like, how do we get clients and customers? And I just went down my list of contacts on my phone and I messaged everyone. I was saying, does anyone know anyone who needs a video? Right. And, and we were doing, I mean, it didn’t matter if we would do like a bar mitzvah or a soccer tournament or, you know, you’re just, you know, filming a dental practice, you know, whatever it was, there was just no focus whatsoever at the time. It was just, how do I get business? It was just me. And I will say that one of the biggest, you know, kind of pivots in the business that that led to a lot of exponential growth was when we started working with lawyers and law firms. So at the time we were doing videos for everyone, brands, different types of professional services, like just all sorts of different industries and businesses. It was just, it was about selling video to everyone, which was not, you know, not a great way to scale. And then,
RV (08:48):
Yeah, so you, you’re doing like, you’re, you’re, you’re selling to everyone, but you’re a generalist and so you’re just like, yeah, getting low dollar things like here and there. When, when you, when you decided to go on law firms. ’cause ’cause Yeah, here’s the ironic fear that all of our clients have when we, when we tell them like, Hey, pick, pick one and, and serve one audience very deep is they think that that will be limiting. They go, well, if I only serve this one audience, I’m gonna be saying no to all of these other people, and that that’s gonna make my business smaller and less revenue and less profitable. It’s like the, the idea of focusing on a, on a more specific, they, they confuse that being specific means being smaller. But it was not, it’s not that, it was not that way for you.
MM (09:43):
Absolutely not. And in fact, I even learned this lesson from many of the lawyers we worked with. So at the time, I mean, this happened by accident. I’m not a lawyer, nobody on our team is a lawyer. And we had a a fan, a phenomenal attorney come to us that essentially she, you know, she was working hard, but she couldn’t compete with the big advertisers, whether it was on tv, radio, billboard. She didn’t have the resources to compete. And we ended up producing a number of videos for her, like really that highlighted her area of expertise, what set her apart. Those videos went on social media and her business exploded. And then that led to her referring another lawyer that she knew and then another lawyer. And at the time, I didn’t know anything about the legal industry. As I started to learn more, I saw a super saturated, very competitive, commoditized space that consumers have a difficult time differentiating one lawyer from another lawyer.
MM (10:29):
And then I saw that, okay, well if they’re producing these great videos that tell their story, this becomes in, in a way a competitive edge, right? Especially for, you know, most law firms which can’t compete on TV and radio and other traditional forms of advertising. I also found, and this is kind of where that niche focus starts to come in, is that the law firms that came to us that were these full service firms that were doing personal injury and criminal defense and family law and so on, they were really struggling to bring in cases versus the ones that were honed in on one practice area. But the ones that were doing the best were honed in on one practice area, but then they found a deep niche, like a personal injury lawyer that focused exclusively on trucking accidents or motorcycle accident cases, right? The ones that had that, you know, that deep niche, they were able to be very focused in their marketing messaging and also were able to stand out and differentiate versus saying, Hey, we help all injured people, or we help not just injured people, but we also help those going through divorces.
MM (11:20):
And we also help those that need like, you know, business litigation, right? Because you’re just so broad. So I think that’s where, you know, that that started. And then for me, when we made that pivot fully and exclusively to working with lawyers and law firms, it’s just, I candidly saw that we were making a much greater impact. And I liked helping small business as opposed to some of these larger corporations where, you know, they had to spend the money, right? They, they had the budget, it was a lot of like decision makers, but helping another entrepreneur was much more rewarding. And we were helping them solve a challenge that we ourselves were solving in the process of how do you differentiate and stand out in a very crowded space where consumers have a hard time towing one apart from another.
RV (11:56):
Yeah. And I, the the other thing that’s amazing about this, right, is somebody listening might be like, oh, well that’s good. Michael figured out his niche and he’s crushed the law space. So now I can’t get into the law space. And I go, no, you’ve reached a thousand, you have a thousand attorneys. How many attorneys are there in the us? Do you have any idea?
MM (12:19):
Oh yeah, there’s about 1.3 million
RV (12:21):
MM (13:10):
Absolutely. And in fact, I was speaking with a, with an attorney recently. So she focuses on allergen law and apparently there’s only three lawyers. She focuses
RV (13:16):
On what? Allergy
MM (13:17):
Allergy law, right? So like if you, let’s say the types of cases would be if you go to a restaurant and you have a child who’s allergic to peanut butter and you tell the restaurant, Hey, you know, make sure no peanut butter, but then they put, put it on there anyway. And they have, you know, this massive allergic reaction they have to go to the hospital that is allergy law. And she said that she’s one of three that focuses on allergen law across the country. Like meaning that there’s just, there’s only three of them. It’s not, it’s not a super well-known practice area. There’s not a ton that do it. But she’s become kind of the go-to expert in this space because she writes books on allergy law, she’s now working with the FDA in terms of advising them. She works with several nonprofits and, and it’s such a, you know, you can find like the more narrow the focus we find, the more successful they are generally and the more known they are for that specific area.
MM (14:02):
Like, it is much, much easier, I think to grow a successful law firm. Probably a successful business as well, if you’re very clear on, and, and as you know, Roy, I mean like, you know who you’re for and who you’re not for down to the marketing messaging down to being able to differentiate and stand out and resonate. So I find that the more and more you niche down, I mean, I guess the common thought is that, oh, there’s gonna be less available. You know, like total addressable market, right? It’s like, oh, there’s gonna be less people, but you don’t need to win. You know, you don’t need to boil the ocean essentially.
RV (14:29):
Mm-Hmm,
MM (15:39):
Yeah, so when we started out, you know, started the company in 2012 video, then started working with lawyers, I believe around like 20 13, 20 14. But really the, so the expansion started where, you know, video was great, you know, to help somebody differentiate and stand out from the competition. It was great content. But then the next thing we heard was that, okay, I’ve got this great video, but how do I get it out there? Like, how, you know, how do I actually get the phone to ring and how do I get, you know, get known? Which is really where the marketing started of us placing the content on social media for our firms. So that was the marketing piece. And then we realized, you know, several years in that, okay, you can have great content and you can be, you know, promoting and amplifying that content, but then what happens when someone reaches out to you?
MM (16:18):
And that’s where all, like, everything beneath the iceberg of do you have a good business? Do you have the right people in place? You know, is the operation strong? Like is the culture, right? Like all those elements that sometimes you can have great marketing, but if you’re already working 80 hours a week, getting more calls, getting more leads, getting more cases doesn’t, you know, really materially improve your life. ’cause You’re already working 80 hours a week. So that’s where we went from video to marketing to coaching. And we soon saw that, you know, when we were doing workshops and coaching our firms on the leadership side of really growing a successful business, you know, in, in, you know, in their field. Now it’s like, okay, you can work with the firm owner. But then we started to get their team members on board because the team members were, that’s where all the true leverage came in for them.
MM (16:57):
So we started the team member workshops and we added, you know, onsite trainings. We come out to their office and then we even recently added recruiting to where we were first coaching on here’s how you can source and find these candidates. ’cause Hiring was one of the biggest challenges for many of our firms. And then we say, you know what, here’s the, we’re gonna show you how to do it and teach you how to do it. And then there’s the option of, we’ll do it for you. But what, where this all came from, I guess coming back to the, the reason for this evolution of the ecosystem was in the fact that we, we said from day one, we’re an law firm growth company. And one of the things that I didn’t love is that I hear a lot of businesses say they are an, you know, an x, y, z growth company, but what does that really mean?
MM (17:32):
Right? And can you really help solve a true business growth problem if you’re focusing really on only on one area? Like if we were only producing the content, if we were only doing the marketing, right? And I really viewed this as being a holistic solution of having like kind of a go-to shop that helps you understanding that you need to have all these elements and all these pieces, pieces to truly achieve these growth goals. Like if a firm comes to us and they’re at a million in revenue and they say they wanna get to 10 million in revenue, okay, is video gonna take them from one to 10 million? Probably not, not on its own at least, right?
RV (18:00):
It’s gonna help, yeah. Not just as an independent item that doesn’t, it has to exist inside of a ecosystem of, of like Strat, like strategic offerings or I guess operational elements.
MM (18:11):
Exactly. I mean, we just found that you’ve gotta get your messaging right. You’ve gotta get the positioning right. You gotta have the right content. You have to make sure that you’re promoting and amplifying the content in the form of marketing so people hear about you. And then once that call comes in that you’re providing, you know, you’re living up to your marketing, you’re providing great service, you’ve got a strong leadership team, like there’s operations in place in terms of processes and systems and procedures and so on. And now you can really start to grow and scale a great business. So all those elements and those expansions, the ecosystem came back to, if we say we’re gonna be a law firm growth company, then, you know, we really wanna make sure that we’re integrated and helping our firms solve this problem, you know, from, from beginning to end.
RV (18:45):
Mm-Hmm,
MM (19:30):
Yeah. You know, it’s funny, it sounds so obvious when you say it, but every time we made one of these expansions in the ecosystem, people looked at me like I had horns on my head and they’re like, what are you doing? Like the, the big shift when we went from video to, to coaching, like, I mean, we had team members that, you know, who looked at me and said, you know, I don’t understand the vision. We had a lot of people in the legal industry that were saying like, what is Chris doing? Chris is a video company. What are they doing getting into coaching? You know, that sort of thing over the years. But as you’ve described it, and this is the way that I saw it as well, was like, this is the natural progression, right. Of fulfilling the next need.
RV (20:01):
Yeah. So there’s, the reason it’s, it feels simple to me is also ’cause we’ve done it wrong for a long time, and then we, as we figured it out for ourselves, then we started coaching clients to do it. And, and right, that’s one of the reasons why brand builders group only works with personal brands. Like if a company calls us and says, Hey, can you teach us something about brand strategy? It’s like, well, yeah, a lot of our strategies apply to companies, but we don’t work with any company. Zero. We work only and exclusively and solely with a an individual single person of helping that person become more well known. But then we vertically integrate that component. And as we’ve done that, and we’ve coached other people to do that, there’s like two, two of the biggest philosophies that, that we’ve realized. And, and you model this too, Michael, is the greatest form of marketing in the world is a changed life.
RV (20:56):
When you change the life of your customer, they will go tell other people and your customer force will become your sales force. And the story you just told us was exactly that, right? It started with like, one lawyer has a great experience, they give you referrals from a, the second thing that has really emerged for us in terms of monetization strategy is that really the key to making more money is to serve a more narrow audience in a deeper way. So it’s going, how can I serve? Instead of going, how can I reach more audience? It’s like, how can I serve the audience I have in a deeper way? That’s the fastest path to monetization, right? That’s not how you become famous, it’s how you become rich. It serve a more narrow niche in a deeper way. And it, the progression you described was just like so perfectly spot on because you’re just going, oh, well I solved that problem and now a new problem emerges, and so I’ll solve that problem for them. And now a new problem emerges. And it just seems like that’s been your, your whole progression, and this has happened freaking fast. You’re not even 10 years. So you’ve gone from zero to a hundred million dollar valuation in less than 10 years.
MM (22:09):
Yeah. Oh yeah.
RV (22:11):
That’s epic. I mean, just, just think about, okay, so for anybody listening right now, I just want you to think about where you were in your life 10 years ago, right? And, and for some of you that might seem, oh, I’m very close to what you’re doing now some of you, it might seem like a lifetime away, but if you were starting on zero this moment, and I said, look, 10 years from now, you could have a hundred million dollars business. Most people would go no way. That’s freaking impossible. It’s not impossible. It’s not only not impossible, it’s likely if you follow the strategies and you serve a community and you focus on transforming their life and you focus on serving them in a deeper way. And I just, I just love, I just love you. This, you’re just a perfect example, real life story of this.
RV (22:58):
So starting 10 years ago, what would you tell yourself? Like what do you wish you knew then that you know now? Because you clearly had an instinct for this. I mean, you know, like even though I’m saying you’re such a great model, this we’ve only just met you, like so you figured this out all on your own. Is there some things that if somebody was listening right now thinking about, okay, I want to be be where you are in 10 years, what, what are the things, what are the, what are like the three biggest things that you would tell them that you wish you would’ve known?
MM (23:34):
Yeah. Well, so I think the first thing, you know, as I’ve been thinking about this a lot is just that really determining whether you have the stomach for this, right? Meaning of just entrepreneurship in general. I try to actually do my best to dissuade people from doing this stuff. And if, and if they still wanna do it at the end, then I’m like, okay, that’s it. You, you have, you have what it takes, right? Meaning that it’s going to be a very difficult journey. It’s gonna be a difficult path. It’s gonna probably involve a lot of pain, but it’s absolutely worth it, you know, if you, if you stick it out. So that’s probably one of just being clear on like, okay, you know, is this something I’m wi willing to dedicate my life to go all in 24 7? I mean, I I will say like, I, I didn’t do it on my own, right? I, I had a lot of help. You know, my wife, she came from a management consulting background, you know, when she came into the business, I was very strong on, you know, on the sales and marketing front. But she laid the operational groundwork, which, which really enabled us to scale, right? And that’s probably one, but number two, I wish. So
RV (24:29):
Just on, so just on that real quick though, I’m so glad you said this because there’s so much so many people are enamored right now with being an entrepreneur and like, start a side hustle and make millions and fly a private jet, and like all the pictures on social media, the glamorous of like, be your own boss. Like, oh yeah, you don’t need to work nine to five. Like, your boss is an idiot. Like start your own thing. And it’s like, you don’t, there’s not, there’s no one’s telling the true story, which is like, you late nights and stress and like, you’re leveraging the house and you have cash flow, like, you know, worries. So I’m, I’m, I’m glad that you, I’m glad that you bring that up ’cause no one,
MM (25:07):
Yeah, well, I mean, up until about four years ago it was seven days a week, you know, 24 7, 365. Like my wife and I, we would come into the office Saturday and Sunday. I mean, you know, it, it wasn’t until like our kids were born and, you know, we had more of the, you know, the leadership team in place and, you know, we’d start to really build a foundation. But up until that point, especially the first five years, it was ramen noodles. It was, you know, wasn’t really taking a salary. And if I was, maybe it was like $25,000 a year. Mm-Hmm.
RV (25:53):
So, so it’s like five to six years of intensity though. I mean, like real straight up. Like you’re not, you know, flying a private jet and living on a yacht. And, and, and it, it’s, it’s like, and, and you say it’s worth it, but it’s like, I think people need to hear to go, you gotta be prepared for, for five years. You’re saying, in your case, five years of, of very intense pain. Pretty much
MM (26:22):
At least. Yeah, I mean at, at least for sure. You know, and, and, and again, everybody has their own path. You know, I, I think we were very, very ambitious in terms of our goals. We wanted to move at a very fast pace. We wanted to, you know, to see a lot of progress year over year for, you know, depending on someone’s lifestyle. I’ll say that what, what made it easier for us at least, was in, in me early on, is that I really didn’t have much to lose. Like, I, I wasn’t coming from, you know, a, a job where I was making good income. You know, I wasn’t driving a nice car, you know, the, the home that we lived in was a, you know, $107,000, you know, town home that we bought as a foreclosure, right? Like they just, you, you start, I didn’t have to give up a Mercedes and, you know, and I didn’t have to give up any type of lavish lifestyle. So that made it a little bit easier, especially in the, you know, in the early days. But, and then I think the other part of it is that only
RV (27:08):
Easier, only easier in the sense that you didn’t have to go backwards. And a lot of people Yeah. Not, not only are very, very many, not very many people are willing to endure the five years, but even fewer people are willing to go backwards from where they are for correct. Four or five years. Especially if they’ve already put in, you know, five or 10 or 20 years to get where they are. And it’d be like, I’m gonna go backwards and, and it’s gonna be even worse. So that’s, yeah. That’s, that’s, that’s powerful to know. What was the second thing?
MM (27:39):
Yeah, so I guess I was thinking about the, the two because I got, I got a good one. That’s the third one. But you know, the the second I, I look back and I wish I would’ve documented more, right? Oh, so in, in, in, in a number of ways. So one is I wish I would’ve taken more photos and I wish I would’ve taken more videos. ’cause You know, I I think back to, you know, some of these experiences and stories which, which have become, you know, such, you know, amazing learning lessons and have made it their, you know, their way into presentations and when we speak at our summits and so on. And, you know, I wasn’t really proud of what we had early on, so maybe that’s why I wasn’t taking photos. ’cause It wasn’t a lavish office and we didn’t have a huge team and, you know, it just didn’t look that impressive.
MM (28:13):
But I wish I did that. And then the other side of the documentation is just, just the systems and processes, right? It’s much easier to do that when you’re small than when you get big and there’s more complexity and things start to break down. And you, and you wish you, you had, here’s kind of the step-by-step process on how to do this. Or if somebody leaves, you know, being able to, you know, to train up and bring in another person. So I, you know, I would say that start documenting things, you know, both in terms of capturing those moments, but also in terms of processes early on, it makes it much easier to scale later. Mm-Hmm
RV (28:42):
Mm-Hmm. Yep. Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s a good one. I mean, I think it’s, when you look at scaling a business, it’s people, processes and product. I mean, it’s like you have to have a great product. You gotta have processes documented and great people and processes is the one I think people don’t talk about, which ironically is the most controllable. Sometimes it’s hard to create a good product. Sometimes it’s hard to recruit and retain good people, but like, documenting your processes, like all of us are a hundred percent in control of it. And nobody ever does it
MM (29:21):
Yeah, so this is a big one, and I see this with a lot of our clients and our firms. And if I had to say like, what is the difference, the biggest difference between a six figure firm and a seven figure firm and an eight figure firm and a nine figure firm, it is the same thing across the board. And it really just comes down to perhaps the level of courage and the willingness to write the check and the willingness to invest. So, meaning that it’s one of the things that I think led to a lot of our, you know, our growth was that we just, it was being courageous. So I, I’ll give you an example. Back in, you know, in 2017, you know, we were, you know, still a very, very small company in the legal space. There were companies that had been around for 20 years and 30 years that were these great like, marketing agencies and consulting companies and so on.
