Ep 371: 5 Things You Need to Know to Hit A Bestseller List | Esther Fedorkevich Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
Have you ever wondered what makes a New York Times bestselling book? A bestselling book,
AJV (00:58):
And so I thought I would share some of those tidbits with you because they were really important to me with the disclaimer. At the end of the day for anyone who is a writer, an author, a content creator, a thought leader, it’s like, I just think this should go without saying that. I do believe solely wholehearted wholeheartedly that knowing the amount of work that it takes to write a book and then edit it, and then rewrite it and then edit again, and then rewrite it again, like that’s no small feat. So I know that at the heart, most authors, most people who have a message on their hearts are not doing this just to hit the list, right? Because the real benefit is a life changed, a life transformed, sometimes a life saved because books have the power to do that. Words have the power to do that.
AJV (01:45):
And at the same time, we know that when you do hit a list, it creates a credibility factor, a shareability factor, a just a, a component to it that helps you share it more, get it into the hands of more people, thus impact change, transform save more lives. So I don’t want this to just be about, oh, like the only reason you write a book is if it’s only good if it hits the list. That’s clearly not the case, cuz lots of not so good books hit the list.
AJV (02:59):
AJV (03:44):
Number two is you gotta have a platform. You’ve got to have people that are already coming alongside with you on this journey. And that’s a really important part of this because although not every author is in the business of hitting the bestseller book or selling millions of books, publishers are
AJV (04:37):
If you don’t want to hit a list and make this some sort of big part of your business, then self-publishing is an amazing route. And self-publishing today is extraordinarily amazing. Like, truly like it’s not the self-publishing that it was 12 years ago. Like you can’t even tell some of these self-publishing houses. You couldn’t even tell that this was done self-published. They’re really great. And so you’ve gotta think about the intent of that, of knowing that if you’re going after a traditional publisher, the intent is that you’re gonna hit the list and you’re gonna sell lots of copies. And in order to do that, you need a platform, right? You, you gotta have a platform of, of fans, followers customers that already know who you are and subscribe to the content that you’re teaching. Then I love this and I loved what Esther said, and she was like, you actually have to have a unique idea, right?
AJV (05:27):
Having great content is one thing, but it needs to be unique. It needs to be a creative idea or concept. What we would say is it’s got to forward thought leadership. It doesn’t have to be a brand new idea, but it’s got to be presented in a brand new way. So those are the three things fundamentally that are kind of like at the base, the foundation of if you’re going after a bestseller list to get this in the hands of lots of, or get this book in the hands of lots of people, those are like the prerequisites. Then there was a few other things that I thought was really important, and she was like, you just, the bestseller list, just hitting the bestseller list on Amazon alone is its own algorithm and its own beast of just knowing what category listings, not listing listings to be in.
AJV (06:15):
And I’m gonna tell you, go listen to my podcast interview with Esther. This is just like one of the most insightful interviews. So just go listen to it in terms of if you’re in that world of writing and publishing a book right now and your launch season or pre-launch season go listen to the interview with Esther. But this whole concept of Amazon listings, it’s like, think about it like this way, when you go look for a book in a retail bookstore yes, there are a few of those left
AJV (07:07):
And I think it’s like, it’s like that but different when it comes to Amazon because you’re just typing in book names or categories. You’re not saying, Hey, I want to research kids books about turtles. Most likely you’re saying, Hey, I want to go kids books for five to seven year olds, boys, right? And it’s like, the thing is though, the category listings are really important and Esther told us awesome story about one of her clients who is a 17 year old who wrote a kid’s book about turtles and it hit number one on the Amazon bestseller list under the category of turtles. Turtles, right? It’s a kiss moment, it hit it under turtles. So it’s like being strategic with the marketing intent is a really important part of, you can’t just have a great book and assume you can just throw it on Amazon or anywhere.
AJV (07:55):
It’s like no, that there needs to be some strategy and marketing intent in order to get it to some of those credibility components like a bestseller’s list that’s then going to help it spread and help the message populate throughout, you know, your intended audience. So category listings actually do make a difference. I think that was really unique and very insightful. The other thing that I thought was really interesting is she shared with me that audiobooks audio sales are up 347%. Now, book sales are also up, but audiobook sales are up 347%. And what she said is that most people even though they listen to it on audio, they will also buy a physical copy because after they listen to it, they wanna go back and have something to underline or highlight or go back over. And so many people are doing both.
AJV (08:49):
But audio that’s huge. And then she goes, I make my author. So Esther is an agent, right? She is the owner and founder of the Fed Agency, but she goes, I say, if you’re gonna write a book, you must do an audio book. It’s a prerequisite, right? You’re doing it. And I would say I would throw that in there as the unsolicited feedback from a consumer books. If you’re gonna do an audio book, make sure you read it. You need to read your own book. Don’t hire someone else to read your book. You read your book. It makes it so much better for the consumer to listen to if you’re listening to the actual author. So just a couple of quick things about audio and the importance of not just having your book and words on pages, but having the audio version will actually help your book sales, audio sales help book sales.
AJV (09:35):
So make sure you have it on audio. Then we talked about a couple of other things that I thought were just really important. And some of them are just high level and, but worthwhile, worthwhile is that if you’re gonna launch a book you need to treat it like you’re launching a business because that’s what it is. And you need to be prepared to put in the time, resources, money as if you were launching a business. And because that’s what it takes. It’s gonna take a lot of sweat equity, a lot of actual equity, bro, dollars and cents like things cost money to prize. But a lot of time, and I thought this was really again, an important thing to remember. It’s like people talk about launch season. If you’re an author or an aspiring author, you know what I’m talking about.
AJV (10:20):
There’s a launch season. But nobody really explains like how long is a launch season. And what Esther said is she was like, A launch season is about a year, a year, not six weeks not three months, not six months, 12 months, let’s say year. And she goes, most of my authors begin their pre-sales and their kind of pre-launch season, six months before the pub date of their book, six months. And now that’s after they already have a plan in place. So think about how much
AJV (11:53):
Organically, or at least 10 years. Now that doesn’t mean you won’t write other books and talk about other things, but you gotta love it so much that for the next 10 years I would dedicate every conversation to this or for my life. Like, I could be talking about this until the day that, you know, I go to heaven, I God brings me home. It’s like I could talk about it forever. That is what needs to be in your book, is the things that people are like, man, like you always talk about that. You should write a book about that. And so just think about that. It’s like, this is not, I’m gonna write it and then for a couple of weeks we’re gonna market it and then it’s gonna spread. And no, it’s the, it’s not build it and they will come. It is you build it and then you go talk about it and talk about it some more and talk about some more and then some more and then a little bit more.
AJV (12:37):
And so it’s just treating it like a business that it’s like, it’s not something you write and it just sits on a shelf. It’s just like a business. It takes a continual process over the course of time before, during, and after to really make it successful. And then the last thing that I would just say I would just share is there is not one sales aha. In order to sell a lot of books, there’s a lot of sales aha movements and a lot of sales strategies. And there’s not one thing that’s a lot of things happening simultaneously that work today and that’s new and that’s different and that can’t feel overwhelming, which is why you need a good strategy and you need a plan that you can do over six months. So some of those things are making sure you’ve got a good social media plan.
AJV (13:22):
And some of the things that Esther and I talked about on our conversation I thought was so good is do fun things that create engagement. Like do a do a book cover reveal with your social media followings. Do a challenge from content in the book. Do different fun things like do a book launch party do giveaways, but create engagement with your social media months and months before it releases. You know, give tiny little sample excerpts outs, share stories, but create engagement all around the content that’s happening in the book. Other things were make sure you do a podcast tour, right? Make sure that it’s like you’re hitting every single media outlet in media venue. You can speaking, right? Speak for free, speak for money, go on podcasts. If you can get big media outlets to interview you, that’s great too.
AJV (14:12):
But it’s making sure that you’re just exhausting all of your resources. It’s not just sending an email to your list or just focusing on your followers. It’s how do I access anyone who I think could benefit from the message that are on the pages of this book? And that takes time and it takes a plan. And it’s not one thing. It’s lots of things happening simultaneously, which means you gotta have a sales and marketing plan. And I think that’s like the big overarching takeaway is that launching a book is like launching a business. And as the author, a huge part of your role is the salesperson. You, like, you are the sales team of the book. And if you are not a great salesperson, then you’ve got got to surround yourself with great salespeople who can go out and market and sell the book on your behalf.
AJV (14:57):
But again, like this is a really important thing just to walk away with, is we say this all the time that Brand Builders Group is, there is no such thing as a New York Times best writing author. There’s only New York Times best selling author. Highlight, bold, underline, whatever you need to do, which means that’s who is selling it, right? That’s who is selling the most. That’s who’s buying the most of that book. There’s not a lot of the best writing. That’s the, you know, that’s just what’s required. That’s the prerequisite, is it’s great writing, it’s great content that should be right. But then there’s gotta be the sales and marketing plan to get it in the hands of the people that you can help. So I hope this helps. You’re so insightful for me. Great reminders, new stuff. So hope this was helpful. Go check out the full conversation on our podcast, the influential Personal brand. I’ll catch you later.
Ep 370: What Makes A New York Times Bestselling Book with Esther Fedorkevich
AJV (00:02):
Hey everybody and welcome to another episode on the influential Personal Brands. AJ Vaden here, one of your co-hosts. And I’m very, very excited to have a special guest and a new friend on the show today. But she’s new to me. She’s not new to Brain Builders Group or to my husband Roy Vaden, because Esther works with tons of our clients, lots of our friends, and also some of our team members. And I was just sharing this with her before, if we didn’t already have such a tight relationship with our literary agent, Nina, like there is no one else on the planet that we would even consider to desire to work with other than Esther. So before I give her a formal introduction, I just wanna tell you guys why you need to stick around for this show because as you saw the title of the show, it’s How to Write a New York Times bestselling book.
AJV (00:48):
And here are the reasons that you wanna stick around to the end. Number one, you can’t write a New York Times bestselling book surprise. So you probably need to stick on, figure out then, well, how on God’s green Earth do you get one if it’s not writing one? So that’s the first thing. Second thing is that this is an episode for you who are in the author space. It doesn’t not matter if you dream of being one, you’re an aspiring one, you’re a first time one, or you’re an established author. This is an episode of if you have a book that you want to get into the hands of other humans you need to listen to, because that’s what we’re gonna talk about. And then the third are just what are some of the ins and outs of actually making it work in the publishing industry today?
AJV (01:32):
Because it’s changing. It’s been changing, it will continue to change. So as someone who’s in that creative space and you wanna get your thoughts on paper and that paper into the hands of many, what do you need to know of how to get a book published and out into the world today? So that’s why you wanna listen and lemme tell you mainly why you want to listen. So I’m gonna tell you a little bit about Esther formally. So Esther is the owner of the Fed Agency. Esther oh my gosh, see better Kevin? Yep. I’ve been saying for Dork for Forever Better Kevi, I’m gonna like say this in my sleep now, but she’s the owner of the Fed Agency. She started her career in a lot of different ways, but some very I think important things to know is like you were part of the Dave Ramsey organization and really helped grow that to what it is. I think that, I think I read somewhere that you have helped more than 80 books become on the New York Times bestseller list a hundred.
EF (02:28):
We’re over a hundred now. We just hit 102.
AJV (02:31):
Woo. I mean, if that doesn’t inspire you to listen to the rest of this episode, then you can just go ahead and like hop off right now. But it’s like if you’ve helped more than a hundred people hit the New York Times list, this is just extraordinary. But one of the things that I loved most about your bio that you sent over is that you’re not just in the business of helping people get their books published. This is about changing lives helping dreams come true and really being a conduit of really good messages for people all around the world. And I love that you’re also a mom. You’ve got two kids. You live in Austin, Texas, and I could go on and on and on, but Esther, welcome to the
EF (03:07):
Show. Thanks AJ for having me.
AJV (03:10):
Oh my gosh, I’m so excited. I have like, genuinely been looking forward to this conversation. Four weeks ever since we got this scheduled because I, I wanna just be I wanna be like one of your customers today because I think there’s so much changing in this space and in the industry of what I’m gonna call thought leadership or the knowledge economy. That’s, I just, I think that we’re, if you’re not constantly having these conversations, you’re already behind. And so as we kinda like step into this and what does it look like today, I wanna know two things to help our audience get to know you is one, you could have done so many different things. Like you have sold millions and millions and millions of dollars through book publishing. You have worked with some of the largest names, household names out there. You could be doing anything you want. Why did you pick this space? So that’s my first question.
EF (04:04):
Okay. So I didn’t pick it, it kind of fell in my lap when I started working for Dave Ramsey. We were self-publishing and then publishing with publishers about 50 different products a year. And they were all financial products. So I was trying to think of like a new way to say the same thing with a new marketing. It’s all marketing guys, right? So new marketing idea, new way. And it was get, I’m like, I wanna do more than just finance books. And so I worked for Dave till the day I gave birth to my first daughter. I was 25 years old and I said, I’m gonna start my own literary agency and I think I could do this. I was good at sales. And I’m like, I love story. So what, it really fell in my lap. Cause I love story. I’m really a branding and marketing person.
EF (04:43):
A lot of literary agents come in this space because they’re literary, they’re writers. I came in this space as an entrepreneur and businesswoman, but coming in from the say I love story and I love helping people know how to market that story. Cuz there’s one thing about writing a great book and then there’s the other thing about getting it out there and selling it. So both things matter, but it kind of fell in my lap. And then I’m really good with people. I was a big Zig Zeigler fan growing up. I mean, I think I’ve listened to every Zig zeigler, you know, audio cassette back in the day. And like, I also just love people. So Dave Ramsey had us read a book. He made all of his employees read a book, how To Win Friends and Influence People. And then I did this Dale Carnegie course and I’m like, I’m really good with people. I love story and I can sell. So I kind of said, wow, that makes a good literary agent, someone who can sell Ari. Because most writers aren’t salespeople naturally. Yeah. Most writers are, you know, they have the ideas, they’re right, they’re, they don’t like bragging about themselves. So it’s perfect for someone like me coming in and helping get their message out.
AJV (05:42):
Matt, I love that. And you put in your bio statement that that’s your also your favorite book. Why is that your favorite book?
EF (05:48):
I think because it’s still relevant today. When he wrote that, think about it, it was no social media. There was no, I mean, I told my employees all the time, did you talk to them? Did you actually actually pick up the phone and talk to them? Right? Did you, so I love relationships, I love building relationships. And my whole business has been built on relationships, real genuine relationships. And I think a lot of times this younger generation comes in and they have, you know, a hundred thousand friends on Instagram or Facebook, but they couldn’t, they have never picked up the phone and talked to them. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (06:26):
Oh, it’s one of my favorite books too. It was mandatory reading early in my sales career. And you said something that I think is gonna set the precedent for the rest of our conversation, which is, you’re, you’re in the literary field, but at the end of the day, you’re branding and marketing aka sales. And I think one of the things that we run into all the time with our podcast listeners to, with, with our Brain Builders Group community and just with everyday conversations is people somehow have forgotten that relationships are still the fundamental way that we do business today. And they think that you get enough followers, you get enough this and this is gonna figure itself out. And, you know, we are lucky to be behind the scenes of a lot of launches. And I’ll tell you what, lots of emails do not convert into lots of books all the time. And lots of followers do not convert into lots of sales most of the time. And so hence why I think this conversation, I’m
EF (07:23):
Glad you figured that out. Cause if there, if that was true, right? We’d all have the magic formula and no, just to sign someone if they had 10 million followers that they were gonna sell 10 million books. But that’s not the case.
AJV (07:34):
That is not the case. And so here is why we’re here today. Like what is it? Like, what do we need to be doing? So here’s my first here’s my first question which is kind of like, you know, part two of a little bit about your backstory is what, what do you think makes someone not a great writer, but a great candidate to hit a list? Because I think that’s like ultimately what so many people want is like, how do I hit that Personally, I don’t really care, but I know that it’s a big goal of most. And so I’m curious, what do you think it is not about the writing, but what makes someone a good candidate to have the list eligibility?
EF (08:16):
Well, I say like, as an agent, I look for three things, right? And you have to have two of these three things to be successful. And I think to have a chance to be a New York Times bestseller, and this is for me acquiring an author to go sell, right? But then I still think it’s relevant as when they go to brand builders and you’re helping ’em, or they’re doing it on their own. It, you have to have a great book. It still has to be a good book guys to sell. Like you can’t just write crap, right? And then think it’s gonna sell because you have 50 million followers, right? That’s, I mean, I can prove you over and over again people that have 50 million plus followers that haven’t sold a hundred thousand books.
AJV (08:53):
I, I agree.
EF (08:54):
So step one, have good content. Step one, the content’s gotta be good. And if you have the ideas and thoughts, work with a great writer or, or collaborator that can help you put those, read them in a way that you’re making the reader, you’re empowering ’em to change, you’re encouraging, you’re inspiring, you’re, you know, making ’em cry. You’re making ’em laugh, whatever the goal is of that book. But they really wanna, at the end, when they close it, they wanna get up and go their, their life has changed somehow. Mm-Hmm.
EF (09:39):
When I started, I started in 2003, the only social media around was MySpace. So there was no Facebook, there was no Instagram, there was, there was no TikTok there. So think like I like started as a young agent, right? When social media was coming out and how the older authors were thinking that we’re selling, you’d actually go into retail and find their book. So I, a quote of mine is, with the death of retail is the death of discoverability. So there’s no retail anymore. So gotta get that outta your mind. And everything is our phone. I don’t have mine here or like the computer. It’s how people are getting to you to buy that book. So platform is huge. And when I can find, even if someone doesn’t have the biggest platforms, but they have a cultish engaged platform mm-hmm.
EF (10:27):
If you, and you can look at that by like, what’s their engagement level, what’s their likes? How many people are actually commenting? That’s super important. That means they have a tribe that’s pretty, you know, dialed into them. And then the third thing, so you got, it has to be a good book, right? A good content. It’s gotta be platform. And the third one is gotta be a creative idea. It’s gotta be a good idea. That’s why when you see some of these books that they have a saying on it, like, make Your Bed Right? Or the four Hour We Work Week, I put them the four hour work week just cause I’m like, Ooh, that sounds amazing. Four hours a week, that’s all I would have to work. Right? And it’s not even about that. So it’s like having a really cool concept where idea or thought process that like actually makes your book different is really big.
EF (11:10):
The har like when someone has a great story, so many people have great stories. It’s finding that secret thing in your story and expanding off of that. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (11:59):
No, I love that. It’s not that you should write a book, it’s you should write that book that you need to write a book about that. So like, for any of you listening, it’s just, I would just sit there and ask yourself like, what do people actually come to you for? Right? And it’s like, that’s something we talk about all a lot, a lot even in like our own like family and our own personal brands at Brand Builders Group is like, what do people come to you for? Like, what’s that superpower thing? It’s not that you have a great story, it’s the stories, the launching pad. It’s what is something that you do so well, so uniquely different that you could write a whole book about it. Yeah.
EF (12:31):
And so like a lot of times like for a pastor by, like, I work with a lot of pastors of huge megachurches, right? And let’s say they wanna write on something and that’s the sermon that got the worst downloads, right? But that’s what they really care about. And I’ll look at them and say, what’s the message that everyone comes back? They remember 10 years? Like, what’s your core message? And guess what that core message is? Their biggest selling book. Like if you look at Warren with the Purpose Driven Life or Joel o with Your Best Life Now, or like, I could go on and on. All of those were those pastor’s core message that people remembered and kept coming back to them. So it’s not the other, the new message because why haven’t any of their other books sold with that book is sold. So it’s, it’s, I think it’s really kind of identifying what that secret thing is, why people love you and are coming to you, what content is that that they’re going
AJV (13:21):
For? Yeah, I love that. Cuz so many people do. It’s like, and there’s this, I’m not saying this is right and or wrong, you can say that, but I won’t. But it’s like so many people want to tell their story, right? And it’s like, that’s for a keynote, that’s for a blog, that’s for social media and that’s a piece of the book, but it’s not the book.
EF (13:36):
Yep. You got it. You’re exactly. So a lot of times people are like, oh, I wanna tell my story. Well, memoirs don’t sell that well, right? You have to have the secret in the memoir, right? Mm-Hmm.
AJV (14:31):
Yeah. I love that so much. And I love this whole thing. It’s, you know, it’s one, one, I kind of wrote this down, it’s like whenever you’re saying it’s like clearly you have to have good content, but it’s like, make it sticky, make it memorable. Make it shareable, right? It’s like, it’s not like, oh, that was a good book and then you forget that you ever read it. Which I’ve done lots of those two platform, it matters. And I love what you said, it’s like death of retail is death of discoverability. So you’ve got to have a platform and what is it, right? And how many people are you reaching? I love that. Number three this is just what I wrote down is it’s about the creative idea, but it’s, it’s about developing true thought leadership. Right? You know, people always say there’s, you can’t say anything that hasn’t been said that may be true, but you can say it in a new way.
AJV (15:14):
You can say it in new context. And with that slight twist, so what is your version of forwarding this thought, this idea this thing. And I, I love that so much because I feel like people really struggle with how do I take these ideas from my head, get ’em on paper, but then translate them in a way where it’s not about me, it’s about the reader, it’s about the end audience, but then getting it from there to actually having someone buy it, right? Yes. So let’s assume we have great content. It’s sticky, it’s memorable, shareable. We have a good platform, we got a great idea, a unique, awesome idea. Where do we go from there?
EF (15:58):
Okay, so let me first say, if there was a magic formula, we would all be worth a billion dollars. Okay.
EF (16:43):
But I’ve had the perfect lineup of all the major shows and it wasn’t a bestseller, which it’s just like, oh, you get so upset, you’re like, what? That’s, and then that book you see 12 months later hit the New York Times. So sometimes you don’t know. It’s not like you, you, you have to do all the right things, right? And one of the things is what worked, and you, I know h i u would agree with this and Rory would agree with this. What worked two years ago doesn’t work today. It keeps changing because people are buying differently. Yeah. And they’re using different, like it was the day of the email blast was everything, right? And then it was the day of Facebook like it all, I believe you have to, you have to do all of the things and consistently. So I kind of think it, it’s like marketing you.
EF (17:28):
You can’t just talk about your book on book launch week and then not talk about it anymore. It’s, you can’t just be onto the next thing. You really gotta give a book time and make that your core message for the whole year and let people hear it, let people talk about it. That’s why if it’s a good book and it’s changing people’s lives, guess who what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna tell your friend when someone gives you a book and it’s not that great of a book. You’re not talking about it it to others. Yeah. So it’s about, I think, I think authors give up too quick. And I see this all the time. It’s like the ones that are persistent, that keep going, that keep working it, that keep investing because you have to look at an author. It’s like when you write a book, it’s a business.
EF (18:04):
Let’s get real. It’s not a hobby. If you wanna be successful, you’re starting a new business and that book is your new business. And a book can turn into more speaking dates. A book can turn into, you know, like you are opening into new audiences that you never were before. It could get you on podcasts, it could get you on media. I mean, a book, a book opens lots of doors. But, and it also makes you that expert in that topic. When you put a book out, what does everyone think? Oh my gosh, that you’re an expert. You, you must be, cuz you have a whole book, a book’s a lot of work. It’s not like, oh, you say I wanna write a book, and then you think it’s gonna be a couple hours a week of your time. Yeah. But I think authors spends so much time writing the book and then it comes to marketing and they don’t put the same amount of time into the marketing.
EF (18:45):
And they think an agent, I always say an agent is not a magician. I I’m not this, I can’t wave my magic wand and make all my books that I do hit the New York Times bestseller list. Right? It’s hard work. And so when you go in, if you can go into with that like, perspective of publishing and your book is, this is a business, I’m gonna grow my business. If you had any other business, you’re not gonna sit open up a retail store and never go work it and never go check, check out your competition and ev I mean, you’re consistently working it. And so I think authors gotta be looking at, you know, when they write a book, it’s part of their bus, it’s a business and it, or it’s part of their business and they’re gonna spend some time growing it.
AJV (19:23):
Yeah. I love that. I think that’s such a great reminder of if you, if you just wanna talk about your book, just so it hits the list, don’t even bother writing it. But it’s like, you gotta be able to willing to talk about this book all day long, every single day for years and years and years. And if you don’t wanna talk about it for a lifetime, don’t write it.
EF (19:41):
And AJ that’s why when it’s your life message, you’re always talking about it. So though, that’s why the, there’s always a book for every author that’s the one that sells the most. It’s because they’re, they love talking about it. So I, identifying that makes it big.
AJV (19:56):
Yeah. I think for, again, for everyone listening, it’s just, if you don’t want to talk about whatever is going on the pages of your book for a lifetime, then start over. Like start over. Because if you want people to buy it, you’re gonna have to talk about it incessantly to the point where you’re sick and tired of hearing your own voice and then you do it some more. Right? And I think that is a thing for all of us, is we move on too quickly.
EF (20:19):
What drives me crazy is when an author is on a, like they have a big break, they’re on a big show, right? Let’s say they’re on Joe Rogan and they never talk about their book. And I’m like, you’re on the big, like one of the biggest podcasts and you know, you’re talking about your book, but you never mentioned that you have a book. So like really working with authors too, and I know you guys do this like on a regular basis, but in my book, you know, here’s the title. This is what I talk about in my book. Like it’s really also training the authors. You want people, people to buy your book, right? So you’ve gotta talk about your book.
AJV (20:50):
Yeah. So that kinda leads me to the second thing that I wanna talk about, which is this concept of, to be a great author, in my opinion, to be a bestselling author anyways, you have to be a great salesperson. And we, we have this saying that brain builders group that, you know, editors edit, publishers publish, but Hoover, him sells, right? And it’s like the author does, the author needs to sell. So I’d love to hear your take on how do you get people to buy your book, right? Because at some point you get big advances for authors all the time, but that big advances don’t mean anyone’s buying it. It’s like at some point you gotta, you gotta put some hustle and grind into this and say, what am I gonna do to move some books? So what moves books? Like what do you see as actually moving books today?
EF (21:40):
A bunch of things, right? All together at the same time because people look and once you see things, you know, like on your, on your feed, when you get the same thing coming up then what do you do? Oh, I gotta buy that. Right? You can’t just do it one time. You gotta keep talking. Like, if I keep seeing something over and over on Instagram, guess what? I’m gonna finally click it and buy it. So it’s consistently talking. Get on line up your podcast, do 50 podcasts, right? Do like, make sure you’re always talking about it. But okay, so when you were, when you were talking about authors have to sell their book, if you’re an author, I’m just, that is not a good salesperson that can’t sell. You better have a freaking amazing team around you that can sell for you. So if your natural skill, like I’m probably, I would say the best salesperson probably I’ve ever met.
EF (22:24):
Like honestly that’s my one gift. I didn’t think that sales actually mattered. Like, but I’m like, oh, I’m really good at selling, so let me, but I can’t sell all my authors books for them. They have to. So if I can train them a little bit how to be at least a little better than what they are at sales. And if they, if they lack that, like the truly like the writers, the introverts that can’t sell, get people around you that can help you sell mm-hmm.
EF (23:06):
Right? So I think, and I mean you guys do this right? I think it’s putting enough time in your presales up. You have to, you can’t just start promoting your book a week before your book releases. The, it’s getting longer and longer. Six months before start talking, do a cover reveal, have your audience like build up this anticipation that your book’s coming out and why they need your book. So I think it’s the building up. You can’t just start a it, I mean you can’t just start week of release. You got, I mean the best selling books, I mean we’ve have planned six months, nine months ahead of time that we’re building towards that release. Hmm. Creating multiple products. Like I love it when we have a trade book and a devotional or e-course or a bible study or a gift book like, or a children’s book like actually building where there’s other products feeding into people wanting to buy the trade book.
EF (23:58):
So everything test leads back to the trade book. So if you have a children’s book that has a some little message that kind of gears you to the trade book, it makes you wanna read the trade book. So a trade book is your, your your main book. You know, it’s, it’s the, it’s the non-fiction self-help book. And then you can have all these little products that kind of leads you or are magnets to lead you to the trade book. So offering free content, doing some kind of challenge before getting people for free to get invested in something that they’re like, wow, this is so great that they have to buy the trade book speaking, setting up a speaking tour around your book. That’s huge. Cuz speaking, you’re, you’re getting a hundred people or a thousand or 10,000 people at one time, all motivated talking, putting it on social media, buying it on Amazon. So that’s why I say like, it’s multiple things going at the same time. Is all of our bestsellers have had that.
AJV (24:51):
Yeah, I think that’s
EF (24:52):
Had a plan. You can’t just go into publishing your book without a marketing plan. And so many authors go into books without a marketing plan. And the biggest, biggest mistake authors make is they think the publisher’s gonna do it for them Guys, I’m telling you, I’ve been doing this for 20 years. The publisher is not gonna do it for you. It’s all on. You have to go in, even if you’re with the biggest publisher in the world and you ha and you got a 5 million advance and every, yeah, they’re gonna put some more money into you. That’s really what they’re gonna do. But you still have to be involved and you have to work your butt off. Like it’s just how it is. You’re never gonna get a best seller if you’re sitting back and just thinking the publisher’s gonna do it for you.
AJV (25:34):
No, I, I think this is really, really important. Going back to what you said earlier about launching a book, writing a book is like starting a business. So it needs to be treated like one or at least a part of the business because like to that it’s like how many of us would’ve actually lodged a business without some sort of plan or some sort of budget with the money and the funds that we had? And it’s like, most would not do that most, right? It’s no different with your book. It’s no different. And
EF (26:02):
If you go,
AJV (26:03):
You gotta have a plan.
EF (26:04):
If you go the business mentality into it, you’re thinking, okay, like if I was gonna start a business and I’m like, okay, it’s gonna cost me $80,000 to invest and start this business and I’m gonna be working 80 hours a week, and I that’s your book. You should be thinking with that mentality going into your book, that is a business and you’re investing in something, however it’s gonna return. You know what your revenue returns gonna be on it, great. But it’s how much work you put into it. You cannot go into a book think you don’t have to invest any money, you don’t have to invest any time. You know, it’s not gonna be a bestseller then you’re just writing a legacy book. Like a lot of, like my rich billionaire clients do they just write a book so that their family can have it. They don’t care about sales, they don’t care about, they don’t wanna talk about it. It’s just for their, their kids, grandkids, great grandkids to know about how they started their business.
AJV (26:47):
All right. So that leads me to a question that I have for you. Something you said made me think about this. So what about for the authors who want an agent wanna go the traditionally published route and they don’t really care if they ever hit a list, they want a big advance and then they just want sales to happen organically.
EF (27:04):
That’s tricky cuz most, most big one, big celebrity clients, they wanna hit a bestseller list, right? The issue I see a lot AJ, is when an author comes in, they don’t have a platform, they have a really good idea, they’re a good writer, they don’t have a big platform. And I don’t work with the smaller publishers really because the smaller publishers don’t pay advances. You’re giving up too much, you’re not controlling your rights. So we have a program here at the Fed Agency where we, we pick a select few, right? But that we publish it for them where we’re helping them grow their platform so that when they’re at the point that they’re ready for a big New York publisher, we’re able to go sell ’em and they’re of value to them. But the days of the big advances, you have to have a big platform if you’re thinking you’re good or it’s gotta be a national media story where then everybody knows the story, everybody wants to do the book and there’s a bidding war on it. And I think, I think the mistake authors make is they don’t treat a book like a business. And that’s really comes down to, so an author comes in here and they don’t care about the bestseller list, but they want a big advance, then we’ll probably get them a big advance if we can. And then the publisher’s disappointed, everyone’s disappointed, and then they’re not really doing another book anymore.
AJV (28:16):
Hmm. So that’s around
EF (28:18):
Building a publishing enterprise. Like we want authors coming in and we do have the books that the authors that they’re only gonna do one book in their career and that’s it. But most of our authors are looking at building a publishing enterprise. They’re saying, I want publishing to be part of my business, part of my brand, part of everything I do. And then we’re mapping out what that could look like.
AJV (28:36):
And if you don’t want that, then probably don’t need an agent, don’t need a publishing house. That’s really the, this is the self-published route, right? If you’re not trying to do this to grow a and treat it like a business, because at the end of the day, publishers are in business to sell books. Right. And they’re depending on you to do that.
EF (28:56):
Yeah. So like, like I’ll take 2022, we did 200 million in sales in book sales. And when you think about that, like wow, that’s $20 a book that’s 10 millions books sold last year from the Fed agency of all of our authors. Right? And that seems like a lot, but at the majority of, if you look at how many of those books actually sold over 500,000 copies, I mean you, you it’s maybe six.
AJV (29:22):
Yeah.