MM (30:00):
And it’s like, and we were unknown, and I wanted to get attention, I wanted to get our name out there somehow. And we thought, okay, so similarly, like our clients were having a great experience with us. And we felt that, okay, well our clients probably know people like them. So people that are very similar in growth minded and entrepreneurial in nature. So what if we did some sort of referral program where they could refer other people to us? And I saw what these other referral programs were in our industry. It was like they were giving away like, you know, an iPad or an Amazon gift card. And I was like, well, that’s not crazy enough. So I had got this idea in my head, and once that started, never left was what if we gave a car away, like to our clients? And at the time it was like, well, what if we gave away a Tesla?
MM (30:39):
And this was in two, you know, in 2017. So people ask me, they’re like, well, how did you give away a Tesla? Well, I had like $80,000 to my name. The Tesla model s at the time was $77,000. I went to the Tesla dealership, I wrote them a check, and they gave me one. Right? So it’s, you know, wow. And, and, and I thought this would be brilliant, right? Like, I thought if we did this, it would get a ton of attention. Clients would start referring other clients to us, you know, because every time they’re referred, they would get a chance to win this Tesla. And as soon as we announced it, 30 days went by, we didn’t get a single referral. Hmm. Like nobody cared at all. And I, and my eyes started twitching because every day I drive up into the office and I parked it in front of the office and I was just thinking like, have I made one of the most massive mistakes ever?
MM (31:21):
Right? Like, of just pouring the savings into a car,
MM (31:59):
So this first one was in 2017, let’s see, we’re now in 2020, you know, four, so roughly what, seven years. And we have now given away, I believe 18 cars over the past seven years to our clients. And you know, in this year we, we will be giving away a cyber truck. But we’ve done everything from like Teslas to a Ferrari, to a Rolls Royce, to a gwa. And you know, I, I got our, our fair share of criticism when people say, well, you know, they give cars away or whatever, and, you know, I have to do that. And honestly, we wanted to make working with us an exciting experience, right? Just because legal traditionally is not known for a very engaging, you know, thing. Like, you know, when lawyers are coming to workshops or, you know, even just in general, the industry as a whole is very traditional.
MM (32:41):
Not a whole lot of innovation, not a whole lot of change. And we wanted to create this engaged community of people that were, you know, entrepreneurial, that were committed, that were wanting to really grow their firms. And we wanted to make it exciting to be a part of that. So if you, you know, if just by growing your firm, you can, you know, potentially win a, you know, a, a Tesla cyber truck or a Ferrari or something. Okay, that’s exciting. That’s not the primary reason to do it, but you gotta do something to stand out and differentiate. And we didn’t have the resources to compete against these massive companies. So that was I think the, the lesson here is just that you gotta be courageous. You gotta be willing to, to, you know, to make those investments and place those bets. And, and I find that those that play on defense of like, not, you know, trying not to lose, that’s a very, very difficult place to be in business.
MM (33:24):
And instead we went on the offense. And even when it didn’t work, at first it’s like, okay, well let’s figure it out, right? And let’s, you know, let’s adjust, let’s iterate, let’s adapt. And, and now it’s, it’s become, in some respects, one of the things that we’re known for. But, you know, that’s how we went from one car to over 18 cars. And that’s how eventually, you know, we had a weird experience at the, at the conference where we gave away a car. Like we, we didn’t control the experience ’cause it was another conference and it was like right after Super Bowl Sunday, it was gonna be this big announcement, but only seven people showed up. And when we called the name of the winner at this other legal conference, they weren’t even there, right? Like they were at home. And then I called ’em, he didn’t answer the phone. So it was at that moment that I said, never again are we gonna give away our grand prize at another conference? Which led us to starting our own. And then that went to, that’s
RV (34:06):
Why that was the catalyst for starting your own conference.
MM (34:08):
That was the catalyst. And then we ended up creating the largest legal conference in the entire legal industry that has 5,000 people attending it. And that, that was the one catalyst.
RV (34:16):
Oh my gosh, this is so, so crazy. So, so just real quick, they get, for every client they refer, they get their name and a drawing to win a car. And as simple as that. Exactly.
MM (34:27):
Yeah. Oh my gosh, that’s,
RV (34:29):
That’s so cool. Okay, so I wanna hear about the conference. Yeah, because the conference is a whole nother business. I mean, th that’s really gonna stick with me just in general, Michael, about just, it’s the courage to invest, right? Like you’re, you’re investing in coaching, you’re investing in team, you’re investing in technology. You’re clearly you, you had to hire staff to be able to start offering all of these other things you’re putting on, you know, doing this raffle with the car. And then one of the biggest investments y’all make is this conference that you do every year. And I’d like to hear about that because that is a, that’s a really exciting thing, but a scary thing. So, and it’s almost like a separate business. I mean, how many people came to the first conference? Where did you do it? And then how have you continued to courageously invest beyond that? Yeah,
MM (35:23):
So if, if you’ve ever been to a legal conference or any type of, I guess, professional services conference, they’re not known for their excitement. Like, meaning, usually what happens is it’s at, you know, in a dimming lit room, everybody’s on their laptops, on their phones, maybe there’s a speaker on stage, but no one’s paying attention. And generally the reason people go is it’s either at a destination like a, like a Vegas or Miami and you know, they’re gonna get, get drunk in network, right? But, but the conference is kind of like a, you know, a sidebar to what, what is actually taking place. And I’d go to enough of these, ’cause you know, I was speaking at, at the time, like 15 to 20 of these a year and I was like, you know what? I think we can do better, but I’m one of these people that’s like, okay, well if you think that, you know, prove it.
MM (36:02):
And you know, so when we did our first conference, my target was 200 people. I was like, if we could just get 200 people there. The first event that we did was in in 2018. And, but we ended up getting 500. But the approach that we took is I looked at other industries and I’d look at like Salesforce, like Dreamforce conference, and I saw what, you know, Tony Robbins was doing. And I was like, what if we did something that had, you know, great production in av, we got a DJ and then we got like great speakers from other industries. So like at our first conference we had like David Goggin speak and Chris Voss, and this was right before David Goggins, you know, his book even came out and before David was known and you know, and we had so many non-legal speakers ’cause you could see a lot of the legal speakers at other conferences, but I wanted ours to stand out.
MM (36:44):
So the first one we had, you know, 500 people attend that one. And it was either gonna go where people walked in and they’re like, what the hell is this? And walk right out. Or it was gonna be a huge hit. It was gonna be one or the other. ’cause It was just so different from any other type of legal conference. And people loved it. I mean it’s, it was unheard of at the time, at least with legal conferences, they have a full room at 7:00 PM when you’re, when your speakers speaking on, I think it was like a Thursday or Friday night, like usually conferences start to clear out like at least legal ones at like two or 3:00 PM And we had the full room, David Goggins was speaking seven o’clock, like not, you know, not a single person on their phones, not a single person on their laptops.
MM (37:18):
Like it was a truly engaging event. And then we continued to do them, you know, year after years they grew bigger. And in 2022 we ended up doing what I think is, I believe it’s the first legal conference in a football stadium. So we did it at Mercedes-Benz Stadium where the Falcons play, where they had the Super Bowl here in Atlanta. And we had 5,000 lawyers at that one. So we kinda went from 500 to the first one to 5,000 at the one in 2022. And now we’ve made the the events even more exclusive. So they’re, they’re now private events by invitation only. The one this year is, you know, is 3000 people, but you know, the production values continue to increase the quality of the speakers and the quality of the contents continue to improve. And it was really about creating a, a conference that was about not the practice of law, right?
MM (38:00):
‘Cause We’re not teaching lawyers how to practice law. Like they’ve gotta come in with that. But more so the business side of law, and especially at the time in 2018, most legal conferences were focusing on trial skills and not how do you grow your law firm? You know, like how do you hire the right people? What about culture? What about marketing and brand and those topics? And there’s a lot of just, most law firms were really struggling to grow their business. So I felt that there was a need for this and now they’re more common. But you know, as they started to catch up, as we start to see other, you know, businesses and law conferences, they still, and I still don’t understand why maybe they’ll hear it on this podcast. Maybe they’ll, you know, they’ll do it different in which case out root for them. But they still don’t go all in in terms of like the production value and the quality and the experience. And it’s just, it’s, it’s almost like, you know, they see the business of all topic, but the, but the experience is what I really think is a differentiator. Is,
RV (38:49):
Is, but those, okay, so, so on the one hand you’re like, yeah, experience, make it awesome, make it engaging. On the other hand you go, it’s fricking expensive. I mean, oh yeah. You’re, you’re having, you know, production crews and setups and tear downs and av and like, these speakers are not cheap, right? Like, how do you, how do you justify the cost of putting on these events and do you, like, do you lose money on them and you’re okay with it ’cause you sell the other stuff? Do you try to break even? Do you make a little, do you make a lot? Like what’s your, you know, mindset there around how you’re investing into these? Because it’s also and is a ton of time. I mean, you don’t just get 500 people to show up at an event without spending a lot of time like talking about it.
MM (39:34):
So I don’t know if I’ve shared this publicly before, but I will, I will tell you. So as an example, and this is also why I think this could only happen in a founder led business. So meaning that if, if I had to make this decision by committee, the answer would be hell no. Every single time. So as an example, that conference in 2022 at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, that was an $8 million conference. Like meaning that between, between the venue rental, the av, the food and beverage, the speakers all, and it was $8 million before anybody walked through the door. And in, as you know, in the event space, there’s no payment plans. These, these people want their money up front. So, and that is terrifying. But I’ll, I’ll tell you how I justify it. And, and also we don’t do sponsors, we don’t do exhibitors like that.
MM (40:15):
It is cut, you know, in some ways unheard of in, you know, in the legal industry because pretty much every conference you go to, there’s the massive exhibit hall, there’s the person who sponsors the wifi, there’s the person who sponsors the cups there. We don’t do that because again, we feel that those detract from the experience and we want it to be really honed in and focusing on like what is going to be most valuable to people. So them having to walk through an exhibit hall of one person pitching them legal funding, another one pitching them, you know, pay-per-click another per person pitching ’em something else we feel could hurt the experience even though we’ve been offered continuously. I mean, it’d be easy to monetize that because people would want to have a presence there. Totally. But the, the way that I justify it is that, you know, it’s kind of interesting in our model that I really believe that we have to walk our talk.
MM (40:57):
So in the sense that if we position ourselves as a law firm growth company, that helps other law firms grow and we’re saying, Hey, you’ve gotta make investments and you’ve gotta take risks. I believe that we have to lead by example. So doing something, you know, crazy like that is, is is a form of doing that. So it’s, it’s this kind of this idea that when people, you know, see someone do something, it means more than when someone tells you something. Right? And then just like seeing is believing, like, you know, we’re at this event I remember at Mercedes-Benz and we’re telling ’em to think big and I remember sharing with the team, I’m like, this wouldn’t work if we were at a tiny venue of like a, you know, like a, a holiday inn Yeah. Telling ’em to think big, right? Just, you know, it wouldn’t align.
MM (41:33):
I, so I will say that, you know, we have, we’ve invested tremendous amount of resources in the events. Some I I would say are really just brand drivers. Like, meaning that, you know, that event in 2022 we didn’t lose money on it, it was still profitable. So we, we generally see like people that come to the event, many that are not clients become clients or join the ecosystem or even existing clients, it’s, you know, in some ways it’s like a re-engagement event where they may, you know, choose to add on additional aspects of our ecosystem to their existing programs. So there is that component to it. But our first focus is how do we make this as valuable as possible to someone. The majority of people that attend the event don’t invest in anything, right? Like probably 80% or more. But it’s such a strong brand driver. Like I knew when we did that Mercedes-Benz event that it was just as important about the people who weren’t there as the ones that actually were there. And when you, when you see or hear someone who’s did you know, a legal conference in a football stadium, like you can hate my guts. Like you can absolutely, you could dislike me personally. You could not be a fan of Chris. That’s okay. But you gotta respect filling that room,
RV (42:33):
Uhhuh. So when you say, you said it’s just as important about who is not at the event as who is at the event and you’re just basically saying like the statement it makes to the rest of the industry. Yeah,
MM (42:45):
I mean you could say you’re, you’re a growth company or you’re a great marketing company and that’s one thing. But then if you get 5,000 people to fly out to Atlanta and show up in a room, I mean seeing is believing, right? Mm-Hmm
RV (43:19):
So you went from 520 18 to like 5,000. So was it like a steady increase?
MM (43:26):
Yeah, so we went from 500, the first one I believe we had a thousand at the next one. And the highest we went before that Mercedes-Benz event, I believe was 2000. And, and by the way, that I do not recommend a 5,000 person event. Like I don’t know if we’ll ever do that again. To some extent it was probably hubris and ego where like, I think the biggest legal conference at that point, we were already that at 2000 and most legal conferences, like big ones may have seven to 800 people. So I figured, okay, well let’s just do 5,000. Basically going from zero to 2000 was one thing. Going from two to five was an exponential, like just challenge of, of just ’cause ’cause at that point, y you, you know, we realized that there’s all the people that attend legal conferences and we were already capturing them.
MM (44:09):
We had the database, they had attended some of our events and maybe they attended other ones. But then after you get, you know, there’s a core audience that goes to legal conferences overall, like from one to the next and so on. But then, you know, once you, once you hit all of them, now you gotta reach people that have never been to a legal conference. Now you’ve gotta reach people that have, maybe have never even thought about the business of law and, and, you know, and where are they? Right? Some of them aren’t even consuming the, the same content. They’re not in the same places. They’re, you know, they’re very, very different audiences. And we had, you know, a huge delta to make up from like 2000 to 5,000 of getting people that have never been to anything like this.
RV (44:41):
Yeah. Yeah. It is fascinating stuff. This is so been so cool, Michael. I, I, I just, I just love it so much and it’s inspiring on so many levels and just shows you how it, this is a very, you know, real, it’s, it’s a very practical reality that’s available. If you do the things and you put in the work and you serve your audience in a deeper way, where do you want people to go? If, if they, if they are curious, I know you’ve got your book on Amazon that they can check out if they want to connect with you, where should we, where should they head?
MM (45:12):
Yeah, so the book is called The Game Changing Attorney. It’s on Amazon. There’s a podcast by the same name. If they’re interested in learning more about me, I’ve got actually a personal brand website, Michael mogul.com. Come on. Yes, sir. Or they can go to the crisp website, which is just crisp.co. And learn about that stuff. But I really appreciate this.
RV (45:29):
And Mogul is M-O-G-I-L-L, Michael mogul.com. Michael, thanks for this insight. And, you know, thanks for being courageous with your risks, man. I love, I love what you’re up to, and we want to, we want to encourage you and we’re learning from you. And we wish you all the best, my friend.
MM (45:49):
Thank you.
Ep 529: Creating Culture | Britney Ruby Miller Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
So how do you build culture when you have a company or a team that is virtual or just a company or a team that’s growing beyond your ability to talk to or interact with every single employee or every single leader on a regular basis? But, but that’s the question. How do you build culture? And I was having a conversation on the influential personal brand podcast with a newer friend of mine. Her name is Brittany Ruby Miller, and she’s the daughter of Jeff Ruby from the Jeff Ruby steakhouse and Entertainment Group. And they have grown to be more than 900 employees, multi-location restaurant, a hundred million dollars in revenue. And we were having this conversation around culture, right? And here at Brain Builders Group, we’re much smaller than that. But we’re all virtual and we only get to see each other all in person a couple of times a year.
AJV (00:59):
And in this post pandemic world where not everyone is in the office, I think this conversation of how do you build culture has come up to be more prevalent in conversations as the years have gone on. And so we have this conversation of how do you do that? And I think there was a couple of things that came out that were worthy of kind of just highlighting in this quick, kind of short episode right now. So the number one is, does your team speak common language? In other words, do you have a, a set of principles, a foundation, that everyone understands what you’re talking about? And so as we were talking about this idea of shared language, it came to this is not from training documents or SOPs, even. Those are, those are good and helpful. That’s not what we’re talking about.
AJV (01:49):
It’s do you have a shared common list of beliefs, values, principles that you work by? And one of the things that I think you can do as a small business owner and entrepreneur that doesn’t cost tons of money is have your own company library. And I think this was a very big takeaway for me but also for all of you. ’cause It doesn’t matter if you have just a, a one, you know, team member organization or you have a thousand, it’s like, do you have a shared language so that when you use an acronym or when you say something, everyone goes, oh, I know what you mean. Because then it allows you to have quicker conversations without the contextual explanation. And one of the fastest, cheapest and most impactful ways to do that is to have a company library. Now, there’s lots of different ways that you can do that. We, we actually have this at Brand Builders Group. We have this leading up to that we use a platform called Better Book Club. In fact, I’ll include a link to that in my post here. But Better Book Club allows you to have a virtual library
AJV (02:59):
That says these are company sponsored events, and you can even reward people for reading those. You can make it mandatory, but then you can also incentivize them to go and read these. And one of the things that we instituted as a part of Better Book Club listens to customers is that we have a book of the quarter that every single quarter, we as a company buy a copy of a book that we’re all going to read together. We’ve done this for two years. So we’re, I think on book number seven, as we’re in Q3 2024 as I’m recording this, and we, we select books that have you know, I would say Universal Appeal that are applicable and beneficial to you no matter what your role is, no matter if it’s day one or, you know, you’ve been with the company since the beginning.
AJV (03:47):
Some of those books have been unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guera. It’s one of my top 10 favorite books of all time. It was mandatory reading for our entire company in Q2 of 2024, right? We started the year Q1 this year with Extreme Ownership by Jocko, Willem, and Leaf Babin. We said, we started the year on this kind of accountability mindset that we all need to take ownership. If you see something, say something, it’s not your job or your job, it’s everyone’s job. Do we have to own this? So we started with that. And so that allows all of us to have common language. So when we talk about like, are you owning this? All I have to do is go, Hey, do you remember when we read Extreme Ownership? That’s what I’m talking about right here. And, and that’s all I have to say, right?
AJV (04:36):
Same thing with Unreasonable Hospitality. It’s like people know, and I say, Hey, are we being unreasonable with this? That it’s not a bad thing. It’s going, Hey, are we really doing this with intentionality in mind? Are we doing this because it’s easy? Or are we doing this because we, we want people to feel seen, loved, and cared for in a, a unique and personal way? I think those are things we’re reading right now, Q3 2024, hidden Potential by Adam Grant of Learning. How do we, we we grow and develop the staff versus just hiring for the staff. And that’s, those are cultural things that we believe in. Those are not necessarily books that fit every organization or every person, but those are have been ones that stick out to us of going, Hey, this is the common language that we’re trying to instill to build culture.
AJV (05:25):
I think that’s a huge part of it’s, do you have shared language? Do you have common language? There’s really expensive ways to do that. There’s super affordable ways and having a shared company library that’s available for all new employees coming in, but also required reading that you have for all existing employees. So that’s one thing. The second thing is making sure that you have well documented and well communicated core values, vision statements, mission statements. Brittany in our conversation calls it her vp Mosa, right? And I think, I dunno if I’ll get all of these, but it was like vision principles, mission Operating Guidelines, SNA Systems and Accountability. Oh my God, have I got that right? This is a miracle don’t hold me to that, but VP Moosa, VP MOSA vp Moosa can look that up,
AJV (06:27):
And every single month at our All hands on deck company meeting we go through these and we have someone in the company volunteer. They pick one of them and they do a mini five minute core value presentation, right? So we have all of them available every single month as we open up our company meeting. But then somebody volunteers, or sometimes they’re voluntold, but for the most part, they volunteer and they put together like, why did they pick this core value? How do they see it being lived out? And why is it important to them and their role at this specific time and time and place, right? So I think that’s just keeping, keeping them real. And it’s not that they’re hearing it from us, it’s, it’s, I care what the team has to say. And honestly, their presentations, they’re so much better than mine.
AJV (07:11):
But that’s one thing that you can do is just have like, Hey, these are, these are the core values that we operate this company with. And I think the most important thing is sharing those when you’re interviewing people during the recruiting and hiring process. So you never want someone to come on board and be like, whoa, where did that come from? So the openness, transparency of going, Hey, this is how it is. It’s not for everyone. That’s okay. But before you take a position here, you should know this is what it’s gonna be like here. Opt out now. No hard feelings,
AJV (08:06):
You better be aligned with your mission, values, mission, purpose with your company. Otherwise, you’re going to be miss role. Bull money’s not worth that. It’s just not. So that would be something the other thing, when you talk about mission and vision, right? It’s like, why do you exist? Why does your company exist? What, what’s your purpose for being in business to begin with? And what I have found is I hope this is helpful and impactful for our team to be reminded every single month, at least monthly, we’re gonna read this together. And we call it our brand mantra, but it, it’s basically our vision and mission statement. It’s why we’re here, what we hope to do, our, our purpose how we do things. But we call it our brand mantra.
AJV (08:55):
You may call it your vision statement, mission statement, purpose, whatever you wanna call it. But for us, it’s a brand mantra. And I do hope it’s important for everyone to take a step back and for at least five minutes as we all read it together, to remind ourselves, oh yeah, that’s why we do that. Oh, yeah, I remember that now because it’s easy to forget. And I, I hope everyone else finds it important, but what I have found that for me is that I need to stand back and read that every single month so that I don’t forget why we exist, what our purpose is, what our mission is, what our vision is in the middle of customer service problems or inundation of reporting and analyses, or managing deadlines or missed deadlines or projects that didn’t get done or missed the budget or did it, whatever.
AJV (09:45):
All this stuff is in the middle of all the stuff going on, which sometimes is very fun. I need to step back every single month at least for me and go, oh yeah, that’s why we’re here. That’s why we do what we do. And if it’s important for me, then I know it has to be important to at least someone else in our team, someone else in the company to go, this is more than about just money, right? It, it has to be, right. For all the things going on, it’s like people could do a lot of different jobs. It’s like, it’s gotta be more than just about money. And that that is how you build culture. It’s like, do we agree on things that are beyond paychecks and benefits? And the answer is yes. It’s like, I want people who want to be here.
AJV (10:31):
Not that they have to be here. I don’t want a paycheck to be the only reason our team is here, which means that we have to attract people on common and shared language and beliefs, and we have to keep them based on the same things. Because not every job has all glamorous parts, and not every company is gonna be sunshine and rainbows all the time. There’s gonna be, you know, stormy weather and there’s gonna be hard times. And people make it when we go, but it’s more, it’s more than about just me or just my department or just my paycheck, right? It’s gotta be about more than that so that we can weather the stormy times but also celebrate in the good times. And so those are just a couple of things. As you’re, you’re asking yourself, like, how do we build culture, a culture that doesn’t have to be managed by one person at the top, or as your team and your company grows, how do you still uphold the same level of standard of excellence or core values that you had when you were really small? It’s because you have to hire for it. You have to manage for it, and you have to retain for it. And if there’s been a time where you’re out of alignment, then you, you can’t be afraid to part ways because that, that’s damaging to the culture of the organization. And by keeping
Speaker 4 (11:52):
One person, you could be damaging 10 others. And those are things where it’s like you hire for it, you manage for it, you retain for it, but you also let people go for it because you all have to be in alignment to have a good, healthy culture. We are not perfect at this, let me tell you. I am consciously aware of where we fall short. But you gotta be open to it. And, and you’ve gotta do something even if you can’t do it perfectly. So, couple of ideas on how do you build culture. If you want more, go tune in to the Influential Personal Brand podcast with Brittany Ruby Miller on how to build strong culture.
Ep 528: Building A 5-Star Life with Britney Ruby Miller
AJV (00:02):
Hey everybody, and welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. So excited today to introduce you guys to a new friend of mine, the one and only Britney Ruby Miller. And if you don’t know her by name, then you’re missing out. And we’re gonna talk about a lot of different things today. But before I formally introduce her, as you guys get to know her, I wanna kind of just tell you why I wanted to have her on our podcast. And Britney and I got introduced by a mutual friend couple of months ago now, and she was so gracious to give me a copy of her book. If you’re watching, you can see it’s five star Life. If you’re not watching, then you just need to go pick it up and read it. But she sent this book to me along with one of the sweetest, kindest packages of all time, because if you know anything about me, you know, the way to my, my heart is really through my children.
AJV (00:59):
And my sweet 7-year-old Jasper came to a, an adult dinner party
AJV (01:59):
So if you guys are listening, the reason I think you should stick around is all things culture. And that’s what I would say it’s like, doesn’t matter if you’re trying to be a build a culture in your family or in your community, or with your clients or with your company. What I’ve summed this all up is, is a, it’s a radical journey through what does it mean to love people really well. And to me, that’s culture. It’s like how do you set a tone and a culture of love and hospitality and generosity and, and, and a and a very politically charged environment that we find ourselves in the United States? These are the types of conversations and interviews that I think will make us better, make our businesses better, thus make everyone around us better. So that is why I am having her on the show. That is why you need to listen to this episode. This episode is one of those episodes that doesn’t matter who you are or where you are, it’s applicable to you. So listen to the whole thing, and then you can check out the recap episode. Now, let me quickly formally introduce her, and then we’re gonna actually get to this interview. Otherwise, I could spend the next half hour just telling you why she’s so awesome. But
BR (03:04):
Got whole bio. Don’t read that entire thing. You better summarize it. I
AJV (03:07):
Love it. She’s, I think she, what I want you guys to know is that she’s the CEO of the Jeff Ruby Entertainment Group. And Jeff Ruby’s is one of our favorite restaurants. It’s iconic, especially the one here in Nashville. I don’t know about all the other ones, but I love it here because this is where we take all of our clients out to dinner. She didn’t even know that
BR (03:25):
AJV (03:26):
But what I think is amazing, and what I didn’t know about the Jeff Ruby organization is that you guys almost have a thousand employees and you guys are doing a hundred million dollars in revenue. And what I love about that is not only is that extraordinary in the entertainment and hospitality environment, but you’re also a mom and an author and a wife, and running this massive organization in a family business environment where it’s going from generation to generation and you know, trying to maintain legacy, but innovate and do things new in a new way. You also have a culinary background and you and your husband Caleb, are coming up with this whole new brand, and it’s like you’re the epitome of, I’ve got a lot going on. So how do you manage all of that? And this is, this is a part of what I’m so fascinated with when it comes to not only entrepreneurship and business ownership, but also, you know, parenting and marriage and making it all work together. So without further ado, Brittany, welcome to the show.
BR (04:35):
Thank you for having me. And your little man was so cute. He was just sitting there chopping away at the adult table. And when I bought him the knife, I’m like, I, I, she’s either gonna think it’s super sweet or I’m a crazy, crazy human being because I bought him a Japanese chef knife. And I, it was, it was fun to, I like to buy little kids their first chopping knife. And so that meant a lot that you appreciated it and made sure we threw in the apron. But he’s the next generation of, of carnivores eating at Ruby, so we gotta get him young
AJV (05:09):
And he uses the knife all the time, regardless of, it’s like he’s chopping up a string cheese.
BR (05:16):
Yes.
AJV (05:16):
Or, you know, it’s just, he loved it. And I think that’s too, it’s how you help people fall in love with brands at an early age, is you create these memorable connections. And so that’s what I want you to kind of start with is just talk about being in this family business. ’cause You grew up in this business, now you’re leading this business, and I think it would be really great for you just to talk about what, what have you learned leadership wise from stepping into a family business and also the process of making it your own as you’ve stepped into this role of CEO
BR (05:49):
Ooh family businesses are, they, they can be a blessing and a curse. Luckily for us, it’s a blessing. And I think just staying on the family business side. And then I wanna talk a little bit about the restaurants and like, what that is because and, and honestly, most family businesses, or most restaurants end up, they are family businesses. And it’s a, it could be a very tough industry, let alone throwing the dynamics of, you know, those types of relationships. And we learned really quick that we have to develop some sort of communication and agreement on how our family wants to treat each other. So we, I think first and foremost, the, the foundation is through our social covenant. That’s through our leadership training. That’s through transformational leadership. And coming to an agreement on how we would like to communicate with each other.
BR (06:38):
What do we do if there’s conflict? What do we do? You know, how do we approach that? We go one-on-one first. If that doesn’t work, we go two on one. We try not to go around. And unless you’re part of the solution we don’t, we try not to gossip in our family and teaching our kids that as well and how to handle things very, very directly and typically within 48 hours. So we go through an apology process. There’s a six step apology process when you screw up. And the last piece of it is after you ask for accountability and, and forgiveness. The last piece is, is there anything else that I need to apologize for? And when you first kick this thing off and you start living and doing this social covenant kind of lifestyle, you, there’s things that come up that were five years ago, 10 years ago.
BR (07:25):
And, and sometimes we have to revisit it and say, Hey, I thought that we already squashed this thing. Essentially, you wanna get to a point where you always know where you stand and you can have clear communication. You’re not gonna have hurt feelings. You know, I, I think about situations, you know, that I’ve had with my dad. I know when I walked through that first six step apology with him he tweeted something to his 90,000 Twitter followers, political. And this was years ago. And, and I’m like, why are you doing this to me? Like, please, I gotta sell sakes to the left and the right. Okay. And, but the way that I told him not to do that was disrespectful. My mentor said, you need to go apologize to your, to your father. I’m like, look at what he did to me.
BR (08:09):
Like this is, now I gotta clean up this mess. Right? And once I apologized for one, he was my boss at the time being disrespectful. I’m very sorry, will you hold me accountable? And if and when you’re ready, can you forgive me? And then when you say, is there anything else going on that maybe I need to apologize for you, clear the air. Luckily that day he was very kind. There was nothing else that was festering up inside of him. But that was the first day he said that he knew I was ready for leadership. And, and so there’s a culture within our family. And then we rolled this thing out company-wide. So I, we started that with our home office, which is, we’re up to about 60 employees now and and then leadership within the restaurants. And so they’ve all, you know, gone through our transformational leadership process and all the Ruby iss and everything like that. So I think on the business side and the family business side, we all, there’s a mutual respect. There’s a way that, you know, we wanna handle our relationships and treat our relationships. And then comes
AJV (09:10):
From like, I feel like that’s pretty rare in any company, much less a family business. Where did that come from?
BR (09:21):
This, this guru who I call Ford Taylor. He’ll like that.
AJV (10:14):
I love that. And so I think, I think two things in here that I think is really amazing is, one, the fact that you guys have a social covenant. Mm-Hmm. And so does that trickle down to all of like your restaurants and everyone else too?
BR (10:30):
Yes, it’s a consistent document. And so, you know, we wanna go in humility. We wanna walk in pre forgiveness, we wanna walk in grace, we wanna have love for, you know, our employees and treat them with respect. And we don’t want to gossip. It’s like, it’s this big list of things and it’s pretty universal across the board. So yeah, we did that at our home office and the GMs have all seen it. Next year’s goal is for really to get ingrained into all the restaurant folks boots on the ground. And but that it takes time. You know, we were building, it takes about 18 months ’cause what we’re trying to do right now is a proprietary tl, which includes all the Ruby iss, the transformational leadership and Enneagram. So
AJV (11:20):
So one of the things here, you kind of mentioned this, like mentors, clearly this person for Taylor’s been in your life for 10 years. That’s amazing. What, what else would you say? Because I think a lot of people are listening are like, I’m sorry, you have an apology standard in your family and in your business. I, I would say that’s, I have personally never heard that before. I hear lots of leadership training, but even processes for apologies and standards and families and in, and in businesses. I’m gonna definitely take this from this interview and be like, putting it in place right now. But I think more than that, it’s like, I love that you said you got that from your mentor, and I think that’s, that’s so important for everyone to realize. It’s like, you don’t have to come up with these ideas. It’s like, we need to learn from those who’ve gone before us. So what would you say when it comes to books, mentors or experiences, what would you say for anyone who’s listening, if that resonates with them, of going like, how do I just be a better person? How do I love people better to create better family culture, business culture? What else would you say has been impactful for you?
BR (12:25):
Well, I think for me, I mean, that was the process. I, Caleb met Ford because he went to a training for two days. And Ford does them all over the world. And so he opted into this training. The good news is he also wrote a book, it’s called Al Leadership. It’s an excellent book. It includes that process, it includes what a social covenant is. It talks about everything that we do. Leadership is in that book. Hmm. And, and so, you know, that, that was key. And I think on the mentor side, I realized, you know, I grew up the Ruby way and everything that I knew and you know, was taught was through Jeff Ruby. So I get brand, I get quality, I understand five stars is what we strive for in the restaurants. Fine dining over the top, changing the game, you know, servant’s Heart, all of our core values, you know in, in our, we call it our VP Mosa, our vision purpose, mission objective strategies and action steps.
BR (13:25):
That’s in the book too. So you map this whole thing out for your organization, which is all culture. But what I also needed was a business mentor. A leadership mentor. And so I, I got that with Russell Mankas. He, he was he worked for my father back in 1986. He opened one of our restaurants and then he graduated onto Hilton and started open Hi opening Hilton’s worldwide. And so my dad always tried to recruit him back, and he’s always like, Jeff, I make way too much money for you, my friend Hilton pays better than your little restaurant group. And so, you know, but they stayed in touch. When he retired, he called my father and said, I wanna go out making a difference. And so I’m going to retire from Hilton. I’m gonna move back from New York to Cincinnati for two years, and I wanna mentor Brittany, and I’ll also be your managing director.
BR (14:20):
And so when I went to, to our, from, I was in operations for 15 years, I would say. Then Russell came to me and we convinced him to stay for three years. And then one day he was just like, all right, peace out. Here’s the keys. You’re good. Truly, the next day he left. And I had no idea. I mean, he was just like, today’s the day. And, and so I worked, you know, it was hustle. I worked my day job at the corporate office. And that was, you know, in operations and marketing and some of the guest relations and the things that I was doing for our organization. But then he handed me a binder the size of Texas and said, I need you to read every single operating agreement, every single lease. So at that point, we had had, we had, I think five, five restaurants or so.