EF (29:24):
Lot of ’em sold a hundred thousand. And so you’re trying to get that author that sold 50,000 in the first year to the next year, saw a hundred thousand of their next book. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (29:55):
And you know, it’s so funny, it’s like when you’re thinking of selling a half a million or a million books, in theory that feels like a lot. But then if you think about it in context of even just the population of the United States is like roughly 365 million and we’re talking about people are trying to figure out how to sell 100,000. That’s such a teeny tiny, I know minuscule portion of the actual just population in the US forget North America or you know, the remain the remainder of the world. But it’s like, it’s really small. So what makes it so hard to reach even such a small percentage of the population?
EF (30:30):
I think a lot of authors give away their content for free. So people don’t think they need to buy the book cuz they’ve heard it. And that’s a big mistake. I mean, you have to give bits mm-hmm. And pieces, but you have to make the book unique that it’s a, you need to read this, right? Don’t, like PE pastors do a sermon series. You walk in, you’ve heard it, you’ve seen you get everything for free, right? So why would you spend $25 for a hardback book? You already got it for free. So it’s making that urgency, right? That need that you need to buy it. And we try to help our authors build transactional audiences, audiences that will pay money, not audiences that just get everything from you for free. And that’s where I think if you’re in business, you’re gonna be thinking, I wanna give some things for free, but I’m not gonna give the magic away for free. Right. I’m gonna make them know that there’s value and that they’re gonna pay for that.
AJV (31:18):
Mm-Hmm.
EF (31:28):
Good
AJV (31:29):
You can give away the what charge for the how.
EF (31:32):
I agree with that like that. And that’s why e-courses are doing so well, right? Because people want, but listen, it’s like if someone gives you a free ticket to a concert right? You’re chances are you probably won’t go right? But when you pay $200 for a ticket, you’re gonna
AJV (31:46):
Show up. It’s an investment. Yeah.
EF (31:47):
It’s an investment. And so I think like, I think the same thing when you, when it an e-course someone says, oh, here’s my e-course for 20 bucks join. I show up like it’s a $20 e-course. Right? But if I’m paying $3,000 for e-course, I’m gonna show up like it’s a $3,000 e-course, I’m gonna look nice. I’m gonna do my makeup, I’m gonna like, but if it’s 20 bucks, I’m like in my workout clothes with wall cap on saying, okay, let me see what the heck this is. You know?
AJV (32:10):
Yeah. Well, and like I’ll, I I tell you like last year I made this commitment that I was gonna read a book every month, right. And I did. I was like, so I, I read 15 books last year. I was so proud of myself. And so, let tell you what happened though is I was reminded of the power of a book and I had forgotten that because I had gotten away and just listening to podcasts and listening to short form contents. And I got reminded in the biggest, most profound way last year from reading 15 books that I even think about myself. Like the amount of time, like, you know, don’t take offense to this, but the amount of time that I took to prepare for this interview, right? That it’s, it’s minutes, right? It’s like 30 minutes versus the amount of time that you prepare, write, edit, rewrite, reedit.
AJV (33:02):
A book is months if not years. Versus I will throw out a podcast with 30 minutes of preparation. I’ll whip together a blog post in 30 minutes and I’ll do a short form video content with five minute prep time. And that is nothing compared to the amount of time, sweat efforts, just incredible resource to put together a book that we then only charge $25 for. Yep. And just a major shout out to when you think you listen to a podcast and you got it, you don’t, you don’t, like there is just, I’m so positively reminded of that last year.
EF (33:44):
Yeah. And there aj there’s something about highlighting in a book, right? It’s thinking about it like if you’re reading it that like I read it a lot for living. So I’m always reading but highlighting and saying, oh, this is really good. This is a sticky state statement of magic. Right? This could change someone’s life. It’s, you get to spend time and sit with it. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (34:20):
I’m so on the same page with that because I just, I’m still reveling in the fact that some of these books, I’m like, this will change my life forever. And it was a $25 investment. I’ve spent 8,000, $10,000 on events that I’m like, I’m taking long lunch breaks and checking emails. And it’s like,
EF (34:42):
Yeah. So I represent this, this really famous therapist, right? And like, she doesn’t even do sessions anymore, but if you did a session, it’ll be like a thousand dollars an hour, right? This is here, you can get her book for $25 Right. And she can, you’ll read it and it could actually save your marriage, right? Or yes. You know, help you like deal with depression or whatever it is. Any mental health issue. And I’m like, it’s $25, right? Like that is like, that’s so amazing, right? That you could get that. You just have to read it and do the work, right? Yeah. It’s the same, like, same thing with any diet book, right? Or health book. It really can change your life, right? If you read it and apply it and it’s only 25 bucks cuz you get a personal trainer, it’s gonna cost you a hundred bucks an hour at least. Right?
AJV (35:23):
Or a coach or a consultant or counseling, all these things. Yeah. So there’s, there’s
EF (35:29):
A way, there’s a way a book, like if you actually use it, do it. You can save a lot of money and get the best value, you know? Heck
AJV (35:39):
Yeah. Cause I just, that’s part of why I wanted to have this call with you cuz I have had such a, I I’ve, I’ve re fallen in love with books and the written words because of my commitment to do this, you know, for a little personal challenge last year. And now I’m just like, I’m blown away that it’s like the amount of money I’ve spent on other things compared to the amount of money I spent on books is not even in comparison. But what I learned from the books versus what I’ve learned from all the other things I did is insurmountably bigger.
EF (36:06):
What was, okay, out of the 15 books you read last year, what was your favorite book?
AJV (36:10):
I have, well, I have to have two because one is the one that will forever change my life and my Eternity, which is the book Heaven by Randy Alcorn. And I read every single word and it’s long and it’s heavy
EF (36:46):
Head. Did you read that one?
AJV (36:48):
I did. That was, that’s how I finished the year was with that. But the one that was my favorite book of the entire year is Nothing to Prove.
EF (36:55):
Good
AJV (36:56):
Book. Nothing to prove. Get out of your head, find your People. We’re all Jenny Allen books that were at the top of my list. But nothing to prove would’ve been my favorites last year. And I just like, I think that’s just a great reminder for anyone who’s listening who is an author. It’s like, don’t forget that in addition to hitting the list, you’re actually changing people’s lives. That’s ultimately, yeah, ultimately that’s really
EF (37:19):
Good. But you got one Jenny Allen booking, guess what you did? You wrote, you read three more after that. So
AJV (37:24):
I have her avatar. Like she, she writes for me
EF (37:27):
AJV (37:37):
You gotta have great content, right? Have great content.
EF (37:41):
Yep. We get thousands of letters in of suicides, not committed of people coming to Christ of marriages saying family’s reunited. And we, like, I tell my staff all the time, this is why we do what we do, right? Like we’re, we’re a part of this because we help get the book out. And I like, that’s really rewarding and I mean humbling and rewarding, but that’s, that’s why you write a book is you’re, the last part is what we were talking about is that these lives are changed, right? Mm-Hmm.
AJV (38:31):
But you’ll never sell a million copies if you don’t have incredibly great content and you’re not willing to market and sell the pants off of it. And I think that is like two really big takeaways for everybody. All right. I know we’re almost outta time, but I have two more really important questions for you. Okay. When it comes to category listings, how important is that?
EF (38:51):
When you mean like on the what it’s the one category or are you talking about Amazon?
AJV (38:58):
I would say both, but we’ll start with Amazon, right? Because I know so many people who are obsessive of has to be in this very specific category because in this category I know that on this week that I can hit X, y, Z.
EF (39:12):
So I, we do a much categories as you can, right? Like on Amazon, because you can, we have a book that hit the okay, so our youngest author, she’s 17, she did a, a c book, a children’s book on like aquarium type of thing, right? And one of the categories we picked that we put her on at Amazon was Turtles. And she hit number one bestseller in Turtles Never. But now that helps the algorithm, right? So yes, I think authors the mistake they make is like, I wanna be in self-help. Great. Let’s be a little more specific because we want you, the algorithms start kicking in and it working and I could do a whole talk with you on Amazon how it works. Cuz doing this for years and years and actually working with people on Amazon are very high level trying to figure this stuff out. You wanna, you want the algorithm working in your favor. So you, you don’t wanna be so broad, you actually wanna try to nail down be pretty specific and that’s what helps you hit bestsellers in different categories. Yeah. And nobody looks back in the day for categorizing, like for Barnes Noble people cared if it was like religious religion, right? Or sell cookbooks or nobody looks at that anymore. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (40:26):
Totally. No one even pays attention.
EF (40:29):
No one pays attention. Just like no one pays attention to what’s on a spine of a book. Like who the publisher is really only people in the business like me and you and but like the general person doesn’t know the difference between what publishers, what publisher, they couldn’t tell you Penguin Random House was the largest publisher in the world. They have no clue. Right? So Yeah,
AJV (40:46):
That’s so true. It’s so true about nobody
EF (40:50):
Else cares about
AJV (40:51):
EF (41:19):
And you, you wanted to say number one bestseller, right? It doesn’t, they’re not looking number one best seller in turtles, right? But our marketing director did a really good job of really narrowing it down to that niche of turtles, right? Cause there’s a turtle on the cover. I’m not laughing cause I’m like, that was kind of genius, right? Because this girl doesn’t have any platform. She’s like a high school student, but here you go. She just hit number one Amazon bestseller interns.
AJV (41:41):
You know, I’m telling you like that is just so important. Back to marketing, branding, selling, writing the book is just a piece of this puzzle. But it’s like you’ve gotta have a good team who knows what they’re doing to figure out these little nuances. And a part of that is like, and I, Rory always corrects me and he goes, it’s not that hitting the list doesn’t matter, it’s just, it’s a piece of the puzzle. But the more times that you can hit the list and the more you sell, the more other people will hear about it and then it spreads. So I have to remind myself of that. Cuz I’m one of those like, it doesn’t matter, but it kinda does. Cause when you do
EF (42:19):
Exactly rose’s, right, you’re both are right. But the other side is the best part is when you see it on the list over and over and mm-hmm.
AJV (42:40):
Yeah. Not looking for the one hit wonder. Okay, last set of questions and then I have a personal question for you. What, no, you told me earlier like kinda like three things, like make it sticky, have good content, have a good platform, it needs to be unique. That’s like generally speaking, but for you personally, like working with a 17 year old girl who has no platform, right? And I just also happen to know some of your authors who don’t have big platforms and all of that. So I know that’s not the only thing you look for and I just think it’s really unique to find an agent who is willing to invest in people who you’re like, no, I see something in you. I see something in this message and I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna do it regardless. It may not get me the biggest advance and you may not this, this and this, but so I’m curious for you personally, what, what makes an author someone that you’re like, you, I wanna work with you.
EF (43:29):
Oh, okay. So I’m a sucker. Okay. Like, listen, like for story, right? So someone comes in and they have a crazy story. I’m like, oh my gosh. And I cry all the time. Like, I don’t know what happened in my forties. I just like
EF (44:09):
If I’m touched by the story, I’m like, I wanna do it. I wanna help you get this message out. But that author has to wanna work. I usually, yeah. Like if an author is like, eh, I don’t need it. I really, I, I, I don’t have that much time in the day. Like, I like to help start businesses and empower people to keep going. I think the biggest mistake people make is they quit before their miracle. Like they’re right there and they just give up. So the best are the authors that are really in it. And so if I have someone that’s super passionate and really in it and know that this is a core message, it’s really hard for me to say no to that.
AJV (44:42):
Mm. I love that. So for you, it really does come down to two.
EF (44:46):
Oh yeah. I’m, I said, I was like, my whole team’s like Esther say no. I’m like, yeah, but this story’s so good and I think it’s got some legs and maybe this could be a movie or maybe we could do this. And so it’s fun like thinking through it. But yeah, like sometimes I have to bring my team in the, for them to be like, no, this isn’t,
AJV (45:04):
We all have to have people who are willing to say no in our lives. But I love that it’s like it’s, this is story, but also are you willing to work? Are you willing to work? Are you willing to work as hard as I’m gonna have to to make this come to life? I love that. I think that’s so cool. All right. Here’s a personal question for you in the group. So you kinda told us earlier what your favorite book was. Well I dunno if it’s your favorite book of all time, but How to Win Friends and Influence People. I would say, what has been the book that you would say, like, for me, heaven will be like forever change the direction of my life. But I would also say like nothing to prove and discovering Jenny Allen has been a life-changing event for me in the last 12 months of going, I’ve never read a book where I’m like, oh, I’m your avatar. It’s so clear who you’re writing to. It’s me. Hi My name’s aj. So I would say to you like, do you have a, an author or a book that you’re like, I don’t care who you are or anything, but if you read this work or read, read this book, or from this author, like, it’s gonna change your life?
EF (46:02):
I do. So everybody that knows me knows my book. Like it’s changed my life. It changed the way I thought about business. It’s changed everything. It’s actually Buck there. It’s by Mark Patterson, who’s one of my favorite authors that I have the privilege of working with. It’s called the Circle Maker. And I, I read the Circle Maker. I was agenting for seven years of my own company and I was pretty successful. And I read this book and it like, it, it just wrecked me. And you know how people are like, oh, I pray, or I, I do this right? And, and remember I get to read it before all of you guys read it. So I’m like, way ahead of thinking, you know? And I’m like, this is gonna be a bestseller. It was a New York Times bestseller. It’s sold over 5 million copies. It’s been unbelievable.
EF (46:44):
But what’s so cool about this book is this guy, it’s, we, we sold it as Hony the circle draw what’s called the Circle Maker. And it’s about praying circles, right? So I started believing God. I prayed circles around every office. I prayed circles around an office building I wanted to buy. I prayed circles like, God, if this is for me, prayed for every employee on every desk. And guess what? I started getting better employees. I started getting like more champions. I started getting bigger authors. And there was this guy, he talks about the end of the book, right? So it doesn’t ruin the book for you guys, but there was this guy named Gypsy Smith, right? And he was this evangelist that traveled all over the world. I think he did 45 trips around the world. And he was this amazing preacher speaker. And somebody asked him like, what was, was the secret?
EF (47:29):
And he’s like, was his prayer life? And he goes right away, he goes, these revival secrets were asking what was God like, what’s, how can God use me? And so when I was reading this book, I’m like, God, how can you use me in a bigger way? And he goes, go home, lock your door, kneel in the middle of the floor. Draw, take a piece of chalk, draw a circle around yourself and pray fervently and brokenly for God to do a revival inside that chalk circle. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (48:29):
Why? I just wrote it down. I wrote it down. Part of me is
EF (48:33):
I’m gonna send you a copy. So I’ll send you one today.
AJV (48:36):
EF (48:42):
Both. Right. So I’m a speed reader so I can read pretty fast obviously cuz I, I read like 300 books a year. But I listened to, so a lot of times I’m, I’m a big believer every book you have to do an audiobook. I don’t let my authors not do an audiobook. It really, yeah. Makes me mad if they don’t wanna do an audiobook. Audio is up to 347% in the last two years. Wow. So more people are listening than reading right now. Huge authors, and I can give you the stats. They’re selling more in audio than actual print. Print cells are still up by the way. So it’s, it’s like, it’s both, they’re buying both versions. Like I do that all the time. I buy the print version and I buy, I listen to audio and sometimes I read a little bit of books. Sometimes I listen to it. I think listening, like when I’m walking or working out or like in the car, it’s so much easier to listen. But I still love to read. So I read every one of the books I represent I or listen to it, one or the other. So I think it’s whatever, whatever your preference is.
AJV (49:41):
Yeah, I love that. I
EF (49:42):
Remember it better AJ if I’m reading it than if I’m listening to it cuz like, you can tune out or get too strong. But when I’m reading it, I feel like I really take it in more.
AJV (49:50):
Yeah, I’m with you on that. I always I always tease my husband. I’m like, you did not read that. You listened to that. That’s not, you can’t say I’ve read that. You can only say I listen to it.
EF (50:00):
I have to tell her when reading or listening. It’s the same thing, right? Because
AJV (50:03):
No, it’s not, it’s not the same thing. I’m so too, I’m so biased, but I’m, I’m very much like, I’m a speed reader. So it’s like I can, I can crush books. I crush books. But I love but I love to hold it. I love to like feel the pages fold ’em, doggier, highlight, underline. But there’s power in everything. Think
EF (50:21):
All women. I think all women like that, right? Like we like take those.
AJV (50:24):
I like to hold it. But I would also say as unbiased feedback for anyone who is listening, when you do your audiobook, at least from this one consumer’s piece of feedback, read your own book. Please do not hire someone else to read your book. I want to hear the author’s voice and connotations and I want to hear it from you. So piece of unbiased feedback. And Esther, I would just say, man, not only are you like repre representing authors that are truly changing the trajectory of this world, like the work you’re doing is changing the world. You are helping get things out there that are saving lives transforming lives. And man, it’s such an honor to get to meet you and have you on the show. Thank you so much. I’m so excited to release this episode and get it out into the world. So thanks for giving us your time today. Thank you. Thanks for having me. All right, everybody, stay tuned and listen to the recap conversation that I’m gonna do on my conversation with Esther. And we’ll see you next time on the Influential Personal Brand. See you later.
Ep 366: How Coaches Can Use Technology to Scale with Minal Mehta
AJV (00:00):
Welcome to our latest episode on the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is AJ Vaden here, one of your co-hosts. And I am uniquely excited about today’s interview because we have really chosen to do a super selective conversation, really built for the coach community that’s a part of our audience. So coaches, speakers, consultants, authors, trainers, like we serve all of you. But this is like really built for this unique piece of our audience that is growing and growing and growing. And it was a decided choice to do this. So if you are a coach, this is for you. So don’t tune out. Like this is the time to like double down and tune in because this is really built to help you be a better coach, better serve your clients, and do it in the most effective and efficient way possible, using some awesome technology.
AJV (01:03):
So that is what this is about. That is why you should stick around. Now, you should want to know who’s going to be talking about all this awesome stuff because it’s not me,
AJV (01:52):
But Minal has also worked at so many of the powerhouse platforms and tech companies from Amazon to YouTube to LinkedIn. There’s so much, so much wisdom and smarts. She’s just really smart behind this conversation. But then made it, she made a decided decision to tailor to this unique coaching community, develop her own technology, which is what we’re doing right now. And really why, like why did we, why did you decide to do that? And how is it gonna benefit so many people in this coaching community? So I can go on and on and on, honestly, cause I think there’s so many awesome things that I have learned about you and this technology and why you do it. And I love the heart behind it as much as I love the technology itself. So, without further ado, Manal, welcome to the show.
MM (02:42):
Thank you, aj. I’ve really enjoyed meeting you. I enjoyed your mission and I’m really excited for this conversation.
AJV (02:51):
Oh, this is gonna be so awesome. So here’s where I wanna start, is I wanna just talk about the rise of the coach, right? We are in an era where in our last conversation I shared this like statistic that I just stumbled across. Like if you just go and do a super, a, a simple LinkedIn search and you just type in coach, right? There is over, I think 1.2 something million people just on LinkedIn mm-hmm.
MM (03:52):
Awesome. And I think there’s just so many things that have come together to make this happen. So, on one hand, all of us just lived through one of the craziest fla swan events in our time. The pandemic and mental health became an imperative. And as we thought about our mental health, we started going deeper into who we are, what we care about, how we show up in this world. And there’s no better person to take you on this journey than a coach who’s been there, done that, been in your shoes, gone on that journey before you, it is tailored and targeted for you. And so I do believe that people are really excited about working with very specific coaches in this moment in a way that’s never happened before. We’re all very open to both taking care of our mental health, but also really going deep and understanding who we are and showing up in the way we want to show up because mm-hmm.
AJV (04:52):
No, go ahead. I’ll, I’ll reserve my thought for a second.
MM (04:54):
I was gonna say, then on the other hand, people who went on this inner journey realized that they also wanna be entrepreneurs. That, you know, the era of being an employee I think is also changing. You know, I myself was an employee, as you mentioned, I worked at Google and YouTube and LinkedIn, and here I am an entrepreneur. Because I do think people are looking deep inside themselves and, and trying to figure out what kind of life they wanna live. And many people are choosing the route of becoming an entrepreneur. Many people are being called to serve and share their knowledge and their wisdom with other people. And I think, like no other time before, both of these trends are happening at the same time. So we’re in this like precious moment where people need the services of coaches, coaches are being called to serve. Many coaches use the services of other coaches because it’s so interconnected and we all believe in our own growth and the growth of the planet at the same time. So we’re in this unique moment where everything is building on each other. And as you said, this is the moment the rise of the coach. It’s happening.
AJV (06:02):
Yeah. You know, it’s, it’s so interesting because I hadn’t like quite connected the parallel of, you know, the rise of this coaching industry with this rise of the entrepreneur community, right? Mm-Hmm.
MM (06:32):
I think those are very intertwined because I do think a lot of people are also realizing the expertise they have to offer. And it’s a great way to get started on building out a business that is uniquely you, right? If you go back to owning who you are and being who you are, and showing up in this world in your truest, most authentic form, then there’s no better way to do it than coaching because you, you are your business and your business is you. So I do think people are choosing to live the life that they want, and many are saying, I’ll become a digital nomad. I’ll become a consultant, all of that stuff. But I do think being a coach and serving global audiences from the comfort of your computer is something that is appealing to a lot of different people right now.
AJV (07:15):
Yeah. That’s, that’s such a great insight. I hadn’t quite connected those two until you said that. And, you know, you said something else that made me think about this. And you know, I have been in the coaching, speaking, training, consulting world for a significantly long time compared to how old I am,
AJV (07:59):
And I was like, no, no, I mean, I’m a coach and a consultant. And they’re like, like, you actually do that. And I remember like, I remember just hearing that and there was like such a assumed insignificant component of that. And then you fast forward to today, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have a coach mm-hmm.
MM (09:01):
Mm-Hmm.
MM (09:48):
Because that is their unique edge. So that’s like table stakes. I know a lot of coaches work on that. I think the second thing that I’ve realized is being part of this, this movement almost at this point in this industry and this community, as you’ve said, is that there’s a difference between coaching and building a coaching business. And I don’t think people realize
MM (10:41):
Like, how do you run your business? That’s like number one, there’s a skillset set to building a business, right? I’ve spoken to so many coaches who are like, well, can you just market us? And I’m like, no, because you are serving your niche audience. You need to speak to your audience. I cannot speak to your audience for you. So you have to learn how to market yourself and how to sell your services. So like, you’ve gotta learn how to build that business, right? So that skillset in addition to the coaching work that you do, and then of course, there’s the tool set as a client of many coaches, I will admit the level of service varies not so much because the coaches are better or worse. Like most coaches I’ve worked with are excellent, but just the way they deliver their coaching is so different.
MM (11:26):
Like, I, I mean, I feel like I’ve gone through coaching programs where they’re like, here’s a zoom link. Oh, and the calendar invite is sent. People are scrambling to find the zoom link to meet after the zoom link. Where’s the recording? I can’t find the recording. Did someone take notes from that previous session that I can lean into? Where do I register for the next thing if I need to subscribe for your ongoing community? I don’t know where to find it. And like so much of my my experience as a client sucks because of the way you choose the tools, right? To, to kind of share your coaching expertise with the world. And so that’s your tool set. Like how do you actually create the right tool set to be able to build out your coaching business? So I think like anyone embarking on this journey today and say, find your niche audience and then make sure you do the work and your mindset, your skillset and your tool set to, to reach where you wanna reach.
AJV (12:24):
Yeah. I think that’s, that third thing is probably, probably the most common thing that I hear. It’s like, I love them and it’s like the content is great and they help me, but, but man, it’s like it’s a cluster. Mm-Hmm.
MM (13:00):
Yes, exactly.
AJV (13:02):
Exactly. those are, that’s really helpful and insightful specifically for all of you coaches who are listening of going, man, it’s like, do you have the organized systems to put all the pieces together to make it easy and consolidated mm-hmm.
MM (13:58):
Yeah. So I’m gonna take a little bit of a journey here with all of you. So I have a degree in computer science. I believe in the power of technology, right? Technology is my friend. I’m a technologist at heart. And the journey that I’ve gone on is a long journey and a short journey all at the same time. But I will start my journey almost from well after college. I, I worked at Amazon for a brief period of time.
AJV (14:23):
Well, you’re also being super humble right now. It’s not that you just went to college and got computer science degrees. It’s like you have a computer science degree from Stanford. Mm-Hmm.
MM (14:41):
That’s true. I will share the details. Thank you AJ, for helping me out here. So I have a computer science degree from Stanford. I actually came into Stanford thinking I was gonna be pre-med. I came from India. I chose Stanford because they gave me the most financial aid. I actually had no idea what Stanford really was. This was back in the day. And I came in 1999 and they gave me more money than anyone else. I’m like, I’ll try it out. And it was literally one of the best happy coincidences of my life. And I think that just taught me, right? Like, things show up in front of you and it’s up to you what you do with them. And I was very lucky to go to Stanford. I was very lucky to discover computer science at that period of time, right? The.Com era and all of that, and the power of technology and where technology can be used for good.
MM (15:22):
I then went and worked at Amazon where I, for those of you who you who used Amazon in sort of like the 2005 to 2010 timeframe, like everything before that buy button on the product detail page was managed by my team. So I’ve touched search on the product page and the homepage for a brief period of time. Navigation, I changed multiple times. And so I truly love making life easier for users online because I do believe in the power of technology. But when you think about how a user interacts, it marries, you know, technology, psychology, like our own feelings as we interact our own needs as we’re solving the problems. There’s like this very interesting moment that comes together when you deliver an interface to a user. So that was Amazon. I then went to business school. I went to Harvard as you mentioned, aj, and that was also a turning point in my life.
MM (16:18):
I, as part of my time at hvs, I really got involved in the career, the career community out there, the career center, like I was part of that. I led various programs for that. And so I don’t even think we’ve talked about this, but a couple years later I reached out to HBS and I’m saying, I said, you need to hire me as a coach. And they said, you are 25 years younger than any other coach we have on staff, right? Like, just go back to that time
MM (16:59):
So you need me, I’m a product manager. I guarantee you 30% of MBAs are gonna try to be pro product managers in the next five years. And so they said, yeah, you’re right. Like we’ve looked at the data
MM (17:45):
So I joined LinkedIn, and at LinkedIn I managed all of LinkedIn groups and LinkedIn messaging. So any member to member communication anything that had to do with building community like that was my area that I worked on. And you know, I think we’ve, we’ll talk a little bit about the power of community, but community is so important to all of us. And yet finding and building the right online community is really, really, really, really hard. And I got to learn a lot about that. Working on LinkedIn groups, the incentives that work, the incentives that didn’t work, all of that. From there, I went to Google. And at Google I worked on a different segment for, for the, you know, five years that I was there. Between Google and YouTube, I worked on what they called the next billion users, which is all of the high growth emerging markets.
MM (18:30):
So people who are rapidly coming online, getting their first mobile phone, don’t know what to do with the data, and how do we give them the best introduction to the internet possible. Because, you know, like these are literally baby internet people coming online. Never. Like we, we’ve been in the internet, we’ve been in the internet for like, you know, 15, 20 years by that point. And you talk about somebody like jumping in in this moment. Yeah. And how do we transition them online? So really got to understand the needs of these users. And at YouTube especially, it is the largest segment of users, the fastest growing segment of users and really understanding all of their needs and helping them with that. And all of this ties together because I was doing the career coaching at hbs. I was going through my own journey of inner growth.
MM (19:19):
Everybody has that moment. I think every coach has that moment that they deal with where they just go deep inside themselves and like turn themselves inside out and like, push forward. And all of this was happening as I was working on the next billion users. I had two kids around that time. It broke me in ways I didn’t expect it would break me cuz I have an incredibly supportive spouse. But it was a shift in identity, a shift in how I worked, a shift in how people treated me. And I found myself yeah, like really doing the inner work to stay true to me. It was hard work to just stay true to me when I worked in like from the outside, some of the best environments in the world, right? You work at Google, that’s incredible. Like, you know, 1% of 1% of people get into Google or whatever it is, right? Like, this is even harder than getting into HBS or Stanford. Like how can you complain about that? But there was a moment where I was like working so hard to keep the balance between the internal and the external. So pandemic happened early in 2021. I decided there was time for a change and I decided that I should go into coaching full-time. And I actually started this YouTube channel that no one can find right now. But I still my
MM (20:36):
But the, but what was happening is all these women were breaking around me. 2 million women left the workforce during the pandemic in the US alone. And my friends came to me and they said, all I think about all day is, is this all there is to life? I put my kid in front of Zoom school, I cook lunch for them, I take care of them. I’m working, I’m working harder than ever before. People are expecting more from me at work. I have no time for me. Is this all there is to life? Highly educated, you know, very lucky women, like high achievers, very smart, very lucky women. Like is this all theirs to life? And they said like, you, you don’t seem to be breaking. Why is that? And I said, well that’s because I did my breaking and I did my rebuilding and I have like my center.
MM (21:22):
And they’re like, well, you should teach that. And so that’s what my YouTube channel in some ways started being about. And I wanted to become a coach to really help burnt out women in tech really find their center and their joy. And this will become relevant soon. But I wanted to do that. I started creating this content and then as I started doing it, the technologist in me reared its head again and said like, you are a coach for one type of person. There’s a coach for everyone. How can you use your skillset and tool set to make that happen? And that’s how all takes was really born, right? Like every coach should be able to connect with their clients deeply in an organized way, in a connected way, in a loving way, and really help them transform. And I wanted to make that happen. And and that’s the, the platform that you said today. I
AJV (22:10):
Mean, it’s like, this is why I wanted you to tell the story for anyone who is listening is, I think so often technology can be built, not, not from this standpoint, not from this usage standpoint and or not just technology, but businesses, right? Mm-Hmm.
MM (23:05):
Exactly. Exactly. And I find actually a lot of coaches use that as an excuse to not grow their business.
MM (23:12):
AJV (24:09):
MM (24:11):
But like at a point where you need to hire a designer and a developer to take care of a software that is supposed to be quote unquote easy to use. So that, like I’ve heard coaches say, I have no profit because that’s what I’m doing. And I’m like, what is going on? This is not where you should be spending your time Definitely at all. Or your money. Like yes. Like you can always do with a little bit of help, but like, you shouldn’t be paying somebody a full-time salary to manage your technology stack
AJV (24:40):
The basics. Yeah. You know, there’s a, a level of this that we would say it’s, it’s what we would call creative avoidance. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (24:48):
We do, we do the work that needs to be done instead of the significant work that must be done. Or it’s a level of priority dilution. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (25:49):
I would set up the zoom link, put it in there, I would then have to set up a Word doc where I kept some coaching nuts and I would probably keep that Dropbox. Then when I did the Zoom, I would then have to download this link because they client wanted the recording and then I would have to store it somewhere on this Word doc because they would often lose it because I sent it in an email. And then I would have to keep track of this word doc and this thing, and then I’d have to keep all of the notes. And then they didn’t want the notes in an email. They wanted those in a consolidated document, but they wanted me to email that consolidated document every single time. So it was the top of their inbox. And that’s just a part of the list, right?
AJV (26:27):
And so you kind of go like, whoa, the amount of administrative operational work that it takes to even do one call is quite extraordinary. And that doesn’t even count if they reschedule last minute or cancel, but still wanna do it and on and on and on. I know that those, those of you listening can relate to some of that because I know you do it. I know some of you and I know you’re doing it. And there’s a better way. There is an easier way. So before we talk about all takes and the awesomeness that you have built and that you’re launching out into the world, I’d love to talk just about like how does technology or how can technology, and this is, you can talk about, I’ll take specifically here, but how can it actually make the coaching experience better for the coach and the client?
MM (27:15):
Yes, absolutely. And I think technology is a tool, right? Like, I know I’ve heard from many coaches that they just wanna throw their laptop out the window when they’re dealing with technology
MM (28:11):
So that’s the first level because as a coach, we are all growing. Many coaches start out one-on-ones, but then they do groups like whatever it is that you’re doing, you want a platform that can handle all the things that you wanna do. The second thing I would say is then in the doing of those things, it needs to be really easy to set things up because if it’s not like then you’re going back to exactly what AJ described, right? Like that creative avoidance of like setting up your technology so it works perfectly and then feeling really good about you got that done, but you didn’t actually move the needle forward for your business. And so having something that you can do really easily to set up any of these modalities, in fact, the sign of truly great technology is that it all feels so familiar regardless of what you do.
MM (28:52):
And I think this is where all takes shines and where some of our, the other coaching platforms out there, it’s like depending on if you’re doing a community or if you’re doing a group, like the user interface is completely different. It feels like everything has just been tacked on and so you don’t know how to use it. And then you get to your clients, most of you probably have repeat clients, like they come to you for a webinar and then they join you for a group or they join you for a subscription and they need to relearn the language of the thing every single time. And so giving them a super, super sim simple language to start with, and then keeping that, that language of the website really consistent for them can go a long way in making sure, sure. Making sure that they engage with you.