BR (15:00):
I mean, they’re huge. And each lease is 150 pages probably. And, and then once you do that, you’re gonna help me negotiate Nashville. And that was the business IQ that I needed. And I didn’t write. He goes, you know, one day you’re gonna be signing these leases. This is not, you’re gonna be your father’s, which is where we are now. My brothers and I own the business and we’ve transitioned G one to G two successfully. And if I’m guaranteeing a note or if I’m signing, you know, for the next, some, some of these leases are like 15, 20 years long. And and then maybe my daughters will be in the same situation, or my son or my nieces and my nephews. That’s really our goal is to be able to give G three the same opportunity that we had. So I wouldn’t have been able to do any of that without Russell.
BR (15:45):
The other thing that I did was built a board, a board of advisors. That’s been very helpful. Helpful. And so there’s a book, actually the five steps to a successful board. You know, they, they have been there through covid. They’ve been there through, you know, we had a family emergency recently. And thank God everything’s okay. But, but I had to step away from the business and my family. We stepped away from the business and the board was there as a sounding board for our executive team. And so my board of advisors, you know, we’ve got a strategist, Harvard, MBA, former p and g engineer, Darcy Bean, she built our strategy and came on board, pun intended. And, you know, we’ve got a data guy from Xavier University, we’ve got a former retired CFO for Kroger on there. And Ford’s on the board as well. And then David Cassidy with our accountant. And so, you know, it’s all different departments that really, and then I have small committees that I meet with and, and they’re amazing. And I think it’s good accountability for me as well. So I got my board of advisors. I got my restaurant and hotel mentor of my father, the Jeffrey B. Wade, and then Ford. And my cup is pretty full with experts around me to hold me accountable when I need to get, you know, whipped back into shape basically.
AJV (17:00):
You know, it’s so interesting ’cause I was on a phone call this morning with a girlfriend. We do like a monthly accountability call, right? Two female business entrepreneurs. And one of the things that we were talking about this morning is, man, like, who do I go to for this, this, and this for my leadership team? Like, how do I not be, you know, the one size fits all for everything for my leadership team? And we were just having this conversation about coaches and mentors and masterminds and books, and we were doing like a cross sharing of all the things that we were doing or have done. And I love hearing you say this because anyone who is listening, I just wanna encourage you that if it’s going slow because you’re trying to do it all on your own, it’s because you’re not supposed to do it alone.
AJV (17:48):
Hmm. Right? And that’s what I just heard from you. It’s like, nowhere in life are we supposed to do this alone. Right? I just, I was, over the weekend, I was having the same conversation about raising kids. Like, we’re not meant to do this alone. Right? It’s like we need grandparents, aunts, uncles, nannies, friends, what, however it is. But it’s like nowhere in the history of humanity have people been succeeding alone. But yet so many of us are trying to figure it out in our little dark offices in our basements, or we’re, we’re trying to do it alone. And what I love what you just said is like, no, like you have an entire community of business experts, mentors, coaches, family, other leaders that are alongside you said, my cup is full with other people. And I don’t think a lot of people say that today.
BR (18:41):
You know, it’s, I was just talking to my best friend about this, where, you know I think before I had kids, I assumed I was just gonna be their everything. Like what a narcissistic thought that would be. Like, my poor kids, like I’m your only
BR (19:19):
And, and they’re like, yeah, can we please let her handle this for us?
BR (20:14):
There’s nothing else that all we needed to do right then was surround ourselves our, our, the, the Brandon’s family and his wife and his kids, and, you know, so we all had different roles. Brandon was in the hospital. My dad was really involved in the hospital. I had the kid role, you know, keeping, making sure all these kids are happy and, and their babysitters are coordinated and meals are coordinated. And, and then and then when he luckily started to we realized that he was gonna be okay ’cause it got really, it, it, we almost lost him. I just remember in that at that point, I made a call to our CFO and our COO and said, I need you to just run the business, step in call me if you need me. You know, but my Dylan handles talent and acquisition and, and he, you know, he’s a vice president.
BR (21:05):
He stepped away. My dad had to step away and I step away as CEO. And guess what happens when four active owners step away from the business? You have a record breaking month in August
BR (21:54):
Like, I wanna be there to cast the vision. I wanna be there for all the little million details and whatnot. And I had to give all of that up. And so I’m going back to work in January. I’m taking sabbatical like the rest of the year. And the other piece was, you know, the podcast, the networking. I, I’m, I’m going to dinners. I’m, I’m, and I do dinners at our restaurant so that I can till kill two birds of one stone and look at the quality and then also talk to the staff and, you know, do that whole thing. And it, and then, by the way, I do have kids and they’re pretty busy. They’re all in sports
BR (22:36):
I’m like, no, no, no. Something drastically had to change. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (23:38):
Yeah. So I’m gonna hire you, pay you, and yet do your job for you. Yeah. But
BR (23:43):
There’s a,
AJV (23:44):
So many of us do that
BR (23:46):
And, and I preach it te it’s teach, train, equip, empower, let go. So what I realized through this process is I got to the empower part, you’re empowered, but I just wouldn’t let go. Yeah. Like, I’m still gonna do the high level business stuff. I’m still in my board meetings. I still look at cashflow, I still look at the financials. I still look at, I have a CEO scorecard. That has been great. We did tee that thing up so I know how the company’s performing, you know, guest satisfaction and, and down to food costs and beverage costs and all of that. And if something’s wrong, then I go to those two people
AJV (24:19):
Would you say that this mindset shift really happened when your brother went into the hospital?
BR (24:28):
Yeah. That, that was a silver lining. He called me when he was able to talk. About four weeks later, he call, he FaceTimed me from, and I was at the Reds game because at this point now we’re like, okay, the crisis is over. We still fly out there. My brother Dylan and I were out there every single week and giving Christie a break. And we don’t want him to be alone out there. And so but when I flew back, I took the kids to a Reds game and he FaceTimed me with this huge smile. Brandon smile was like, I am, well, he said, I’m so happy you quit your job. And I said, Brandon, I, it’s on pause, but
BR (25:10):
And that meant everything to him. The beauty, I always, I say now, Brandon’s even a better version of Brandon now. And what I learned through, and he was already amazing. What I learned at the Craig, where he is, you know, they, they, they kept him for the maximum amount. They wanna keep him for a pretty long time. And we’re like, okay. But he is walking again. You know, he’s talking, he’s, and they said that more often than not, and it doesn’t matter if these people come out fully recovered or, you know, maybe they’re in a wheelchair. It’s really, even with them being in a wheelchair, they’re coming out better versions of themselves because of what the time that they’re allowed to themselves that they allot this time to the mental game as well. And making sure, you know, you, you have a totally different perspective on life when something like that happens. I know for you with, you had a crazy situation with your brother growing up, and it, it’s, I can’t, I mean, that, that blows my mind. It’s just, this is something I, well, I think for you, it changed your life forever. This has changed my life forever for the good. Yeah.
AJV (26:16):
You know, it is so interesting that I, again, perhaps this interview was really just for me today. I don’t know if it was for everybody else, but we’ve been having a lot of these, why does it have to take a crisis to get our attention conversations in our house? And over the summer, this past summer, we had two really close friends die unexpectedly. And it was, it’s been, man, it’s been a really deep time of going, why
BR (27:31):
No, I mean, I think I wanna know the answer to that too, because I’m saying the same thing. I am speaking at an event in October to 800 women, and it was supposed to be my testimony and the I am second in the book and all of that. And so I was writing it from a perspective of how I’ve healed from being at the Meyer clinic in 2008, a Christian psychiatric place, and how I healed from all the things, you know? And so it was this kind of past tense, been there, done that perspective of being in just the darkest place of my life. And I remember saying to Caleb as I’m writing this, and it’s a, it’s a lot about perfectionism. And I, I was asked to speak at a church recently on perfection, going like, I don’t even remember what it feels like, you know, which is amazing thing, right?
BR (28:24):
So I felt almost like a fraud. I’m, I’m building this speech, I’m writing this speech, trying to relate to people, but I really can’t relate because it’s, it’s, it’s like, it’s happened and I’m healed. And that’s the beauty of God, the cycle of life, right? And the healing process and whack like out of nowhere, there we are in our crisis. And now I’m like, wow, okay, now I know exactly what to speak about and I can reference the things that have happened, but what I’m feeling right now, and in the suffering, there’s so much beauty and, and you can’t live in a life without any suffering. Right? But I agree with you. It’s scary. I’m going, like I said, the same exact thing, please, God, do not let, I just don’t wanna deal with this. I can’t deal with any right now. Like, we just had enough with the Ruby family, right?
BR (29:09):
Like, can we, can we heal a little bit more? But by the way, that was really awesome to get to a good place of silver lining of, you know, stepping back and, and being intentional. And it really relates back to Covid. You look at the shutdown and it’s like, so much beauty came outta that. So how do you take the Covid shutdown or your life experiences and you, you get into that place and you have some sort of intentionality, some sort of reminder without going through it. How do you do that? I don’t know. I, I don’t know if it’s some sort of question you ask yourself before you go to bed at night and then you wake up. Is there some routine you can get into to stop? I mean, is there, are there habits, you know, spiritually that you can do to, to wrestle that out? I don’t know. I if you find your
AJV (29:53):
Next book, we all need to know
BR (30:40):
I always felt a calling. At some point I took religious studies in college. I just felt you know, and I, I didn’t, I knew I was going into the restaurant business but I always thought maybe one day I’ll write a book. Well, I didn’t know it would be about healing from, you know, infidelity and and from multiple miscarriages and losing those babies and, and what we had been through when I remember when Caleb, we went through this process with our marriage, fighting for our marriage, and Caleb confessed and he had to go get help first. My mentor called her. My spiritual mom said, if you can get through this with Caleb, you will have the most rock solid marriage that you can ever imagine. And that was so foreign to me. Hmm. Like, there is no chance, like, I don’t even know if I’m gonna stay with this guy, by the way.
BR (31:33):
And, and so we went through two years of healing from what had happened, and then also healing from the, the pregnancy losses. And you get to a point where then I was able to do that same speech that Kathy gave me, my spiritual mom to other women. I started to say like, Hey, and, and it was so like, taboo. Like, oh my gosh, Caleb did that too. You, I’m like, yeah, you know, and I remember Ford told me, ’cause he talks about his marriage and confession as well, and he really walked Caleb through those, those times in his life. And Caleb, I said to Ford, by the way, I will never do what you do Ford. He laughs at still to this day. I will never be up on a stage talking like, that is not gonna be my story. That is something very private.
BR (32:23):
But you get to this point where you’re just so healed. My life is so much better. I’m married to my best friend. I’m married, he’s a, he’s a life coach to me. It’s my, you know, and, and so I just, I felt super, super called to do it. And I wrote it for in three months during Covid, actually on Mondays. I would write a chapter on Monday and and then handed it off to Caleb and he would co-write and edit it. So it was a cathartic process. And we were, we just, I don’t know, it’s just, it felt right.
AJV (32:53):
Yeah. You know, I love that. ’cause You know, a big part of our life and our business is books. That’s a huge thing that, you know, we believe in. And what I tell people all the time, it was so interesting to hear you say this. I’m like, I, people say, should I write a book? And I’m like, I cannot answer that question for you. I just know that, you know, it’s time to write a book if you feel called to it. Like, if you can’t not talk about it. Right? And you know, the whole idea of like, you know, people write books as business cards and I’m like, nobody reads those, right? And so
BR (33:45):
It’s a lot of work. And no matter how confident and, and how sure you are that you’re supposed to write a book. And I’ve talked to other women who’ve written kind of the same type of testimonial books, you still have a vulnerability hangover when it’s out
AJV (35:07):
Yeah. Well, just a reminder to everyone,
BR (36:09):
There’s so many, so many books out there that, that have totally changed my life. If they weren’t there, I, there’s, I’m, I remember at the Meyer Clinic, Audrey, my counselor said, you need to go home and read the book boundaries. Like, that’s their curriculum, you know, and this is a three week process. I’m like, I’m here for you to teach me. It’s like, no, no, no, go home and this is your homework. You have to read this. And that’s why when people, we onboard people, you know, there’s a list of five books you have to read in order to be a Ruby manager. And
AJV (36:37):
What are those five books?
BR (36:39):
So you got, I, you’ve got Good To Great, which is one of the best five dysfunctions of a team, I think is amazing. And I’m going to throw re Unreasonable Hospitality. And right now it’s a Danny Meyer setting the table. But our, our mutual acquaintance I think that would be good. And so, you know, and then one is the, not Counting Tomorrow my dad’s book. And I would hope if you work for me, you re wanna read my book as well. So it’s, it’s it’s a, but there’s so many, so many good ones out here. I would say in on the personal side, you know, I think boundaries is probably the number one thing for perfectionism, anxiety, how to deal, you know, with people with personality disorders, which I have in my family. Not my immediate family, but people I have to deal with. And reading that book’s going like, oh yeah, I’m an enabler. I’m codependent. That’s what that means. And oh, I actually need better boundaries for myself as a perfect, when I went to the Meyer Clinic, I was diagnosed with perfectionism, not anything else. That was it. Perfectionism. So I’m in recovery for perfectionism. And that book was, is something I went back and read it a couple weeks ago. I read it so long ago and I’m highlighting again everything. And I’m like, gosh, one day I am gonna get it. Just
AJV (37:53):
BR (38:20):
I speak the same like language. We just went to Chick-fil-A a couple of weeks ago. I took our a, a group of folks down there and with their home office and we spent two days learning the Chick-fil-A way. And that was our number one takeaway was how many books, I mean, they’re all culture. And the way that those leaders and the owners, franchise owners of each Chick-fil-A train, you would think they have multiple, multiple, multiple pro processes, procedures, SOPs, they have none.
AJV (38:51):
Love that
BR (38:53):
Truet did things, how the Kathy family operates, what’s near and dear to them. And then they’re empowered and let go to go run your business according to the ways that the Kathy family did it. And so we came back and said, man, we gotta get everything, Jeff, Ruby, everything that’s up in here, one book’s not enough. We need all his tips, his Ruby iss, we need the coffee table books. We need the 10 Commandments of service. Like all of those things are individual little books that if you go to Chick-fil-A you can see in their bookstore, it’s not just merch. I mean, it is basically their training models for their entire company that they give to all their employees.
AJV (39:28):
That’s so good. ’cause You can get so inundated and overwhelmed with SOPs and training docs and it’s like, let’s bring it up. Not here people, let’s just all speak the same language so that we all know what we’re working with. I love that. I think that’s amazing. And I think, you know, one of the things too, it’s like, you know, on the topic of, you know, this is a, a podcast about personal branding, but personal brands aren’t just for marketing and, you know, attracting clients. It’s also does your team, your employees, do they know what you believe? Right? Mm-Hmm. That is also a part of building a significant and influential personal brand. It’s just allowing people into the inner workings of this is what I think believe. And so one of the questions I wanted to ask you, ’cause this comes up to me a lot, and not everyone listening shares my faith.
AJV (40:16):
Not everyone in our company shares my faith. And so I just wanna, before I go into this conversation, I wanna preface all the welcome here. And you do not have to believe what I believe for us to mutually coexist. So just wanna preface that. But if you follow me on social media, you know, I talk about God and Jesus a whole bunch. And that wasn’t always that way. For the majority of my career. I did not talk about that publicly for a lot of various reasons. But I felt like in 2021, I was a deep, dark depression. I had a, I-I-I-I-I was in a deep dark depression for pretty much the most part of that year. And when I started to come out of it people kept asking, like towards the end of 2022 and into 2023, they said, man, like, you’re different.
AJV (41:02):
What, what have you been doing? And I felt like I heard the Lord say, tell ’em tell me, tell ’em the truth. Tell ’em what you’ve been doing. Don’t, don’t talk about the books you’ve been reading or don’t talk about the Bible studies. You join up. Tell them what you’ve been doing. And what I was doing was I was reading the word of God, and I hadn’t read it consistently in a long time. In fact, 2021 was the first time in my entire life I read every single word of the Bible, and then I did it again, and now I’m doing it again. And I felt like God was saying like, no, tell ’em what you are doing. And I said, y’all, I’m opening up the word of God and I’m reading every word and I’m letting the Holy Spirit into my life. And people are like, what?
AJV (41:46):
What? And I’m like, yes. I did not get a therapist. I did not go to counseling. I am reading the word of God. Right? Nothing wrong with those other things. And I started being vocal about it. And now I get asked all the time, like, aren’t you afraid if you talk about this, you’re gonna turn people off? Or do you, do you talk about this just here? Or how do you talk about it in your company? How do you talk about it with your clients? And I know you talk about this, it’s in your books, it’s in your social media. You’ve mentioned it briefly today. And I would love to hear from you because there’s a lot of people asking the question, like, in a pretty polarizing environment, how do you talk about it? And so I’d love to hear from you, like, why do you talk about it? And then how do you talk about it?
BR (42:33):
You know, that’s the same question I asked Dan Kathy face to, I said, you all have, they’ve been through the ringer in the past. And you know what, he owned the past and said, we didn’t always handle things the right way. What we do, and this is all that matters, is people will know who we are by our love for all, for everybody. And, and so they don’t feel the need to shove their certain agendas down people’s throats. They really are saying now everybody knows we’re believers. Everybody knows that, you know, we’re a company of faith. And first and foremost, you love people, love God, love people, and that’s it. And I didn’t go to seminary when I was baptized in 2001 because I wanted to appreciate all world religions. And that for me was, I took a ton of Buddhism class in college. I took Judaic studies Hindu, Wiccan, I had a Wiccan class.