MM (29:34):
And then the thing that is the [inaudible] the the icing on the cake is can you build connection online? You know, over and over again. Like people, coaches are like, I wanna live anywhere. I wanna work from my laptop. I want to meet my clients wherever they are. But I miss those days where I could see them in person, where we could talk to each other in a conference room when we could go for a walk with each other. And there’s something about that connection that’s really important. And I don’t, having worked on communities for a large part of my career, I don’t know that being online can fully replicate that energy exchange that happens in person, but at all takes, that is one of our guiding stars, is how can we make this online experience feel as real worldly as possible? And so if you see, if you’re watching this, you’ll see that we live in a white background, not a a dark background, right? Because when you’re sitting in a room, you’re sitting in a clean, well lit space talking to a person not in a dark room where it’s like, actually that would scare me if I was sitting in a dark room with a group of people
MM (30:40):
You know? But you don’t, you don’t think about that when you’re there and then you leave zoom feeling, oh my gosh, like I’m feeling a little down, a little depressed. Yeah, you’ve been sitting in a freaking dark room, it makes no sense that you’re sitting in that dark room. So something as simple as that. Like other things are like, we have these like expressions that we share. We have this hard expression that I’m sharing this confetti. We’re building more, if there is more than just the two of us, like at all takes you sit in a round table and have a conversation. And I say that my kids sit in circle time. They’ve sat in circle time since they were two years old. There’s something about sitting in a circle that calms our nervous systems down. We understand it, we get it. And so that combination of the expressions, being able to emote with other human beings and sitting in a circle where, you know, where every person is sitting like people are really vulnerable and open in those settings, which is exactly what you want to build real world connection online, right?
MM (31:35):
So I think technology can be used in a, a variety of ways to not only make your life easier, but to make that connection with your client or client stronger. And then if you have a group, then even making the connection between your clients stronger, because that is a whole another level of unlock that you can, you know, you and your clients can experience. So I’ve spoken a lot about all takes, but I do think like those are the things like great ease of use for the coach, ease of use for the client, one place to do everything. Don’t manage your technology everywhere. Connection, connection, connection. Super important. And okay, my connection is unstable. I don’t know AJ if you can hear me. Let’s see. All right. I’m gonna hope we come back. Okay. So
AJV (32:24):
I, you pick it up where you said I, I’ve talked a lot about all takes, but
MM (32:29):
I think Yes, yes. So I’ve talked a lot about all takes, but I think really like the, the things you’re looking for in your technology are ease of use, ease of view, ease of use for you, for your client. One place to do everything. Not like, you know, 50 different softwares that you have to use and pay for by the way to do all the things that you need to do for connection, building that connection with your clients, even though you live in this world that is very like all over the place right now. And the last, last, last, last bit I’ll add because I do believe in the power of community is having a community of people that can help you. Because one of, one of the things I’ve heard from a lot of our coaches is that they feel very alone as they start their businesses. And I think with the brand builders group, aj, you guys are building a community of coaches that can go through this together. But you know, any platform that can give you the right community of people who believe that all boats rise at the same time, let’s help each other to make this happen, I think is really critical as part of this journey.
AJV (33:33):
I, I mean I think there’s all of that is so true and accurate and I would just say as someone who is using a bunch of different technologies right now as we try to consolidate, right? I think that’s like one of the big benefits that I have seen in all takes is it’s the consolidation of lots of different things that you’re using manually mm-hmm.
AJV (34:25):
Wow. Then we create a client playlist in YouTube for every, a private playlist for every single client that we have, 600 playlists for every single client so that we’re not just recording something once and then letting it drift off into the, you know internet. But it’s a, we, we, we keep those for us, for to review for training for our team, but for the client and the coach. So it’s like even us at this stage of going, we’re trying to consolidate all of this, and that’s the nice thing. And I can only show, I will share this on my behalf of going, like, our team has been on the hunt for like, how do we make this easier mm-hmm.
AJV (35:14):
And it’s how do we consolidate conversations? I e chats. So not everything is going back and forth in email all the time because that’s exhausting. We have enough emails, we don’t need more emails. Mm-Hmm.
MM (36:13):
Yeah. So I think all takes is gonna actually do with all the things that we talked about, right? And I’d say that we are in, we are like our coaches in the state of permanent growth. And so one of the things actually before I even go into the specifics is I will say that we are such believers in what all our coaches are doing, that if you give us feedback, you’ll see oftentimes that the platform is implementing that within the next few weeks. And so, like one of the things we look for is in our coaches is people who are actually willing to give us the feedback and build the platform that they want, right? So I’ll start with that as one of our key principles. But if you are a coach the way you would use all takes is you would come and we’d create for you what we call your business page.
MM (36:55):
It’s one place where all of your offers can be consolidated in one single place. Your offers can be one-on-ones with you know, with as many clients as you have. Each client has its own space. It can be a group offer that you have multiple group offers that you have. It could be webinars, it could be courses. No matter what you’re doing, you have a business page where all of these offers can live. Each offer can be public so visible on your business page or unlisted. So if I’m doing, you know, AJ’s coaching me and we have a one-on-one relationship and we have a space that only she and I can access with our playlists and our recordings and our chats and everything, that can be unlisted. So no one else can find it. She and I can find it and everything we have lives there, but no one else ever needs to see it or find it unless we share the link with that person. And so you can create any type of offer when you go into each specific offer. First of all, your clients can register for an offer directly from our website, so no more Eventbrite plus Zoom, which some of our coaches use, which is really weird cuz Eventbrite wasn’t meant for this use case, right? Event freight is great for, I’m organizing a meetup and I need to sell tickets, but not, not a
MM (38:06):
Coaching call. Not a coaching call, but a lot of our coaches I’m hearing use Eventbrite to manage their registration. So with all takes with any of your offers, the registration page is super simple. The client has all the information they need, images, videos, if you have videos when any meetings are gonna take place, the description of the offer register button, when they register, they can pay directly through all takes. And so you don’t have to build a separate payment processing thing out there. Once they are registered, they then get reminders for when their various meetings are happening, so you don’t have to send out reminders, right? And then once they register, they get into that space, that locked room that only people who’ve registered for that locked room have access to. And that locked room has three key components, which we believe actually constitutes the majority of coaching.
MM (38:56):
You have your live sessions, you have any content that needs to be shared between coach and client or clients. And then you have the conversation history that happens between coach and clients. And it’s really simple. There’s three sections. Anytime people need to attend a live session, they go to the live session area, they click on it, they’re in this round table. Anytime they wanna see content, it’s right in that content section, whether it’s like agenda or recordings, course content or anything in between. And then any conversation that has been had in that community is in that chat section. And so not only is there one space, just like imagine like if, if we had a coaching group meets at, I don’t know, green Library room 1 0 5, and we all end up there and all the information about all of our coaching is stored there, that is the feeling you get when you come into one of our, our spaces.
MM (39:46):
But that space, unlike, you know, green Library 1 0 5, like stays with you. So anyone who has access to that space has access to that space forever. And so your your clients aj, who want access to that playlist six months down the road, like they know exactly where to go to find it. And there is no email back and forth. It was just the space that we shared that has the memory of everything that’s happened. And so I think that’s where technology can be used for good, right? Like the real world is great to build connection, but to like have that history privately because I think the world has also gone too far in terms of what is shared publicly. Like that’s, that’s basically what all takes is. And I think we have a community of like-minded coaches that are helping each other learn and grow while while they use these tools and really grow their coaching businesses.
AJV (40:34):
Yeah, I think that’s like the, like I think that’s like a huge part of this. It’s where technology can really be such a super beneficial asset to you is going, technology’s never gonna replace the human element mm-hmm.
AJV (41:27):
And it’s like at some point you’re going, I’m tired
AJV (42:16):
I can think of ones that do lots of these things individually mm-hmm.
AJV (43:07):
But I don’t, I’m doing this because genuinely it’s like our, I’ve had our team request, like formal demos in addition to our conversations. It’s like we need tools that allow us to do better work and this is a tool that could really help you. So go to all takes.com, request a demo and check out the work. Now I will say, and I’m watching the time cuz we only have a couple of minutes left, there is something else that you’re doing right now that is also pretty cool. And before we bounce, because this is like so timely to when this is all happening, I want you to tell people what you are
MM (43:41):
Doing. Okay? So we are doing something really fun and a little bit scary for me. So
MM (44:25):
So we’re doing this thing called the Making of a Coach challenge and our head of sales and you know, she’s also sales marketing and mindset coach. Her name is Mary Diaz, is gonna coach me into becoming a coach. We’re going to do our coaching calls on this platform live. We will share it with everybody. We will share my mindset shifts in addition to the tool set and skillset shifts that need to happen. And within eight sessions or 30 days, we expect the coaches that go on this journey with us and do the work to be able to enroll paying clients. And whether it’s a workshop or a cohort or one-on-one, whatever it is that you wanna do, like we’ll, we’ll guide you on that journey to making this happen. And you’ll get to see me do it with you and in front of you and share with you like how I’m feeling.
MM (45:12):
Cuz this journey is one of like great grit. And the, the more you can have the tools, the technology tools of course, but also the mindset tools to make this happen and the community that pushes you forward, that that’s something that can only be a superpower that you have. So sign up for the making of a code challenge. If you go to all takes.com, there’s a banner up top click on that banner, there’s a landing page with all the information. You click yes I want in and I’ll take you down that process. We’re looking forward to welcoming the right people with open arms on the other end and holding you and supporting you as you build out this business that you’ve always dreamt of building.
AJV (45:55):
Yeah. And I would just encourage that because this episode was really designed to tailor and to reach the coach community that’s a part of our audience. And doing this life, this thing called life. We were not meant to do it alone, right? And this is a great opportunity to come alongside other people who are doing what you are doing or what you wanna do and be a part of the evolution of what does this look like and how do I come along and be a part of this journey with a group of people who are doing what I do or doing what I wanna do. So highly encourage what a cool thing to get to be a first, you know, kinda like a firsthand seat too. And also get to do the work too, right? It’s what really creates this really awesome engagement and starts to build some really amazing community, which we all do need, we all need.
AJV (46:47):
And there’s additional competition here. There’s enough for us all. So come along for the ride. That’s what this is all about. So I’ll put all the links in the show notes. So you’ve got different ways to connect, but thank you so much for coming on and one, just the background and the wisdom and the experience you have. Like we didn’t even scratch the surface of all the things that you could be talking about. Because at the end of the day, this all has culminated in this awesome thing that you’re doing right now for a really unique group of people that we happen to get the privilege to serve. And this is an awesome platform with major benefits to everyone’s involved. So I’ll do one last call to action. Go check out all takes.com, request the demo, see if it’s a fit for you. And Manal, thank you so much. We are so honored to have you on the show and I cannot wait to talk to you again soon, everybody else. I love ya. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.
MM (47:47):
Thank you aj. Okay. All right. I’m gonna stop the recording and I will, yeah.
Ep 363: 15 Legal Strategies for Entrepreneurs to Reduce Taxes | Henry Yoshida Episode Recap
RV (00:02):
Well, most of the strategies that we teach at Brand Builders Group are strategies to help you grow your income, right? Obviously most of the time on this show we’re interviewing guests. Most of the teaching that we do is in our paid membership. Of course, that’s our core businesses, helping mission driven messengers to build and monetize their brand and become more well known and make a bigger impact in the world. So most of what we talk about is how to grow your income. What’s interesting though is the interview that I just did with Henry Yoshida, which if you haven’t listened to it, go listen to it. The first part of the interview is all about understanding a vehicle called a self-directed i r a, which is, it’s not a new vehicle, but it’s one that you most people haven’t heard of that’s becoming more popular, especially because of like a tools being created like the one that Henry has created.
RV (00:52):
Which is very, very affordable way to sort of transfer your i r a into more self-directed or non-trad, non-traditional assets. And anyways, that’s what the whole interview is about. But towards the end of the interview we started talking about just general tax strategy. And you know, there were a few things that came up that inspired me to go, you know what? I’m gonna, I’m gonna put together a killer episode here for you all and this on tax strategy, because this is not something that you normally hear. And I would consider, like when most people think of Brand Builders group, right? They think of like, oh, you guys help people, you know, crush book launches, right? Like, we’ve had at the time of this recording, 11 clients that we’ve helped hit the New York Times or Wall Street Journal bestseller list.
RV (01:43):
We’ve had four clients that we’ve helped that we’ve, that we’ve worked with where their TED Talk has gone viral over a million views. We’ve had five clients grow their business more than seven figures in a year. Like it’s, it’s, we we’re known for like those kinds of things. But when you are with us for a while, like a lot of our clients stay with us for many years. Like as your business starts to grow, our training gets more and more advanced. And one of the things that we talk about, but rarely, it’s more like in smaller rooms like our private Highland Masterminds and like our most experienced people is tax strategy. And, and we talk about things like managing your financial statements and, and you know, forecasting and, and just, you know, legal stuff that you don’t hear a lot. So anyways, what I wanted to go ahead and put out there into the world and just make this available for free is 15 legal strategies to help you reduce your taxes if you’re an entrepreneur. Now obviously I’m, I’m not a cpa, I’m not a C F P. I did, I did go to school by undergrad. I studied much about accounting and I do have an mba. But you should always, always, always, you know, consult with your local tax advisor.
RV (02:58):
You know, know. So I don’t consider this professional like legal advice officially, but I’m telling you, you wanna check into these things. And I’m not gonna explain ’em all in detail cuz we don’t have time. But I’m gonna rattle these off of 15 legitimate legal ethical tax strategies that you can, you can explore if you’re an entrepreneur. And this is important. And, and I would actually say part of why I’m putting this together, and no offense to CPAs, there’s some great CPAs out there, but in our experience, we have worked with a number of CPAs who actually aren’t very well equipped to offer tax strategy advice. Most of them just do tax returns. They’re not very creative, they don’t ask very many questions. And when I mean creative, I don’t mean creative, like they’re bending the rules. I’m saying they don’t even know what questions to ask in order to take advantage of many of the kinds of things that I’m gonna share with you here.
RV (04:00):
Right? And so the, the place to learn tax strategy is not graduate school. It’s it’s not, you know, professional training. Where you really learn it is from other entrepreneurs. And, and honestly, they have to be very successful entrepreneurs. Otherwise, this conversation doesn’t come up very often and very, very few people know much about it. And so, anyways, that’s why I thought let’s go ahead and just put this out into the world. This’ll be, you know, hopefully you’ll see an example of some of what our high level business training looks like. Yes, we teach, you know, all the other things. Copywriting and funnels and podcasting in the business of speaking and book launches and how to train your sales team and sell high dollar offers and, you know, build your content and write your book and your positioning and messaging. But our phase four curriculum gets pretty ninja and it gets pretty advanced on, on just general being an entrepreneur.
RV (04:54):
So here’s just like one example of a micro lesson. I’m gonna put this out here into the world for free. You know, take it with a grain of salt, but this is, this is stuff that we’ve learned by experience. So here we go. I’m gonna rattle through these again, I’m not gonna spend a ton of time on each one, but these are, I’m gonna say these are hints for you to go investigate and look because they’re very legitimate. So, number one is what came up in the interview with Henry and that’s what kind of inspired me to put this together for you is a defined benefit plan or a pension plan. So you can listen more to the interview cuz we kind of talked a little bit in, in detail in the interview. But the bottom line with this is that as a, as a business owner, you can create a, a mechanism by which you provide a, a retirement benefit for your employees, okay?
RV (05:46):
Typically, like you think of 401k, right? And but when you are an employee of the company, there are certain plans that allow, allow you as the owner to maximize or create, create large contributions to your retirement account. So it doesn’t pad your money doesn’t pad your pocket with money in the short term. In fact, it, it takes money out of your pocket because you’re putting it into retirement instead of putting it either into your checking account or or into the government’s pocket. But what it does is it allows you to have to, to, to contribute much more than you would normally be allowed to include with something like the r you know, there’s Roth IRAs and they have income limits, and then there’s traditional IRAs and they have total contribution limits, and then there’s four oh [inaudible] limits.
RV (06:40):
So, you know, typically, you know, 25,000, 20 to $30,000 ish somewhere in there is about what you can do. But if you’re an entrepreneur and you have a successful business and you start to make real money and you go, okay, what are other things I can do? I can provide this awesome benefit to my employees and it gives me a vehicle to sock away more money for retirement later. So, you know, pension plans, defined benefit plan, go, you know, investigate that and listen to the interview with Henry, you can check that out. Second thing if you’re making a profit the, the, you know, the entity, the legal structure of your, of your business entity dramatically affects your, your tax liability and your tax implications. So there’s, there’s more that should be considered into this conversation. But in general, okay, a a great place to look if you are, you’ve been a, an entrepreneur and you’ve got a fairly successful business and you’re making profit, is to look at the structure in L L C filing as an S corp, right?
RV (07:43):
So a lot of times a business starts as like a sole proprietor, then at some point you maybe become an L L C. But look into L L C filing as an S corp for lots of of entrepreneurs that are sort of in this maturing phase, starting to make money. There is a great opportunity for tax advantages. Now there’s some, there’s some other things that get triggered. And, and what I’m sharing with you, I’m not sharing with you unethical or illegal strategies. These are legal ones. Part of what makes them legal is that they have counterbalancing forces, right? So in order to take advantage of some of these, there’s certain other things you can take advantage of. But I’m sharing with you sort of like my, some of my greatest hits here. There’s, there’s a few that are not on this list that are more advanced really for like scaling companies.
RV (08:31):
Really, really like, as as you start thinking about selling your company that would come up. And there’s one on here. The last one, by the way, I’m gonna show you how to become filthy rich and never ever pay taxes in a completely legal way. That’s gonna be number 15 on this list. So, so keep staying tuned for that. All right, so number three specifically, this is something for training companies. So if, if you are a training company which means you train people, you, you train, you have like you know, a lot of times it’s, it’s some type of information marketing type business where you do professional training. There is something called a 1 99 a exemption. Okay? Now this is set to sunset currently, I think in 2025. But if you just go to irs.gov and just look up 1 99 A, this is qualified business income deduction and look for the FAQs.
RV (09:30):
This creates a major tax advantages that, you know, could, can be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. If you have a company that you know, is like, let’s say multi seven figures, that is a true, legitimate training company. And there’s certain things you have to do to qualify as a legitimate training company. Brand builders group, we’re a training company. We have curriculum and, and we have workbooks, and we have courses in systematic training and processes that we put people through. So look at, look up the 1 99. A number four is the Augusta rule. So the Augusta Rule, this is something that says you can rent your home 14 days a year. I, I, I believe, again, don’t quote me on all this, this isn’t what I do full-time, but I, I, you know, I’m, the things I’m saying shouldn’t be grossly out of out inaccuracies.
RV (10:21):
They, they should be pretty accurate. Off the top of my head, I think the Augusta rule says you can rent your home 14 days a year tax free. It comes from the masters tournament and people who live in Augusta who rent their home out during the masters and they make a bunch of money. So what the Augusta rule allows you to do is to rent your own home to your business. So if your business has meetings and you have to rent boardrooms or meeting space and that’s a legitimate business operation and function that you have whatever the market rate is that you would pay to rent somewhere else, can be amount that you can you know, the equivalent market rate of, of renting a similar property or space somewhere else you can rent to yourself and use your home for those meetings.
RV (11:08):
And, and 14 days worth of that can be tax free. So this is this is one of the things you sometimes hear on the internet and you’re like, is that real? Actually is real? A few of these are gonna be like that where you’re like, man, I’ve, I’ve heard, you know, I’ve seen Instagram and TikTok videos like have gone viral. A lot of times they’re over sensationalizing things and they’re not, you know, telling you about like the restrictions behind them, but some of them are, you know, they’re actually legit and you just have to sort of investigate. The Augusta rule is one of those. Number five is a D A F, which is a donor advised fund. This is a charitable, this has to do with charitable givings. And basically, you know, when you make charitable contributions, the government allows you to, to deduct that from your taxable income.
RV (11:55):
Well, the thing is, is you might, let’s say you have a bunch of money come in at, at one year or something, you have a big launch or something, g great happens. You just have a good year and you’re sitting on a pile of money and you’re not sure who you wanna donate that money to. And, and you don’t wanna pay taxes on it. So you go, I’m gonna start a d a f a donor advised fund, which allows me to put my money aside in ear market for charitable givings, and I can take the tax deduction now so that I don’t get taxed this year, but then I have to give that money later. So again, it’s not like it’s some magic way of, of keeping money in your pocket, it’s just saying, rather than paying money to the government, I’m gonna pay money to causes that I care about and, and I’m gonna give, and so I’m reducing my tax liability.
RV (12:44):
And the government does that on purpose. It’s not like you’re sneaking one past them, right? What they’re doing is they’re incentivizing business owners and people of wealth to invest into and give money to things that make the world a better place. You know? And they have to be, you know, actual nonprofit organizations and they, they have to uphold certain standards to, to classify what, whatever it is, a 4 0 1 [inaudible] [inaudible] and i, I think is what it is. Yeah, I think, I think that’s it. A 4 0 3 [inaudible] maybe, maybe there’s both of ’em. But anyways, they have to be a nonprofit organization. But the point is, you can take the deduction immediately now and not have to give the money until later. Also, the money inside of your fund can grow and grow and grow and earn interest while you’re figuring out who you want to distribute that money to.
RV (13:33):
So that’s a, that’s a cool one. Number six is a keep bonus, and that’s Q E A A P. It is a rule that allows you to make up to $1,600, I believe, per employee as a gift and a deduction for any gift. So basically, instead of paying them $1,600 in income, of which you have to pay payroll taxes on and they have to pay in income taxes on, you can actually get money to your employees. So it’s a way of getting them more money where neither of you, like you get the tax deduction and they don’t pay the income tax on it. And you can do that up to $1,600 per a year per employee using something called the keep bonus. So that’s a really cool way. Again, it doesn’t put more money in your pocket, but it is, it prevents you from paying taxes.
RV (14:29):
You, if you don’t do that, what’s gonna happen is you’re gonna get taxed on all that money, and the government’s gonna take a percentage of that. So it’s basically like instead of paying it to the government, you could pay it to your employees. And again, it’s the reason it’s not illegal. It’s not like the government is stupid or that they don’t know this. They’re, they’re doing it as going, Hey, there’s a vehicles and ways to increase the amount of money that you give to people. And this is why, by the way, this is why entrepreneurs get tax breaks, is because the government knows you’re stimulating the comp, the, the economy you are helping you, your, you’re helping stabilize the country. And b by the way, I should have said this earlier, these are all US based tax strategies. So I know we have a lot of you that are listeners that listen internationally.
RV (15:15):
This is completely US based. I apologize, but I’m not, I’m not well versed in international tax law, but what I would say is my experience has been many other countries have similar types of things, similar types of vehicles. They’re often called something differently. So still worth paying attention to this and then kind of investigating your local tax code or asking a C P A or asking a successful entrepreneur or investor about some of these things. But anyways, in the us you know, the, the government gives tax breaks to entrepreneurs cuz we’re creating jobs, which means we’re giving income to people, which means there’s a less dependency on the government for their, for their income and for their health and wellbeing and their family, and also for their retirement, right? And, and that takes pressure off of the government. And so that’s, that’s kind of why this works.
RV (16:03):
It’s not like we’re pulling a fast one over them, but it, it’s also, if no one tells you this, you’re not gonna know any of this stuff. And I went to graduate school, right? Like I went to graduate school and I don’t remember learning any of this.
RV (16:51):
So you don’t have to pay taxes, payroll taxes on that money, but you’re, you’re transferring money from the business to your employees without having a, and it’s lowering your tax burden. It’s lowering your, your tax impact. So that’s number seven. Number eight, okay? This is another classic internet viral video One is something called the section 1 79 deduction. This is sometimes referred to as the Hummer rule. And you go, people are going and buying hummers and taking a hundred percent of that as a deduction. Is that really real? And the answer is yes, it was for a while, and it kind of is still. So section 1 79 refers to that section of the, the tax code, which says that vehicles that weigh over 6,000 pounds are they were, they were a hundred percent deductible. I think that’s trailing off.
RV (17:50):
I think it trails down a little bit year over year. But this, this is something that we actually took advantage of because when you have these, it’s the catches, it has to be a, it, the vehicle has to have a gross vehicle weight rating, G V W R, gross vehicle weight rating of more than 6,000 pounds. And if that is the case and you buy a vehicle that weighs over 6,000 pounds, that’s considered to be like a commercial vehicle for your business, you could take a hundred percent of that amount as a deduction in the year that you made that purchase. Now this was like a year ago, I think this is already factoring out, but and, and, and, and may, it’s gonna disappear at some point unless the tax law changes. But anyways, investigate the details of a section 1 79 deduction.
RV (18:42):
Number nine is vacations, okay? Business trip slash vacations. It is true, you know, to my knowledge that you can take deductions for vacations if more than 50% of the time is for work, right? So you have to be doing work related activities more than 50% of the time. So there are details around this that matter and that, that, that are important. There’s details around all of these things, like I should have mentioned. Going back to the Augusta rule, which was number four on this list, one of the things you have to do if I remember, is you have to take meeting notes and you have to produce meeting notes that say I had, I actually had this meeting in my house on this date. This is what we talked about. And this is a meeting that we would’ve had somewhere else at a hotel.
RV (19:32):
And I would’ve, I would’ve or could have had to have paid that money to a hotel. And rather than doing that, I’m, I’m taking it as you know, a tax deduction for on my taxes, but I actually had a real meeting. You have to actually have a real meeting and have, have notes. Now you know exactly how long the meeting is and what exactly do you cover. Those things are, you know, a little more gray area and a little bit depends on your appetite for, you know, how much you follow the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law, et cetera, et cetera. But on business trip vacations, a good example of it is, Hey, I’m gonna go to Miami and I’m going to, you know, set up work meetings on Friday and on Monday, and then I’ll just stay there Saturday and Sunday.
RV (20:14):
All now of a sudden that becomes a business trip that I can write off you know, in full or large portions of, or certain components of, so again, there are, that is a legal, legal deduction. Number 10, this one is interesting. I almost didn’t put this one on the list cuz we’ve, we don’t, we’ve never done this, but I’m hearing of a lot of people doing this. So I would approach this one with extra caution, but if you have a company and you own a video production company, okay, so you have to start a business. You, you know, which means there has to be some legal documents, right? And you create an actual business that is a video production company that does video work. Then anything that you buy that shows up in your videos, it can be a deduction because it’s considered a part of the set design.
RV (21:10):
I’m sure it’s not anything you buy, it’s probably not cars and houses and, and helicopters and things although maybe, but you know, just like certain other things, like anything that would appear in one of your sets, which again, there’s probably limitations to this, but a lot of times it’s much more flexible than you realize if you actually go investigate the details. And this is where I talk about, you know, CPAs aren’t super creative, they don’t think of this kind of thing. And you go, well, if you shoot videos as a part of what you do and you go, can I start a little side business that does this legitimately? Like it’s gotta be a business. You gotta have some other clients beyond just you. But how many clients do you have to have for it to be considered legitimate? You know, is is kind of a flexible conversation.
RV (21:53):
So and then you go, man, I’m gonna, I’m gonna buy a prop you know, and I’m gonna buy a $200 set of bows headphones, because I’m gonna use that as a prop in a video and it’s part of my set design, right? So yeah, there’s an ethical gray area that comes into this, but there’s a, there’s a legal component that is, is perfectly legal if you are abiding by certain things. So pay attention to that. Alright, number 11, another internet one. This one is often becomes, you know, one of these viral videos is to hire your children. And this is true, this is a, is a, is a perfectly legal strategy. As long as your kids have an actual job, I think they have to have a job description and they have to have certain, certain form formalities and certain things that establish them as an employee of the company.
RV (22:46):
So in this case, you can pay your kids up to, at the time of this recording, I think it’s $12,500 a year, and the kids don’t have to pay taxes. Why? Because nobody has to pay taxes on the first $12,500 per year. So how does this save you money on taxes? Well, it’s basically a way that you can get money to your children with pre-tax dollars instead of after tax dollars, right? If, if I were gonna, you know, buy something for my kids, I’d have to buy that with after tax dollars. Like I draw income, I pay taxes, and then I have money to pay, put give to my kids. If my kids are an employee of the company now I can pay them $12,500 every year. They don’t have to pay taxes. And now they have actual money that is theirs that they have earned.
RV (23:38):
Now that money has to, will go to them. It cannot be money that you use otherwise that is like, you know, illegal. But if it is money that is going to them that they’re using for their things, paying for schooling, paying for sports, paying for whatever I don’t even think there’s restrictions on like toys and things. Like I think they can spend the money double check that, but, but it’s their money. It can’t be your money. You can’t pretend to pay that money and then take that money and go buy yourself a car with it. But it can be money that they have and they can, they can then start to invest that money and use that money to pay. I think they can even pay for like private school and things that are of personal direct benefit to them. And you go, the reason it’s an advantage is you’d be paying that money anyways, right?
RV (24:22):
Like if you didn’t pay it to him, you’d be paying that out of your pocket and you’d be paying that money with after tax dollars. So look into the specifics again of exactly you know, you can’t just say they’re an employee, you have to give them certain duties and things, but it’s, that’s reasonable, right? And you’re the business owner. So you’re, you are within your legal rights to determine what you pay people for and what you hire them to do and how much you pay people, right? The, as, as long as it’s above minimum wage, there’s no, there’s no government mandate on what tasks you choose to pay certain money for. And so, you know, there’s a limit here, there’s a threshold, but again, this is perfectly legal. Number 12, anything with your logo on it is considered a uniform or advertising expense, including clothing, right?
RV (25:12):
So brand builders group, you know, I, I’m for some of you are listening to this, you can’t see me, but I’m wearing my brand, a brand builders group sweatsuit that we got. It’s got our logo on it, this is a hundred percent write off, right? So I’ve got this little tiny logo on here, and now all of a sudden this piece of clothing is a hundred percent write off as advertising expense and I would say is very legitimate, right? Those of you that are watching this video, you see the logo right inside the video. So it’s like very, very legit now. So considering put your logo on things now there’s probably some limits here. Like putting a logo on your car doesn’t necessarily mean you can just write off the whole car, but there are some things like that where people wrap their cars and they do certain things.
RV (25:57):
You should look at that. Number 13, number 13 is an H s a A health savings account, okay? A health savings account. Think of it like an I r A, it’s just an account where you can put money in. You know, kind of like how we were talking with Henry about the, this, our whole conversation in this last interview was about SD IRAs, self-directed IRAs. It’s just a, it’s just a special type of account that has special tax treatment in the eyes of the government. And HSA is an account. When you put money into your hsa, that money you don’t get taxed on the money you put in there. Now, here’s the catch. All of that money has to be used for health expenses, right? So that’s why the government, again, you’re not pulling a fast one over the government, it’s legal.
RV (26:46):
They, they ins they create this tax incentive and the whole tax system, right, is not about penalizing people, it’s about incentivizing people to use their money in certain ways, in ways that benefit the economy, the overall health and stability of a country and, and, and you know, a government, et cetera. Well, this, if people have money saved for their own health expenses, that reduces the dependency again on the government. It keeps you healthy, et cetera, et cetera. There’s advantages to the government and to the overall, you know, country of keeping people healthy. So when you put money into your health savings account, now you have money that is earmarked. You can only use that money for health expenses except once you are over a certain age. So if you put money into an HSA year after year after year, and it’s growing, right? It’s an, it’s, it’s, you can have that invested that is growing.
RV (27:43):
You at a certain age, which is probably 59 and a half or 62 and a half or 65 or whatever the number is. Now, if you haven’t used that money for health expenses at that point, I believe you can then take it. And you can use that money. You, you can, you can use that money as retirement if not, even if you can’t do that or even if the legislation changes around that. The advantage is you have money growing and growing and growing. So even if you’re gonna use it for your, you know, your to, to be in a retirement home one day and and assisted living home, the advantage is you’ve had money growing and earning interest and, and, you know, you’re, you’re saving on taxes throughout your lifetime. It’s growing. You’re not paying taxes on that. And then when the time comes that you need it for large health expenses, the money is there, right?
RV (28:34):
So that’s a huge advantage. And I actually think that once you reach a certain age, I think you can access some of that money as retirement money. In, now again, in the interim, it doesn’t put more money in your pocket. It, it’s, it’s all of this is allowing you to invest. Notice the theme here. The government is incentivizing you. The government is using tax law to incentivize you to use your money in certain ways, providing jobs, taking care of your health, investing in things, and providing for your own retirement and for the retirement of your employees. That’s why these things are all legal. It’s, it’s, it’s because they want you to use it in a certain way. So what a lot of successful entrepreneurs do is they go, ah, let me put some money. You know, if you max out your I r a and you max out your 401k, and you start to make real money every year in profits, every year you go, well, let me put all my money, let me, let me max up my hsa my health savings account, which is I think at the time of this recording, around $3,600 a year, you can put $3,600 a year in there and now that account grows.
RV (29:38):
And then if you have the money or hopefully then you just, you pay your health expenses with after tax dollars so that you can have this big thing growing as a nest egg that gets bigger and bigger and bigger over the, over over time. So that’s a great, a great legal strategy. Now, these last two are huge strategies and they, they are gonna, they will sound crazy, but these are ways that you can actually legally avoid paying taxes at all. Like and you know, or certain parts of taxes. Okay? So here’s what number 14 is, and you may have heard of this. The, the more successful you become as an entrepreneur, the more you’ll start hanging around people who are having these kinds of conversations. And you will start to hear about Puerto Rico Act 22, Puerto Rico Act 22.
RV (30:32):
We have several friends now at this point who have moved to Puerto Rico. John Lee Dumas was our first friend that did this. And now I can, off the top of my head, think of like five other friends who all live in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico Act 22 allows you to play a, a flat tax rate of 4% again, at the time of this recording. But you have to live, you have to be a primary resident of Puerto Rico. So if you like Puerto Rico and you don’t mind living in Puerto Rico Puerto Rico is a US controlled territory, right? So you’re under the protection and the, and the rule of the United States. But you, you, there, there are some caveats here. So you have to live in Puerto Rico, you know, one day more than half a year. So whatever that is, 162 or 163 days a year, whatever the number is.
RV (31:23):
You have to live there. You also have to do certain things to establish Nexus. Like your banking account has to be there, your place of worship your your, your primary mailing address, your your driver’s license, things like that have to be legit. You have to become a legit Puerto Rican resident. But when you do that, you then do not have to pay federal income tax of the us. You only pay Puerto Rico taxes, which are 4%. Now one of the other things to be aware of is that you give up your right to vote, as I understand it, right? So you can no longer vote in elections, but and you gotta move your family to Puerto Rico. So there’s some trade-offs, right? But you’re also going, you might be going from a 40% tax bracket or 50% tax bracket if you live in California.
RV (32:09):
And if you can set up your business and operate legitimately in Puerto Rico, you’re gonna go to 4%. So you could like almost double your income just by moving. And you have to stay there a certain number of years. I think it’s like three years or something. And if you, if you come back before then you have, you know, there’s, you have to like do back taxes or whatever. But so anyways, look at this. It’s a real thing. Puerto Rico Act 22 and then number 15, this is the grand finale, the Grand PBA of how you can literally become a millionaire, a multimillionaire, a billionaire even, and never pay any taxes at all. How does this work? How could you possibly, how is this real? Yes, this is real. Okay? This is how wealthy, wealthy, wealthy people think. How do we know we happen to know a lot of wealthy people?
RV (33:06):
Because a lot of, I mean, we’ve had four clients at Brand Builders Group who are billionaires in like the last 18 months, billionaires with a B, right? So we’re starting to see and hang out with some like really wealthy people. So what is the best way to create wealth and never pay taxes? How is this possible that you can have billions of dollars and never pay taxes? So here’s, here’s how you do it. It’s not easy, but it is real. Is you start a company as an entrepreneur, you grow that business, and then you take that company public. Once you take that pump, that company public, now you have stock that is actually worth real money. It has a, a real market rate. And what a lot of these billionaire founders do, and I’m talking big companies, right? Big time people like celebrity entrepreneurs that you hear about.
RV (33:59):
So what they do is they take their company public, they have millions and millions and hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars in stock. And then what they do is they take a loan against that stock from a bank and you never pay taxes, right? So, so, so they’re using their stock as collateral to take a loan from a bank. So that’s how they turn it into money. If they were to sell the stock, that would be a liquidity event. So they would then realize that as income and they would have to pay taxes on it. But there are, there’s plenty of banks who will look at a public, publicly, publicly held stock as a, as a strong collateral against alone. And so they’ll take a loan from the bank, they hold up the stock as collateral, they technically own the stock. They never have to sell the stock.
RV (34:48):
And what’s happening is the bank is giving them a loan against it. And now they’re just paying, they’re paying interest, they’re paying interest on that loan to the bank. But it is, it pales in comparison to what you would pay in taxes to the government. I found this, bam. That is how you can 100% legitimately avoid paying taxes and become filthy, filthy rich if you wanna do it. So there you have it, no gimmicks nothing illegal. Definitely some things that have some stipulations and some criteria that you want to pay, pay attention to. But these are the kind of things that happen if you hang around brand builders group, right? These are the kind of people we hang out with. These are the kind of conversations we’re having in addition to how do we change the world and how do we help you change the world?
RV (35:35):
And how do you add your service to more people and, and make an impact and make the world a better place? And a big part of how you make the world a better place is how you use your money to do that. So we have no problems making money, right? We love money. Money’s just not the most important thing in our life, right? For us we’re, we’re Jesus followers, we’re Christians. Like for us, we’re a hardcore Bible thump and Jesus freaks. So we don’t serve money, money serves us. Money is a tool, but we, we care about money, we’re deliberate about money. We like to make money, and we want to help you make a lot of money, and then use your money to do good in the world for you and your family and your employees and for the people around you.
RV (36:17):
So there you have it. 15 legitimate legal ways to save money on taxes. Investigate these, check these out. Hey, share this, share this episode with someone who needs to hear it and request a call with our team. Will you go to brand builders group.com or sorry, wrong number, wrong number go to free brand call.com/podcast. Go to free brand call.com/podcast. Learn about us. Read a little bit about the people we work with you know, the clients that we serve. We, we serve major celebrity clients, ed Mylet and Lewis, how, and Eric Thomas and Amy Porterfield and Peter Diani, and John Gordon and Matthew West, right? Like, we have major celebrity clients, but our heart is also for the people who are just starting out and who are real entrepreneurs trying to find their way and figure this all out. And we’re gonna guide you. We’re gonna guide you on everything, marketing, sales, positioning and then scaling your company with leadership and financial strategy that is legal and ethical and that actually works to make the world a better place. So check out free brand call.com/podcast. Share this episode with an entrepreneur that you know who needs to save money on taxes. So I want you to think in your head right now, who do I know that is an entrepreneur that needs to save money on the taxes? Share this episode with them. You might just change their life and the lives of their employees and maybe the people around him and the investments that they make. And keep coming back here every single week listening and in to the influential Personal Brand podcast. Bye for now.
Ep 362: Alternative Investment Vehicles for Entrepreneurs with Henry Yoshida
RV (00:01):
Hey, part of what we wanna be doing on this show is just sort of bringing you insights and strategies to help you, obviously as a mission-driven messenger, to become more well known, but also as an entrepreneur, to become more savvy and sophisticated. And today we’re gonna talk about a little bit about tax strategy in investing which may not seem always that exciting, but specifically I’ve asked this guest to be on the show. We’re gonna talk about a tool called Self-Directed IRAs. We’ll explain what that means why you might care about them, how you potentially use them and, you know, immediate action steps. But let me introduce you to Henry Yoshida. So, Henry was referred to me by one of the smartest people I know, Jason Dorsey. He’s been on the show se a couple times. He’s a close friend.
RV (00:51):
We we’re, we’re best friends in real life. His company is who we use to do our, our trends and personal branding, national research study. And Jason told me that Henry is one of the smartest people that he’s ever met. So that said a lot because I was asking Jason about self-directed IRAs, and then I got to learn about Henry. So Henry is the c e o and he’s the co-founder of a company called Rocket Dollar. So this is a FinTech financial technology. It’s a FinTech platform that lets people invest tax advantage retirement dollars into private alternative investments. Now, that’s a mouthful. We’re gonna, we’re gonna break that apart and help you understand what that means. But Henry is a C F P. So he’s a certified financial planner. In fact, he’s been a C F P since he was 22 years old.
RV (01:40):
He was the youngest c f CFP at Merrill Lynch, which is where he worked for 10 years. He’s also a, a professional licensed realtor. And he’s got 20 years of experience in finance. He, he actually was the founder of a venture backed company which was a robo-advisor company called Honest Dollar, that was acquired by Goldman Sachs. And he is the founder of another group that has managed had 2.6 billion in assets under management. He graduated from the University of Texas, UT at Austin has an MBA from Cornell University. And, you know, now is building his like personal brand and expertise really around these kind of like, vehicles of self-directed IRAs and Rocket dollar among other things. So with that, Henry, welcome to the show.
HY (02:24):
Thank you very much, Rory. Thanks for having me on today. Yeah, I’m really excited to be here. And Jason’s spoken very, very highly of yourself. I mean, he, he literally took time from his vacation to
RV (02:34):
Talk about I’m, I am the reason for his success. So he should be speaking highly
HY (02:40):
Denise first and you second. I’m sure
RV (02:43):
Denise first. Yes, Denise for sure. But the you know, so I was asking him about self-directed IRAs be and, and, and was something, you know, we have always had 401k. You know, I think I had a Roth, I when I, when I was 22 years old or something, and started learning about that. But only recently learned about this tool called a self-directed i r a. So can you just like high level layman’s terms, tell us what, what is a self-directed I r a
HY (03:16):
Sure. Self-Directed ira, it’s a, it’s a pretty n terribly de non-descriptive term for a type of ira. So the way we explain it and the way it’s become known, a self-directed IRA is an IRA account, very bespoke product. A lot of people in America have these accounts know generally about how they work, but a self-directed IRA is one that lets you keep the same tax treatment tax benefits of a, of a regular IRA that you would have in any brokerage firm. But instead of public stocks, bonds, mutual funds index fund ETFs, you can make private and alternative investments. So anything that the IRSs allows, which is anything from real estate to digital digital currency to making private investments into a friend’s startup technology business those all can be done inside of an IRA if you have a specialized provider that could do self-directed ira. So that’s what it is. Just think private and alt investments with the ta, same tax benefits for an IRA is what you
RV (04:18):
Can do. So, yeah, so basically this becomes a vehicle that I can take my money and if I don’t like the poll markets or don’t wanna put it there for whatever reason, or I have more there and I just wanna, I wanna invest in other things. Like some of the things you mentioned, I mean, crypto’s been obviously a hot topic in recent years. Real estate. Sure. et cetera. I can then use this account as a retirement account. I can do those investments, I can control those investments all the way to private companies and even debt instruments, et cetera. But have it have the same tax treatment, meaning I don’t, I it is tax deferred. So all the money I put in there, yes, those investments are gonna stay, those assets are gonna grow. Hopefully if I do a good job of stewarding that well and managing it well, and then when I retirement, when I retire, I take it out and then I’m taxed on the gains there. So exactly like an ira, it’s just, it has more flexibility into what kinds of things I can invest into. Yeah,
HY (05:18):
Exactly. Yeah, because the industry, you, you, you know, it’s almost so much so that you said you and Jason were talking about this, that people think that an IRA can only invest in public market securities or some derivative of it, like a mutual fund. But the reality is that the ability to invest in things that aren’t public market securities has actually existed since the inception of IRAs. It’s just not as well known. It’s not as well there aren’t a lot of providers in that space. So really, you know, my company’s mission and sort of my own personal background was thinking that, that now maybe to properly diversify someone should create a very simple, very affordable you know, household brand name to let people do private investments inside of an ira because that’s where a lot of investment opportunities are. But you’re exactly right that, that the, the gains everything is in there is tax deferred. And if and when you sell these investments in retirement, that’s when you actually pay taxes. So you can control it just like your regular IRA right
RV (06:16):
Now. And so basically there is some compliance and headaches and regulations and paperwork and details and kind of like that stuff around starting a self-directed ira. And what you guys do is you basically created a, a vehicle where it’s like you can, you know, for a, for a pretty low, very low fee, you can just, you guys can deal with all that and then now I can open an account and it gives me the ability to manage and do whatever I want to do.
HY (06:45):
Exactly. And, and our fee is structured that way because since these are self-directed, people typically find these investments on their own. So we’re not a mutual fund company creating a packaged product and then we charge the customer a management fee for however much money they put with us. But our fee is actually just a one-time flat fee because we typically are not sourcing those investments for the individual. Our fee, our ongoing fee and our signup fee are just flat dollar amounts 360 upfront and 15 a month. It’s just there to cover exactly what you mentioned. The, the not so fun part, cuz this is an audio podcast, but you know, I can see your face when you say paperwork compliance, the setting up painful and so forth. Yeah, it’s painful. So what, and that’s
RV (07:24):
Why we people do what you said earlier. You said like the, the idea of alternative investments in an I R A has existed for a long time, but you don’t hear about it because there hasn’t been as much of a way to like sort of deal with that stuff. The in, in a, in a really smooth fashion. And that’s kind of the problem you guys are trying to solve, right?
HY (07:43):
That part. And then I’ve been very public about talking about this too. It’s that the, the, the existing industry players that provide IRAs to the vast majority of the American public, they’re also the manufacturers of these these as package products as well. So it doesn’t really, there’s no real incentive for them to allow Rory to invest in Jason Dorsey’s business, for example using an account at a major existing provider because there’s no management fee that they can, that they can take for doing so because that’s a, that’s a deal between you two. Yeah.
HY (08:16):
And so forth. So that’s another reason that that’s why this industry really hasn’t become as well known. But you’ll find that sophisticated investors have been doing this for decades. Yeah. And there are several hundred billion of IRA monies inside of private investments.
RV (08:31):
Yeah. So, so here was my initial question. So I’ll ask you cuz this was the catalyst, right? So the catalyst for me was going, you know, we’ve always done 401k, I r a, we, you know, we’ve got that, we’ve got, you know, somebody that manages that and you know, but we are wanting to kind of start doing more with real estate mm-hmm.
HY (09:35):
Exactly. No personal benefit. It’s a, it’s a prohibited transaction is the technical term.
RV (09:40):
Dang it.
HY (09:56):
And artwork is a collectible. So that’s actually one of the two things that are specifically disallowed inside of an IRA generally. But, but it’s kind of interesting that we’re in a 2022, almost 2023 world now that many investments are actually now securitized. So it, it’s, it’s kind of crazy. But the private investment world now allows stock certificates that, that are, are actually backed by a piece of famous artwork or a collectible baseball card and so forth. And there’s websites that do that. And if the investment is properly securitized, then actually I RRA providers are allowed to hold shares of that. But the example you use, which is by a Picasso, hang it up in your house you wouldn’t be allowed to do that because you have the benefit of of enjoying the artwork or showing it off to your friends.
RV (10:43):
Uhhuh
HY (11:32):
Exactly. Yeah. It’s just all IRAs. These, these are just the types of IRAs. So my own vision is that sometime in the next few years people will say there’s traditional IRAs, there’s Roth IRAs, as you mentioned, you had when you were 22. And then there’s alts capable IRAs or self-directed IRAs. It, it’s just not the known third one, but it’s just, they’re all different types of IRAs Yeah. And so forth. So you’re right. And, and what’s the limit? You can put money in the limit for 2022 is $6,000. If you’re under the age of 50 then you can do another 1000 in 2023. And this is all inflation adjusted. So that’s been kind of nuts this year and probably heading into next that you, next year you’ll be able to put away 6,500 into an ira if you’re under the age of 50.
HY (12:17):
Cuz it’s, it’s just adjusting up for inflation. But remember most of these accounts, and probably a lot in your audience, Rory, that the reason why there’s so much money in IRAs is that most people actually sock away a lot of money in some sort of stint in a corporate world before be going out on an entrepreneurial journey. So, myself included, I worked for Merrill Lynch slash Bank of America for a decade and I contributed larger amounts than 6,000. It was less than at that time for IRAs in a 401k, then the company provided a match. And then when I left Merrill Lynch, that account is able to be rolled into my own IRA in my name and, and it had much more than if I’d been able to just put away three, four, $5,000 per year by the time I was there and so forth. So most IRA money is actually old 401k,
RV (13:04):
Old 401K money that then when you leave the company, it can’t be in that 401k and then it gets moved into an I R A.
HY (13:11):
Right? You’re able to leave it if you want, but you’re even more restricted because that company you know, probably only offered you 20 mutual fund choices. And then if you move to an irate at a major brokerage house, then you can buy any public stock that you want. And then if you are having a discussion to potentially buy real estate or invest in cryptocurrency or a small investment in your friend’s business, then you would need a self-directed ira. So that’s kind of the, the evolution,
RV (13:37):
Right? Yeah. And, and so, you know, a couple of the things, and just correct me if I’m wrong here, but like, as I think about this, I’m going, all right, if I wanna start investing in real estate, which typically takes a lot of money right? To, to, to, or, you know Yeah. Takes a lot of money to get to get going Yeah. Is saying part of the way that I can access capital is to pull it from my own retirement account. Whereas normally if I pulled money out of my retirement account, I would get penalized. But in this, in this mechanism, you could, you could convert from your traditional IRA into a self-directed ira. And now I have capital that I can, I can use to go out and buy real estate as an example. Right,
HY (14:18):
Exactly. You just can’t buy the one that you described, which is a vacation home that I use, you might personally use sometimes on your own up to a certain number of days. But the good news for your audience is that you could actually use a self-directed IRA to buy a vacation home that you permanently rent out on Airbnb. And any of us in your audience can actually go to your vacation home. It’s an investment for you. And it’s a, maybe like a getaway for us, for example. You just can’t use it.
RV (14:44):
Even the vacation business can a and can a and the business can’t benefit from it either. Like, can you buy a commercial property that your business is in and the commercial property is in your self-directed ira?
HY (14:56):
You can’t do that either, because if you control that business, then you can’t do it. But for example, if you bought a commercial property and you wanted to lease space to my business, I have no connection to to to your IRA or to you personally from a, just a relationship status. And then I could be your tenant paying a market rate. It, the, the basic rule thumb to make me make it easy is think that anything that you have inside of an ira, whether it’s self-directed or traditional, it just has to be purely an investment. It can’t be something that you, you know, derive personal benefit from that we talked about earlier, or that you get, you get any sort of benefit from. It has to be arm’s length you know, from you. It has to be purely an investment. And then that’s when the government allows you the opportunity to defer those taxes for years, decades and maybe even longer.
RV (15:46):
Yeah. And then, so when you think about the type, the common types of investments that somebody would do here one of the things that is potentially interesting to me about a self-directed IRA is well, first of all, you’re self-directing it so you have more control over like, what’s going on there. Mm-Hmm.
HY (16:46):
There,
RV (16:46):
There, there’s more flexibility. It gives you a chance to have bigger wins as well as typically bigger losses like Sure. So what are the other like, major types of investments that people are doing inside of a self-directed? Does that mean real estate? You got real estate, crypto, private companies? If I wanna invest in my buddies business mm-hmm.
HY (17:09):
Another big one is, is, so the industry itself is, goes all the way back to the seventies. So IRAs were essentially created in 1974. So for probably the first 20, 25 years, the only IRAs that were not offered by the major brokerage houses to do public stocks, let’s say self-directed IRAs for the first two decades were probably only created to do real estate investments. Private credit investments and probably precious metals. So maybe another one that we didn’t talk about was actually investing in, let’s say, gold. For example, like people held gold inside of ira. So that was a big industry, maybe less so now. And again, you can’t hold the gold bar in your house while it’s in your ira. You have to actually have a custodial provider to keep it in a vault for you. But remember these were created in the seventies and eighties. So at that time, oddly enough, that was probably the last very high inflationary environment and people kind of looked at tangible assets like real estate and assets that might hold their value for the long haul, like precious metals. So the industry actually developed around those asset classes first and
RV (18:16):
So forth. That’s, that’s interesting. So then basically, you know, the market conditions back then were, you know, maybe similar to what we may or may not be heading towards, but certainly recently interest rates have been going up and things like that. Yeah. And so you’re saying that people, you know, sort of tend to start to look more towards alternative investments and these kinds of
HY (18:38):
Sequence? Yeah, and I do wanna go back and say that, you know, I, I talk a lot and people always say that, you know, all alternative investments may be, you know, may be riskier than public investments. And I don’t know if that’s actually the case cuz you know, we just talked about that if you did cryptocurrency or investing in a small private business, yes that may be riskier than buying an s and p 500 company like Tesla or Microsoft for example, or Johnson and Johnson, McDonald’s. But, you know, I think it might be argued that, that as we record this today, Tesla is down 65% year to date so far, you know, heading into the end of 2022, that’s 63, 60 5% is down year to date. And even when what you might consider like the confluence of very bad events for real estate, I’d be hard pressed to think that a single family home has dropped 65% in value, you know, just this year.
HY (19:30):
So it could be argued that that tangible investments, some of which you could do in a self-directed IRA, actually might be considered y you know, relatively more stable than some investments you do in the public markets. So some alt alternative and private deals, yes. Maybe more, I guess you could say risky. But that riskiness is usually due to either you’re investing in an early not yet mature company or there’s an illiquidity issue with that investment. But, you know, sometimes if you’re buying something tangible like precious metals or real estate I would say that that actually is very good. And, and right now there’s, we talked about this before recording, there’s 15 trillion in IRAs in America. Almost all of it is invested in stocks and mutual funds right now. And if there aren’t providers like mine that allow people to get into some more tangible investments, well that’s a risk to the American public at this point cuz they have nowhere to go. Even bonds are down actually 15% year to date right now in the us
RV (20:29):
Uhhuh
HY (20:42):
A big difference. It’s tangible. You can see it versus a piece of paper that, that may or may not you know, know, represent an actual stake in, in an, in a maximum mature company that’s publicly traded.
RV (20:51):
Mm-Hmm.
HY (21:22):
I I just think that self-directed IRAs to me are maybe very similar to your audience. The, the, you’re your listeners, a lot of people are pursuing their passions or what they want to do. They don’t wanna work for a 100 to 200 or 2000 or 200,000 employee company any longer. And they go out on their own. I think self-directed IRAs are almost the embodiment of being able to invest in things that you know about that you care about and so forth. I mean, you, you could do that through your public stock investing and say you believe in, in climate change. So you invest in Tesla for example. You hate supporting the cable companies, so you buy Netflix. But in a self-directed ira, people can really say that, you know, I’m going to use my own capital support a local business if they would take an investment from me to be a passive partial owner of this or real estate in a town.
HY (22:12):
So one of our first customers, and this is one of our first customers at Rocket Dollar. I remember talking to her on the phone. She grew up in San Antonio. She went to business school in New York and was a management consultant with a great salary and said, you know, I actually want to buy all rental properties in San Antonio, like where I grew up. I live in New York, I live in a nice apartment here, great salary. But I would feel so much better if I know that I bought four homes with my I r a there. And were able to let families rent it and live and raise their children in a house that I owned. It’s an investment for me. I’m making money, making gains, making income on a monthly basis. But I also know that there’s four families that live in these homes as well and so forth.
HY (22:59):
And I remember thinking, wow, that was huge. I mean, you know, yes, you may feel some benefits on investing in a public company, but nothing like that. She knew these people you know, they were at otherwise living in an apartment, right? But now they can live in a home with a backyard. And she knew their kids and she’s like, this is the best of both worlds. I’m making money, it’s an investment for me. And I’m able to provide households like real homes with real backyards and real neighborhoods for four families. And where I grew up,
RV (23:28):
What happens with the cash flow on that real estate? So the, the, the property itself is held in the self-directed ira, it’s throwing off rental, is that flow through as personal income or does that have to stay inside the ira? Somehow
HY (23:41):
Everything stays in the ira. So IRAs that are self-directed are exactly the same as IRAs that hold public stock. So if you own a stock that pays a dividend and you bought it in your ira, that dividend stays in the IRA u unless you’re over 59 and a half, at which point you could maybe decide to get that distributed to you and then you pay taxes on it cuz you can control that. But if you’re collecting 1500 in rent times, four homes in your ira, 6,000 a month, that’s 6,000 just accumulates inside of your ira. And what we find with our customers that they end up getting to like, Hey, now I got $50,000 after one year of owning these four properties, I can go do another deal maybe not real estate, but now I’m gonna go buy a $50,000 investment into this real estate syndication for storage units. And so where they build up cash, just like if you owned a bunch of dividend stocks inside of your current ira after a couple years, you’d have a bunch of cash inside. You either redeploy it back into something or if you’re old enough, you might take it as income and just pay taxes on it while leaving the rest of the property in the ira in this case
RV (24:45):
Uhhuh
HY (24:46):
And that’s the tax strategy component that we were kind of hinting at
RV (24:49):
Uhhuh
HY (24:56):
If you own real estate, everything is done with the I rra dollars. So again, you don’t mix and mingle in, in that, in that sense. So th that’s one of the things about owning real estate is everything is done in there. And that’s actually how we’re structured at Rocket Dollar. I kind of liken our account to sort of like an I r A bank account. And you set yourself up to pay property manager landscaper, you know, if you cover some of the bills, for example, for your rental properties, you do it from the I r dollars. You don’t do it with Rory Vaden regular dollars for a property inside of an ira. You have to keep it one or the other. And that’s why a lot of our people, maybe your people as well,
RV (25:37):
Property taxes, landscaping capital improvements too.
HY (25:40):
Everything. Yeah.
RV (25:41):
Uhhuh
HY (26:03):
You would, you would pay whatever income taxes are due on that money. If, let’s say it originally was a 401k, you never paid taxes on any dollar in a 401k and now it’s an ira. If you pull out a $300,000 cash value and you’re under 59 and a half and you’ve never paid taxes, you will add that to your taxable income for that year. That year all at once. But the beauty of IRAs, just so you know, is once you become 59 and a half, you could decide to take out as much as or as little as you like to supplement you know, your own living standard or needs. So if you created, let’s say 15,000 in income but you want to keep the properties, you could just take that 15,000 out when you’re 60 years old and, and use that to supplement against like other income sources. You have follow. That’s what our
RV (26:50):
Customers do. I didn’t follow that part.
HY (26:52):
So after 59 and a half, you can take out any amount in your IRA that you want that’s available in cash and whatever you take out, if you haven’t paid taxes, you will just add that to your taxable income for that year. So if you decide that you want an extra 5,000 a month, cuz you have two properties that generate 2,500 in rental income, you could, if you’re 60 years old, for example, just take that 5,000 every month and then you’ll
RV (27:18):
Taxable income.
HY (27:18):
It’s just taxable income. But remember you were able to roll that, maybe you bought those properties 20 years ago and so forth. You, you didn’t liquidate the property, you’re just taking a distribution on the income from that property.
RV (27:33):
Right. Which is an, which is an advantage at that point cuz now you have your, you have turned your retirement account into an income stream that goes forever and ever, which theoretically you would have also from dividends I guess if you were, if you were in a like, public market or whatever. So
HY (27:48):
Yeah.
RV (27:50):
So then how do, like, if, how do companies buy real estate inside of their businesses and how do entrepreneurs typically buy their second homes? Like from a tax, you know, advantage place? How do you see those kind of tend to be structured?
HY (28:09):
Yeah, so they, they don’t really do, if it’s an ira, they don’t do that. And they, they, you know, again, we talked about it earlier, they wouldn’t really co-mingle.
RV (28:16):
Yeah. So this doesn’t, so now we, now we have to leave, we have to leave the, the self-directed ira, by the way y’all, I haven’t mentioned this yet, but so Henry’s company’s called Rocket Dollar. If you go to brand builders group.com/rocket that’s our affiliate link where you can check this out and you can learn about it. And like you said, it’s, it’s a, it’s a ridiculously low thing. It’s like 360 bucks or something at the time of this recording, one time fee and then a small monthly, like 15 bucks a month. And that, and that helps you deal with the compliance and have this vehicle and this account open and gives you some other features and stuff that allow you to sort of, it becomes the mechanism, I guess the vehicle at which you can like actually do this and, and move money around.
RV (28:59):
So, and then I, so I guess, and then we’re leaving now we’re leaving that conversation. Yeah. Behind. So we have to leave the conversation with a self-directed ira. When you go in, when you, when you start saying, okay, what are some of the tax strategies I can do as a company if I’m a higher earning, you know, entrepreneur because my personal brand is crushing it and you’re generating millions of dollars in speaking fees or your membership side or your royalties or your course sales mm-hmm.
HY (29:47):
The big one, and, and this is actually a very known thing for a lot of your small community and regional banks here in the us they love actually financing successful cash flowing business owners to buy a commercial property that they may use up to 30% ish of the building. So let’s say you purchase a a 10,000 square foot building in the suburbs of Nashville or the suburbs of Austin. And I have friends that actually where I live, I, I have a bunch of friends that actually own these types of buildings and then they run their small business in roughly 10, 15, 20, 30% of it. And the bank is actually happy to finance that. So the business owns, owns the property or the business owner in this case your, your audience listener would buy that property and actually have a lease agreement with the with your business for 30%.
HY (30:36):
And then you’d rent out the remaining 70 and the bank and they help pay that mortgage. And in 10 years time, because commercial loans are, are not amortized over 30 years, in 10 years time, you now might own outright this building for 6 million while actually using a, a normal known expense on a monthly basis for your business. Cuz right now all of these businesses are probably paying some sort of rent right now, but instead wanna pay yourself the rent and have it pay down that loan and 10 years later you own this 6 million building in the suburbs of Nashville, for example. I see a lot of that, that that has nothing to do with IRAs, but I think that’s a great business strategy. Maybe better than the vacation home because it’s, it’s, you know, little, I think that’s something that’s a little more amenable to the local community banks that, that do that a lot right
RV (31:25):
Now. And so in that case, you then start a separate business, like a separate L L C that owns this commercial property that’s then renting it 30, renting like 30% of it, you’re saying
HY (31:37):
The part that you need. Yeah.
RV (31:39):
Back to this other business that you own, which is like, let’s call it your main business mm-hmm.
HY (31:54):
Building. Exactly. Yeah. Uhhuh
RV (32:18):
Uhhuh
HY (32:19):
RV (32:48):
Uhhuh
HY (33:16):
Exactly. Yeah. So I see that quite a bit. And then, you know, if you don’t want to be too actively involved in that business, you can, you can bring on a partner. You could just be very sort of integrated with a property manager that’s experienced. I mean, at the end of the day, you most people probably want to concentrate on their primary business. They’re not in the business of running multiple businesses and so forth. But that’s just just a strategy. The other one I would say this is maybe more specific to the business owner and doesn’t involve needing another outside thing is that if you’re a very successful cash flowing business and you have a small group of employees, let’s say anywhere from five to maybe 20, but these are, you know, maybe even up to 50 a lot of people don’t do this.
HY (33:58):
And this goes back to my pre FinTech days, but I would encourage business owners to actually look at things beyond a 401k. Like we don’t have ’em as much in America anymore, but pension plans are actually very, very good vehicles for business owners to accumulate a large amount of money for themselves while still having an attractive benefit to keep your key people for not just two years or five years, but probably 10 and 20. I mean, that’s another problem we have in, you know, today probably being a business owner is it’s very hard to retain employees. Most people think that they’re gonna stay two years at a place and then go from job to job to job. But you know, you and I, Rory, we probably know a lot of businesses where they’ve had their core group of people with them for a decade or longer.
HY (34:45):
And those tend to be very successful businesses. And if that person sets up a small business pension plan, typically the owner if their spouse is involved, they could put away over a hundred thousand dollars a year to themselves and shield it from taxes while then providing a smaller benefit to the employees in the form of a guaranteed pension. But over the course of 10 years, you’d be able to sock away like a seven figure amount that would turn into a guaranteed income stream. The lesser known, I used to set up a lot of those back in the early, you know, kind of 2000 to 2012 timeframe
RV (35:19):
Now for these businesses. And so pension plan, what is, when you say pension plan, define pension plan for me, cuz I don’t, when I think pension plan, I think very large entities and big structures. I don’t think small businesses. I get that. I get what you’re saying is basically the, the, the mechanism here is that by introducing this benefit to all of your employees or some portion of your employees, you’ve now created a way for you to put more money away each year into retirement accounts so that you don’t have short-term taxes, you don’t get to have that money, but you don’t have to pay taxes on it. And now that money, you have a larger and larger pile that’s growing tax deferred, not limited by the, the normal thresholds of like the 401K and the ira, which are much, much lower. Right. So I’m, I follow you there. Sure. But like what does pension plan mean?
HY (36:10):
Yeah, so pension plan means essentially this is a plan where only the business contributes on behalf of every employee. So you are required to cover every eligible employee. So if you have 10 people in the business, let’s say it’s a spouse and a a couple that basically own the business, the couple might be in their mid to late forties, the other eight employees may average age only 25. So you do a pension plan, it’s adjusted for accumulating retirement. So every year you have an administrator and they tell you that, hey, your business, you need to put $200,000 or $150,000 is your contribution for the whole company’s plan, all 10 people. But because you’re older and you’re more highly compensated, maybe 90% of that money goes to you and 10% goes to the other eight people. But they’re happy because they actually have a guaranteed retirement benefit down the road.
HY (37:07):
You know, pension plans actually do exist for small businesses. I think they’re gonna make a comeback here over the next like several years. But not at the big gigantic companies or government or let’s say, you know, municipal type employers. But it’s a powerful tool and, and you have a lot of audience members who you just said that maybe they’re just crushing it with their course sales or their speaking engagements. And this is a 10 person business and the, let’s say the, the couple that run it, they’re usually decade, a couple decades older than the average employee at that business. They could put away a big amount with, for tax benefit for retirement for a guaranteed income stream and shield themselves in current income. Right Now the great thing about making a million dollars in income is you made a million dollars in income. The problem is you’re probably gonna end up netting only 650,000 of that income if you make all 1 million.