BR (43:37):
And because I wanted to appreciate all faiths and all people and what you just said, you know, so I switched my major from business to religious studies. And that I think gave me such an appreciation for all the faiths that are out there. But it’s, my faith isn’t for everybody. And, but I think if you work for me, people know when we talk about it, ’cause we are, you know, especially, I mean, we’re doing prayer services with my employees for Brandon. You know, we were worshiping together. And I hope our team knows that this isn’t something. And I talk about it a lot, like there’s an appreciation for all of it out there. But, but you also choose to work for a family of faith. And so this is what goes along with the territory and from a public standpoint. So it’s basically, you know, there’s two different versions that I can tell my story.
BR (44:35):
The Plain glass or the stained glass versions. I have a speech for both
BR (45:29):
This is what God has called me to do. What has he called you to do? You know, what is it? 90% of all people out there believe in something
BR (46:19):
It’s, you just held me accountable too because when I was going through my dark depression, what did I do? I, that’s the same thing. I actually opened the Bible and I got in there and I did a chapter a day. And then I would underline it, then I would highlight it, then I would note, do the notes. And I have never felt more peace in my life than when I was doing that. And now I feel like it’s, you know, I’ll open it during church and fill out the verses and here and there, but when you actually study that, there is, it’s, it’s, it’s almost like your anxiety’s immediately gone. It’s, and there’s a peace. And I’m like, why? It’s the same thing. Like, life’s too short. Why don’t we, why do we have, why does it take a crisis? You know what, why does it take whatever to get back in the word and to feel that overwhelming peace that you can’t explain and that it can come from nothing else other than God and from the word of God.
AJV (47:10):
Amen. You know, it’s so interesting because we were just talking about literally like this. I feel like you’ve been like had microphones in my house the last few days because this is like so many other things we’ve been talking about. And one of the things we were talking about is how it’s like we, we, I hear so many people today go, things are so crazy. Like, has there ever been a time in history where things are so out of whack? And I’m like, have you ever read the Old Testament
BR (47:39):
AJV (47:40):
And I just tell you some stories, the Old Testament, it’s like, it has always been this crazy it just looks different. And it’s like every
BR (47:47):
Election’s the most important election ever,
AJV (47:49):
You know? And it’s like everything is like, you know, it doesn’t matter if it’s the pandemic or the economy or gender issues or whatever people are talking about. I’m like, listen, y’all, none of this is new. None of it, right? All of it is documented from thousands of years ago. And I think one of the things that gives you overwhelming unexplainable peace through reading the Bibles knowing this is not unique
BR (48:17):
Mm-Hmm.
AJV (48:18):
It’s been done before. It’s been said before. It’s been seen before. Nothing that we are experiencing today is for the first time.
BR (48:26):
Well, at the Meyer Clinic, you know, when they talk about depression and anxiety, what the homework is is go home and study David, go home and read Psalms and see when the pit of depression and darkness and how he cried out and cried out for so, so long. And so their training and, and it’s still a medical place, there’s still medicine involved and you’re doing blood work and all of it, but you’re doing nine to five every hour on the hour. You have a different class. And one of ’em is going and really seeing how prevalent depression and real feelings are in all these emotions in the Bible. And and then seeing how he came out of it and got through it.
AJV (49:05):
Yeah, I know. And it’s again you know, it’s like I wanted to ask is I know that you’re vocal with it and with such a large org organization and, you know, such a a public figure, I think it’s really important for those who are going, like, how, how do I weave that in? How do I know how to do it? And a lot of it is just being honest. It’s like we don’t all have to believe the same thing, but this is what I believe and I think it’s really convicting for everyone just to step into. It’s like we can all coexist and accept each other’s differences. We don’t have to agree with them to be around them. And so, all right, this is my last question. I’m watching the clock. I’m very I’m cognizant of our time, but my last question is, if there was one piece of advice that you could give to someone listening of how to build better culture in their organization, does it matter if they have a team of one or 1000? What would be your number one piece of advice to build better culture?
BR (50:02):
You have to define what your VP Mosa is. You have to articulate it on paper. So you’ve gotta go through a process to write down what is near and dear to you. So our core values are true to self change the game hustle, right? X be exceptional. And Servant’s Heart, those are the core values that, you know, we real, that embody Jeff Ruby. You gotta write your vision, mission, and purpose for what, if it’s your company or if it’s your family. We really have three different VPMs. I have my own personal, we have our family, and then I have our business one. And until you’re able to articulate it on paper, I think, you know, obviously be a good person and, you know, you wanna live a good life and, and show people that you’re a quality. That’s the number one recruiting tool is being a good, a good leader. A good human being is what people wanna work for. But with turnover and the labor crisis and everything, you’re not gonna keep people once they finally understand, you know, you just have to be able to articulate it. People leave ’cause they’re not well trained or they don’t understand the vision. And so I think you have to be able to go through a process to articulate what your, what your vision, mission, and purpose is.
AJV (51:10):
Yeah. It’s really finding alignment with the people within the organization. And if you can all do that, then you’re all gonna be on the same page. And it’s kinda like the whole thing. Somebody once told me, it’s like not everyone is gonna be for your organization for, they might be for it for some time, right? But it’s not everyone is for you forever. And that, but that doesn’t mean that as some exit, you know, better comes in and it’s being okay with the release. And I think all the huge part is that it’s like as you change and the company changes, the people change, right? They come and they go. Brittany, thank you so much for spending some time in the midst of so much that you have going on. This has been so helpful in so many different ways and I would just encourage everyone who’s listening, if you’re not familiar with the Jeff Ruby organization check them out, jeff ruby.com.
AJV (51:59):
Definitely get a steak at one of the restaurants. It’s world class, none other. But also I’m gonna put Brittany’s Instagram profile in the show notes because she’s got all kinds of cool stuff coming up with her Five Star brand, five star Life. I also put the link to pick up five Star Life book because I think it’s awesome for anyone who is going, like, how do I just have general improvements in all the areas of my life? Brittany, is there anything else that you feel like they should know or, or where should people go to connect with you? I
BR (52:34):
Don’t think so. You nailed it.
AJV (52:53):
Well, thank you so much. This has been so awesome. And for everyone who’s listening, stay tuned for the recap episode, which will be coming up next. We’ll see you next time on the influential personal brand.
Ep 525: When Less Is More | Robin Robins Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
I know that we’ve all bought into the idea that more is better at some point in our lives, personally or professionally, whether it’s more money more things, more accolades, more accomplishments more travels, more stuff, like more friends, more customers. Like I know for all of us that we suffer from the, I think I need more or I think I want more syndrome. At some point in our life, and maybe as you’re listening to this, you are suffering from the more syndrome right now. But this is actually a conversation about how you build more with less. And really specifically this is about how you build a better and bigger business on a smaller audience. And that’s what we wanna talk about. So there, there’s a couple of things that I wanna bring up. And a lot of this stems from an amazing conversation that I had with a phenomenal entrepreneur named Robin Robbins.
AJV (01:07):
And she’s another redhead located in Nashville, Tennessee. I was fortunate enough to be able to interview her on our podcast, the Influential Personal Brand podcast. Go listen to that episode. It is an NBA and entrepreneurial lessons. But there was something that she said in there that really got me thinking about this concept of less is more, right? Not more is more, but less is more. And she said in the interview, your company rides on the who internally and externally. And we’re gonna talk about that for just a couple of minutes. And I think this is a really important thing because I think a lot of times when we think about the who, we think about one or the other, we think about, you know, books like Start With Who, which is about like recruiting and hiring. And we think about cultural aspects of who we hire and how we build our team.
AJV (02:03):
And I think those are really important. In fact, we talked a lot about in this interview how hiring great leaders is how you grow your organization. It’s like you will only grow as fast as you grow your leaders, right? Because you, as the entrepreneur, the business owner, cannot do all the things, be all the things to all the people all the time and expect for you to grow. That’s why so many of us wonder why we started our businesses in the first place, right? Because there was this dream of time and, and margin and space and creativity and freedom. And then what actually happens is you are the person doing all the jobs and you don’t even get to do the thing that you like anymore. ’cause You started it because you were really good at this one thing, but now you’re trying to learn finance and accounting and billing and operations and customer service and all the things that you didn’t even want to do when you got into business.
AJV (02:55):
But that’s because you are not relying on the, the strength of a leader, right? And you don’t have to have tons of people in your organization to make them super, super impactful. But one of the best pieces of advice that I’ve ever got is hire great people, pay them very well, and expect a lot out of ’em, right? And I think that that’s, it’s a lot about a who, right? One great person, one a player, can do the work of three very average players. And I mean that, and I have seen that up and down and all around in my professional life. It’s like one A player literally can do the work of three C players, right? And some of that’s attitude, some of that’s experience, some of that’s determination. But a lot of it is really just work ethic. It’s like, how hard are you willing to work to figure out the thing versus relying on someone else to figure out the thing for you.
AJV (03:53):
And I think that’s a really important concept. If you’re in that position of like, Hey, I do wanna grow, I do wanna scale, then the first thing you need to do as you’re thinking about growth and scale in your business is going, do I have leaders that can help me get from where I am to where I wanna be? Because where you started won’t sustain you, right? And I think that’s a really important truth. It’s like, what got you here won’t get you there, right? That, that, that’s true, right? The, the sales, the operations, the staff that’s needed to go from zero to a million is very different than one to three, three to 10, 10 to 30, 30 to a hundred. That’s a completely different ballgame. It’s a completely different level of systems and operations, staff skills, experience, and most importantly, people, right?
AJV (04:45):
It is a different level of people. And so as we’re talking about this concept of your company rides on the who, there’s the internal components that, you know, do you have a players and are you paying them well enough that they’re not just a paycheck away? And do you expect a lot of them? Do they have growth potential? Do they like the culture? Do they like you, do you like them? Those are all things that when we talk about building an organization that hinges on great leaders and a lot of that is great leaders who can build great systems, right? It’s like you, you are the assistant until you hire the assistant to do the jobs that you’re currently doing, right? Because the thing is, is like somebody else will always be better at what you’re doing because they can be more dedicated and focused than you can as the business owner, you should be doing other things.
AJV (05:37):
And that’s getting clear on the money invested into quality people is worth it because it frees up your time to go do the next thing, whatever that may be. So there is this internal component of the who really matters. And a lot of the growth of a company is directly correlated to the quality of the leader, right? But then there’s this external component that we talked about in this interview that I thought was also really awesome, and I thought this was really important. And I’m actually looking at my notes from this, and I, I loved what she said. She said, this is Robin, Robin said this, get you get more customers when you get more specific and you can go listen to the interview. But she has built, built a multi eight figure business, I think somewhere in the 40, $45 million annual revenues, recurring revenue business.
AJV (06:32):
And what I love is that she shares this. She goes, there are very few people who can actually even buy what we offer. And I, I don’t quote me on this, go listen to the interview, but maybe 10,000. That’s it. So I think a part of it, she was like, we know anding about our customer, what they need, when they need it, what they can afford, what they’re trying to do, what size they are, how many people they have, what revenue they’re at. We know everything about them, and we have built our solution. So specifically catered to this small group of 10,000 people, she goes, we have built a, you know, $40 million business servicing a, a very even small fraction of that people, she was like, but our whole thing is we don’t have to have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of prospects to build an enormous business.
AJV (07:25):
We just need to get so clear, so specific that we are so dialed in on that niche specific audience that we can get bigger with a smaller audience, right? That’s because you can do more for that audience. It’s, versus it’s the difference between doing a little for a lot of people or doing a lot for a fewer amount of people. And in her case, it’s not super small, it’s still thousands. But I think that’s a really important concept because a, a lot of the more conversation that I hear in my world is I’m trying to get more followers, right? Specific on social media, or I’m trying to get more subscribers or I’m trying to get more leads and I’m trying to get more clients and, and people are kind of consumed with this idea of I need more. And I just wonder why, right?
AJV (08:16):
It’s like, do your current subscribers or current followers buy from you? I don’t know. Maybe they do, but I bet a lot of you get most of your business from word of mouth and referrals and your current customers. And I bet that if, if we all took a really deep hard look at who our audience is, we could all admit we don’t need millions, don’t even need hundreds of thousands, don’t even need tens of thousands. And most of us don’t even need thousands of people to go after, to build a very life sustaining, fulfilling life-giving business that’s making a positive impact on the people that you are around on your family. It, it could be generational change, and you could do that with dozens of clients. So more is not always better. Sometimes less is better. ’cause You can do more for those people when you have less clients.
AJV (09:10):
And so I just wanted to challenge everyone in this conversation of going, you can grow to a very large size business with a very small client demographic, and you’re able to do that because you know your client demographic so intimately, right? But there’s not just the external who factor. There’s the internal who factor, which is the, the cultural dynamics of you’re only gonna grow as fast as the leaders in your company, right? You and I love this whole thing, it’s like you can never, you know, grow faster than the systems that you put in place, right? And I think a lot of times when you do that is when you self implode, like when you grow faster than your systems and processes can manage, is when we see these have amazing potential companies implode right before our eyes because they couldn’t sustain the growth.
AJV (10:00):
They didn’t have the right systems, the right processes, nor the right leaders in place to do the thing. Don’t make the same mistake. Don’t don’t over romanticize growth, right? There, there is a, a power in boring organic growth, right? And nobody likes to talk about that because we wanna talk about how you went from zero to seven figures and the next six months. Like, but that’s not always good, right? Sometimes the boring organic
AJV (11:11):
More money, more followers more clients, more leads what have you just said? What can I do with less, right? What, what could I do with what I have? And instead of focusing on more people or more leads or more followers, what if you just said, no, I’m just gonna focus on serving the ones I have better. And it doesn’t have to be more or bigger. I just wanna do more and better for what I currently have. Because if we do a life changing service to the people we have, they will tell others about you, right? We talk about this all
AJV (11:52):
The time. The best form of marketing on the planet is a changed life. And that goes for clients and employees.
Ep 524: From Scrappy to Strategic: How to grow an 8 figure business with Robin Robins
AJV (00:00:02):
Hey everybody. Welcome to the influential Personal Brand podcast, AJ Vaden here. Really excited to introduce you guys to Robin Robbins. And she and I are fairly new to knowing each other, but Robin has known my husband and my co-host Roy Vaden for a very long time. And he has been singing her praises for years. And so the fact that we get to have her on this show today is really exciting. And before we formally introduce her, I want you guys to know why you should stick around today. And I think one of the things that most of our audience says at some point is, how do you go from, you know, where I am today to that dream company, whether that be a seven figure, eight figure, or nine figure entity. And I think today, the really the goal is to explore what it takes.
AJV (00:00:51):
What are the hard decisions you have to make? What are the choices you have to decide on along the way to help you go from where you are to where you wanna be on this venture, right? This ad venture of entrepreneurship. And so Robin is coming on the show today. Let me tell you just a tiny little bit about her. She is the CEO at Technology Marketing Toolkit. And what they do is develop highly effective marketing and sales strategies, very specifically to MSPs and managed service providers, if you don’t know what that term is. But I think one of the things that’s so amazing is that she has built an incredibly successful business for a very niche audience. And it’s one of the reasons that I wanted her to come on today, is talk about how do you succeed with less, right? And in this case a less
RR (00:01:52):
Thank you, aj. I appreciate you so much. I know I’ve gotta have you and Rory come speak to my audience ’cause I’ve just, you know, it’s, I just, I know. So you, the value you guys bring to people is amazing. And yeah, so I’m, I’m as much a fan of you guys as I, you know, maybe you are me. I, I appreciate that. Oh, we’re super. You guys do incredible work.
AJV (00:02:13):
And I told I told Robin before we hit record that, you know, Rory has been like, listen, y’all got to meet each other. I feel like you have the same personality, you got the same hair color. You guys have so much going on. And so I’m really excited to introduce you to the show. And, you know, one of the things, I just wanna share this quick story because I think this is a really powerful component of what a lot of people struggle with listening or not. And I asked Robin right before we hit record, Hey, I didn’t get a call to action A CTA for the show notes. Is there any sort of call to action that you want me to give? And she was bold enough to say, well, you know what? Not really. I don’t think a lot of your audience are managed service providers. And if you’re not an MSP, I don’t really want you
RR (00:03:00):
Clutter out. It sounds really hurtful when you say it that way.
AJV (00:03:03):
Clutter out my lead magnets. You know, but here’s, here’s why. I think that’s a really important story to tell. That is not what most people say. I have never once in the history of this show, which has now been running for six years with consistent two episodes every week, have anyone said, no, I don’t have a CTA for. And I think that’s significant because you have extreme clarity. Extreme clarity on who your avatar is, right? Yeah. And so let’s just start there for a second. ’cause I know most likely you didn’t start that way on day one, right? Right. And so what was the process? And you know, and this is, you know, for everyone listening, this is a conversation and entrepreneurship. But also Robin Robbins and her team who I know several people at her team really enjoy. Everyone I’ve met at her team, but they are really some of the best people in the world at doing what they do. And they do it for a whole bunch of people in a really specific and niche way. But also I think that in addition to entrepreneurship, for everyone who’s listening, it’s really clarity and courage is, I think, a part of like, the theme of this. And so how did you, over the course of what, 20 years now, determine that this micro niche audience is the one that you wanted to serve? How did that come about?