RV (38:02):
Right. And the other thing is, a lot of these, if they’re small business, they don’t have tons of employees and tons of you, you know, you might have a couple assistances or whatever. Like it’s not like you have five people on the payroll that make a quarter million dollars a year doing, you know, highly, you know, complex C-level type jobs. So
HY (38:17):
You might have a great core group of eight people, that average income is 70,000 and if you’re, let’s say running the business and taking more and you’re older, you would find that you would be putting away probably a six figure amount for yourself. And you’re still doing it right by those employees.
RV (38:33):
No, you still have to have a lot of cash flow. That’s the problem is that you gotta have the cash flow. Yeah. But you’re either gonna pay it to the government in taxes or you’re gonna pay it to your employees as a benefit to them. Exactly. And and to yourself. So like that money is not gonna stay in your pocket either way. It’s basically how, unless you put it, unless you do this. So if you is a defined benefits plan is like a cash balance plan, is that the same thing as a pension plan?
HY (38:57):
It, yeah, it defined benefit pension plan. Similar cash balance is a type of, of pension plan that is kind of a, it looks a little bit like a 401k, looks a little bit like a defined benefit pension plan and so forth. Like that’s getting a little bit into the weeds. But for people that are your audience, if they say that, you know, I am one of these people, I’m, I’m more highly compensated than the general employee who’s on my team. And I’m also maybe generally older if they look into this, they, they might find that if they can sustain cash flow and of course after they work with you and aj, they surely that’s, that’s that that’s gonna happen right away. In time that they’ll have this great business, they may say to themselves that this is a way to like, you know, really have the benefit down the road because otherwise you’re gonna get taxed very heavily today.
RV (39:45):
Yeah. Well and that’s, you know, the only reason I know defined benefit plan is cuz that’s, that’s come up several time with our, and in some of our like high level mastermind circles with some of our, our, our higher level clients is we’re always, we’re telling them. So I, it’s interesting I didn’t equate that to pension plan, but it’s the same vehicle which is ef it’s effectively a completely legal mechanism by which you can increase the limits, the, the thresholds of what you would normally be able to invest into tax deferred accounts like a 401K or an ira. And you get to provide this awesome benefit for your employees, which is that they, you’re contributing to their retirement in a small business. That’s pretty wild because you go, man, I’m working with a small business, my benefits package is like as good if not better than some of the biggest companies out there. You, you know, it’s really cool thing. I love that.
HY (40:34):
Exactly. Yeah. And, and you know, we were talking, we were introduced by Jason and I was just reading his book, which is basically showing business owners and companies and corporations how they might take advantage of hiring into that Gen Z you know, generation for people younger, if there’s two levers, if they’re younger and they have lower salaries it is something to consider if, if you’re the small business very stable with your business and cash flows, that that’s how you could put away, I mean, we just talked about IRAs allow you to put away six, $7,000 a year 7,000 if you’re over 50 401ks allow you to put away 20,000. This is how people put away 100, 1 50 200,000 and shield it from taxes, which is why it probably comes up in your high level master mastermind groups.
RV (41:18):
Uhhuh,
HY (41:21):
Right? It’ll be a 22,500 next year, but it’s it’s 20,500
RV (41:27):
This year. So, so yeah, that, that’s something to ask about. And it is the kind of thing where it’s like no one ever told us that. And you don’t know to ask about it now, you know, the thing is you gotta be careful is you have to commit to it for a certain number of years, right. So you have to like lock it in. So you need to have stable cash flows. But
HY (41:48):
That is true. That’s a, that’s a good point. And you know what’s funny is I’ve made my entire, I’ve always, I’ve been in this industry for over 20 years and oddly enough, someone asked me this one time, he said, you know, you’ve done it this whole time that you technically never recommend an investment strategy or an investment itself. I said, exactly, I have this belief that people are gonna invest in things, whether it’s in the private markets, to the public markets already. They’re gonna do what, what, you know, is appropriate for them. And all I’m saying is that look, if you think about how you hold that money, whether it’s in an ira, a pension plan, a 401k, that same investment that you are gonna do, if you hold it in a better way, you’ll actually make usually somewhere between 20 to 50% more per year on that investment.
HY (42:34):
You know, whether you invest in the s and p 500, someone likes that someone wants to invest in Tesla, another person wants to invest in real estate, crypto or private businesses. If you hold it the right way and I show you how to do it, you’ll make thir 20, 30, 40, 50% more per year Yeah. On the investment you were already gonna do. That’s not my job to recommend the, the, the investment to you that’s your advisor’s job or your own decision to make. But you sh people don’t pay nearly enough attention to how they hold investments.
RV (43:03):
Yeah. And I think where the magic part of where the magic is, is going, if I take that money as income and I pay taxes on it, I could still invest that money into my friend’s company. I could still invest that money into crypto and if I hold it for longer than a year, I’m still only paying capital gains tax. The the, the magic though is if I do that through the self-directed ira, all of the money that I would be paying in taxes now stays in the investment and it rolls and it rolls and it rolls and it rolls. Right. And that’s like a pretty, like over the course of time, that’s a monumental you know, IM impact. So
HY (43:44):
Exactly. You’re rolling a dollar, you’re, you’re, you’re a hundred cents. The whole dollar, $1 is going in if you do it after maybe 60, 65, 70, 70 5 cents of that dollar. So over time, that holding period, you’re compounding on either 65 cents or you’re compounding on a dollar. There’s a big difference.
RV (44:02):
Yeah. Just by the technicality of how it’s held. Now, the, now the other thing is you don’t have access to the money. So that’s the big thing is like, it’s in here, it’s staying in here, it’s not going anywhere.
HY (44:11):
Well the beauty of private investments is they typically are a liquid anyways. So the reason why there’s a premium there is because they aren’t quite as liquid as being able to buy and sell a hundred times a day or a week, let’s say some public stock. So you actually get compensated for that. So the way economics works, you’re getting a slight you know, premium for the ability not to, to always be a hundred percent liquid, which, you know, right now, maybe it’s been proven that it’s probably a good thing. You know, you read a lot of articles that say that 2022 is the year where you may not want to like overly look at your investment statements, right? Yeah. You’re, you’re probably better off just focusing on your business and, and building your audience and growing your business.
RV (44:49):
Yeah. Reinvesting
HY (44:50):
The investments are a long-term thing, so don’t really worry about what it’s gonna say here at the end of Q4 in 2022.
RV (44:55):
Henry, how do we buy our vacation home? What’s the, what’s like, what’s the smartest way to go about doing that or to think about that?
HY (45:03):
Yeah, well, inside, again, inside of an ira it wouldn’t be a vacation home that you use. So that is one thing that if you, if you just know that there’s this lock solid investment opportunity, but something that you could do with not having on your own then you can use IRA dollars if you wanna buy one on your own. I mean, this is, I I have no association with this company, but I have friends and, and I’ve seen these particular platforms develop, but where you might actually just fractionally own a vacation home. So it’s, it’s a modern digital twist on probably timeshare but only luxury properties. I just think it’s safer cuz for me, I’m a big proponent of how you hold the investment and maybe if at all possible not locking up you know, all the capital at one time and at which point, if you own the entire investment with a lot of locked up capital, you exponentially increased your risk.
HY (45:54):
So maybe you can buy one 32nd of a luxury property through one of these digital platforms instead of you coming up with a 20% down payment and making sure that you tell your tax advisor that you only stayed in the place for less than 21 days a year and tracking everything. That’s, that’s risky to me. I think that I, I do this myself. I think you should actually look at some of these digital platforms where you could just pay y you know, a set like $40,000 for example, and own one 32nd and get your allocation of time to a property. The, the, the one you know, in my mind I think about is park City, Utah. Interesting. And for example, because of 20% down payment on a $900,000, you know, luxury property there, small two-bed, two and a half bath cabin, that’s a lot of capital. We’re talking over a hundred thousand dollars in down payment plus the risk of owning it outright
RV (46:48):
Versus,
HY (46:49):
And I specifically think of Park City because there were wildfires there that severely impacted some of these properties in like a Lake Tahoe or Park City. What if that was yours? And, and you and I are col respectively, 1700 and 1300 miles away from there right
RV (47:04):
Now. Uhhuh
HY (47:23):
And you’re limited from, you know, the amount of time you can actually physically be there. Anyway, in a sense. Yeah. Anyway. And you know, people are, someone sees this as a problem to a certain subset of the population, just like Rocket dull does as well. And you know, you just stick to like very tried and true ones, which is that maybe the outlay of capital is limited, right. And so forth. So that might be a way to do it through one of these platforms. I don’t own a property, you know, in my name fully outside of my primary residence that I’m talking to you from right now, but do take advantage of these platforms because it’s a, it’s a known limited amount of capital known, limited exposure to me. And then everything I can, I consider every investment I do private, public how I hold it, you know, I got eight days here, so I think a lot about you know, where I should sort of dole out different things. Are there some, like other advantages I can take right now before the end of the year?
RV (48:21):
Interesting.
HY (48:21):
I have a very limited skillset, Rory. It’s I think about this, I’ve done this for 22 years. I’m like the I always think about optimization of how you might hold an asset. That’s, that’s sort of how I’ve been trained.
RV (48:34):
And you’re, are you an active, you’re not an active advisor, you’re not really an active advisor anymore, right?
HY (48:40):
No. I sold that practice, you know, prior to the Robo-advisor. You know, so that was back in 2000 14, you know, we had 2.6 billion in assets that we managed on behalf of individuals and, and, and businesses. But I sold my stake and, and it’s a conflict to do that right now. It, it’s actually an impact thing. It’s funny that you just asked that question here kind of as we wind down. I really just thought that by building a FinTech product company, I can actually impact more people than I could ever by just selling some little fractional portion of my business week Yeah. To certain folks. So I really thought about that way. It’s that it’s been successful for me, but the really, the real thinking is that if I create Rocket Dollar the platform, I can work with 1 million people and billions of dollars if I basically just, you know advise people for time, you know, on an assets under management basis I can maybe work with at most 30 families effectively.
RV (49:40):
Yeah. Well, and that, that was part of why, that’s part of why I, I thought to have you on the show, because, you know, we, we have, we have advisors. We love, we trust lots of clients that are advisors. Right. We’ve got lots of advisors. Yeah. But, you know, since you’re not actually, you’re incentivized to like, sell any product other than Rocket Dollar, it was like, Hey, let’s bring Henry on and ask him some of these questions. Of course, again, y’all, if you go to brand builders group.com/rocket, you can learn about this and how to open the accounts, a few hundred bucks, very low monthly fee. And then Henry’s team is taking care of the, the backend. And now you are, you’re free to self-direct your own retirement investments in a tax-deferred way. And there’s some really cool things and, and it does seem like the way the world is shifting in the economy, et cetera. It’s, it’s kind of like an, an, it’s important to at least know that this vehicle exists. And that’s why we wanted to talk about this subject and that’s why we found you, Henry. So you’ve been so generous with your knowledge, your wisdom, your experience. Thank you so much for that time. And man, we look forward to following this journey.
HY (50:47):
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. And I’m, I’m glad I was able to share a little bit and explain some of these self-directed IRAs, which will become a big, big thing over the next five to seven years.
RV (50:57):
Ep 359: Developing a Mindset of Persistence | Annie F. Downs Episode Recap
RV (00:02):
Some of my favorite interviews on this podcast and show are the ones where we get to hear the story about how a mission-driven messenger or personal brand started in the very beginning. And if you haven’t yet, make sure you go back and listen to the interview that I just did with Annie F Downs, because that’s the story that she tells about how she got started, how she made her first dollars. And I, it’s just so, so inspiring and, um, and actually inspired me. And so I’m gonna share with you some of my, some of my thoughts and highlights from, from the show, uh, from that interview. And then also just kind of like some of the things I want to add to it and, and share with you. Um, the very first thing that I wanna do is something very tactical. I wanna share with you some of the data about podcast advertising dollars, um, because that came up in our conversation.
RV (00:53):
She hosts a podcast and she also runs a podcast network. And so we were talking about monetizing a podcast. Um, and so I asked her in the interview, you know, how much do you charge for the ads? And how much can you really make as a podcaster and when do you start making money, et cetera. Um, and, you know, she, she openly admitted. She’s like, I don’t really like know all of those, those specifics, um, you know, off the top of my head. But, um, you know, she threw out some numbers. And, and then, um, we actually, at Brand Builders Group, we have a course called Podcast Power. And you know, this is where we teach people one, one of, we have 14 courses in our full curriculum, right? So our members who are, uh, paying members of our, of our membership community, they get access to 14 courses.
RV (01:35):
And one of ’em is Podcast Power, and we have a whole section in there on advertising dollars. And so I didn’t know the numbers off the top of my head, but I went ahead and went into the course, grabbed that specific section, and I wanted to share a couple of those with you just since it came up in the, in the, in the interview. Um, and it, it admittedly, you know, making money from podcast ads is, is a little bit of like a gray box because it’s, it’s not like it’s, I guess it’s a free market system, right? Like so many things, um, there, there’s not a, a hard and fast rule of how it has to be. Um, it’s driven by supply and demand, and it’s driven by like how many, what your show is about and how much advertisers want you, and they want access to your audience and how convicted they are that your audience is the right fit for them, et cetera, et cetera.
RV (02:21):
So, um, that’s part of what it comes down to. But, um, I did wanna just share with you these are, these are the numbers that we, we share with our paying clients, right? So, and, and if you are one of our members, you can go into podcast Power in our workbook. It’s on page 42, um, of, uh, that workbook’s 137 pages, which, you know, obviously we’ve got lots and lots of content we’re teaching y’all. But, um, so the number that we were using in that conversation with Annie was if you’ll have a podcast that gets about 10,000 downloads per episode, and I loved what she said, and I would edify what she said, that basically the first week, uh, will be a number. So let’s say like 5,000, whatever the number of downloads you get that first week will probably double over the next nine weeks.
RV (03:08):
So if you get 5,000 on the first week, then you probably will get another 5,000 over the next nine weeks. And that’s, we see that to be, you know, about right, too, just like, you know, using rough numbers. So we’ll use 10,000 downloads per episode. Um, right? So if you’re doing an episode every week, that means you’re getting around like 40,000 downloads a month. So that’s a, you know, that might take a couple years to get to give or take some, depending on what your topic is and your, you know, who you are, et cetera, and, uh, your network. But, um, for a 15 second ad, um, and this is what we did, is we sort of pulled together data from our, uh, clients and we work with, you know, some of the biggest podcasters in the world, our clients of ours. And, um, you know, we got hundreds of of members.
RV (03:53):
So we, we see this, but it’s, you know, this is, again, this isn’t like scientific per se. This is our poll of our community to try to put some real numbers to something that’s kind of an obscure conversation. Um, that for a 15 second ad, um, that, uh, if you, if you did four episodes a month, so we’ll just stay there, we’ll just say, if you had 10,000 downloads an episode and then you were doing four episodes a month, an advertiser might pay you around $720 a month, um, which would be, you know, like for four episodes, like $180 per episode. And if you were doing four episodes a month and they wanted, they wanted all four, if they wanted a spot on all four, then you might make $720 per 15 second ad per advertiser, right? So if, if it goes up to a, if a 60, that’s for a 60, a 15 second ad read, if you were looking for like a 62nd ad read, um, those, uh, uh, come out to approximately like $25 each, like, you know, for like a A C P M, right?
RV (05:02):
And so if you go, all right, if we’re gonna have 10,000 downloads per episode, then you would, you, an advertiser might pay, uh, 250 an episode or a thousand dollars a month to be on all four of your episodes. So, you know, Annie off the top of her head, she said, yeah, if you have a podcast that’s getting 10,000 downloads an episode and you have an episode coming out every single week, then you know, I said, what would that podcast make in a year? And she was, she was reluctant to answer, but she threw out a number that was, uh, I think she said like maybe $40,000 a year is what that podcast would make. Um, and you know, when I went and looked up our data and what, what we actually formally teach, um, so we’re seeing around a thousand dollars a month for one 62nd ad read.
RV (05:53):
So that would be $12,000 a year, but that’s only for one 62nd ad read. So if you had three 62nd ad reads, um, in each episode, that would be $3,000 a month or $36,000 a year. So I actually think she was pretty close. I actually think that’s about right. Um, and for those of you that are podcasters are aspiring podcasters, you know, anyone who’s an experienced podcaster knows that if you start the year with 10,000 downloads an episode, it’s gonna grow. And it, it’s always, it’s one of the beauties of the podcasting medium is it’s constantly growing and, um, it’s just a snowball that builds and builds and builds and it’s a really, really beautiful and wonderful medium in that way. So, um, yeah, so that is, uh, you know, a, a good, a good rule of thumb if you get up to a hundred thousand downloads an episode, you know, you multiply that by 10, now you’re talking about making, you know, $10,000 a month per advertiser, uh, which would be like 400.
RV (06:51):
If you had four of those on each episode, that’d be like $400,000 a month or 5 million bucks a year. Like that would be pretty massive. So it may not scale quite up to that, but that’s, you know, you can make real money over it long term. But in the short term, if you’re podcasting, you’re not gonna make much money from advertisers cuz you’re not in front of that many people, right? They’re paying C P m, which is cost per thousand impressions. So you don’t, if you don’t have thousands of downloads, then you’re not getting, you’re not getting many impressions and they’re not gonna be paying you, uh, much for those, right? So, um, that is a little bit of data there. And if you’re an early podcaster, and even if you’re an experienced podcaster, right? Like our, our podcast gets, you know, well north of, of that number, but we don’t, um, we don’t have ads on our show other than our own ads.
RV (07:39):
And so we offer just people, uh, our various free training and we give them a chance to, um, you know, uh, learn from us or engage with us or request a free call at some point. That’s what we really want you to do, right? We want you to go to free brand call.com/podcast and request a call to say, Hey, we’d love to talk to you about what is your dream, what is your vision, um, to build your personal brand and monetize it, and then talk to you about how we do that and how we help people all the way from the biggest personal brands in the world down to people who are just starting out. And we’ve got stuff for, um, every different budget. So anyways, if that’s you, let this be our ad read, uh, here in this and go to free brand call.com/podcast and request a call with us.
RV (08:19):
So I hope that is, I hope that is helpful for you. That was something I wanted to make sure and look up, um, and give to you the, the, the next thing that I was inspired by listening to that, uh, you know, re-listening to that interview, re going over my notes with, uh, uh, Annie and was just, you know, she said something and it was kind of like quick, but she said, get help before you can afford help get help before you can afford help. And this really reminded me of a concept that is in my second book, which is Procrastinated on Purpose, five Permissions to Multiply Your Time. And in that book, which is also based on the, uh, which my, my, my viral TED talk is based on my, my TED Talk’s called How to Multiply Time. Um, we talk a lot about the concept of getting help in your life, um, like extra hands to help you with things and hiring people to do it.
RV (09:15):
And what people always say is they say, I can’t afford it. Like they say, Rory, I would love to hire someone to help clean my house, do my landscaping, edit my videos, write my copy, do my website, et cetera, et cetera. And they say, well, the problem is, I, I can’t afford it. And so I want to reintroduce or remind you, or if you’ve never read my book, um, that second book, the, I want to introduce to you the concept of mvat, M V O T and m OT stands for the money value of time. Now, the, the concept of the money value of time, first of all, should not be confused with the time value of money. The concept of the time value of money is about knowing what is $1 worth today out in the future based on some assumptions of compounding interest.
RV (10:03):
And that’s a powerful concept also, but not what I’m talking about here, right? That’s the time value of money is basically knowing what, uh, an amount of money will be worth at some point in the future, um, based on, you know, compounding interest. M v OT or money value of time is just a very, very, it’s a much simpler calculation and it’s a much simpler assumption and a much simpler thing. It’s a much simpler thing to explain, which is just that all of us have an hourly rate of pay, all of us do. Now, you might not get paid hourly, right? You might be a salesperson on commission, you might be an owner who’s on profits. Um, you, you, you might be, you know, and, and, and an investor who gets dividends, like, uh, we get paid in different ways, but all of us can figure out what our hourly rate of pay is if you just take the total amount of money you earned, right?
RV (11:02):
Whatever you earned in income, and you divide that by the total amount of hours that you’ve worked for a year. Um, and to do it quickly, you know, rough math here is to use the number 2080 for the number of working hours in a year. So if you just approximately, you know, did you take 200 2080? That’s about what HR professionals use to estimate the number of working hours in a year. And if you take that amount and you divide that, uh, take your total income and divide it by 2080, it’ll give you your hourly rate of pay. And what you’ll find is, let’s just say somebody, if, if somebody makes like $150,000 a year, okay? So if you made a $150,000 a year divided by 2080, then that means you make $72 an hour. Let’s say if you make $75,000 a year and you divide that by 2080, that means you make $36 an hour, right?
RV (12:02):
For the, for the, the, the time that you’re working. So here’s the thing, as people always say, I can’t afford it, I can’t afford to hire somebody else, but the the key insight is to realize you already are affording it. You already are affording it. You are paying somebody to do that work. You are either paying someone else at their rate of pay or you are paying yourself at yours. Because if you are using an hour of your time to, to complete any task, I don’t care what the task is. If, if you are completing a task, then the opportunity cost of your time is equivalent to whatever your mvo is, is to say, if, if instead of mowing the yard for an hour, if I took that hour and I use that hour and reinvested it into work and to income generating things on average, that’s the hourly rate of pay I make.
RV (13:00):
So the way to think about it is to realize, you know, if you make $75,000 a year, every hour that you’re doing something is you’re paying $36 an hour to do that task. It’s like a, it’s like a, a price of admission. You’re saying, oh, I’m gonna pay $36 and I’m hiring my, you know, I’m hiring myself to do this. Whereas if I could hire somebody for less than that rate of pay to do that task for me, then I could reallocate that time and I could reinvest that time into things that generate income or generate more money at that rate of pay my mvo or higher. And what you find is that if you do that over the course of time, then your mbot gets higher and higher and higher because you spend more and more of your time. You spend a higher percentage of your time focused on higher income p earning activities, and you spend a lower and lower percentage of your time on non-income producing activities.
RV (13:58):
And then you are you. But that work still needs to be done. It just doesn’t need to be done by you and you’re able to afford it by reallocating your time into higher profit activities. That is the concept of mbot that is, uh, in the delegate chapter, uh, along with another powerful rule called the 30 x rule. In my second book, procrastinate on Purpose, five permissions to Multiply Your Time. But I bring it up here because this is the conversation that Annie was saying is she was saying, I always by help before I can afford help, and that is how it has been with me too. I’ve never felt like I have extra money around to hire the next person. We don’t, but we know we need the help in order to grow. And so what happens is I’m always trying to minimize my lifestyle expenses, right, in order to create more that I can reinvest into hiring people to help us get things done.
RV (14:56):
When you do that over and over and over again, at some point it catches up and now you have people who are getting things done and making things happen, and now you start to make more money and you’re making money off of the system that you’ve built right off of the network or the infrastructure or the, or the organization or the company, because you’ve got a group of people who are all doing things and they’re, you are paying them. That’s, that is what an entrepreneur, that’s what it means to be an entrepreneur. You’re giving life to, uh, jobs around you. You’re a job creator. And Annie’s story was that she, she talked about how she couldn’t even afford to pay her assistant. She could barely afford to pay her assistant. Um, when she first was getting speaking gigs, most of the money was going to the person who was booking the gigs for her. And I’m not saying that I like it. I’m not saying that that’s how it should be. I’m just saying that’s how it is.
RV (15:56):
And if you’re serious about changing the world, if you’re serious about being a mission-driven messenger, if you’re serious about like wanting to do good work in the world, you are gonna have to make sacrifices and you’re gonna have to make short-term sacrifices in exchange for the long-term payoffs that come, which is money, it’s influence, it’s impact, it’s income, it’s purpose, it’s peace. It’s all the things that are these beautiful rewards that show up from, from doing it. But there’s a price that you have to pay right there. There’s, there is sacrifices required. This comes from my first book, take the Stairs, the Pain Paradox. The Pain Paradox says that one of the key mindsets of UL ultra performers, one of the key distinctions that UL Ultra performers have made is they realize that, that the short-term easy leads to the long-term difficult. Meanwhile, difficult short-term choices lead to easy, long-term consequences.
RV (16:55):
And so you gotta make that choice. And that pulls me right into, you know, the third thing I wanted to share with you about what it takes to make it on this journey as a mission-driven messenger. And at the very end of the interview with Annie, I said, Hey, if there was somebody out there right now who’s in, you know, struggling in that moment, what would you tell? What would you tell them? And effectively what she shared is you have to make a decision that you’re not gonna quit at some point in your career, at some point in your life, you have to resolve, you have to conclude. You, you have to come to a, a summary analysis that says, I will not be stopped. I will not quit. I will not give up. I will not abandon. I will stay, I will fortify, I will edify, I will solidify this commitment.
RV (17:57):
I’m not going anywhere. You can’t get rid of me, right? There’s no one in this world who can stop you except you. You are the one ultimately who gives up. You’re the one who ultimately fires yourself. You’re the one who ultimately calls it quits. No one else can do that for you. They can bounce you around from different opportunities and close certain doors, but at the end of the day, you are the one that decides if you’re gonna be successful or not. And you decide and you resolve that you’re gonna keep going even when it’s hard. You, you have to, you have to reach this point in your life. You have to reach this time where you say, I don’t care if it’s difficult, I’m gonna succeed. Even if it’s difficult. I don’t care if it’s inconvenient. I’m gonna succeed even if it’s inconvenient. I don’t care if I’m having a hard time affording it.
RV (18:45):
I don’t care if there’s rejection, I don’t care if there’s fear. I don’t care if I am tired, if I’m exhausted, I don’t care. I am going to rise above that. I am going to succeed in spite of that, I am going to do it anyway. And that is what it takes. That is what it takes to be successful in this industry or any industry. It is that personal resolve that, that discipline, that commitment, that vision and that that persistence to just say, I am going to rise above all that. If the world throws this and that and whatever at me, it doesn’t matter. I will not be stopped. You can’t stop me. I’m going to do everything in my power. Then I’m gonna find a way or I’m gonna die trying. Nobody is gonna wave their wand over you and say, you deserve to be a a messenger.
RV (19:34):
You deserve to be an author. You deserve to be a speaker. Right? You, if you’re waiting for that, you’re gonna wait your whole life. Stop waiting for that and go get it and decide. The only person who waves that wand is you. And you. You wake up and you say, this is what I’m gonna do with my life. I’m gonna inspire people, I’m gonna help people. I’m gonna make a difference. And I will not be stopped. I might get rerouted, I might get tired, I might have setbacks. It might be hard, it might be difficult, inconvenient, uncomfortable, challenging, and it might be scary, but it doesn’t matter. This is the life that I choose for myself. I am in charge and I have a future that I’m pursuing and I am writing my story and I am the author and I decide that this is how it’s going to be. I’m gonna make it. Even if it’s hard, nobody else can do that for you except you.
RV (20:41):
And that is the power that you do have. That power. And, and listening to Annie’s story was just such a great fresh reminder of that to me, right? She was a four-time author, right? She had an agent and four book deals and she could barely, she was barely making it. And now, you know, you see her, she’s on stage in front of thousands of people and she’s got this huge podcast in this amazing network, all these great opportunities. She’s inspiring people, she’s changing lives. Like she’s doing all these wonderful things. And people see and they go, well, I could do that, I could do that. Right? They look at her on stage like, that looks like so much fun. I could do that. Why? How come I can’t do that? Cuz that’s not the job. The job is overcoming the fear. The job is overcoming the inconvenience.
RV (21:28):
The the hard part is all the parts you don’t see. It’s not given up when most people will, right? It’s not accepting someone else’s rejection as, as permanent. It’s realizing it’s just temporary. It’s just a redirection. And you can make that decision right now. And if that’s you and you are ready to make that decision, I would say the first thing you should do is you should come and join us because we are among the very best in the world, if not the best in the world, at helping mission-driven messengers to reach more people and to make this dream come true. We know a lot about it. We’ve done it, we’re doing it. We have several people doing it. We, we, we can help. But you gotta make that decision that you’re not gonna be stopped. So I hope you do that. If you’re ready to make that decision, go to free brand call.com/podcast, request a call with our team.
RV (22:22):
Uh, if not, if you’re not quite at that point, um, just keep tuning in and keep hanging out and keep learning, um, and keep, uh, checking in on these amazing guests and these inspiring stories. We’re so grateful for you that you’re here. Um, share this episode with somebody who needs it. If you would go share, go tell Annie, uh, go find Annie on social media and send her some love. Let her know that you heard her, her on the Influential Personal Brand podcast. Um, and just give her a thanks for showing up and being a part of, uh, this amazing community. So, you know, they, these folks do it for free. They come on here because we’re friends and because they wanna help other people just like you. We’ll catch you next time on the Influential Personal Brand podcast.
Ep 343: How to Scale a Coaching Company and License Your IP with Todd Herman | Recap Episode
RV (00:02):
Holy smack,
RV (01:12):
And, and we know something about it. We’ve sold a company a coaching business, but I think it was far undervalued for what it should have been. And I think knowing, knowing many of the thing, like having learned some of these things, I’ll share with you some of my highlights is definitely gonna change the, the future of our, our business. And the way it already is, AJ and I have already taken action on several of these things from when this interview took place. So, first of all, alright, so Todd Herman was, was our guest. We were talking about how to scale a coaching company and how to license your ip. And here’s my top three takeaways. So first of all, my very first takeaway is about the power of trademarks, or I should say the value of trademarks and the, the financial value of trademarks.
RV (02:02):
So, you know, if you go back and you listen, one of the things that Todd said is he said, look, if somebody’s gonna come by your company, if you’re a personal brand company, is he said, the first thing they’re gonna ask you is, how many trademarks do you own? What? Like, I’ve never, no one has ever said that before. Like, I’ve never, I’ve never heard that before. Because we have not spent a lot of time like focused on our ip. Like, and it’s you know, one of the things he said is he said, look, if if you win an IP infringement case in the US it’s a minimum of $250,000. So he said, we don’t, you know, he doesn’t send cease and desist letters. He just sues people. And that’s pretty wild. You know, like that’s a pretty assertive or aggressive stance.
RV (02:50):
I mean, depending on how you look at it. But I gotta tell you, this is a place where I feel like we’ve been getting, we’ve been getting the short end of the stick here. There are so many quotes of mine that get ripped off and stolen and put all over the internet there. I mean, there’s a few of ’em specifically, success is never owned. It’s rented and the rent is due every day that originally appeared in Take the Stairs be the Buffalo and my Buffalo story. People are now putting that in their TED Talks. We’ve got you know, this, this story I tell do it scared about do it scared again. That was 10 years ago. We published that in a New York Times bestselling book, and we almost never get cited for those things. And then, you know, my focus funnel from my TED talk on how to multiply time and in a brand builders group, I mean, we’ve got dozens of these visual frameworks.
RV (03:45):
Now, some of those things are, are, are not trademarks that we can get. Like success is never owned. It’s rented. The rent is due every day. That’s more of like, you know, kind of like a copyright issue. Anyways, we, we need to, we need to do an episode for you on the difference between just copyrights and, and and trademarks. But specifically what, what Todd was talking about is these visual frameworks that you create, which we have a bunch of them, right? Like we have the brand DNA Helix and the modular content method. I mean, we have the, the services spectrum, and I mean on and on and on on, we have the marketing map for book launches. And I mean, every single one of our 14 curriculums has at least two to five frameworks. And in our captivating content course we teach people how to create their own frameworks.
RV (04:38):
Like we teach our clients how to do this is something that we’re really good at. What we haven’t been doing is actually protecting them legally. And this is the part that blew my mind is he said, each trademark is worth approximately $250,000 to your valuation. So we’ve got 14 topics in our curriculum. We have 14 courses in our full curriculum. Let’s just say that each one of those has three frameworks, some of ’em have more, but if we have three, then that’s, that is 30. That means we have 42, we got 42 frameworks. What is the math on this? I need to look at this. I got so pause for the interruption here. So if we’ve got a minimum, let’s say 42 frameworks in our whole Brand Builders group curriculum and $250,000 each, that is 10 million by itself. That means we could, you know, according to this rough math, right?
RV (05:39):
And it’s, it’s rough math, but it’s, it’s, it’s based on, it’s based in reality. We could add 10 million to our company valuation by going out and getting trademarks and all this. So guess what we’re doing? We are getting trademarks like crazy. So we have started this process. We are going down that path to get trademarks on these things because they’re super duper powerful. So anyways that is a big, a big, big, big deal. And, and, and a and a big i a big idea. So I think that was fascinating. So you gotta, first of all, it shows you the power of creating frameworks, which if you don’t know what that is, like gosh, request a call with us, y’all like free brand call.com/podcast. Just do it. And seriously, you’re talking about millions of dollars in, in this one thing. If we teach you how to create like a couple frameworks, it can be worth a million dollars to you.