RR (00:04:23):
Yeah, I think, well, let me kind of go all the way back to how I even start in business. ’cause I always describe myself as a very unlikely, uneducated, and reluctant entrepreneur. You know, I didn’t start this going, I’m gonna build, you know, we’re, we’re probably gonna land somewhere around 44, 40 5 million this year. I never in a million years thought I’d have that going on with, you know, 130, 140. I, I lose track how many employees were, we’re hiring more. I, I walked into the lunch true store. I walked into the lunchroom, and we have two offices. And I, there was like someone standing there and I’m like, hi, who are you? Right?
RR (00:05:10):
But so
RR (00:05:52):
I’ve learned sales from, from early on. So I just started reaching out to people saying, Hey, I’m independent.
RR (00:06:44):
So I continued to look for a job. And but I started just like doing this consulting thing. And I didn’t know what it was. I just, you know, I didn’t, like, I had a website. I had to barter for a website. I didn’t have enough money to buy a website. So I bartered with, there was a web design company and I said, Hey, I’ll, they needed help, I think with like, some copywriting. And I said, Hey, I’ll, I’ll write copy if you’ll do my design, my website. So that was a barter, right? So, you know, I just started out like this. And then at that point when I said, I, I think I could do this, you know, my client base consisted of a shipping company, an MRI imaging center. I had a computer training school. I had a self test software, like a test prep software company.
RR (00:07:30):
I had, who else? Goodness. It’s like, it’s all over the map. You know, there was, oh, I had a Bijan who was a spiritual advisor, right? You know, I mean, it was like this eclectic, anybody who could fog a mirror, wave a dollar, I wanted you
RR (00:08:17):
Like for example, I tested doing digital pay per click lead generation and getting paid by the lead and, you know, across different, so that was like a specialization, not in a, not in a avatar customer, but a in a thing, right? And and then I started to test in different industries and stuff. And so one of the big breakthroughs that I had is there was a company, I had an association with company called CompTIA. And I learned strategic partnerships or JV partnerships from J Abraham. So that’s, I started reaching out to, to people who had big lists and saying, Hey, I’m really good lead generation marketing. I mean, mean, my pitch was a little better than this, but saying I’m really good. How about I do a free webinar for your audience on marketing lead generation? And CompTIA was one of the companies that said yes.
RR (00:09:03):
And I poured my heart soul into that and made it the best web. Well, it wasn’t even a webinar, it was a teleseminar. ’cause This is, you know,
AJV (00:09:56):
Prospect. Yeah,
RR (00:09:57):
Yeah, yeah. And, and stop comment commenting on my ad. ’cause You’re gonna get, you’re gonna just drive reaction to stupid people. ’cause You know what I mean?
RR (00:10:50):
I can provide a lot of engagement because people are very interested in sales and marketing. They were paying me to do this. So, so that’s how I got into this vertical. And there was a point, and that this is a true story. So I made a decision. I said, this is it. This is my industry. I’m gonna double down on it. I’m gonna go all in. And it took me, you know, that was like a, I got laid off like January of two, of two of 2002. And by the end of that year, I had incorporated technology marketing toolkit. And the reason for the name is technology marketing. I wanted that keyword at the time. Having keywords in your URL was like a big deal. And technology marketing was already taken. So I just slapped on toolkit and called it a day. So that’s the science behind the name. So anyway, so I, I, you know, I get started here and I started to fire my other customers and say, look, I’m, I can’t do this anymore. I gotta have all my effort and energy on this particular vertical.
AJV (00:11:43):
Can we pause right there for a second?
RR (00:11:45):
Yeah.
AJV (00:11:46):
Most people don’t do that. Yeah.
AJV (00:11:48):
At all. And I think it would be really helpful to understand, like, one, like what is it about you or the understanding, I think a lot of, you’ve already said it’s, it’s, you gotta go from scrappy to strategic. You did that pretty quickly. Mm-Hmm.
RR (00:12:21):
Yeah, I mean, it’s a mindset. So it is like, is this true story? Like I still wasn’t making a lot of money. I was still teaching fitness classes. I used to teach aerobics classes two, three times a day to pay the rent while I was trying to get the thing going. Right? Best shape of my life had shin splints that were from hell. But, you know I’m serious. It was like it, this, it was real. I mean, this is real story I’m not making up. And you know, I had, I had somebody who, you know, I talked to and they wanted to hire me as a consultant, weren’t an MSP. And I said, I’m sorry, I’m just not taking anybody who’s not an MSP at this time. And they said, oh, you are so full of it. You know? And they mailed me the check.
RR (00:12:58):
Anyway, so I, I mean, here I am, I’m barely making the rent. And I get a check. I’ll never forget, it was for $795. That’s what I was charging, like, on a monthly basis, right? And they mailed me this check, and I look at this check and I think, oh, you know, I could just go another month or whatever. And I was like, Nope. I, I put it back in the envelope, I mailed it back to the person and I said, sorry, I’m not taking you. And that’s a true story. And it wasn’t like I had a mentor or coach. I don’t know. I would, I’ve been in sales and I just know your company, the, the health, the profitability, your whole company rides on the who, who is the customer. And if you have a disease, dysfunctional, broke bad, wrong fit customer, your business can never succeed.
RR (00:13:52):
Ever. Like, ever. And so, like, you know, like I had a friend and I won’t mention the name just because I don’t wanna make, you know, it’s not a bad story, I just don’t wanna make ’em feel bad. But they were getting started in information marketing, you know, trying to be a guru and whatnot. And in this, and it was an attorney. And she comes to me and she’s like, Hey, you know, I’m selling, I’ve been selling this course for like, you know, 1995, whatever, some real cheap price, right? I’m selling this and I’m really struggling to sell. I’m trying to send people dah, dah, dah. She’s gonna, I said, stop. I said, the cheapest thing I sell is $2,000. The problem you have is you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re wearing yourself out trying to make a $20 sale to somebody who feels like $20 is a lot of money.
RR (00:14:39):
And that’s why you’re having all these other problems in your business. Like, go upstream. And, and it was like a light bulb went on because so many people teach, oh, we’ll just have the tripwire product or offer a service or whatever. And I did that too. And it, and there is a place for it. But I think at the same time, like as I’ve grown my business, you know, now today we went from selling like an info product, you know, for $500, $700 to where we sell now, two year, three year memberships. The cheapest being $24,000 total. I mean, a thousand dollars a month, that’s the cheapest all the way up, you know, to, to double that. And, and we, we sign on two year contract and we don’t do a money back guarantee. So like, that’s unheard of. But every time I have stepped up and taken a like harder stance on who I take as a customer, the more the business has grown.
RR (00:15:37):
Love that. And it’s, it’s, it doesn’t make sense lot. Like you sit there and you go, well, if you offer cheap products, you think you’d get more people. If you had a money back guarantee, you’re gonna get more customers. And you’re right. But you get the wrong ones. You get the ones who aren’t serious, the ones that are just gonna buy it. And then we used to have an, a massive, maybe you’ve seen this selling information products. We used to have a mass refund issue right after Thanksgiving because everybody would be like looking around and they’re sofa for two nickels to buy Christmas presents. And they would look on the shelf and they’d see my product there and they’d go, oh, wait a minute. That’s a money back guarantee. And they would call us and say, I want my money back. It doesn’t work. Or some of ’em were honest and just said, I need money for Christmas presents.
RR (00:16:17):
Right? Or I haven’t opened a thing, I haven’t used it, so I just wanna return it. And so those are not the people I want is customers. Yeah. So there’s, I, there’s a balance there. You know, when you’re just starting, you don’t wanna make it too difficult to be your customer, but at the same time, you don’t wanna hold onto that strategy forever. What gets you started might not sustain you. And you really gotta take a look at who is my customer? And I’m in a vertical, but I’m also just trying to get the top 15, 10% of this industry. Because I know 80% of the 80% is the Pareto principle. 80% are gonna be worthless, useless broke. I mean, if you look at the stats, only only 4% of companies, all companies in America ever break the million dollar mark. Only 4%. So that means, for the most part, 96% are worthless to you.
RR (00:17:09):
Right? I’m talking businesses, and I don’t mean worthless as human beings. I mean worthless, like from a standpoint of getting a cash check out of ’em, right? Then, only 0.4% ever get beyond the $10 million mark. And so you start to really see, you are dealing in tiny, tiny percentages. And the question is, do you want like a hundred percent of the bottom or do you want just like a 10% of the top of the cream? And so now it takes time. ’cause You gotta build a reputation. You gotta build a brand, which is what you guys teach a hundred percent. Everything you guys teach is, is spot on. I think what we’re talking about here is an emotional strength. Mm-Hmm.
RR (00:17:58):
I’m like, you gotta have a target customer profile, and you’ve got to make sure you don’t get shiny penny syndrome, where everybody comes at you like, oh, there’s a dollar over here. Oh, there’s $5 over here. Oh, there’s, because you start to water down and you’re not for somebody specifically. So I’m teaching this to an audience and this cute little couple come up, they’re a little, you know, married couple running an MSP probably under a million dollars in revenue, pretty small, nice, sweet people. And they say, Robin, you know, they come to me on break. And they’re like, intellectually, we know what you’re saying is true and right and correct, but we’re just scared because we’re trying to, you know, we’re, we’re barely making it as it is. And if we pick a particular customer, if we niche, then we’re gonna stop people from doing business with us.
RR (00:18:46):
And I said, okay, well, tell me a little bit about what’s been going on in the, in your business. It was like, this was a, in the fall of last year. And so it was like, you know, I said, tell me like this year, how many new, tell me about the lead flow. Where are you getting customers? And they kind of like, get this really sheepish look on their face and they look at each other and they go, well, we haven’t gotten any customers. And I say, well, who the hell are you trying to keep out then? Who cares? Like, you know, you can’t get worse, right? And they kind of laughed and they, and they realize, I’m like, you’ll find that you actually get more customers when you’re for somebody, specifically when I can say, here’s who my customer is, specifically from a demographic and a psychographic position.
RR (00:19:26):
I know you teach both of those things, right? So I don’t have to explain that to these people. But you know, when you really know, like one of the things that’s really important for me is I gotta have customers that have true, honest ambition. If they don’t have honest ambition to grow, to make more money, to serve more, to build enterprise value in their business, not just make more money. They are not of any use to me because I can’t scale that customer. They’re, they, I can make a quick buck on ’em, but I can’t build an asset. I can’t build enterprise value of my company if I get the wrong customer.
AJV (00:20:01):
You know? I love that. And it’s so interesting because we have this conversation often with our community as well at Brand Builders group. And I was actually on a call yesterday and I literally had this exact same conversation and I just asked this individual, who is your ideal speaking client? Like, if you were to tell me the perfect audience, who would it be? And she was like, well, women, any woman. And then she said, well, no, wait it could be women or you know what, just salespeople, anyone in sales. And then she was like, but you know, really it’s just anyone who believes in mental health. And I’m like, women in sales who believe in mental, no, no, no. Anyone like that. And I was like, so where do you find those people? And she was like, that’s just it. It’s, it’s anyone.
AJV (00:20:47):
It’s, it’s everyone. And it was like this aha moment. And I’m like, okay,
RR (00:21:25):
And you can’t. Right? I was, I’m looking right now, there’s a, there’s another little story and I wanna, ’cause I wanna get the numbers right. But yeah, so I had a client that she calls me up very, very excited runs an MSP that’s in New York City now, a couple years ago, their New York state implemented a law that’s called the SHIELD Act. And the SHIELD Act is a legal requirement for businesses to protect data that they have from cyber crime, ransomware, et cetera. So what, you know, for example, you have to have good backups. You have to have proper cybersecurity protocols in place. And she, she’s her and her husband super excited. A lot of my, a lot of my it sounds like I have all women for customers, but I really don’t. But she’s like super excited and she’s like, Robin, we gotta create a campaign.
RR (00:22:16):
And I said, okay, great. Who are we targeting? And she goes, well, all small businesses in New York City or New York State, really? I said, okay, well you are kind of right outside New York. Can you service people outside of your geographic area? Well, maybe, but not really. So maybe if we just said New York City, I said, okay, well how many small businesses are in the New York City metropolitan area? And she said, that’s why I wanted to look. I did a search in her geographic area where she was, if I just went like a 45 minute to an hour drive from her location, there were 22,000 businesses in her in that area. And I said, okay, so what’s your budget to market to these 22,000? And she says, well, we might be able to swing a thousand bucks
RR (00:23:15):
No one’s gonna know you did it. But you, if that’s all you’re spending to get to 22,000, you gotta narrow this down because you can’t boil the ocean. Yeah. You know, it’s like a term, you can’t boil the ocean. So like, we gotta have, the other part you have to think about is you, I think Seth Godin uses this term is the smallest viable audience. And what that means is, you know, what’s an audience that you could legitimately serve that are the lowest hanging fruit, the highest probability, the, the, the right fit? And it’s gonna be small. And as your business grows and you have more people who can, who can you can sell to as you have more resources and finances and stuff like that, you know, you can, you can expand that. Now, like with us, we haven’t really expanded our niche.
RR (00:24:04):
My niche is only MSPs in North America or English speaking countries like Canada, the UK and Australia. Now, do we have clients everywhere else? Yes, we do. But they find us and they buy, but we don’t pursue them. So really our list is only about, there’s only about 27,000. I think I just looked at this number. It’s like 27,000, 28,000 total in my universe. Total. That’s not a very big universe, right? And so again, people say to me, well, you know, how do you grow this business if you narrow it down so much is because you’re hyper-specific, because your services that you have price elasticity, meaning you can charge more when you specialize. It’s easier to find people, it’s easier to get referrals, it’s easier to get strategic partners. Because when you really know, here’s who my people are and where they go, you just put a hundred percent of your efforts there and you get exponential returns versus just spreading it out wide and thin and hoping you hit the right person.
AJV (00:25:02):
You know, like one of the things that you just said that I think is really valuable is, you know, your name comes up in various conversations, just anyone we’re talking about memberships, technology, recurring revenue comes up in those spaces, which is where we live. And I think one of the things that, and what enables you to do when you decide like, this is my niche audience. I don’t need tens of thousands, like 20, 27,000 is what you said, right? Most people listening to this couldn’t serve 27,000 people if they wanted to. Most couldn’t serve a thousand if they wanted to. Most people are trying to serve dozens, maybe hundreds, but definitely not even in the thousands. But we’re trying to reach millions for some reason when we’re only trying to really serve dozens or hundreds. But what I heard you saying is that when you go super niche, you start to start to know everyone in the industry, right? And it’s like, and you start to become known in the industry because it’s a smaller community, which is thus makes it easier for you to do what you do really well and become known. Sure. Was that, is that fair?
RR (00:26:08):
Yeah. No, I mean, we have so active members. So we have clients and then we have members that are members of a peer group or a membership. We’re just, just, we’ll cross the 1500 mark of, so 1,500 people who are in a membership active customers. Our, our industry has gone over under massive m and a, right? So two trends that are going on a lot of mergers and acquisitions, we lose our best customers ’cause they get bought UN unfortunately I say unfortunately for us, I mean, I’m very happy for them, but they get bought and so they go away as a customer ’cause they just sold their business, right? So m and a and then there’s been a cropping up of a lot of newbies and they fail very quickly because this industry that we’re in has gotten more difficult to be, it’s more difficult to be an MSP today than it was 10 years ago.
RR (00:26:56):
Without a doubt. It costs more money, it’s more difficult to get customers, everything else. So, you know, we have about 1500 members in peer groups, which is the largest peer group in our industry. And we also, we have about, I’d say about 6,000 active clients and that have bought a program, have come to a seminar, have, have done something like that. So that’s not a lot like you think, I mean, the core of our revenue is coming from 1500 MSPs. Then we also do sponsorship, which kind of lays on top of that. So we’ll do about 10 million of our revenue this year. Nine 10 million is gonna be in sponsorship dollars for events that we, that we run. And there’s probably a list, our core sponsors, there’s about a hundred 150 core sponsors. And then we’re always kind of you know, leveraging like always trying to find new ones.
RR (00:27:47):
But, you know, that’s not, you know, that’s not massive. That’s not a massive list. That’s not a massive number of customers. It’s about just being very strategic and smart with what you’re offering. And again, like, so if you’re a guru, so think about it this way too. You know, you’re only gonna get a very tiny percentage of an audience to buy because most people are not interested in growing, making more money. I, I mean they’re just not like the nature of what we do, which is selling advice. There’s it, you, you are wired like you, you know, AJ you, me, everybody listening, you guys are wired differently ’cause you’re on this. Just the fact that you’re listening to this tells me a lot about you. That you’re ambitious, that you wanna grow, you wanna make more money that excites you. That does not excite the majority of people.
RR (00:28:37):
I mean, like, I, I listen to my, my, my salespeople make calls. I listen to their calls and they had this guy on. He’s like, I don’t know. He is under a million dollars in revenue. He is not setting the world on fire. And we’re like, Hey, we can, we got a program that can that is, that we can guarantee we’ll help you increase your sales, your profitability, get better customers. Indoor. It’s not like guesswork. We’ve been doing this for two decades. We’ve refined it, perfected it. I mean like it works. He’s like, you know, I’m good
AJV (00:29:47):
I love that. I think this is like some of the most important strategic advice that anyone could hear at any stage of your business. Because I know everyone is tempted to this and you said it’s earlier, it’s like this is more of a, an emotional dilemma. A hundred percent that you got to battle and fight as the business owner, as the entrepreneur, or even as the salesperson, right? ’cause You can just get diluted at any level. At any stage. And that would be like, my next question for you is like, how have you kept this ability to stay so focused and so niche as you’ve grown where you’re not doing the sales calls anymore and you have all of these layers. Like how have you been able to pass this down? So the team that is now selling on behalf of the company is being just as integrous to the quality of the customer as you would be.
RR (00:30:32):
Well, you never, I mean that, see, you say it’s just as, as as it would be for me. You’re not, that’s not gonna happen. So part of the realization is, you know, when you start hiring people, now I this whole saying of, oh, I’ll hire people that are smarter than you. You know, and then just get outta, well, look, if, so there’s so, like my web designers are smarter than me when it comes to designing a website. I don’t even know how to do it. My, you know, my marketing team who runs all the, the tech that, that does the backend when we do webinars and all that, like, I don’t know how to do that. They’re smarter than me on that stuff, right? But like, you get sales and marketing people, like, it’s gonna be very, very rare. And I do have some people on my team that are as good or better than me in certain aspects of marketing, right?
RR (00:31:22):
But the vast majority are not. And that’s okay. ’cause They don’t need to be as good as you now. They have to have integrity. I mean, we have it painted on our wall. The North Star is the attraction, the development, the retention of raving fan customers, right? So that’s on our, that’s not some BS that we put on a motivational poster. We really believe it. We really, so everybody’s gotta be bought into that. They gotta be bought into excellence, no drama, hard work, teamwork, all those things. But the reality is, as you grow your business, not every single person is going to be as good as you. And if you don’t, if you can’t accept that, you’re not going to grow. Okay. So I was at a I’ll, I’ll tell you. So I was at a mastermind meeting with Joe Polish. You might, you know
AJV (00:32:10):
Yeah. Genius network.
RR (00:32:11):
Yeah. Yeah. I was actually, I get the claim to fame. I was the one who gave him the idea. I was the first member. Right? Oh,
AJV (00:32:16):
That’s awesome.
RR (00:32:17):
Yeah. So anyway, so I was, it was, I don’t know if it was like, yeah, I don’t know if he called it Genius Network at the time, whatever. I was at a meeting where Joe, you know, and he had a guy, and I don’t remember the guy’s name. All I remember is he was the, he owned about a hundred franchise restaurants in like the, a Arizona area, right? And his, he was talking about what it takes to scale and grow. And he says, you know, and I’m gonna paraphrase what he said, but he says, you know, the problem is when you have one or two restaurants or three or four or five, he said, you’re still small enough where you can, you know, run over to the, the restaurant that has a plumbing leak and you can start putting towels on the floor or the bathroom’s not cleaned.
RR (00:33:03):
You can jump in there and get it cleaned. Or you can run behind the cash register and take care of that. Or you can. And he says, and that’s what drives you nuts, is the abil. You’re still small enough where you’re trying to keep your hand in everything. He said, when you get to a hundred franchises, you can’t, you cannot do that anymore. You have to depend on people. And you start running the business by the numbers. So you go, I remember I was saying, so I’m like, okay, so we only had like one sexual harassment lawsuit, so that’s good. ’cause That’s within the range. And we only food poison like five people. And that’s good. ’cause That’s within the acceptable, now I’m serious and everybody was laughing, but to us it would be horrible. Like you, like I are you kidding? That would tear.
RR (00:33:42):
Like, I don’t want that to happen to my employees. I don’t want that to my customers. But as you scale a company, if you, the bigger you get, the harder it is to re to maintain that same level of quality and integrity. Now you fight for it. You fight for it. You have, and the key to it though, and, and I’m telling you, I’ve just, it’s the key to it is the leaders you then hire, not the employees, but the leaders. Because the leader, you are the leader of your team right now. And you are the constraint. You know, a great leader frees up capacity for their people and their department and their co or their organization to expand. And what happens is, as you grow, and this has happened to me multiple times, someone who’s really good when you’re 20 million is no longer good when you’re 40 million it or somebody good when you’re at a million is no longer a good, when you’re at 2 million, you have doubled the size of your org.
RR (00:34:36):
And what happens is we have good people, and sometimes we feel very loyal to them. But there’s a thing called the pita principle. And you, you’ve, you, your org outgrows their capacity or their pro their their pro. You try to promote ’em. But they’re, yeah, they’re, it’s beyond their skillset, right? They, you know, and, and so some people can grow with you and others can’t. Now if they’re good people, you retain them, but you put ’em in different seats if you can, right? Because great people are very hard to come by. And you want that, that loyalty is important. But I think also to grow an organization, the only way you’re going to do it is by hiring great leaders who lead your sales team, who lead your marketing efforts, who lead your operations, who lead your financial ser the financial services, the person who you know, leads hr.
RR (00:35:26):
Like, that is the only way you grow. And as you grow, unfortunately, you’re gonna have to swap out leaders because very, very, very few people can stay with you long term. Now, I have a couple like Jeff Johnson who works with me. Jeff’s president of the company. Jeff’s been with me forever. He has stepped up and scaled as we’ve grown the company. He’s matured, he’s grown. Nicole, she’s matured, she’s grown. She’s my COO. So there are, there, there are those people. So there, I’m not saying it’s impossible, but there are a lot of leaders I’ve hired that had that you just have to fire ’em because a bad leader in an organization can destroy your organization. So to grow, and this was a lesson that took me a long time to learn. ’cause I didn’t like hiring people. I don’t consider myself a great leader of people.
RR (00:36:08):
I’m a very good sales person. I’m a great copywriter. I’m a great marketer. I great at strategy, but hiring leaders and running an org is a different skill. And I’m aware of my shortcoming. So I have to hire people that are great at those things because, and then step back, not step away because I’m still very involved. I’m still watching what’s going on. I’m looking at the numbers I’m looking at. I see there’s this, oh, well you hire someone, you abdicate No, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah. You micromanage until they, you, you’re riding lockstep with them for months, a year before you can really start to step away. And they have earned your trust that, see, this is like, that’s another, you can’t just hire someone and look the other way and say, give ’em the two part training of good luck and hang in there.
RR (00:36:55):
It doesn’t happen. You know, because then you, next thing you know, the whole department’s blowing up and you look and you go, what the hell? We’ve drifted so far from our vision, from our core values, from our like, and now you got, now you got real collateral damage. And that’s happened to me on several occasions. So I’ve learned it. And if you’re gonna grow an org yeah, you, you, well, you have to decide that you want to grow. And then it’s about hiring those leaders on the team that will grow those divisions for you.
AJV (00:37:23):
No, I love that. You know, as you were talking, I was at, I was at a recent mastermind trading, and Craig Rochelle was one of the speakers. And you know, he’s a, he’s an author, but is, you know, he’s the lead pastor at Life Church, which is now like the largest multi-campus church in the world, I believe. And like, one of the things that he said is he said, you can have control or you can have growth, you cannot have both. Right? And it’s like, there is a part of this and it’s just what you just said, it’s like you never expect that they will do it as good as you or like you, they can be better than you in some areas and you’re better than them in some areas. But this whole idea of you’re gonna be the one doing all the interviews and all the things he is like, you can do that and not grow.
RR (00:38:07):
That’s, well, I mean, I think you can still have control. I mean that’s, I would disagree. I I know what he’s saying. His intention is if, like, if I wanna grow the sales department, I have to hire a sales leader who can recruit on, design the onboarding, do the training, do the daily coaching, do the looking at the list, do the day-to-day stuff to run that org. I cannot do that and be CEO That’s two different, it’s two more than full-time jobs. I can’t do both. So from that per that perspective, that kind of control, yes, you have to give up the work of doing these things, but you should still have some control and maintain and insights into what’s going on. You gotta maintain control from the standpoint of the strategy. Mm-Hmm. You know, ’cause someone said to me the other day, they’re like, well, are you that kind of person where you know, you, you know, you, where you, you don’t let, you don’t let anyone do anything outside of the ideas that you have.
RR (00:39:03):
And I said, well, well, no, I’m open to new ideas, but I believe in you imitate before you innovate. Mm-Hmm.
RR (00:39:45):
He was like emailing people. He is making these promises that there was no, they, they were like unethical. ’cause They’re not things that we provide and could get us in legal trouble. So it, so I, my my mistake is I let too much control Mm-Hmm.
RR (00:40:32):
You can’t do every job. I get that. But you still need to maintain an understanding because somebody in your billing department could be doing something that could be destroying relationships, putting you in legal trouble churning customers. And it’s just because you’re not, you say, well, you don’t have control. Right? But you don’t have visuals on it. So I, I just wanna be really clear. There’s, I i, I get really crazy when people are just like, well no, you just hire smarter people than you and get outta their way’s. Not exactly how, you know. Yes, but not exactly like that. Yeah.
AJV (00:41:07):
I’m laughing because I now know, right? When Rory says, oh my gosh, y’all are like the same person. I now know why
RR (00:42:04):
No, that is your job as ceo. Your job is to say, here’s who our customer is. Here’s what our services are, here’s what our brand promises, here’s what our core values are. Here’s how we’re gonna make money in this thing. Like you’ve gotta create your financial model. Here’s who we’re gonna have on the team. Here’s who we’re not gonna have on the team. And set standards and make sure those standards are met. So you think about like your children now, you know, it’s not exactly the same. ’cause Children kind of mature, you know, at, at, at an age. Employees mature faster, let’s say. But you know, like as your child grows, you wanna step back a little bit and let them learn to tire their shoes and let them learn how to cook something. Like, I’m like, I’m freaking out. Like my, the rule in my house with my girls, you know, and they’re old enough, they’re 10 and 14 is they’re not allowed to cook anything when we’re not there.
RR (00:42:54):
‘Cause Sometimes like I’ll walk the dog, like I’ll leave them for a little bit. I’ll walk the dog down the street, come back. Right? No cooking of anything if my, if I’m not here, right. You know, so you, you step back and you give them, you have to give them freedom to grow and learn, but you don’t like, like not get involved in their lives. You know? I mean that’s like, you still have to maintain control. Who are they hanging out with? What are they eating? What are they reading? What are they watching on, on digital? Like if you don’t maintain control of the, of their phones. Mm-Hmm.
RR (00:43:42):
And I can trust you to make good decisions and trust that you know what to do. It’s not to say that they won’t make mistakes, it’s just a matter of like, it’s not fair to your team to throw ’em into the wild and expect them to somehow know how to produce a result with no leadership, no training. No guidance, no resources. No, you, I mean, it’s the biggest complaint I hear. We have marketing managers that come to us in our program or salespeople and they’re like, Hey Robin, can you help me out? I don’t, what do I do? And I’m like, well, what’s your job description? Like, what were you hired to do? No idea. So how are you measured? How do you know you’re doing a good job? No idea. I’m like, well, how do you get paid? And they’re like, you know, it’s like I’m serious.
RR (00:44:25):
Like they have someone hired ’em and they put, gave ’em like a stamp of saying, okay, you’re in marketing. Here’s Robin’s program. Go implement it. And it’s just, that’s not leadership. Mm-Hmm.
RR (00:45:09):
You know, we’re like, I don’t just like, I didn’t just abdicate say, okay, have a good day, you know, figure it out. Go out. She’s my, my chief revenue officer. But so, but it’s gonna take a year for her to really, I have to be with her. ’cause I know the history. I know where the bodies are buried. I know what we’ve tried in the past that worked in, didn’t work. And so even somebody who’s a very high protein, high level person still needs this CEO leader to be there and, and walk with them. Right? And I know I can step away very quick quickly ’cause I trust her. I think she’s got high integrity, she’s got a lot of experience. She’s grown things in the past. She’s bringing ideas and strategies I haven’t thought about. But even then I don’t just go, okay, well here’s your salary and go, go get it. I still have to mean a control over what’s going on in the org.
AJV (00:45:53):
Yeah. And I think that’s really insightful of even when you make the hire doesn’t mean the other person takes over. Like, you’re gonna be with them on that journey through the process. And I, I couldn’t agree more. And I think one of the things is like, these are like true lessons and, and high level entrepreneurship. This is a difference between six figures to seven figures, seven figures to eight figures, eight figures to nine figures is understanding the balance of some of these things. Now I’ve got one last quick question for you. And then our time is almost up. You’ve been doing, you’ve been doing this 20 years, right? Almost same avatar the whole time. Super similar business model. I know it’s changed and evolved a little bit over the course of time. As you look back over the last 20 years, if there was one lesson as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, as a leader, however you wanna, you know, title that if there was one lesson that you’re like, I don’t care if these listeners take away anything else, as long as you hear this, this is what I want you to hear as we’re wrapping up,
RR (00:46:53):
No pressure. Like, you know, just take the Bible and can you boil it down to a single tweet? ’cause Yeah,
AJV (00:46:58):
That’s it. You,
RR (00:46:59):
That’s, you know, eternal salvation if you know this one lesson. Yeah.
RR (00:47:09):
You know, I, it’s, it’s so hard ’cause there’s so many things that I would say I think, you know, looking back, I, I wish I had trusted my gut more and had more confidence in what I thought was right versus being afraid or scared of what people would say. ’cause My gut has never been wrong. What that sense you get about a person or a deal or something like that. I just wish I could go back and say, trust your gut. Stand your ground. You’re, you, you know, it’s, you’re doing the right thing. And I think also in that, from that kind of a, a branch to that is there’s very, very few mistakes you can’t recover from. So even when things look absolutely like the worst you get, you make a hire that just nearly destroys your company. I had a period in my life AJ, where I it was early on I had about seven employees and in a period of under a month, or I mean under a year, sorry.
RR (00:48:16):
I had like five or six of ’em turnover. I had to fire one, I had to fire a bunch of ’em. I, and I had two. One of ’em stole my client list and went to a competitor and there was a lawsuit. And then they, they sued me for defamation, which was just frivolous. It was just kind of a bargaining chip to get me to stop chasing them. I had another employee who left and and was trashing me and like, just flat out lies on social media. And I had, another one I found was stealing money from me. I found another one that I, it just on and on like that all goes on. I had a very, a high profile client go south on me as well. Where that, again, this was very weird. Like this was a very low integrity person in what they did.
RR (00:49:02):
I’ll just leave it at that. So I have this massive turnover. I have this very high profile client going south on me. I found out I had had melanoma all in one year. All in one. I found out I had melanoma. Which, you know, and then on the end of the tail of that, after I, ’cause that was when I decided I wanted to have kids. I wasn’t sure I wanted to have kids. And I said to my husband before I went into the surgery, if I come out and I’m okay. ’cause We were, they were concerned. It had metastasized. And I said, I wanna have a family. And like literally three months afterwards, I get pregnant. I have a miscarriage. This is all happening in like a nine, 10 month period. Right. and I was, that was like the lowest of low I’ve ever been.
RR (00:49:49):
And, you know, I wish I could go back and tell myself, girl, you got this. Like, all this is bad. But in the end it’s all gonna work out, I promise you. But I couldn’t see it at the time. And, you know, I have a renewed faith in God and I wish I could go back and tell myself, he is your savior and he will, he will protect you. ’cause He was there. I just didn’t see him. Sorry, get emotional. ’cause It’s like that important. But I, I think it’s, you know, for all of you, I think there’s nothing that’s going to happen that you make a mistake. Like, I hired the wrong people. I trusted the wrong client. I made some bad decisions. That’s, that’s what it was. I mean, all that happened was my fault. I mean, I even went in tanning bed.
RR (00:50:33):
So the me melanoma, who the hell knows it was my fault, right? So it was all like things I had done. But I think just to trust your gut and know that in the end, if you just keep doing the right thing, you work hard, you take care of people, you do what’s necessary, not what’s expedient, not what’s easy, not the shortcuts. If you keep it, it, it, it will all, it will work out. And just have that confidence. ’cause You’re gonna get beat up. You’re gonna get your butt handed to you multiple times. You’re gonna make all kinds of mistakes. You’re gonna get people who, who rip you off and it’s going to anger you. And I’m telling you it’s not worth it. Like to go, I’ll show them, I’ll sue them. And then you get embroiled in it. Like I’m telling you guys, like, it’s, I think the thing for me is just keep doing what you’re doing, doing the right thing and it will work out. But trust your gut more. ’cause There was, there were signs and I just ignored those signs about the people that I had in my life at the time. And I was kind of afraid to make, make a stance or I was afraid to fire them, or I was afraid to say, no, I’m not doing that. Or I was afraid to say what need to be said. And I think going back, I should have, I should have done that more and then had just had faith in, in, in God that it, it will work out.
AJV (00:51:50):
You know what? I bet you’re not afraid to do those things anymore,
RR (00:51:54):
RR (00:52:34):
And I gotta remind myself, you know, there’s people around me that I gotta just be a little kinder with a little. And it’s, I gotta be very hyper aware of it because that’s not the mode that I’m used to. And that’s really it. Other than that, if I, if you serve people, I don’t focus on competition. I’ve got a ton of it. I’ve got people who copy me. You’re all gonna have copy. You know, it’s, it’s all gonna be okay.