RV (06:36):
Like that. One thing that you would learn, and this is one of our biggest specialties, is helping people create their own visual frameworks and things. And and then we’re about to make a specialty of how to get those things trademarked,
RV (07:29):
But then what you need to do is then go back and record yourself on explaining why you trained it the way you trained it. Record that. And that becomes the, the train the trainer content. And so the train, the train, their model, which has been around for decades is this idea that, you know, like with companies like frankly, Covey was one of the, one of the, you know, they went public for doing this. They were, they’re nine figure business and went public and a huge part of what they did. So I remember I got to meet Dr. Covey. So, you know, this is all based on seven habits of highly Effective People. And the late Dr. Steven Covey and I got to meet his son one time. He came to our house, someone invited him to our house, we had this little get together, and he was explaining to me how they did their whole business.
RV (08:14):
And, and a big part of it was this train the trainer model where you, you know, let’s say they have you, you have your program, you have your normal course, and let’s just say it takes two days for someone to go through your full experience. Well, when you sell it, you can say, okay, come through the, the full program for two days and you pay X or pay X plus y and stay a third day or a fourth day, and I’ll, I’ll certify you. So not only will you go through the program, you also will become certified to teach the program to other people. And that’s a train the trainer model. Or sometimes people would call it a two plus one because it was like basically a two day public event and then a one day certification training and the content for that third day is what he was talking about.
RV (09:02):
So what Todd was talking about in the interview was saying, you know, train your, train it record, record yourself training it, and then record yourself explaining why you trained it that way. And that is what becomes the content for that third day, which becomes a product in and of itself that you can sell for lots of money. And then, you know, the way that the Covey, you know, family was describing this to me, is that really what that business model is, is shipping kits. They’re shipping kits. What does that mean? Because they, they, they wouldn’t make their money on the, the certification as much, although you can. You know, there’s, we got a lot of friends that do certifications, make a lot of money doing it, Donald Miller. And you know, like Jeffrey Gier does this, John Maxwell does this where they certify, they certify, by the way, if you didn’t know, this Brand Builders group now is certifying and licensing our content to people to go out and teach different parts of our content.
RV (09:55):
We don’t license all 14 parts, but there are certain parts of our curriculum that you can get licensed in, and we can, we can help you move faster in your business by giving you our content, you licensing, you’re buying our content, but then having the right to go reteach it and charge, you know, bundle it in with your other services and charge and our content’s amazing. And it’s really, really well, well polished. So anyways, the way that the Train the trainer model works is, so you, you know, you make money selling someone to come to your two day event. You make more money certifying them on how to teach your content, but then where they would make the most money is that they, they could, they could charge whatever they wanted to put people through their class. The only caveat of the arrangement legally was that they had to buy their kits for certifying people through the, the home company, right?
RV (10:50):
So, so say for example, you paid Brand builders group, you know, whatever, let’s, let’s call $5,000 you know, 7,500 bucks, something like that. Which is often, you know, typically somewhere between 20 512,500 is typically what you’ll pay for like an annual license to be able to teach somebody else’s content, right? And then you get to come and part of that includes, you know, materials and everything, but then when you go out and you, you sell it and you say, all right, I’m gonna host a class on this thing, but then you have to buy the workbooks from us. And what they do is they make these really nice kits with workbook. You know, the, first of all, the book is in there, workbooks are in there. They have little chachkis desk calendars, quote books you know, maybe CDs, maybe little like, you know, action guides or whatever.
RV (11:37):
And you know, maybe a magnet and flyer, you know, like some, like a map they put up on the wall. All these different sort of like ches that you build around your content and it comes in this box, which is a kit. Well, if, let’s say someone from United Healthcare as an example likes your content, they come through, they get certified, you might make a few thousand bucks from that person getting certified. But what you really want is you want them to, to take 5,000 employees through your content. Cuz now 5,000 people are getting introduced to your content and they’re also buying 5,000 kits. Well, if each one of those kits is a hundred bucks, y’all, what is this? 5,000 times a hundred. I don’t wanna overestimate this. That’s $500,000 from one customer, from one event, you know, from one from one company.
RV (12:29):
You could make a half a million dollars doing that. And that’s what, that’s what the train the trainer model is. And so that’s just, you know, it was super pragmatic. It was a good reminder of that, that business model. And and that is something by the way, that we are doing. So, you know, if you actually, if you actually go to brand builders group.com, if you are looking at if you’re interested in this, I’m pulling up our own website here for a second just to make sure I tell you, right? But if you go to brand builders group.com and then you go under brand strategy, there’s a, there’s a link that says content licensing, and you should do this. You know, even if you’re not a, you know, if you’re, even if you’re not interested in getting certified on our content to, to resell it you should go to this page.
RV (13:12):
The shortcut to the page, by the way, is brand builders group.com/get certified. You can at least go to this page and see how we’re doing it and see how we’re, we’re selling our certifications and you know, just monitor that. But like the book Strength Finders, you know, we interviewed Tom Rath on this podcast. It’s the best selling non-fiction book of all time other than the Bible. And the you know, since the creation of Amazon, I should say. And that’s what they do. They sell thousands of copies every week. Cause they’re a train the trainer model. And so people are buying, like, buying these, buy the droves because they’re certifying their clients and they basically have an army of salespeople out there selling this book and this methodology. So really, really powerful stuff. Again, you gotta be protected. So you need to have your trademarks in place, you gotta have your agreements, you gotta have good frameworks, you gotta have tight content, all the, all the things that we, we coach people on how to do.
RV (14:11):
But then, gosh, this is how you go out and scale it, which is just like exponential thinking, really, really, really powerful. And then the third takeaway for me from this interview, which was just a good reminder, and you can’t, you can’t hear this enough, and I can’t hear this enough, but I loved that Todd really edified this and, and, and, and hit it hard as he said. You know, everyone spends all their time on the, on the, the marketing and sales side of the business. But when you’re building a truly scalable coaching company, or when you’re trying to create intellectual property that actually has enterprise value, it’s
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Really all about the delivery. It’s all about the implementation, it’s all about the execution. It’s about, it’s the client success that grows the business. The way that we say this is that the, the best form of marketing is to turn your customer force into your sales force. How do you turn your customer force into your sales force? You help your customer succeed and everything you do, if you, you have to become consumed. You have to become like just completely infatuated and, and, and like totally focused on how do I help my clients succeed faster? You wanna grow your coaching business, that’s the number one question you need to be answering. How can I help my clients succeed faster? What tools can I help them to implement faster? What, what support do they need? What type of training? What type of structure? And it’s all about, it’s not so much, oh, I need to teach you everything.
Speaker 2 (15:50):
You know, I need to be focused, not so much on teaching you everything you need to know. I need to be focused on helping you get results as fast as you can. I need you to get traction quickly. And so you’re, you’re perpetually innovating. You’re, you’re iterating your content, you’re adapting, improving your content. Not to add more content, but to basically do it, to, to have less and go, what’s the least amount I can teach to get so that somebody has to consume the least amount in order to get the result? And that’s very much what we are. You know, the journey that we’re on right now in Brand Builders group. We’ve got amazing content and curriculum, and now it’s just like we’re constantly going, how can we sharpen this and whittle it down and, and make it tighter? I would also point you to the interview that we did with Amy Porterfield on this show.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
By the way, Amy Porterfield is now one of our clients brand’s group client, which is super exciting. And we, but before Amy was a client, I interviewed her on the show talking about creating courses and, and we did this whole thing about she was talking about the importance of getting your students to complete the course and, and things that you need to do along that way. And so that’s what I want you to be focused on, right? Like the best form of marketing is a changed life. The best form of marketing is a changed life. The best form of marketing is a customer of yours who wins a a customer who creates a massive result. And this is why we’re talking about our customers all the time, right? Like we just had our 11th customer this last week hit the Wall Street Journal bestseller list 11 times.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
We have helped a client hit the New York Times Wall Street Journal and or USA Today bestseller list 11 times. We just had our fourth client create a viral TED talk, meaning they wrote a TED talk that got over a million views. This is somebody that we’ve been coaching for years following our methodology of applying the principles and applying it to a Ted, TED talk and getting over a million views a fourth time. We’ve done that, right? Like we, we have four clients, four clients that have gone from zero to over a million dollars in business within a couple years of starting in our program from, from like zero to over seven figures a year. Now, we don’t promise that for everybody. That’s not an income claim. I’m not guaranteeing that. I’m saying though, that we’ve had four people do that. So these are the results that make people like, those are the wins.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
We need more of that. We don’t need four, we need 400, right? So that is the, that’s the, that’s where you want the obsession to be. Not just how do I sell somebody and get a new client, but going, how can I help my client succeed faster? How can I help them win? How can I what can I do to shorten the learning curve? What tools and templates can I create for them to get them there quicker? And, you know, that is, that is where the magic happens. That’s how you get people to win. The most powerful form of marketing is a changed life. And when you focus on that, you turn your customer force into your sales force. And once that happens, you’re gonna have exponential radical growth. You’re gonna be scaling a business and scaling a company that has real enterprise value that is a high level education some seriously valuable information.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
The interview with Todd and this, you know, what we’re talking about here. So share this episode. Will you, with somebody who’s serious about scaling their personal brand, not just having one, but going, how do you scale one to multi seven figures and eight figures? This is something we know something about, right? We have had four, AJ and I have launched four multimillion dollar businesses and and an eight figure business. And brand builders group is very much on its way to eight figures. We should be at eight figures within the next year or two. So like these concepts work. They’re powerful, life changing, I mean, changing the complete trajectory of your family tree and you’re learning it for free right here on the Influential Personal Brand podcast. And of course, if you want to come alongside of us and let us be your personal coach and help you implement these things directly and apply them faster so that you can get results quicker, go to free brand call.com/podcast and let’s have a chat about that. Until then, keep tuning in here. Enjoy it. Thank you for being here. We’re so grateful for you. Share this with your friends, keep coming back. We love ya. And we’ll catch you next time on the Influential Personal Brand Podcast.
Ep 342: How to Scale a Coaching Company and License Your IP with Todd Herman
RV (00:02):
You know, as humbly as I can say, sometimes when I think about this podcast, I go, it’s insane the quality of the guests that you hear and get access to for free and the quality of guests that I get access to for free. And today is definitely an example of that you are about to meet. If you don’t already know one of the smartest people in business, in personal development. That’s how I would describe Todd Herman. We’ve known each other for years at a distance. We’ve, we kind of gotten closer over the last few years and just every time I turn around somebody’s talking about how brilliant this guy is and how sharp and how awesome he is. So he’s a Wall Street Journal bestselling author of a book called The Alter Ego Effect the Power of Secret Identities to Transform Your Life, which came out years ago, but has been, you know, one of these perennial bestsellers.
RV (00:55):
He’s an international speaker, he’s a peak performance coach. He has been the recipient of Inc’s 500 fastest growing Companies award. He speaks for groups like ypo, like some of the most prolific groups around of course he’s been featured in CBS and Business Insider. A lot of the like, you know, major media kind of empires. But one of the things that Todd has done that is super unique, which is what I am particularly interested in, not cuz we’re trying to do this, but because we kind of did this once and very few people do it, is scaling a training, coaching, consulting business and selling it. He has done this three different times in three different ways with sort of three different group, like three different kind of models, which is what we’re gonna talk about because I think that this is the future. I think that pe personal brands eventually wake up to the idea to go, yeah, I wanna be well known. I wanna have influence, I wanna have reach, but dang it, if I’m gonna work as hard as normal entrepreneurs, I also wanna have something that has enterprise value and asset value. So anyways, I kind of just begged Todd to say, dude, will you come on the show and just like, share your wisdom. And it took me a long time to coordinate schedules, but he’s here. It’s great to have you bro.
TH (02:14):
Dude, I’m excited. Yeah, just to dig into this stuff cause I know your audience and the topic around, you know, building a coaching business that could be somewhat sellable for someone is such a foreign concept for many people. Not that everyone has to sell something, but I’ve been in this space for 26 years. I’m going into my 26 year, I started in 1997 before coaching was a thing. So happy to open up the kimono so, so to speak and just drop as much as I can to help out.
RV (02:47):
Yeah. Well, I’d love to hear it. And I do wanna get into, I wanna talk a little bit about alter ego, cuz I know that ties in, I mean, that ties into it. Yeah. But just to give us the history of scaling and selling a company and, and I want to hear just kinda like, okay, you have these sort of three different generations or iterations that you’ve done. Yeah. And you know, I think like I was mentored by Zig Ziegler and I knew him personally and I was, I was friends with him when he fell and he hit his head and he started to lose his short term memory. And it was interesting to see how that affected the business. Right. Yeah. And he couldn’t speak anymore. And of course Dave Ramsey is here in Nashville and he’s been thinking about y for years about succession planning and scaling the business beyond him and creating the personalities. And I think this is, as personal brands wake up to the idea of going, man, how do I build something that outlasts me that runs without me? I’m not the just the dancing bear on stage all the time. Yeah. And you, you’ve, you’ve done that, man. So tell us, tell us three quick stories about what they were.
TH (03:51):
Yeah, so the, the very first one was the peak athlete, which is what I started in 97. And I was you know, very young at the time. I was 21 when I started doing mental game coaching, people performance stuff for athletes. And I as I was growing that business, I did it on the back of really only one channel. So there’s different types of channels we can all use to market with, right? And so the only thing I knew how to do, I was not a marketer by any stretch imagination, but I grew up in the world of four h I grew up on a big ranch in farming. Yeah. Canada, and, you know, in the world of four H, it’s like agricultural boy scouts for people who don’t know. And you always had to do a speech every single year in your club.
TH (04:35):
And if you won that one, then you’d go to the next level and next level, next level. So I started when I was 10 and I just fell in love with speaking. I was very natural at it. And that was what I used to grow the peak athlete was I offered free speeches in a context of 90 days and I ended up doing 68 free speeches in my province of Alberta where I was living at the time. And people go 68 species, 90 a day. How did that happen? And I mean, that’s a completely different story, but that’s what kind of got me my waiting list of clients. Okay. Got it. That it, and so, but I was trading nothing but time for dollar. I was super busy. I would charged $75 for a package of three sessions. That’s what my price point was when I did my quick in taxes in 97, 98, 99, I was making $8 and 56 cents an hour.
RV (05:24):
Nice
TH (05:26):
Gas money was my biggest cost was traveling around all these young kids after school to, to see them. But I’m a big,
RV (05:34):
You were selling to kids, you were doing speeches and then at the end of the speech you were basically saying, Hey, if you like this, join my, my $75 package coaching program.
TH (05:45):
Yep. Yep. How I gave up my free speech was I said, I’ll do my talk for free. Normally it’s $2,200, but if you get all one parent from each of the kids in the room, I’ll do it for free because they’re the wallet holder. Right. That was the, that was the worst part about that business was this person’s getting the service, but this other person’s paying for it. Right. But as a parent, we’ll do anything for our kids. Right. So that was the, that was what I did. So the offers were either work with a kid one on one or come in and work with a team. So I was just learning as I was going. There was no internet back then for me to be Googling how to run a coaching business because that wasn’t even an industry at the time.
TH (06:26):
And so this is awesome. I love this so much, but I was super, but I was, you know, even though I wasn’t making much money, I was busy and I was working a lot and I loved what I was doing, so I was getting a lot of reps, which is probably the thing that’s most overlooked in I think our world today. People are trying to race towards expertise status before they ever even have any sort of practitionership or, you know, send you on the muscle or on the bone. And, you know, I’ve, I’ve passed well over 19,000 hours of 1 0 1 coaching with elite athletes. So, long story short was, was doing quite well, but I didn’t, I just knew I didn’t know enough. So I sought out a mentor named Harvey Dorfman, and he’s known as the Yoda Baseball greatest mental game coach to ever live.
TH (07:14):
Cold called him, asked if I could come and spend some time with him in North Carolina during the baseball off season. And he called me back and he said, you’re not gonna live with me kid, are you? And I said, no, I have got an aunt and uncle who lived near you in North Carolina, which was a lie. That wasn’t true at all.
TH (07:56):
And then he started funneling me clients and he also talked to me about like, hey, like developing intellectual property, had never heard of that before. So, you know how this then ties into all these other ones is if you wanna grow and scale and ultimately sell a business, what people don’t understand about this world is one of the first questions any company is gonna ask you is how many trademarks do you own? Okay. My company now, like the one that I, the one existing I own 44 trademarks. Wow. Each one of those trademarks has a dollar value on it. So everyone thinks it’s all about, well how much revenue are you doing in your company? No. A buying company wants to know how well is your stuff protected in the inte cuz this, this is what we’re selling is intellectual property, whether it’s your coaching process, whether it’s the method that you have, whether it’s the brand framework that you use. And so I fell down that rabbit hole of learning about intellectual property. I went to Steve Jobs, his mentor David Sip is his name. He wrote the book visual meetings, visual teams, visual leaders. Steve Jobs only mentor mentioned him once. And that was at a speech that I happened to be at at University of Washington. So I went and learned how to draw models and create models and frameworks and whatnot. So ultimately the peak athlete ended up selling two decades later almost to Ral Madrid. In,
RV (09:25):
So did you have other like coaches or was it just the methodology in the IP that you sold?
TH (09:31):
I, i, rare there was I never scaled through other coaches. I scaled through intellectual property and licensing. So the peak athlete, I built out a amazing training system for developing the inner inner game of athletes. And then I licensed it to the German soccer federation, the Danish Olympic team, the South African spring box sports teams around the world. And
RV (09:58):
I actually just went to a South African spring box rugby game in Sydney, Australia, like a month ago.
TH (10:06):
That’s how lucky are you? That would’ve been a great game because it
RV (10:08):
Was, it was awesome. So you you, you licensed this methodology to these teams. Yeah. So you just cold called these teams and then said, Hey, I’ve got a process for training your athletes and it’ll cost you this much per year or whatever.
TH (10:26):
Well, I mean, this goes back to the benefit of speaking a lot. So I would, because I was speaking so much, all the leads were basically coming in at the end of those talks. And then I had built up such a good name that at the highest level of really any industry, most decisions are made by, you know, Hey Rory, do you know anyone that is XY good at X, Y, and Z? Yeah. And if you can keep your name top of mind, which is, which is branding or personal branding it’s a com It’s a very unfair advantage that you have. So I never had to do as much cold calling. I did do direct outreach, but that really wasn’t my game. My game was getting on stages and around the world talking about what I talked about and which was building the triune athlete, the mentally, emotionally, and physically tough athlete. And and then giving people processes. And then, you know, I would mention in my stories in case studies that, you know, the German soccer federation since 2004 has been, you know, licensing our training and, and their development of their athletes and, and on and on and on.
RV (11:36):
So yeah. So you weren’t cold calling them, you were working through relationships, but they were, they were a client of yours, so they were paying to access your system.
TH (11:46):
Yeah.
RV (11:47):
Yeah. And then you would deliver it to them.
TH (11:49):
Like, I would do a train the trainer series. I would do a trainer, the trainer series with all their people one showing them how to train on it and then second showing them how to coach on it. And that was the secret was because there was a lot of stuff out there that’s training in nature. The problem is if your stuff is only at the level of training someone or educating, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s becoming an embedded part of the ethos or the philosophy of an organization. But when people are now taking the training and implementing it through coaching, that’s a very different you know, essentially metastas metastasized tumor that goes on inside of that company. So, you know, German Soccer Federation renewed that license for well over a decade with me. So I did the work once and then every year I would do an update with them. Typically a two hour call with their head of training and a few other people. And and that was basically it.
RV (12:56):
Interesting. So they’re just, so you’re trained the trainers and then you’re licensing the IP for them to go and administer it. How do you define the difference between training and coaching?
TH (13:10):
Well training is typically one to many people at the front of a room where you’re introducing whether it’s new concepts, new methods, you’re, you’re teaching something, you’re training someone on how to, especially with our world of like intellectual property and think like, I’m not showing you how to swing a baseball bat necessarily. Cuz you can train someone on that and you can, that’s where training and coaching kind of gets a little bit mixed up at the same time. But in our world, there are two very different disciplines. Training is giving them the processes, the systems coaching is ensuring that it’s being put into action. And coaching is really about three things. There’s really, coaching is only three things. Encouragement, accountability, and progress. Those are the three legs of the stool that support a coach. If you’re someone who doesn’t know how to encourage or can’t hold people accountable or can’t model back to people the progress that they’re making, those you would grade yourself very low on being a good coach.
RV (14:12):
And so then who did you sell this to? Because you’re already, you’re already printing money, right? If you’re licensing it, it’s just like, yeah, these people are using it and that person is using it. So like, who did you sell it? How did you identify the buyer? How do you value that kind of a thing. Mm-Hmm.
TH (14:32):
Yeah. So first, who did you sell to? It was as two ways you came in. Relationships with coaches would be the most common way for me to come in. So could be the the, the GM or coach of, say the German national soccer team. Okay. And I develop a relationship with him because I have a relationship already with the head coach of the Cleveland Browns. Like people don’t realize in sport just how much people from other industries now share and talk. And I got to live through that cycle in the eighties and nineties, not necessarily so, but two thousands, very collaborative culture. And so in through the coach or in through training directors you’ll be be looking for, let’s say the director of training for the Danish Olympic team. Okay. They’re the people who are tasked with how can we improve and develop our athletes. And they’re out there constantly doing research, trying to find out what’s new in physiology, behavioral sciences, neurosciences and, and whatnot. And that’s, those would be the two main people that I’d be coming in through was there in professional sports. Like the nhl I did a direct mail campaign and it was, I sent out the direct mail campaign to the GMs of the teams and to the head coaches. So every team would get two letters. One to the GM and one to the head coach of the team.
RV (16:01):
Yeah. So when I meant sell, so that’s awesome. That’s, that’s helpful is just like, you know, there’s somebody in charge of buying the thing and you figure out who they are and you work through referrals and presentations and direct mail. Yeah. I meant when you sold the company, did you, you actually sold that company?
TH (16:17):
Yeah. So what happened was Real Madrid has now become the the diamond on top of the sports mountain. There are sports teams from around the world who go to Real Madrid University. They have a university now and make a pilgrimage to go and learn about how Ral Madrid develops their athletes because they’ve been so far ahead of everybody else. Like North American Sport has been an archaic mountain for a long time with the way that they’ve approached sport. And Ral Madrid has been way on the forefront of diagnostic type stuff. You know, getting people to wear bio feedbacks type devices. And so I was a part of a team that came in to develop Al Madrid’s Peak Performance system. And so like working with like Christian Ronaldo and, and those guys, but that’s who ultimately wanted to buy it and own, own the IP that I had.
RV (17:17):
Okay. So they just,
TH (17:17):
So the deal, the deal that I struck with them was they can buy it and then and, and they didn’t care about any of the revenue. They just wanted to own it. And, and so all those other basically contracts that I had it was a two year out. They could, the German soccer federation could continue to use it for two more years. I got to con I got to keep it for my own personal use though as well.
RV (17:44):
So when you sold it, you basically maintained like your own global license to use it and train it however you want it?
TH (17:50):
No, not global license. I could use it for one on one clientele. Cause I had built up such a big name in sport. Like, you know, when Kobe Bryant is one of your clients and you helped him build out the black mamba, you know, and, and your, my entire world was built around referability. So the only way that you could get to me to work with me one on one was you had to be referred by a present client or past client. And so I could use it for 1 0 1 stuff. That was, that was the only thing I really cared about. Yeah. I
RV (18:16):
Got that. So, and did they approach, so did they approach you about it, I guess? Or did you approach them like they
TH (18:22):
Say No, cause I was already work. Yeah, I was already working with them. The relationship is so strong. They see its impact, you know, and like when you think about the frustrations that all of us can have around wanting to achieve any sort of goal or mark of excellence in some sort of discipline, whether it’s marketing or whatever. And we’ve all been handed bits and pieces to things when someone comes along and they actually have a well defined complete and codified system of dealing with a whole athlete, which then also permeates at the team level. It’s so refreshing. And when you think about from now that program director side of things, or the head coach or the gm, they’re like, this allows me to not have to go out and acquire 10 other people to do this. I got one stop, like it was a full meal deal type thing.
TH (19:13):
And that was always my goal was to like continuously develop it. I was the first, like back when I started sports psychology was the term that was used. And we were the first company to hire three neuroscientists to come onto our team. We were the first ones to dive into the actual science because when people actually know anything about psychology or psychiatry, out of all the scientific disciplines, it’s the least sciency. It’s the most theoretical. And we were the first ones to start really diving into the science of it. And so that’s just because I come from a farm and ranch, you know, my dad has phrases like, well that dog won’t hunt, which is basically a, you know, a barometer. And I found a ton of it in, and I still find a ton of it in the self-help, personal development, you know, all that kind of world space. People are still spouting off stuff that was written 70 years ago that is categorically, categorically proven to either be false or very ineffective. There are way smarter ways to go about achieving some level of mastery or success than what, so
RV (20:20):
Did you have a lot of employees when you sold this? Or was it really just like, it was the ip It was basically a IP and some trademarks and that was,
TH (20:26):
I kept it super lean all the way. So at my, at my max for the peak athlete, we had seven team members.
RV (20:34):
Yeah. Seven. Yeah. Uhhuh. Okay. So then, so then tell us about the next ones. This is fascinating. So the next one, so that’s really like an IP business. You’re basically selling your methodology to someone who just says, we love it, we believe in it, we want it, we wanna own it.
TH (20:51):
Done. Yeah. So, so this ties into again, your personal brand world. So here I am speaking on stages. A lot of times the people in your audience are not target markets for you, but they like the topic that you have. So here I am talking to athletes and sports teams and invariably, once you start rising through the ranks of sport, a lot of times the only people who can afford to keep their athlete in more elite levels is people that have got some money in their pocket. And one of the things that started happening was, I’d get people coming to me afterwards and say, listen, I loved what you just said about you know, the Traian athlete or developing mental toughness or inner game stuff or emotional resiliency and, you know, but I was thinking the entire time, these are all the same issues I’ve got on my team in my business or my team or department in the government.
TH (21:47):
And so people would say like, could you do the same thing for my company? And for the first couple of times I’d say, no, you know, I don’t really know. And that was maybe, maybe the immaturity of my entrepreneurship. A great entrepreneur would’ve, would’ve went. Yeah, absolutely. And so I said this to one of my mentors. You talked about Zig Zigler. Jim Roan was one of my mentors. He was actually my first. Oh cool. I met him when I was 21. And I actually know some funny stories about Jim and Zig behind the scenes too. But Zieg always got very frustrated with the fact that Jim was terrible at returning phone calls
TH (22:36):
So what I then started was a company called No Limits Coaching and Consulting, which was geared towards performance and leadership training and coaching for the corporate and government world. Okay. And I used, again, just speaking to kind of build that up, it was almost like a little side hustle thing I think for me to say yes to. Ultimately though, that one ended up becoming bigger than the sports one, cuz corporate can spend way more money. And it’s actually what forced me to do licensing because I wasn’t able to devote as much time anymore to, to the peak athlete as much. So it’s a great example of how constraints are actually great powers of invention for you because with that, I ended up, because the peak athlete when I ended up selling it was the world’s largest mental game coaching and peak performance company in revenue and in number of people that we served.
TH (23:31):
Cuz we did well over 2 million athletes in total coming through our training programs back then. So No Limits. My first client was actually the Canadian government. They were, cuz that was Rick came up to me at the end of one of my small little talks of 30 kids and asked me. And so I just simply took the ip. And this is a good example of taking it into just a new market. The product never changed that much, you know, change out some lipstick and some eyeshadow on it, right. 20% of it just to make sure it’s customized to that audience. But human performance is human performance. It doesn’t matter if it’s really on the field over here or on the court and or whether it’s in the boardroom or sitting at your desk. Performances. Performance is performance. And that’s, that’s how I started to grow that business. And,
RV (24:22):
But you had sold the, you had sort, you had sort of sold this ip, so like the certain visuals and labels and all those things, you just have frameworks to like, you have to change that, but the principles are the same and the you can’t, you can’t just, like nobody owns principles.
TH (24:38):
Yeah. No one owns principles, but the moment you put something into a shape, you can trademark it. So circles, triangles and squares are your best friend in in our world. So if, if you have steps, if you have processes, you can’t trademark those, but you can trademark things like, so I’ve got one, people can go to it and it’s, it’s a good learning lesson. So my, my entrepreneurial performance training company 90 day year. So if you go to 90 year.com and there’s one called the Five Stages of Business, that hierarchy model, it’s like almost like Maslow’s Hierarchy needs my five stages of business that is a trademark piece of IP that cannot be replicated, reproduced without the express written consent of me and my company.
RV (25:27):
Mm-Hmm.
TH (25:28):
And so I’m a very big protector of ip. I’m actually well known for it in, in kind of our world. Like you, you don’t, you don’t touch my stuff.
RV (25:38):
So let’s talk about that. Okay. So, okay, so these are the three companies. So you have the sports company, then you have the leadership company. Yeah. Who’d you sell the leadership company to
TH (25:47):
Chevron.
RV (25:48):
What?
TH (25:49):
Yeah, so I did a speech in San Antonio, Texas. It was a leadership event. And just so happened that this guy Ken was, who was the executive VP at Chevron, came up to me and they were dealing with a major issue with developing a workforce. That was a big divide between the seniors and the juniors because in the 1980s there was no investment in the oil and gas space. So they had something called the big crew change, which was all these people who were senior were gonna be leaving with all of the intellectual property of how to run a, you know, oil and gas or energy company. And they had no one to backfill with. And they’d been trying to fix it for a decade, but no one was coming together. And he came to me and said, I think you’re the guy who can do this.
TH (26:36):
And I was like, I’ve never been in your space. I mean, I grew up on a farm and ranch and I know the gas world about as much as anyone driving by a, a pumping rig. And I said no at first. And then he convinced me with maybe a little bit more money. And I also realized I was, the opportunity was gonna be incredible cuz I was gonna be sitting down with the CEOs and presidents in sometimes even leaders of countries around the world getting this big project done. And ultimately they ended up buying that leadership and performance training system that I had.
RV (27:10):
So was it very similar? They’re basically buying a set of frameworks and, and visuals and methods and phrases and charts and tables
TH (27:20):
And, and a train the trainer system that could be easily deployed towards remote, you know, areas around the world. Exactly.
RV (27:27):
Yeah. So, so, so the train the trainer thing is interesting. So basically you have to, it’s almost like you have two things to build. You have to build the thing and then you have to build the thing that trains people to teach the thing. Exactly.
TH (27:40):
Yeah. So you’ve got, and the easiest way to think about it is, here’s how you would do it is if you train it, then record yourself going through why you trained it the way that you trained it. And then I would take that and then I would take that transcript and then I would just go make my edits into it. And when you start to like, learn more about facilitation skills, how to be a great facilitator, the first thing that I learned in my, my own growth as a, you know, person in this space in my own career was how unimportant sometimes the content was.
TH (28:19):
Hmm. We all try to overwhelm people with lots of content and what’s more important is getting people traction and momentum. Because most people’s experience of almost all courses and training programs is they never did implement anything. But if you’re the one who even got them from 0.1 to 0.2 or you know, A to B, let alone z cuz we’re all thinking about, I’m gonna get you to Z but that’s, you imparting your own desires and motivations onto the one learner. And all some people want is just a, a micro improvement even. So anyways, that’s just, you know, when you learn good facilitation skills, you learn that, you know, not to overwhelm people with content, content is, is very important.
RV (29:05):
So your buyer came up, your buyer in that scenario came out very similarly. They were someone that saw you in a speech, they became a fan, you develop relationship. They, they become a customer basically as a customer. They go, man, we like it. We believe in it, we want it, we don’t want else to have this. Here’s a check and we’ll take that from you.
TH (29:25):
That’s right.
RV (29:27):
Yeah. I love that. I freaking love that. Yeah. So then, so then the third one is an entrepreneurial coaching company.
TH (29:35):
Well that’s my, that’s my current one. That’s the third one was another one that happened in about a six month time span after I had sold the leadership company. I still had a bunch of intellectual property that was left over and I was kind of just looking for my next thing to do while I was still,
RV (29:54):
They didn’t want, like they didn’t, they didn’t wanna, that
TH (29:57):
Didn’t need didn’t serve their needs. Yeah. Didn’t serve their, you know, the market of who they had. So then I went and sold that last little bit to which, which now getting to your point of trying to find a buyer, this was me going out and finding a buyer. And I, what, what I did was I pinged about, I think it was probably 18 different friends in the industry and said, Hey, I have this piece of like training material. It would most likely be best for this industry, this type of, you know, client, customer, do any of you know anyone who would be interested in, in purchasing it? And a friend reached out right away from the self-defense market and, and said this stuff would be outstanding in for a friend of mine. And then they made the connection and, and that was how it sold. And, and Rory, this is actually a real, this is something I talk about a lot to all of our mentoring clients as well. The hardest part about this business model, everyone says it’s so easy and, and they’re wrong. It’s not, coaching is not as easy as everyone says it is.