RR (00:53:16):
I hope I’m probably telling you way more than you need. But, you know, one of the things I never, when I started my business, I never wanted to be an influencer. Like, I never wanted to be the one on stage the guru. Like, I, I did it because I saw it as a means to selling stuff, not as a means. Because I like to be on stage. I’m, and I mean this sincerely, if I was never on stage again, wouldn’t hurt my feelings. I don’t mind doing it. But it’s not like my favorite thing in the world, right? I just, I’m kind of neutral about it. In fact, I’d rather be behind the scenes than on stage if I had, if I had my, my preference, right? But, you know, so much of your business gets wrapped up in your ego because you go, well, hey, I don’t have a million followers on Instagram and YouTube and Facebook and all these things.
RR (00:54:02):
And we see these people who are doing amazing. I’m not taking away from ’em. I mean, they have these millions of views for a reason. They’re, they have incredible, incredible messages and stuff. And I’m not, I’m not, I don’t mean this in a jealous way. What I mean, it is, you can get caught up in that and feel like, you know, what, if I’m not relevant anymore, what am I gonna do if this thing doesn’t work out? Like, I’ve gotta be, I gotta be more popular. I gotta be get more likes. I gotta get more clicks. I gotta get more. I, if I don’t, I’m a failure. Right? And I started having those feelings quite a bit and it was, it made me nervous. ’cause I felt like the business kind of rose on that. Right? And, and again, I think my faith in God, just coming back to that is that is an earthly prize that, you know what?
RR (00:54:46):
I don’t need to get wrapped up in that. I just need to take care of people. I need to work hard. I need to do the right thing. And it’s okay if I’m not the most popular YouTuber or Facebook person or whatever, and not to get wrapped up in that too much. You know, because I, I can tell you this, I know a lot of very wealthy successful people that you all never heard of. Yeah. I mean, I know of billionaires and multimillionaires, none of you have ever heard of running an IT business, running a software company that you guys, if I said it, you would never know who the heck I’m talking about. Right? So it’s possible to run a great business without having all these fans, followers. Now I’m not, again, I’m not, please don’t misunderstand me. They’re important. Totally.
AJV (00:55:30):
I totally agree with you though. Okay. So
RR (00:55:31):
I’m just saying like for your spirit, I just don’t get too caught up where you feel like you’re failure if you’re not as popular. ’cause You look at my YouTube channel, you look at my Facebook, you’re like, I get like three people liking it. That’s it.
AJV (00:55:42):
I mean, I’m definitely not all that different. I mean, we run a personal brand strategy firm and I’m like, well, don’t go look at mine because that’s like, I’ve never had roughly more than what I have right now. It’s 10,000 followers. And like one of my personal mantras is that you do not have to have millions of followers to make millions of dollars, and you do not have to make millions of dollars to make a massive and eternal impact. Right. And it’s like a
RR (00:56:05):
Hundred percent. That’s what I’m saying, what you’re saying. Yep, a hundred percent.
AJV (00:56:07):
And you know, and I love what you said, and it’s like I’ve been reading a lot through the Old Testament right now, and we’ll kind of like, I know wrap in this, but it’s like, one of the things that I’ve been, I’ve been holding on to is like, just like gold where we are refined through the fire, right? And it’s like nobody looks back and says, oh my gosh, that success, that victory, it defined me. I learned everything I know. And I had this victorious thing that happened. It’s like nobody says that. I look back and go, like that valley, that challenge, that horrendous year, that awful relationship that, you know, that bankruptcy thing, it’s like we grow through the crap, right? Mm-Hmm.
RR (00:56:49):
Yeah. I mean, it’s the fertilizer of life. Right? Exactly. You know what I mean? You just,
AJV (00:56:53):
And knowing that it’s like, and I love what you said, it’s like, man, if you just don’t give up, you just
RR (00:56:59):
Give, just, you know, get more. I, I think it was Ed Ette said this, we just had edit what, you know, and I know he’s, he’s a client, you some stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And he said, you know, don’t get your ego wrapped up in your results. Get it wrapped up in your intention. And I love that because that’s what I’m really, you know, if your intention is to do good in the world and to help others and, you know, get wrapped up in doing that and providing real value to people. And you know, the other thing is, is learn business too, guys. You know, I, you know, the other thing is if I could go back and say to myself, you know, you can build an actual, like a company with actual enterprise value that is sellable. Not just a company that makes money.
RR (00:57:39):
‘Cause In the beginning, I’ll tell you, I wasted the first, I’d say the first 12 years I just was making money and it was more money than I ever made. And I thought, this is great, you know? And as I started to evolve and grow my business, I started to realize, hey, you know, I had to learn how to run a, a legit business, not this kind of lifestyle thing. And, and if you ever wanna run a lifestyle thing that’s, that’s up to you. I’m just saying like and then as like in my industry, ’cause mergers and acquisitions is such a big deal, I had to bring in several, what I call experts and residents on m and a and enterprise value and financials. And so I started surrounding myself with people that are not like branding and marketing, but that are like, here’s how you read a p and l.
RR (00:58:23):
Mm-Hmm,
AJV (00:59:06):
Ah, this is so good. I mean, I literally took three pages of notes,
AJV (00:59:48):
I think that’s so, so, so, so good. And then the third thing that I wrote down, and you said it in the very early, it’s like you gotta know from when you’re going scrappy to strategic, right? Mm-Hmm
RR (01:00:18):
Share it with your mssp if you outsource your IT support, that’s who I want. Woo. Woo. That’s
AJV (01:00:24):
Know where your audience is. That’s what you need to
RR (01:00:27):
Know here. They probably don’t even have one, so that’s fine. But
AJV (01:00:29):
Yeah. You know, I think this, it’s, so this is one of those conversations that really, it’s like this is, this is a conversation 20 years in the making. And if you guys haven’t realized like you just got a masterclass in entrepreneurship, I would encourage you to go back and listen to it. And then also stay tuned for the recap episode that I will do next. Robin, thank you so much. Everyone else, we will see you next time on the influential personal brand.
Ep 507: How to Generate Massive Warm Referrals | Jordan Montgomery Episode Recap
RV (00:04):
Let’s talk about how to generate massive, warm inbound referrals In your business. And we’re not gonna talk about it. I’m gonna teach you exactly how to do this, and I’m telling you, I’m gonna, I’m gonna tell You the secret of what I personally do that
RV (00:29):
Floods our Business regularly in a recurring fashion with massive warm referrals. And I can teach this to you in one sentence, and then I’m gonna share with You four Reasons for why you should do this beyond just getting warm, massive, warm referrals, even though that’s what we’re talking about here. Okay? So How do you do this? How do you generate Massive warm referrals inside of your business? It is simple. If you want to get
RV (01:06):
Referrals, you need to give referrals. That’s it. If you want to get referrals, you need to give referrals. You need to become an expert at giving referrals. You need to have great systems for giving referrals. You need to develop a heart for giving referrals. You need to develop a faith for giving referrals. If you want referrals, you have to become a master at giving referrals. And if you become a master at giving referrals, I promise, I promise you’ll get referrals in return.
RV (02:38):
Of the leads that come into your business, mostly because you’ll be working all the warm leads and all of the normal leads that come in. It’s like you gotta have somebody to help you
RV (02:45):
Work, work Through those. And that’s like a big part of what becomes your team.
RV (02:50):
So that’s the Secret in one sentence. I’ve done this again and again. I’ve watched AJ do it again and again, I’ve seen the clients that do this in, in their life again and again. There’s, there’s people in my life that I, I am the recipient of, right? I, there, there’s a couple people here. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll give a couple shout outs. One, I will say Randy Garn is a, is a human that just focuses on giving referrals. And he seems to have, you know, no lack of referrals coming to him, and no lack of business coming to him. John Ruland is a, is a person in my life who loves to give referrals, and he seems to have no lack of influence and, and referrals and relationships coming to him. It is there, there, there’s so many others. There are so many others. We have so many clients, so many friends who have so generously give referrals to BBG.
RV (03:41):
And they get, you know, they, they are, they’re people. I look in their life and I go, yeah, sometimes. And here’s the thing you gotta know, is that when you give referrals, sometimes you get referrals back from that person, but sometimes the referrals you get are not back from that person. They come from somebody else. But it’s, it’s creating this abundance mentality, this abundance mindset, this abundance energy, this faith mindset, this faith mentality, this, this, this, this faith mindset that pours back into you. And you have to do this. And you go, man, if I really want to get good at getting referrals, you might need to flip a switch in your brain and go, why am I not getting more referrals? Right? Like, why am I not getting more referrals? If that’s you, like, if you look at your business and you go, I don’t think I really get that many referrals.
RV (04:37):
I’m certainly not flooded with a massive number of warm referrals. And you go, then I would ask you to say the second question. How good are you at giving referrals? Because I’ve never met someone who is great at giving referrals, who doesn’t also sooner or later, eventually over time, have a flood of warm bound of, of warm inbound referrals. So you might be thinking about it wrong, right? You might be going, oh, I, I need to have better product or a more sharper system, or a, you know, something in terms of like, why don’t I get more referrals? Or you might think, oh, my clients don’t refer people. Of course they do. Everyone refers people like, we refer people that we like, and we, most of us prefer not. Most of us, all of us prefer to do business with people we know. We prefer to, to buy and sell and transact with people that we trust.
RV (05:31):
And that happens through shared relationships. So what I wanna talk about is four reasons why. Beyond just getting more referrals per se. I wanna talk about four reasons why you should become a great giver of referrals for reasons why. Okay, first one, again, you probably overlooked this. Most people that I have this conversation with overlook this point. And yet this is a key point of getting referrals. And it’s a key reason to give referrals. One of the most amazing, beautiful byproducts of giving referrals is that you keep in touch with your past clients. You keep in touch with your past clients. When we say give refers referrals, who are you going to refer? You’re, you’re, you’re probably going to refer other vendors that can serve the people that you know, like, and trust. And if it’s inside your business, the people that you know, like and trust are the people you’re transacting with.
RV (06:39):
It’s your clients and going, who can I introduce to my clients? That’s the mindset here is to go, okay, I have all these clients. A worthy referral from you is to someone who is, you know, a legitimate person, a legitimate buyer. Maybe they’re, maybe they’re a legitimate vendor. And you go, I need to think about who can I introduce to my clients and who can I introduce my clients to? What’s amazing about that, and this is the number one reason beyond just getting referrals about why you should become a great giver of referrals, is that keeps you in touch with all of your past clients. Like, the reason why I book so many people on podcasts and, you know, social media like lives and stages, you know, speakers and stuff, is not ’cause I’m in the business of that. I’m not in the business of that.
RV (07:32):
We don’t get paid to do that. What the reason that I do that is because it keeps me in touch with past clients. I’m going, oh, you need to meet this person and you need to meet this person. Well, when I am constantly thinking about who can I introduce to my clients that would be helpful for my clients, whether it’s another vendor to them or if it is potentially introducing them as a vendor to somebody else, either way it keeps me in touch with my past clients. That is why you should do this. The second reason why you should give referrals and become a master at giving referrals is because it builds reciprocity. You may have heard this, that it’s called the Law of reciprocity, and I would argue emphatically that it is in fact the law of reciprocity. It is not the theory of reciprocity.
RV (08:29):
If you give and support and help other people, it’s not that you might have other people give and support and help you back in return. It is a law. This, it is guaranteed to happen sometimes. It doesn’t always happen from the person you’re giving to, but it always happens. And often it does happen from the person you’re giving to. Almost always it happens, although it may not be in the same form, right? It’s like, I might give a business referral and they might, they might help me, you know, move my furniture when I move my house or something like that. So it’s not always the same currency, but it is always this balance of relationship equity that, that, that, that holds and maintains. It’s it, and it is a, it is a law. So you want to learn to proactively tip this scale in your favor.
RV (09:26):
Now this Bible verse, I’m gonna share with you a Bible verse. Okay? This, this is a, a this is a, a Bible verse about tithing. Okay? So this is specifically about tithing, but it, it nails the attitude and the mindset here of reciprocity. So this Bible verse is Malachi three 10, I think. Make sure that I send that right? Yep. Malachi three 10. This is one of my favorite Bible verses. Okay? So this is from the Old Testament, and here’s what it says. Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse that there may be food in my house. Test me in this, says the Lord Almighty, and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it. The God of the universe is saying, test me in this.
RV (10:26):
Now he’s specifically talking about tithing to him and saying, trust me with your money, trust me with your resources. That’s the tithe. The first 10th percent, which is what tithe means. It’s a 10th, right? The first 10th is give it back to the Lord and test me In this. There’s not very many things you know, the Lord says, test me in this. In fact, I can’t think of anything else where there’s a few things where I say, you know, do not test the Lord, but in this one, the Lord is saying, test me in this and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing. Now, this is true about giving in general, which is why I’m using this. Now, if you’re giving to another person, that person may not throw out the floodgates of heaven on you.
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They may not have the ability to, that they may not do that, but God will. You can’t outgive God. You can’t outgive the universe. It’s, it’s a law of, of nature. And, and the God of the universe who created the universe is saying just in giving money to him, saying, trust me as a, if you become a giver first, then I promise you’ll receive much more than your fair portion. And it, it, it is a measure of faith. And that’s one of the reasons why to do this is it, is it builds reciprocity, but specifically it strengthens your faith. When you are giving anything, you are learning to say you’re learning grace. Grace means giving without expectation of receipt, but it is giving. It is giving and trusting that it somehow some way will come back to you. That is a measure of faith.
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And if you can learn to do that with humans, men and women, if you can learn to do that with humans there, it will also then help you develop that relationship with the Lord. And if you can do that with the Lord, it will also help you learn and develop that relationship with humans. Now, humans are not perfectly just like the Lord is, but I think the Lord often fills those gaps and go, well, I’ve been given to so and so and I was taking care of them, and they didn’t really give me anything back, and maybe they couldn’t give anything back, but it shows up somehow. And, and it is, again, it’s the law of reciprocity. Third reason why I want you to become focused on being a master giver is it forces you to become systematic. A huge part of growing a business.
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Look, in, in, in my second book, procrastinating On Purpose, I said, no business can outgrow the strength of its systems. And I firmly believe that to be true today, as much as when I wrote it almost 10 years ago. Like, no business will ever outgrow the strength of its systems. A business is nothing other really than a product, a set of people and a set of processes or systems, right? It’s the three Ps. So you have to create great processes. Anything that forces you to create great processes is likely to force you to create a great business and in order to be a great giver, right? A a decent giver is someone who occasionally thinks of like, oh yeah, hey, I have a friend you should meet. But a great giver. A master giver develops systems like to systematically, proactively go, who can I introduce this person to?
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Who can I introduce this person to? Inside of our members or in our, in our membership portal. For those of you who are members, if you’re a brand builders group member, you know that I have a whole training called the relationship switchboard, and I show you the actual switchboard I use. It’s just a simple sheet where I track it’s a spreadsheet where across the columns are all like, you know, the media opportunities or the speaking opportunities, and then the rows are like people who are great guests or great potential speakers for that. And all I’m doing is tracking all of those connections and relationships. And so whenever I get a new client, I am systematically thinking, and this is a private client, right? I’m talking about someone who I am working with personally, and I’m going, okay, who can I introduce this person to that would be useful for them and who they could also be useful to?
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It’s systematic, right? Giving referrals to be a master giver requires you to be systematic, intentional, proactive, deliberate strategic. That’s what, if you become a master of this, it will force you to do that, which will also help force you to develop those skills and those character traits, which will help you in other parts of your business. And it will namely, help you with massive lead generation. So that is another reason to give referrals beyond just the fact that you’re gonna get ’em, is it’s gonna force you to be systematic. And then the fourth reason why I want you to become a master at giving referrals is because it reshapes your heart from a posture of self-centeredness to service centeredness.
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And I believe that that is a big part of the journey of mankind. I believe that that’s a big part of the challenge of our humanity. I believe that that’s a, is is one of the big trials of our lifetime. It is one of the biggest opportunities for growth. It is one of the biggest opportunities for personal development. It is one of the biggest calls on our life as, as, as Christians or just as good people, even if you’re not a Christian, is to go, can I mature from my childish, my childish, immature self-centered nature of only thinking about myself, wanting what is best for me, looking out for me? Can I at some point mature to being service centered, looking out for the needs of others, trying to provide for those around me, trying to make the world a better place for everyone, not just for me.
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That transformation from self-centeredness to service centeredness is one of the sources of great happiness and joy and purpose in your life. And learning to give referrals makes you a master of that. I don’t think it’s an accident. Again, to give you a Bible verse, this is an Acts chapter 20 verse 35. So this is in the New Testament. This is shortly after Jesus, you know, dies, resurrected, you know, appears, and then is ascends into heaven for the final time. Paul, in the Book of Acts, this is like all the disciples talking about what happens right after Jesus ascends into heaven and how the, the movement of Christianity begins. Paul quotes Jesus directly in Acts 20, verse 35, and he says, remembering the words, the Lord Jesus himself said, it is more blessed to give than to receive. It is more blessed to give than to receive.
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Again, this is a posture that’s worth pursuing. This is a journey of a personal development transcendence that I think is, is, is a, is worth taking. This is a, a trial worth triumphing over is the journey from self-centeredness to service centeredness. And being a master referrals forces you to go on that journey and to, and, and it, and it helps shape your heart. It shapes the posture of your heart and your character in a way that is healthy for you, even if you never get another business referral. So there you have at four reasons why, to become a master at giving referrals, even though and above and beyond the massive number of warm referrals that you will get. If you just do these things, go find someone and serve them. Be helpful to your past clients in a way more than just selling to them. Introduce them to useful people and stay plugged in here for more great inspiration and tips to hopefully help you in your journey.