RV (31:05):
TH (31:05):
No, coaching is very, everyone says it’s so easy because it doesn’t take any inventory. You don’t have to buy something and it’s gotta be on a ship that comes over and sits in a warehouse somewhere. So it’s taking up cash flow or you know, something like that. But, you know, building any business where you’re building the product and the marketing at the same time is very, very challenging. And so one of the things that I had done early on was I learned about licensing. And so that’s what I did was I went out and bought up and I licensed other people’s training from them to make me go faster so I could go out and impact more people. So you know, my worst decisions in my career have always been based on ego. You know, I needed to do it to satisfy my own ego needs and my best decisions were all ones where I I didn’t try to do it on my own. I went and I, you know, whether it’s license something or I outright just buy it from someone their own ip. Cuz you can buy information for a lot of people don’t know how to value things. And
RV (32:08):
Well I wanted to ask you about that. Like how do you, how do you go about valuing this? Right? So I mean, let’s say somebody’s listening right now and they’re like, man, I’ve been in the mortgage industry for 30 years. I got the training manual, da da da. Like I got the whole thing. And I mean, I, the way that I think about a business is, you know, and I think the, the, yeah. My, my undergrad was accounting, right? And so I process it from a very financial, it’s like, it’s a, it’s a present value of a future stream of estimated cash flows. Mm-Hmm.
TH (33:16):
That’s exactly right. Yeah. And so sometimes people are looking at speed, okay, does this thing, is this thing gonna make us go faster or is this thing gonna make us, or is this thing gonna make, give us a a competitive advantage over other people that was real madrid’s play with with my stuff because they were building up this university and now they didn’t have to go build curriculum, hire other people to put it together, try and get people to collaborate together who have very strong opinions on things, know it has to be this way and this way and and that way. That’s always the challenge about bringing, you know, anyone who’s a subject matter expert on something together is you bring seven together in a room and you got a lot of times seven different opinions on how it should be done or could be done.
TH (34:00):
So you’re avoiding political hassle then as well. And you get to monetize it tomorrow. That was, that was what Ri Madrid could go into. A Chevron wasn’t caring about monetization, they were caring about actually the big massive problem that they had, which was this big crew change. And so, so that was speed, then speed to mitigating the problem that they had. So the way that I think about IP and trademarks, this is just a rough number, but it’s born fruit for me three times for every trademark that you own, it’s a worth about a quarter of a million dollars to your business. Your business is value if you, the moment you add a trademark to your company. Now there’s some conditions to this, which I’ll explain, but it’s gonna add $2,000 in valuation to your business. And now if you are in the coaching space of let’s say goddess energy, let’s just say, you know, and there’s no knock against that.
TH (35:01):
There are some people who are do quite well in that space, but that’s not a big market. That’s a market that you actually have to create with your marketing. Cuz no one wakes up and says, I want to be a goddess today. But there’s other people who wake up and they go, man, I am sick and tired of trying to fight so hard for clients, I need a stronger personal brand. Now they might not say it exactly language that way, but personal branding is quite a large market. Alright? So, you know, if you know Brand Builders Inc goes out and takes a look at their IP and readjusts it and makes it more trademarkable and registers it, and you have 10 of those pieces you just added, even if you have no clients, that’s two and a half million dollars worth of valuation
RV (35:54):
And, and to do this process. So each one you’re saying is maybe roughly valued at 250,000. Yeah. How much does it cost? Cuz you, if you create it, you gotta hire a lawyer, you gotta fill out some paperwork, you gotta file, do some filing, you gotta wait for some approval, you have to like answer questions, go back and forth, and then one day the,
TH (36:17):
It’s not that, it’s, it’s, it sounds super hard to a lot of people. I thought it was exactly like that to Rory the first time I did it. And then I
RV (36:24):
Was actually describing that like, it’s pretty easy. Like, it’s like these are a few very simple tacticals. It’s a, I mean, is there more to it? Well,
TH (36:32):
The, the answer the answer for me and you, I mean, I send everyone to the same lawyer that’s been doing it for me for a long, long time, and he’s been, he’s, he’s literally specializes just in our space, Peter you know, based outta New York and, you know, yeah, I think I I I even forget how much it costs me anymore, but I think it’s probably somewhere around 2,500 bucks, you know, from start to finish with the different people who are involved. Very little time on my end to get it done. But, you know, someone else can go and do all the filings themselves and it’ll cost them a few hundred bucks.
RV (37:05):
Mm-Hmm.
TH (37:06):
RV (37:39):
And what if you find out that, like what if you find out what if you find out that somebody created something after you, so like, let’s say that you have created this thing, it’s been in use and now somebody else has it. If they got the trademark first, does that prevent you from basically getting it? No.
TH (37:59):
No, because there’s I, I forget the actual technical term. It’s just on the,
RV (38:05):
It’s like a first, it’s like a first in use.
TH (38:06):
Yeah, exactly. It’s the word is in, there’s something in use. Yeah. But yeah, it’s, if it’s, if you’ve been, if you can prove that it’s been in use for a long, and it is happened with me a couple of times and we were able to prove on two different occasions that we had at in use first. I actually just won a lawsuit against Instagram because they were not giving me an Instagram handle and profile. That’s a trademark name of ours. And Instagram lost and they had to hand it over to me.
RV (38:33):
Take that Zuck. Yeah,
TH (38:36):
You don’t, you don’t win many of those battles
RV (38:44):
So they have to, they have to grant you the handle because you have the registered trademark of that. Absolutely.
TH (38:49):
Because the, the laws of the US trumped whatever their privacy policy in terms of use policy was on their site.
RV (38:57):
Uhhuh
TH (40:19):
I’ll never forget when Creative Comments came out, and then I had a few friends who jumped on it that were in it that had ip and I pinged both of them. And I said, you’re opening up a can of worms here. And like, cuz you can’t unsqueeze the toothpaste once you let your IP or your frameworks be open for anyone to use. Now again, good example is actually business model generation, what I think is one of the best books written in the last 30 years, our most important business books written in the last 30 years by good friend of mine a Smith Alexander Osterwalder. And, you know, it’s, it’s a, it’s a canvas, it’s a map of business models. Okay, well they, they opened theirs up for creative comments. So if you went and did a Google search for business model canvas or business model generation canvas, you’re gonna get back 36 million results of that image and that canvas being on different blogs and consultants websites around the world, well, a few years back, they wanted to try to stuff all that stuff back inside because they were now their business model changed and they were now running a lot of workshops.
TH (41:27):
Well, problem is, is there were a lot of other consultants out there running workshops off of their canvas. And that’s probably, if you were to factor it out, well over a hundred million in certifications and licensing that’s lost to that business because they could have certified those people in going out and using that canvas. And now they’re certified partners of the business model generation world. So when I say when you get back, going back to your world or idea of policing it, a I tell the story over and over and over again, it’s a part of my brand story. I tell the story of, you don’t touch our stuff. It took, I’ve got 19,000 plus hours on the field of play doing one-on-one coaching. That’s not counting the group and the speeches and the trainings I’ve done around the world, which now doubles that number.
TH (42:18):
Right? you don’t take my stuff and it’s not cease and desist that we send, we sue and we, the minimum amount you earn in America for IP infringement is quarter of a million dollars. Okay? Now we take that money and we donate. I don’t do it. So I can earn money. We take that money and we take off whatever the cost was and then we go and we donate it to one of our favorite charities. She’s the first, which helps young girls in third world countries put them through school. But all it took was a couple of those and people getting stung very hard by our team that we have an army of thousands of people, Rory, who ping us every week saying, Hey, I just saw someone in it looks like they’re using your, your thing. And, and a lot of times it’s not that, like, it’s not an infringement, but we have a lot of people, we found people who were giving away some of our course material as opt-ins and downloads and lead magnets for free. Well, that guy in particular, he’s one of the people who, this was about four years ago, five years ago now, quarter million dollars he lost.
RV (43:29):
Interesting. So then you just, because, because it’s, because it, it is actually protected by a trademark. You’ve got the right to do that. And so you absolutely, you just file a suit and they’re either, I guess, and so they either have to settle with you or they have to stop using it or, or
TH (43:46):
No. Like, no, it’s, it’s, no, they, Rory, it’s, it’s so obtuse and you know, whatever other term can come up right now. But to think that someone isn’t doing it maliciously, they’re doing it malicious, they know what they’re doing, we go to the end, we finish it with them. Interesting. There is no appol, I’m so sorry, I didn’t know what I was doing. And no, there’s none of that. There’s none of that. That’s why like for me, like attribution, it costs you nothing to say, I heard this amazing quote in the book, take the Stairs, or I saw Rory Vaden speak on stage and he says something that was an absolute truth. Rent is due every single day, you know, whatever the full quote is right? No one’s gonna remember that you like, it doesn’t cost you anything to sanitation. I mean, I’ve had people come to me and say like, did you have to name drop the 35 people? And I’m like, well that was their quote
RV (44:48):
Was their citing the citing the So you’re
TH (44:50):
Citing yourself. Yeah. And I am, I’m standing on the shoulders of so many amazing people that help me get to where I am. I’m not gonna dishonor, you know Harvey Dorfman as someone who was so critical to my success when it was his idea that I was just sharing up there
RV (45:05):
Mm-Hmm.
TH (45:05):
RV (45:07):
Yeah. So yeah, this idea, eye
TH (45:10):
Opening, I get it. Like it pains you, it pains you. And this is my problem with people who don’t understand this space. People think that just because it’s words or it’s a picture that anyone else can go and do it. No. If you walked into a sports store and you took a pair of soccer cleats off the shelf and tried to walk up with it, it’s, it’s not shocking that you would get dinged for that. Well, you can’t walk into my intellectual property storehouse and take my thing off the shelf and go pass it off as your own. It’s just not gonna happen.
RV (45:43):
Uhhuh. yeah. Yeah. Well this is eye opening, man. I mean, I, my my Ted talk which is probably the most organically viral thing that we’ve ever had is few, few million views. Yeah. It’s all based around a diagram that I created called the Focus Funnel. And my guess is focus funnel is probably trademarked by someone, but that visual is, if you Google it, it’s everywhere. And you, you know, it’s like all over the place. It’s cuz millions of people have seen that, seen that talk, but we don’t have a trademark on it. Mm-Hmm.
TH (46:57):
Well, I was gonna say, I was gonna say like, so the number that I’ve typically found in a business that’s more mature like yours and that’s, there’s no secret as to why I say I’ve got 44 registered trademarks in our name right now is because the average really well designed program has about 40
RV (47:17):
Mm-Hmm.
TH (47:42):
And, and bigger companies like private equity companies, that’s what they’re gonna look at. They’re gonna, that’s gonna, cuz everyone wants to sell their customer list or their revenue or whatever and you know, people don’t realize that you’re being plugged into a larger ecosystem and yeah, it’s, it’s funny cuz we’re talking about this topic, it’s not something I typically ever get interviewed on. Yeah.
RV (48:02):
That’s why I wanted to ask you about this
TH (48:04):
RV (48:40):
Yeah. Well that is, yeah, that, I’ll say that, that has shaken me more than a couple times where I’m going, this person is basically telling a real, like almost verbatim from something that I posted three months ago, three months ago. And I’m like it’s hard to go. Yeah. You know, is it the same? But it’s like, it’s so close that you’re like, I think anybody would raise an eyebrow at, at this. And it’s anyways, that’s the,
TH (49:11):
Here’s, that’s, here’s here’s the reality. The public doesn’t care.
RV (49:15):
Yeah. The public doesn’t care.
TH (49:17):
Yeah. The public doesn’t care. And so, because I’ve had friends in me like man, because they think I’m spending so much time doing, so I’m like, I don’t spend any time doing this. This is, that’s the purpose of having a systems and processes in your business. And there’s a team of like, when it, when when there’s an inquiry that comes in from a former client or a client and they say, Hey, I think this person, my executive assistant passes that straight along to the legal side and then they just take care of it, I might become aware of it.
RV (49:44):
Mm-Hmm.
TH (49:44):
RV (50:05):
Interesting. Well buddy, this has been amazing. I know that you, and you’re doing a lot of work with entrepreneurs and things now, and we didn’t, I mean we went way over time, but like where, where should people go if they wanna plug into what you got going on?
TH (50:19):
So Todd herman.me is my kind of home base on the internet and that has links going out to all the different other, you know, whether it’s my book, the Alter Ego fact and and whatnot there, or entrepreneurial stuff. But I know you got a big coaching audience too, and I’m scaling up a, a coaching platform to help coaches grow and serve their their people. Because what people don’t under the hardest part about this business isn’t necessarily the marketing side, it’s actually the delivery side. Because our model is all about if you’re a coach, you are, you’re actually getting paid to help someone transform in whatever way. Whether it’s building a new skill, you know, reaching a new outcome, finishing a project or even, you know, deeper emotional transformations that might be happening. And the thing that actually grows this business is actually client success. It is not marketing like everyone thinks it is, it is client success cuz that activates referrals, retention, and testimonials. And so we’re building out a platform and we, we’ve built it out. We’ve got some, we’ve got thousands of people onto the platform. Tony Robbins company came onto it as well. And yeah, so that’s what I’m excited about right now. And that’s up coach.com.
RV (51:31):
That’s cool. So up coach and it’s, it’s basically like a, a tool for helping coaches manage all their clients and like track like the progress and
TH (51:39):
All that. And their clients can log in, you can put courses in there, you can track their habits, you can add tasks to them or manage projects. Like there’s, you can put all your worksheets right inside of it so that you’ve got visibility into them, actually whatever they’re writing instead of it being a Google doc or a PDF download as well.
RV (51:56):
Really cool. Yeah, really cool. All right, well we’ll drop you, we’ll drop you back link, we’ll drop you an SEO backlink them as well. You will have the full authority of brand builders group.com backlinking. So Todd, man, this is great. I’ve, I just, I I I’ve always just, I learned so much from talking with you and it’s always just such a sharp perspective and just really helpful man. So I appreciate you going off script here and like sharing with us. Like this is definitely an interview like no other that we’ve ever had on the show. And that’s
TH (52:29):
Well good. We zagged we zagged today. So that’s cool with
RV (52:33):
Me. Yeah, I love it, man. So everyone make sure that you go follow Todd, send him some comments, send him some love. And brother, we just, we’re, we’re grateful for you and we and we wish you the best.
TH (52:46):
Cheers man. This has been great.
Ep 331: How to be Comfortable Selling High Dollar Offers with Ian Koniak | Recap Episode
RV (00:02):
Love, love, love hearing the true success stories of our clients who, you know, get to the point to where they’ve reached such a level of expertise that we can have on our podcast to share with you. And that’s what this Ian Cognac interview was all about. I mean, I, if you haven’t heard it, I mean, it’s so inspiring. He, he joined Brand Builders Group three years ago, y’all, three years ago, and three years later he’s doing almost, he’s gonna do about one and a half million dollars in revenue his first full year in business. So the first two years he was with us, he had a, he had a job, he had a day job, He was doing the stuff. We were teaching him on the side, he was building up. And then, man, and, and then, you know, he, he, it was time to leave.
RV (00:49):
He left, he executed, he’s followed the playbook and almost one and a half million dollars in revenue. He’s at 1.2 million right now, 10 months into his first year full year. And he’s gonna do about a million and a half dollars, is what he told me. That is inspiring. And that could be you that could be you. Like, and can we guarantee it? No, we can’t guarantee it. Like, we can’t guarantee those results for everybody. But I guarantee you that everything that we teach and talk about works, it always works. Eventually it works. The question is just when and how fast and on what magnitude and what scale. I was telling our internal team this morning you know, we just, we just had our client, another client of ours, Eric Thomas, et the hip hop preacher, just, we, we ran his whole book launch with him and his team and start to finish, manage the entire thing.
RV (01:41):
We hit the New York Times Best Sellers list. And I was telling our team that the playbook we run for Eric Thomas is the same playbook that we run for someone who is a first time self published author with zero followers. It’s the same playbook. It always works. The only difference is the magnitude of the results. And so this stuff works. And anyways, just so invigorating to see one of our clients like Ian succeeding. But I mean, we have a, we need to start like a little seven figure club at Brand Builders Group because you know, Lisa Woodruff and Candy Valenti and Anton Gun, like, we have a, we have a large group of clients that have gone to seven figures, like within a couple years of working with us, which is really, really awesome. So anyways, the conversation was around sales and specifically I titled that episode, How to Be Comfortable Selling High Dollar Offers because that’s what Ian has done.
RV (02:37):
If, again, if you haven’t listened to the interview we’ve known him for years. He sold for RICO business products, and then he was the number one salesperson worldwide at Salesforce selling million dollar deals. And he made over seven figures a year in income there. So and then he became a brand builders group client, and is now, you know, doing his personal brand doing sales coaching, specifically B2B sales coaching. So if you’re someone who sells business to business, like you sell to other companies, Ian is one of the people that we, we recommend. So if you go to brand builders group.com/ian cognac, that’s K O N I K you can, excuse me, you can check that out and learn about what he’s up to. It’s just, he’s literally like the, one of the best in the world, and that’s what he’s, that’s what he’s teaching people to do.
RV (03:28):
So I love that. Now I’m gonna share with you three of my takeaways things that I was reminded of. Obviously, sales is something we spend a lot of our time doing. We don’t focus, Brand builders group doesn’t focus so much on teaching B2B sales. We don’t focus so much on selling to companies. We do teach people how to book keynotes. Sell keynotes is something we do really, really well. But outside of selling keynotes, most of our curriculum is around selling business to consumer and directly to an end person to get them to buy. But in our former life, you know, with the way that AJ and I met was, we started a company that was sales coaching and sales col co consulting. And we exclusively sold sales training to companies. And that was an eight figure business that we sold in 2018.
RV (04:12):
And so we, we know a lot about sales, but these days most of what we teach is selling B to C business to consumer. And so I’m gonna, I’m gonna share with you three of my highlights, three of my re reminders that I got from Ian, and, you know, just kind of like triggered things that I wanna share with you specifically for selling high dollar offers, B to c business to consumer. Because, you know, we, we talked about a lot of things in that interview, b2b, b2c, enterprise sales, It all applies. But here in this recap, I’m gonna talk about three things that really are going to help you sell high dollar offers and feel comfortable selling high dollar offers, offers. And by being comfortable, I mean, not feeling slimy, not feeling sleazy and, and just being confident. And yeah. So these are really, really important.
RV (05:06):
All right, so number one, and this was a, this was a, a, I’m gonna use the words that Ian said here, I thought were eloquent, is he said, Make your number one intention helping your client achieve a goal rather than pitching your product. Like you wanna make your number one intention helping a client achieve a goal rather than pitching your product. And this, I I, I couldn’t agree more. Like, it’s almost like if you’re in a conversation with somebody and you’re focused on the sale, you’re gonna miss, you’re gonna, you’re gonna lose the relationship. You have to look past the sale. And almost like even when I’m talking to a prospect, like if I’m in an active sales conversation with somebody sales to me is not about talking somebody into something they don’t want. And it’s not about talking someone into, to something they
Speaker 2 (05:56):
Don’t need. Sales isn’t really talking people into anything. Sales is about understanding what is their current situation and does the thing I have help them accomplish the end result. So when I’m in an active conversation with a sales prospect, I’m like looking past the sale, meaning it’s almost like I’m, I’m, I’m listening to what they want to achieve in their life. And I’m saying, Okay, let’s pretend they actually bought. Let’s assume that they bought, if they were a customer of ours, right? Now, are we set up to help them achieve the thing they’re saying they want? That’s it. If we are, then the answer is, you gotta buy. Like, you need to sign up, like we’re, we’re gonna help you. If the answer is no, then it’s definitely not. And if the answer is unsure, I have to ask more questions. I have to listen until I get clear.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
I can’t really help them get clear on whether or not we can help them until I’m a hundred percent clear. But it’s like, that’s why the more that we’ve gone on, the more specific our audience becomes, and the more we narrow in on what we are doing and we’re growing, we’re reaching more people by narrowing our focus. Like at brand builders, at our core, we help experts, right? We also help entrepreneurs and we can help executives. But our core business is, is like if you are an expert of any type, you’re a coach, consultant, speaker, author, a doctor, a lawyer, a chiropractor, you, you know, a financial advisor. Like if you are an expert person who wants to become more well known, meaning your business will grow, you will make more money, you will make more impact. You’ll, you’ll achieve your life mission by having more people know about you.
Speaker 2 (07:47):
If you’re an expert who wants to become more well known, and I say this as humbly as I can, you should give us your credit card and just sign up. Like, we are the best in the world at this. We are like, I, I just, we, we’ve we’re, we’ve done this so long in so well, in such a deep way that like, if you are an expert who’s trying to become more well known, you’re trying to reach more people, you’re trying to make more impact, like, we got you. Now, if you’re not that, then that’s where it’s like, yeah, we’re not set up, we’re not, you know, we’re not set up for you, right? Like, you, maybe we’re not the right fit. You know, it is a great example of this interview with Ian. If you are, if you’re an enterprise salesperson, if you’re a W two employee and you sell to other companies, brand builder’s group, we’re not your people.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Doesn’t mean you can’t learn stuff from us, You can, but I’d go, you should talk to Ian, like homeboy is the best in the world at this thing. Like all he did was sell companies like business to business products. So for you in your business, it’s about being super clear on what results can you help people experience? What goals can you help them accomplish? Somebody comes to us, they say, I wanna be a bestselling author. We go, Yep, give us your credit card. I wanna become, I wanna speak on more stages and bigger stages. Yep. Give us your credit card. I wanna get paid more money for speaking, coaching, consulting. Yep. Give us your money. I wanna generate more online leads for my, for my service based business. Yep. Give us your money. Like, I, I want to be, you know, I wanna grow my social media following, I wanna have a bigger podcast.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
I I want to I wanna scale my expert business. I want, you know, more automation. Give us your money. Like this is what we do and we’re gonna dominate for you. We, you gotta be clear on the results that you can deliver for people. If you wanna get clear on what your uniqueness is and what separates you from everyone else, give us your money. Like, that’s our flagship thing. Like, we do that so well. So what is the result that you provide for your clients? Like, it’s, it’s almost not even thinking about what do you do? Like we all think about what do I like, what do we do? And people say, What do you do for a living? I want you to think about for a second, just go, What are the results that I am capable of providing to somebody? And the more that you live in that world, you think in that world you talk in that world, you create videos about that world, you write copy in that world.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
And then specific here, the more you have conversations in that world, like from that perspective of going, Okay, the person is talking to me, here are the results that I’m capable of helping them to deliver, are these the results that are on their checklist? Are these the results they’re pursuing? If they are, then it’s like, give me your money. Sign up. You’re crazy. Like you’re looking for a path that I have walked down. Come with me, let me show you the way. But if they’re not, then go, I’m not, I haven’t been down that path. I don’t know how to do that. You know, and try to try to point ’em to somebody else who can, right? I, I don’t think I would, I would not be the best person in the world to coach someone to be the number one enterprise B2B salesperson. I would definitely refer that person to Ian.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
I’d be like, You should talk to my friend Ian. Like he’s got this dialed in now. You wanna launch a book, You wanna become a bestselling author? There’s nobody in the world that I could say legitimately no one in the world that could do that better than us. There’s a, there’s only a couple other people who I would say they know what they’re talking about. But like, less than five. So, and, and I would say that in many ways we’re, we’re, we’re one at least one of the best in the world. Same thing, You wanna Ted talk, you wanna grow your speaking career, you wanna grow your coaching, your information products, like, gosh, we’re your people. So get clear on that. But if you’re, if you’re focused on making the sale, you’re overlooking, you’re not looking at results, you’re just trying to make money.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
And so it’s like you have to overlook the sale. But what I mean is look past the sale, assume that they were a client, Could you help them actually achieve what they’re asking? If yes, they should buy, if no, they should not. So I love when he said the, the, the intention of make it your number one intention to help your client achieve a goal rather than to pitch your product is so good, so good. The second thing I wanna talk to you about is called the Pressure Free promise. And this is a bit right out of our formal curriculum. So if you’re not yet a brand builders group client we have 14 topics in our, in our training program. Each of them is a different two day experience, but one of them is called Pressure Free Persuasion, which is our version of how we teach sales, the methodology that we call service centered selling.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
And, and we have coined this whole new way of selling you know, all these proprietary frameworks. And one of the, one of the techniques in that program is called the pressure free promise. And the pressure free promise is all about releasing pressure in any sales environment. Like whether it’s one to one, one to many high dollar offer, low dollar offer, it’s one of the most powerful things you can do. It’s like, it’s such a tactical thing. And what is it? The pressure free promise is just promising people that no matter what happens, you are not gonna pressure them. That’s what the pressure free promise is, is saying that, Look, if I’m gonna show you, I’m gonna learn about what you need, and I’m gonna tell you about what we do, and if there’s a match, I’m gonna facilitate the process of you buying because it’s gonna be the right thing for you.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
If what we have does not fit what you need, I’m gonna facilitate the process of you saying no, and that’s okay. I’m gonna, my job is to help you decide what is best for you. My job is not to sell you. My job is, is I’m a matchmaker. So it, the pressure free promise is a mentality. It’s also an actual, like, literal phrase. But the the mentality is my job is a matchmaker. If this is a yes, I’m gonna help you move forward. If this is a no, I’m gonna help you say no, but I’m gonna help you get clear that it’s gonna be one of those. But I promise you, either way, I’m not gonna pressure you. That’s the mindset. It, and, and, and we’re articulating, we’re saying out loud, we’re telling people. And so it sounds like, it sounds, you know, some variation of this.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
It doesn’t have to be verbatim, but it’s saying, you know what, You know, Lisa, what I wanna do today is I really wanna understand what you’re trying to accomplish, and then I’m gonna tell you a little bit about what we have. And if this is a good fit for you, then I’m gonna encourage you and I’m gonna show you how to sign up. If it is not though, I’m gonna encourage you not to sign up. Whether you buy or not is not my main concern. My main concern is figuring out if what we have is a good fit for you. And so, I promise either way, I’m very easy to say no to. I promise it’s okay if you don’t buy, I wanna let you know it’s okay to say no. That’s the pressure free promise. You’re, you’re, you’re promising them. We’re not gonna have pressure.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
We’re promising them. I’m not talking ’em into something. We’re, but, and we’re promising them clarity. Like what, what I’m really committed to in a sales conversation is clarity. It’s clarity about the match. I’m a matchmaker. If it’s a good match, I’m gonna tell you to buy it and I’m gonna help you do it. If it’s not, I’m gonna tell you no, I’m not afraid of a no. And this is the difference between a pressure, a service centered salesperson and a normal commissioned breast salesperson. I’m not afraid of a no, I don’t mind a no no is fine. I’m not trying for a, no, I don’t, It’s not that I want to, No, I want to, yes, but I’m not afraid of a no. I’m not resistant to a no. A yes is good. A yes is what I want. A no is fine. What I don’t want is maybe, maybe is unacceptable, maybe is not okay.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Allowing people to say maybe is a disservice, not just to you, It’s a disservice to them because if they say yes, they can powerfully move forward. If they say no, they can powerfully move forward. If they say, maybe we are both stuck, neither of us can move forward. We have allowed ourselves to be stuck in this indecisive limo. And that is where mediocrity breeds and thrives in the world of indecision, right? I’d rather make the wrong decision than live an indecision. I’d rather take the wrong action than live an inaction. I would rather make it a no than allow it to be a, maybe, maybe is disgusting, like maybe is despicable. I like, don’t hate the no, hate them. Maybe like I’m okay with them saying no. I’ll encourage ’em to say no. In fact, if they tell me, maybe I’m gonna make it a no cuz I don’t want maybe is not powerful, maybe is mediocre, maybe as marginal, maybe is stuck in a world of not making a difference.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
It’s maybe as stuck in a world of inaction, maybe as I’m not doing anything great with my life, but I haven’t yet freed myself from being stuck in the middle to actually go out and do something. So I’m fine with no, I’m not okay with maybe, So you don’t say all that to them.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
You give them permission to say yes. The moment you give them permission to say no is also the same moment that you give them permission to say yes. Because by allowing them the permission to tell you no, all their walls come down, all their, their relu, their sales resistance comes down, their, their buying reluctance comes down and all of their preconceived notions dissolve, and they can just have an open, honest conversation with you, which is what we both want, right? And so it’s, it’s about being service centered, not self centered. That’s what this is about. So that’s the pressure free promise. The third thing is turn your customer force into your sales force. This is the ultimate form of lead generation. The ultimate form of lead generation is turning your customer force into your sales force. How do you do that? It’s so simple.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
Is it asking for referrals? Yes, we should ask for referrals, but it is by over delivering for your current customers. Like the best form of prospecting is helping your current customers succeed. The best form of prospecting new customers is loving on your current customers. When your new, your current customers succeed and thrive, then it makes referrals easy, which means the next sale is easy. But if your, your current customers aren’t succeeding or they’re not loving the program, or they’re not getting results, they’re not gonna tell anybody for you. But when they are, right? When you satisfy a customer, not just satisfy, but when you over satisfy, when you create a raving fan of your current customer, every customer becomes a salesperson. That typically happens much faster than recruiting and hiring and training a new salesperson. So turn your customer force into your sales force by overdelivering, loving on them, giving them more than they expect, giving them and, and, and just being consumed with the question, How can I help my clients succeed faster?
Speaker 2 (20:16):
That’s what we want you to be focused on. That’s what we want you thinking about. How can I help you succeed faster? Not how can I make more money off of you, not how can I get, you know, more referrals from you? Like, those are fine things, but make your number one focus. How can I help you succeed faster? How can I will help you win better? And the way that we came up with our whole affiliate program was, I didn’t wanna sell to my friends. Like, I have all these friends who are speakers and authors who are very successful and they need a lot of ’em, frankly, need what we do or can benefit from. They may don’t need it. They can benefit a lot from what we can do. We can help them a lot, but I didn’t wanna have to sell to them.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
So it was like, great, well, what if we came up with an affiliate program where we paid them money for everyone they introduced to us, and then they could use that money to buy from us? Like John Gordon the author of the Energy Bus just became a brand builders group client, full fee, full paying client of ours. And we’re working with him on some sales stuff, right? Him and his team on, on scaling their, their sales team and, and scaling some of their, their high dollar offers. Well, John’s been a friend. John’s a mentor of mine. I don’t like, you know, I was like, Ah, I don’t really love trying to sell to, you know, my friends and mentors, but he referred so much business to us that he had all this money. And I said, Hey, John, like, we’re, you know, we can pay you this money, or, you know, you can, you can, you can pay it back to us and we can offer you some services.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
And it was like done. And so everybody wins, right? So we came up with that by, by by, by being focused on how can we help others succeed? And that mindset, just by itself is what this is all about. That is what this personal brand journey is all about. How can I help others succeed? Not how can I get more followers, not how can I be more famous, not how can I make more money? How can I help others succeed? How can I help others get a result? How can I make a bigger impact in their life? That is what Brand Builders Group is all about. That’s part of our uniqueness. Like, like it or not, that’s who we are. And that’s what we are about. And, and if that is you, then you are what we call a mission driven messenger. And you should become one of our clients.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
We will rock your world
Speaker 3 (23:44):
Need, need more money, right? Like we, we need our clients to succeed. We need our clients to win. That is like the ultimate fulfillment and we get out of all business is seeing our clients win. So thanks for being here. Thanks for letting us be a part of hopefully helping you win in one way or another. Keep coming back, share this episode with somebody who wants to feel more comfortable selling High dollar offers. And we’ll see you next time on the Influential Personal Brand podcast.
Ep 330: How to be Comfortable Selling High Dollar Offers with Ian Koniak
RV (00:02):
I am so looking forward to this conversation with a friend of mine and AJ’s for years. His name is Ian Cognac, and he’s one of the best salespeople that we have ever come across. He, we actually, aj, AJ met him first before I did, and they became friends. He was a sales training client of ours and he at our former life, at our former company. And he had us doing some work with him, him, his team. He was one of the top sales people nationwide for a company called Rico, which was like selling copiers and, you know, sort of business office products and things like that. And then he left and went to Salesforce and so the, the big crm, Salesforce, and he was the number one enterprise account executive at Salesforce in the world. So he’s been a sales manager. He has been a top salesperson.
RV (00:56):
And then we started working with him again as a client here recently at Brand Builders Group a couple years ago. We want to hear a little bit about that story when Ian finally left sales and started his journey as an entrepreneur now in sales coaching, which is something that we don’t provide at Brand Builder’s group, like per se, as like cl classic sales coaching like we once did. And so anyways, I wanted to have Ian on for you to meet him and teach us some tips and tools for how we can sell more in our businesses. So, Ian, welcome to the show, Brother. It’s been a long time coming,
IK (01:32):
Rory, it’s so good to be here. And I just wanna say thank you for enrolling me in 2019. I, I joined Brand Builders in April. You were just starting out in, since then, It’s been over three years and I, I’ve quit my job. I’m a full-time solo entrepreneur and now I get the privilege of, you know, helping people learn to sell in a way that has high integrity and purpose and connected to what they want most. And it really is because of, you know, a big part of it is because of following the playbook of Brand Builders Group and the work we’ve done. I’ve been working with your, you, you and your, your partners for, for over three years now, and you’re doing great work. So it’s great to connect as a guest and a testim testimony to, to the work we’ve done together.
RV (02:15):
Man, that’s awesome. Like what Give, it was a sense of what, what is your business doing this year? Cuz it’s like, so when you first started working with us, you, you had a job, so you were making a bunch of money cuz you were top. We’re gonna talk about that in a second, but then like just on that note for a second, how has your business evolved and like, give us a sense of the scope of the business that you’re up to now, three years into it?
IK (02:37):
Yeah, so, so at first it was really about like, who do I wanna serve? What, what is my brand positioning statement? Who are, who are my icp? What, what am I gonna do? And it was really about creating that audience. So I, I spent the better part of 2019, 2020 really just kind of figuring it out and doing a side hustle, if you will, coaching. I wasn’t ready to walk away from a seven figure income per se, in, in sales. And I’m supporting my family and couple kids. I’m the, the breadwinner for my, for my household. And so, yeah, I was very nervous and I, I remember you, you said to me, you said, Just go for it, Ian, you’re gonna be fine. And I, I, I just wasn’t ready to just go all in yet. So the first two years was really about building an audience and kind of proving out the model.
IK (03:17):
I was doing private coaching and then I decided to deploy the same program which brand builders taught, which is having three levels of membership. So I deployed a one year membership model where I call it bronze, silver, and gold coaching through my platform, which is untapped your sales potential. And through that the gold is private coaching with me. The group the silvers group coaching in, in the bronze is online coaching and online access. So I’ve built a amazing portal with all kinds of training modules. I meet with a mastermind every week where we have live events and group calls and I do private coaching for my most exclusive clients at, wanna work with me one on one. Just to give you some numbers, the business already is surpassed seven figures and we are just in October right now for my first full year as a solar
RV (04:03):
Show. Wow.
IK (04:05):
Yeah, it’s doing, it’s going great. I got, I got 70 paying clients, 20 in gold 50 in silver and I haven’t even launched the bronze yet. So this is all, yeah, it’s all happening very quickly and it’s very exciting for me.
RV (04:17):
Man, that’s amazing. So seven figures in your first full year well that’s awesome. So, Well thank you for that. Thanks for sharing that. And you know, I I, I remember if you’re listening and you’re a client of, of brand builders, you know, we teach the content diamond, which is like our social media strategy where we talk about answer one question every week on social media, on video, just five to seven minutes and just do it over and over and over. And we’d always tell people like, if you’ll just do this, if you just buy into this and you just follow the process, like it will work. It never doesn’t work, it always works. It’s just a question of when, and you started posting videos on LinkedIn in 2019, and I remember you’re getting eight views and six views and you did that relentlessly. And I don’t know how many views your videos are getting now, but I saw that you recently were ranked as like the number one LinkedIn sales star by sales success media, like, and so you’ve just been doing that one thing relentlessly.
IK (05:23):
Yeah. Content market is how many and
RV (05:24):
How many views are you getting now on those videos?
IK (05:27):
I’m averaging per post 30,000 views per,
RV (05:30):
Oh my
IK (05:30):
Gosh, that’s not, I’m, yeah,
IK (06:17):
In the beginning it was like, okay, just stay consistent, stay consistent, gradually built up. And, and what happened is the, for anyone who’s thinking of building brand and has like their own business still that they’re, you know, employed at corporate or whatever, I would say start the audience building now. Cuz when I was finally ready to launch my platform, it was in May of 2022. So I’d been building my brand for three years up, up to that point since joining Brand Builders. And when I launched my private coaching, the gold coaching sold out in two days, all spots, ah, and then the silver sold 50 seats. So I, I had over a half a million dollar launch as a result of, you know, building this audience. So people say it’s like the tip of the iceberg, you’re only seeing the tip, but what was beneath it in this case was consistent content posting every single week for three years prior to that launch.
IK (07:06):
And when you finally have a product, you’ve established that reputation, you established trust. Here’s the best part, and I don’t know a single person in the world who’s done this. If you know someone, please tell me. But the launch occurred without any sales calls. So everyone spent either 6,000 or $12,000 online in paying via credit card. Wow. No sales team. So that’s, that’s really what I was most proud of is the fact that there had been so much trust established that people were gonna pay 12,000 without even talking to me or having a sales person to talk to about the program. So it really does work when you’re consistent and when you’re answering the right questions and solving the right problems that people actually face and care about.
RV (07:44):
Yeah, I love that man. And, and so it was once, so you did it once a week for three years, so like 150 videos, and then by the time you were ready to like, make the jump and do this, you sold half a million bucks in the first launch.
IK (07:58):
Yeah, that’s right. And, and, and the other thing I started doing is I, I actually hired somebody in 2022, you know, I think it was probably February-ish working with him six or seven months. And he took my top performing videos and my top performing content and he think of them as a ghost writer, but he reposes and rewrites some of this stuff. It almost almost sounds like me. So he helps me. So now I’ve gotten to the point where I do probably two or three original posts, one video and a couple texts, some, sometimes some pictures on LinkedIn per week. And then he’ll fill in the gaps. So I’m actually posting seven days a week now. So my content volume has gone up to daily on LinkedIn and I’ve seen a dramatic increase in traffic from when I posted once a week to when I’m doing posting daily now. So my, my followers is up to 30,000 on LinkedIn and the view is the engagement is, is really high as well. So it’s been, it’s been really interesting to see how well you can scale if you find someone who writes like you, who can analyze the data, who can repurpose what’s relevant. Yeah. It’s almost like he, he’s my voice, right? So
RV (09:03):
Yeah, that’s the, that’s part of the content I’m in is get the videos transcribed and send ’em to a writer and then, and then have ’em repurpose the content. Like, I mean, it’s just awesome, Ian, because you know, I’ve known you for so long, you’ve always been super successful in business. Like, but to actually see you doing it and go, oh man, what we teach works like it actually works. Oh my gosh. Like if you do it, it works. Like it really, it really, really fill me up. So, so I do wanna talk about the sales specific because like brother, you have crushed it. I mean now, even now in your own business you’re still selling and, and you know, using your personal brand to do some of that. But like, how did you become the number one, Like you were number one at rico, like you were one of the number one like directors of, of sales, I remember that. So you had, and you had 70 account executives underneath you. That was about the time we met. Then you became number one at Salesforce. Like what is it about what you do, do you think that has made you a number one salesperson versus, you know, all the sales managers, the salespeople, you’ve managed other sales people that have been on teams, you know, people you’ve met in, in the industry. Like what, what makes you a number one or what makes a number one salesperson?
IK (10:18):
Yeah, I love the question. And for anyone I don’t know if you have links, but I’m, I’m happy to share. I put together a an ebook or it’s really like a infographic on the top 10 traits of elite sales performers, the top kind of, you know, 1% of sales performers. And I studied a lot and I partnered with them
RV (10:37):
And I, and let’s do this, I do want people to get it. So if you go to brand builders group.com/ian cognac, so go to brand builders group.com/ian cognac, we’ll put, we’ll put a link here to what you’re talking about, Ian. So in his last name’s K O N i k K o N I a k K O N I a K.
IK (10:56):
So I’ll, I’ll get you that link. But fun, fundamentally for me personally, I get to ask this question a lot. I think, I think one of the things which I tend to, to do really well is I have a firm, it’s energy, right? Sales is a transfer of energy from one person to another. So for me, I genuinely have a lot of energy in that it contagious, it’s infectious. And I hear that a lot from clients. I ask someone why they bought for me for a corporate client and they said it was your energy. We, we thought the sales team needed more energy and we knew you brought that to the table. Now again, is that repeatable? Is it re reusable? No, that’s a personal thing. So I, I’d say for anyone who wants to improve their energy, right? You need to think about how you can actually help your clients and believe in the product or service you provide, right?
IK (11:47):
The reason Roy, you do really well at selling, even though you may not consider yourself a salesperson, you’re an amazing salesperson, is cuz you believed you can help anyone who joins your program and follows the steps that you teach. And because of that belief, your conviction, your energy when you’re talking to prospects is going to be extremely high. So if you wanna improve your energy, it starts with strengthening your own belief in in. How do you do that? Well, you need to talk to customers. You need to see the results they’re getting. If you’re brand new to a company, find out who your top customers are, interview them and really learn about what their before state was and what their after state and how you help them. Once you know you can help people fundamentally, once you know that you can truly improve their lives or improve their company’s performance, you are going to feel more energized, more, more passionate and, and become a better salesperson. So I think it starts with belief, which then transfers to energy, which then transfers to how you engage with your clients. So that would be probably not my number one.
RV (12:45):
I mean, it’s funny how you say that. Like I literally just experienced that in the opening of this interview. Like cuz you’re a past customer also, like hearing you go, yeah, I went from zero to seven figures in less than three years and really in my first full business year, I’m getting 30,000 views, like following this process. I’m going, gosh, it works like this stuff. It’s so convicting, like we’re gonna raise all our prices after this impact is what we’re getting. You need
IK (13:10):
To
RV (13:12):
Like, it just, it’s just, it’s so invigorating. And I think sometimes I think honestly, honestly, sometimes salespeople are a little bit afraid to talk to their past customers cuz they’re like, oh, you know, like, did it work? Was it good? Like, did they have a good experience? And but you, when you see that actual transformation, you just get so convicted on it. Yeah.
IK (13:33):
So I, I just did, I started my program in May, so I just did a pulse survey for Q1 for all 70 members and I asked them specifically, you know, what do you think this program is worth it? What value have you gotten? How has this helped you in your personal life? How has it helped you in your professional life? Right? So I’m capturing not only feedback so I can continue to improve the program, but I’m actually capturing success stories that I can use for marketing for future launches. But the, the real value is like hearing these stories, hearing people, Hey, I’m spending more time with my family. I’m not burning myself out, I’m selling more than ever. And I’m also able to play with my kids like cuz cause I don’t just teach sales, I teach, you know, a lot of like mindset and habits and balance and you know, I I I practice my faith, I have family, I have other values that, you know, my story and you know, my struggles with addiction and I had to overcome a lot of personal challenges that I incorporate into what I teach.
IK (14:25):
Cuz ultimately if you’re successful in one area, you’re making a lot of money, but you actually don’t have time or presence to be with your family or you’re not actually happy, then how is that successful? Right? So for me it really is more than that. And, and I think genuinely that, that’s what attracts a lot of clients is they want that balance. They want that true success, not just in how to sell more, but actually how to do it in a way that is high integrity, where it’s not sacrificing what’s most important to them, whether it’s their time, their family, their health. So I think knowing your uniqueness in positioning your service so that you can be your true, authentic self rather than just teaching a piece of content is also a big part of what I do and how I’ve been able to really, really grow my, my own business very, very, very quickly.
RV (15:11):
Well when you say talking to your past clients, like that’s so huge. Like, just cuz you kept the stories, I mean we did the trends in personal branding, national research study, you know, like earlier this year when we released it and it’s, you know, we were asking what we asked the average American citizen, what’s the most influential factor that contributes to you making a decision? And we said, Oh, the person is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, a New York Times bestselling author, they have a large social media presence or da da da da. None of those were number one, not even close. The number one thing was they said they have customer testimonials on their website. That was the number one thing. It’s like, it makes people believe that if other people are saying this is good, it’s, it’s the single most powerful thing and you just don’t get it.
RV (15:59):
If you don’t talk, you don’t call your past clients. Like if you don’t talk to ’em or you don’t survey ’em, you don’t, you don’t get that feedback. So how else, you know, when you think of account executive and, and I wanna make, you know, help me understand that term a little bit because at Salesforce you were doing truly like enterprise sales. You’re selling to like large companies. Some of our, some of our personal brands do that, right? They sell corporate training and they sell ’em to like big fortune 100 companies. A lot of, a lot of our, our, you know, listeners of the show and are more like small business entrepreneurs that, that sell more like business to consumer. So help us understand what does account executive mean? And then I know at Rico that wasn’t really like enterprise sales, that was more like B2B sales, but sort of give us the landscape of the different types of sales. And, and then what I’m specifically looking for is what is it, what can someone selling their personal brand learn from someone who has been selling enterprise accounts and like what’s the transferable skill set? Cuz you’ve, you’ve now straddled all these worlds at Rico. You were B2B at, at Salesforce, you were enterprise sales and now you’re a small business like solo per selling B to C to individuals. Yeah. So you’ve done it in all all three, which is very rare.
IK (17:21):
Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s such a good question. So I think, I think if I can just pan out and give you kind of the, the landscape of sales. A lot of people think sales and they think like B to C, right? And in the big influencers out there on Instagram, whatever, that is not what, what I did for 19 years I did specifically b2b. And in B2B there’s really two segments
RV (17:42):
Of business to business y. If you’re not familiar with the term, B2B is business to business. B2C is business to consumer.
IK (17:48):
Yeah. And for anyone who wants to know how this relates to people who have their own per personal brand or entrepreneurs, if you are selling to a company, you’re selling your training, your coaching, your portal, your services to a company, listen up because that’s business to business, okay? There’s a lot of universal principles to that apply to all three, but I’m gonna kind of give you a quick school in, in, in kind of what the differences are. So, love it. There’s two types of B2B sales. There’s strategic sales or enterprise sales, and there’s transactional sales. So think of B2B transactional as I’m selling copiers, I’m selling paper products, I’m selling janitorial services, I’m selling something, computers, it’s a commodity, right? Short sales cycles, generally price is gonna be very important and it’s gonna be high volume. Okay? High volume, high activity, kind of grinded out, do the activity, then you build the pipeline, then you get the sales.
IK (18:44):
So it’s, it’s kind of like anyone can go into that job and if you’re a hard worker and if you just do what you’re told and you basically stick to the, the numbers, it’s very metrics driven. You’re probably gonna be successful selling commodity. Now, typically that range, you see people maybe go from like a hundred, 2000, a hundred thousand dollars a year, right? And, and top earners might make 2, 2 50, but in general you’re not getting paid because it’s an easier sale. It’s transactional, it’s high volume. And there’s not a lot of differentiation between providers cuz it’s commoditized enterprise selling B2B enterprise or B2B software. If you think of companies like Workday or Salesforce or Microsoft or Oracle or any of these IBM big C selling software, these are much higher volume sales. So these sales oftentimes are several hundred thousand dollars, or in my case, several million dollars.
IK (19:37):
Now, if company’s gonna spend two, three, 4 million a year with you, you better believe there’s going to be multiple decision makers. It’s going to be a longer sales cycle. You’re going to have more stages in a sales cycle where you have discovery and demonstration and actually you have to do a business case. Maybe it has to go to a board. So think of RICO as transactional for 10 years and then me going to Salesforce to sell enterprise for nine years. So I had to go from this transactional hustler, grind it out, hard work, do the activity selling rep to a strategic selling rep. And the skills are not the same. The skills of an enterprise seller selling software, you need to be able to get to senior executives in a company, not office managers or lower levels, but senior executives who are responsible for making those big decisions, right? So how to access the C-suite, that’s a skill. Another skill is how to put together a business case in an ROI so that CFOs can justify this type of investment. Another skill is what’s called multi-threading. On average, there’s seven decision makers in the enterprise selling space. It’s not one person, it’s the legal team, the IT team, the security team,
RV (20:47):
What do you call it? Multithreading,
IK (20:49):
Multi multithreading. Okay. So just, just for the sake, I don’t wanna get too technical, but for the sake of the different sales cycles, they’re very different. A strategic person needs more organizational skills, time management skills, project management. They are not hard closing because again, there’s so many different decision makers and it’s a longer sales cycle. So they need to build partnership and relationships with clients. That’s primarily what I teach in my coaching programs is how to do this B2B software, strategic selling. And the upside of this is, when you’re doing this well, you make north of seven figures. This is the elite, the NFL mvp, the highest paying sales job in any business to business sales is selling software. Okay? So if you wanna, if you’re thinking of your business to business and you want to make as much money as you can selling software, you can make seven figures a year as a individual W two employee, which is unheard of.
IK (21:45):
I never knew this was possible. I’ve done it a couple times at Salesforce. Okay. So that’s the second se segment of sales. The third segment is B to C. This is when you’re selling direct to consumers. So think of a real estate agent or Rory selling me the program of joining Brand builders group. This is what I sell. Now I sell individuals that are joining my programs. I also sell B to B because sometimes I do company trainings to go out and actually train sales teams. So I’m doing both B2C and B2B right now as an individual B2C sellers, the cycles are gonna be much shorter. Okay? It’s also going to be, typically you’re dealing with one decision maker. Maybe they need to talk to their spouse, but it’s a much, it’s one or two sales calls, right? Whereas the B2B could be 20 or 30, right? So again, you’re, these are six to nine month sales cycles in some cases. So it, it really is about getting to value very quickly. But there are some common elements of all three segments which are critical to success. And the reason I was successful in all three is I took those same elements of what makes people successful and I applied them to all three of those segments. So I hope that clarifies things for anyone. Like, cuz sales is not just sales, right?
RV (22:54):
RV (23:46):
In our former life we sold consulting, we sold training. That’s b2b. So there’s a lot of personal brands that sell b2b. There’s not that many personal brands that sell enterprise where you’re selling something that is, you know, 5,000 seats at a time. Yeah. There’s a couple that train the trainer model, which is like what Franklin Covey did, where that model is more of like where you’re shipping kits, which I don’t know if you’ve ever stumbled across anyone as a personal brands that do this, but you, you could end up being in this space one day, Ian, which is basically just like you, you create a kit right? On your methodology and then you’re selling it to United Healthcare to their HR department and then you certify people internally and then they buy 5,000 kits and you’re shipping, you’re shipping kits. Like that’s what kind of Franklin Covey model is.
IK (24:34):
Yeah. Yeah. And there are people, Grant Cardone, I think I, I can’t quote the numbers, but yeah,
RV (24:39):
He does some of that. He
IK (24:40):
Does Cardone University card company companies where all their sales team have seats. And I think that business, I mean it’s definitely eight figures, but I heard something around like 40, 50 million just for that specific line of, of Cardone University and that’s b2b. He’s got whole sales team. So it absolutely, if you’re a personal brand, if I wanted to scale up and take my program and then sell it to Salesforce, for example, where they have 20,000 users and then they go through my program, I could do that. It’s not something I’m choosing to do. But it’s absolutely relevant to personal branding space if you have programs that have, you know, audiences in those companies that you can sell seats to, for example.
RV (25:18):
Yeah, that’s really cool. I mean that’s a whole nother thing in and of itself, of going, you know, when you think about the vision of how big a personal brand could be, you know, like Grant Cardone is selling BTA c getting people to buy tickets to come to Growth Con or whatever. Yep. And he’s selling b2b, like they’ve got trainers going out to companies doing stuff and then he’s selling Enterprise Cardone University, like buy a thousand seats in this, in this virtual, like there’s a big, there’s a big world here of how personal brands can become, you know, multi eight figure and, and all of that. So I wanna talk about referrals and lead generation specifically mm-hmm.
RV (26:05):
A lot of times once they get into the conversation, right, they’re talking with someone, they do a decent job cuz they are convicted on their product. Many times at Brand Builders group, you know, we say as you know, we serve mission driven messengers. So these are people that have like dedicated their life to their expertise. They believe in it. It’s almost like they’re a bleeding heart where they would give it away for free because they just love it. What they have a harder time doing is creating sales conversations and meeting new people. So what tips do you have in the way of lead generation referrals? How do I get, I mean obviously content marketing, which is a big part, part of what we do. What, what your story is recently, but like you weren’t doing content marketing at Salesforce, you weren’t doing content marketing at Rico yet, you were still generating new business like crazy. So let’s not allow content marketing to be part of the answer. How do you generate, how do you generate leads?
IK (27:03):
I mean, genuinely you can do it in a number of ways. I think in, in B to C specifically what I do is I go on podcasts like this. I I, it’s part of my strategy. So I’ll go to a lot of podcasts and people will hear me. So I identified like the top podcasts that are in the sales specific B2B sales space. And I you know, I reached out to the podcasters. I actually hired a agent to help me get booked on this. And I, I probably do at least two or three podcasts a month and I get a lot of leads coming in through, through that. I think another channel is, is just referrals. I set up, I didn’t even set this up yet, but I have a lot of people in their programs that are coaching with me right now tell their friends about it.
IK (27:58):
So I’ll just have people reach out and say, my friends in the program is getting a lot of value. Cuz again, if you’re, if you’re people that are joining you are, are getting success, they’re gonna talk about it, they’re gonna talk about coaching. And so what I typically will do is I will you know, I won’t even ask for referrals, they’re coming organically, but I’ll ask people to share their success stories. And part of my 2.0 launch is to set up kind of what you did with, with bg. I, I have referred a ton of people to, to BG over over the years. But I wanna have that same affiliate structure where, you know, if people have had results, they can refer their friends. So now you have 70 sales people versus, you know, this, this mm-hmm.
RV (28:52):
Oh, just so y’all know, what Ian’s referencing is we actually pay our customers lifetime referral fees when they, when they introduce someone to us. And so it’s like we, we have never run a paid ad and, and I want to, I’m trying to, but like we’ve been generating so much demand that we haven’t been able to scale our team fast enough to keep up with the demand coming from the word of mouth referrals because we pay people to do it too. So they actually make some of our clients make a lot of money. I mean, we have clients that make six figures a year just in referral fees. So
IK (29:24):
Yeah. And it’s coming. I, I’ve been building up now where I’m seeing, I’m seeing the impact there and I get the get the get the bill.com payment.
RV (29:33):
Oh, from us. Yeah. We send you money
IK (29:34):
Every month. Yeah. Yeah. Cause cause I believe in it and that’s the thing, like if I believe the program works and I’m a, and I’m, I’ve experienced firsthand I’m gonna be your best salesperson, there is, there’s no better salesperson. So really capturing the results and then putting a structure together where you have an affiliate program and if you are a personal brand, you can do this through like Kajabi’s got a tool for it and all the, you know, the ma major CRMs have have ways to set that up pretty easily to link you know, attribution to, to the referrals here. But, but
RV (30:05):
Even what I, even what I hear you saying is even if you can’t do affiliate links, just get your customers to share their story. Like that’s what it’s really about.
IK (30:13):
Yes, yes.
RV (30:14):
Get them results and then let them share their story.
IK (30:17):
They’re texting every time they text you and say, I got this. Capture it right and save it. So you can keep those text message every time you get a voice note every time anyone shares a success story or a win capture that, that’s gonna be your asset library on your website, on, you know, any sales calls you want to use. If you ever do a deck or a pitch deck or anything, you can share that. It’s just something I’ve done since the very beginning and it’s been absolutely huge in, in, if you go to my LinkedIn profile, you’ll see over a hundred referrals and it’s literally stories I, when someone finishes my program and say, if, did you have a good experience? Yes. Well, can you leave a referral on LinkedIn? Fortunately I haven’t had anyone that’s had a bad
RV (30:53):
Experience. Oh, a recommendation you mean? Yeah,
IK (30:55):
Yeah. A recommendation on they
RV (30:57):
Go write a public thing on your LinkedIn. Yeah, that’s another great one. Like the whole world can see it right there.
IK (31:03):
And, and I’ll just point people if they have doubts or, Hey, go read the recommendations. Like, I don’t want, here’s the thing. In order to be the, the common thread, I wanna give you some tips on what makes a great seller across all the space. So if you sell b2c, B2B keynotes, whatever, it doesn’t really matter. The, the common thread here. Here’s something really important that I want everyone to, to think about is the best sellers are not attached to outcomes, Okay? And it’s contrary to what may, may many people believe when they have quota goals or revenue goals. But if you’re focusing on your own outcomes, you are going to be inward focused where you and your goals are more important than your customer’s goals. You see, the best sales reps are actually invested in truly wanting to help their clients. So when they show up to a sales call or an interaction, they really wanna understand, does this client need my help?
IK (31:55):
Where do they struggle? What problems do they have? And am I a good fit to solve those problems? And if the answers yes, asking for money and getting ’em to a role is going to be the easiest part. So in a sales call, I’ll spend in a 30 minute sales call, 20 or 25 minutes really just understanding their world, their situation, where their struggle, what is the impact that these problems are having on their life, on their family, on their income. I literally will have people crying and happens almost every time where you really get ’em to open up and say, I’m not where I not wanna be. I’m not providing for my family, I’m not achieving the goals that I set out to, I’m sick and tired of this. And I’m like, Yes, you’re ready. Right? So it’s, it’s the same concept in B2B or b2c.
IK (32:35):
You really wanna show up with the intention of helping your client solve a problem or achieve a goal rather than trying to pitch or sell something. Okay? That is the common language of the best sales people, is they don’t, doesn’t feel to the customer like they’re being sold, It feels like to the customer that they’re sharing their world in that this person is interested in learning about them. So what I always tell people is, be interested, not interesting. In other words, the more you can show up with curiosity, interest, and really trying to understand the world of your clients, the more interesting you are going to become to them. Okay? So don’t try and impress, don’t try and pitch. Don’t try and, you know, show up and, and wow them, right? Or else like you’re gonna lose them. Instead just leave your ego at the door and be really curious and interested.
IK (33:26):
And if you can’t help them, then go in and it’s your obligation to get them to, to sign up because you know it’s in their best interest. And then again, closing becomes the easiest part of the sale. So I think that to me is like really key in terms of, you know, some of the, the commonalities across all these different, you know, different schools of sales. It’s like if you’re, if you’re selling keynotes for example, and, and you want to go in and, and position yourself as the keynote speaker for their annual conference, you’re gonna wanna know like, what is the biggest problems that your employees are facing today that you want the keynote to address? Where are are struggles? What do people wanna learn about? What are they asking for? What would you consider successful if they walked away from? What would you want the energy to be?
IK (34:11):
What is the biggest thing? Why’d you reach out to me? Why’d you reach out to me? A as a potential speaker, right? So it’s really, you’re, you’re trying to uncover their goals and what success looks like to them. And then you tailor your messaging around how you’re gonna help them. Cuz if you don’t know what they want first or what they’re trying to achieve or what their problems are, then your pitch is gonna fall flat. So I think again that’s really important. I want to give, give some of those tips away. But that’s, that’s the key. It’s like if you do that,
RV (34:36):
I think that’s the big thing people don’t understand. Like they think of sales is like being a, you know, a smooth talker and like having the right thing to say, like whatever. And just going, all you’re doing is trying to really understand what their situation is and, and can you help. So, okay so basically most of your leads come from your existing customers.
IK (35:01):
They’re all from content marketing. I know you don’t wanna but they
RV (35:06):
Down. I don’t mind hearing that. That’s what we teach people how to do, right? Like that’s, that’s I know that especially in a B2C world like content marketing, podcasting, social media, like, you know, email marketing, all that stuff. Can
IK (35:17):
I walk you through exactly how I got my leads? Cause I have 13 on my wait list, so I’ll tell you what my strategy is and you just, hopefully your users can use it. So find the channel where your clients are in mind. It’s b2b, right? Sales people. So it’s LinkedIn or if you’re again, potentially selling two businesses and you’re a personal brand and this resonates, this could be a source of lead traffic, this podcast, right? So fundamentally find your source and go there where your clients are. So wherever that is, that’s where you want to be most active. So anyone who I post every day on LinkedIn, okay? And people connect with me, so I’ll get, you know, 50 connection requests a day. Every person that requests me, not that I’m requesting that, that raises their hand and says, I wanna connect with you or follows you, or whatever it is, depending on the channel you’re on, I send them a message, right?
IK (36:04):
Or actually I have a VA send it and the message is simple. Hey, thanks for requesting me as a connection. If you’re looking to grow sales, right? And I only send this to the people that are sales professionals cuz that’s my icp. I wouldn’t send this to someone who is a marketer or project manager, just the one, I’d say, if you’re looking to grow your sales, here are three ways I can help. And I say, number one, I have an email newsletter that you can get new videos every week sent to number two. You wanna capture the whole archive, go to my YouTube subscribe here, and I have link to subscribe. And then I say number three, my coaching programs are completely sold out, but if you want to join the next coaching cohort, here’s the wait list link to work with me directly on that wait list link.
IK (36:43):
I have my pricing laid out, I have the program laid out, and when they sign up, they know what they’re getting. So when they sign up for the wait list, they know what the investment is, they’ve already raised their hand, they fill out a form, right? And if I really wanna basically call them or create true lead source, now I have 1300 people that are teed up and I could set up calls with them and I would have them fill out a form before they book it to further qualify them and make sure they’re fit using, using ly. So that’s kind of the way I’ve been doing it, minus the calls because again, it’s just me and I don’t have sales team right now, but that’s exactly, you know, the strategy that I was used. Once that wait list is ready for launch, then I’ll warm up the, the wait list.
IK (37:22):
So I basically cap my enrollment, I cap my members, and then I have a a nurturing campaign to everyone on the wait list, Hey, it’s coming get ready enrollments in three months, here are some success stories, here’s the curriculum. Hey, you have questions, just email me or reach out on LinkedIn. And so they’re continuing to hear from me. It’s not like five months and then they lost interest them, I’m nurturing them and then they’re also on my newsletter getting, you know, continued content where I can build that trust. Then before I launch, I say I only have 20 spots available. First come, first serve, put the link and in, and then I make it, you know, more of a, a time based in a, in a, in a cap, a member cap based program where I’ve already done the math and I know how many people I need to hit, you know, the target revenue goals for, for, for what I want to do. So that creates overwhelming demand because they need to get in and they know that it’s a limited offer and there’s only limited spot. So I, I love that versus just open all the time. Anytime you want it, just hop on a call. It’s here when you, you’re ready, right? So by the time I get to the launch, everyone’s like literally dying to, to get in the program. So that’s the strategy I’ve used and it’s working really well so far.
RV (38:27):
Yeah, I love that. That’s so great, man. I, it’s just so simple. I mean, it’s just, you know, adding value and building trust and then just letting people raise their hand and say when they’re ready. We are, we’re evergreen. Like we always, we’re like an evergreen open option. So it’s always interesting to see like how people use the launch strategy to, to sort of like build the demand and, and there is always that more natural urgency in a launch model than with the evergreen. And if you’re doing an evergreen model, you gotta, you gotta have some type of urgency for something. So I really love that. So Ian one last thing here. I already, so I already told everybody, you know, by the way, go to brain builders group.com/ian cognac, we’ll connect you to Ian where you can like download some of his free trainings and, and be plugged in with everything that he’s going, he’s got going on.
RV (39:20):
His last name is K O N I A K, Coac. Before I let you go, a few tips on closing. Like any other tips on like, if you’re in an active conversation, I know you’re not doing calls now, but you’ve done years and years of calls and, and you know, it, I think when you’re selling enterprise or when you were doing b2b, like even when you’re selling copiers, like that’s still a big decision. How do you bring people to a decision quickly? You know, on, on, especially like high dollar offers, right? So whether you’re selling, you know, millions of dollars of CRM software, or you’re selling them a copier that’s tens of thousands of dollars or a consulting program or a coaching program. Any, any tips or advice on like you said, if you’ve done a good job asking the questions and listening to their need and, and, and that this is the easiest part. So what would you say about closing?
IK (40:22):
I, I think again I just shared this, I, I’ll, I’ll give three tips that I, I think work well. But the premise is if you were attached to an outcome and you need to get the sale, you are gonna show up as needy and you’re gonna have commission breath and commission breath stinks. So like above all else, the tone and the energy you need to bring is one that this is for you. It’s not for me. This is going to help you. If you wanna do it, great, I’m here. And if you don’t, hey, that’s your decision. No, no sweat off my back. I’m here to help. But honestly, some people can’t help themselves. You lead ’em to water and you can’t hold their head and force them down to drink. They need to go down and wanna drink themselves. So I think that is a mindset shift more than anything else.
IK (41:10):
And in realizing like, Hey, I don’t need this to feel worthy. I don’t need them to sign up. Okay, this is good for them and if they miss it, it’s their loss. So that’s, that’s kind of the underlying energy. Now as far as like strategies or closing tips I think it’s really important, and this goes without saying if you’re, if you’re selling business to business, so if you’re selling a keynote or to a company, you need to be dealing with the decision maker directly. So never take no from someone who can’t say yes. So if, if they’re not paying for the keynote, you need to get to the people who are deciding what speakers are there and who are paying for it, right? Versus somebody who’s just collecting information on all the speakers, right? You need to make sure you’re dealing with the heads of that department.
IK (41:49):
So anytime I was selling coaching or training to a company or keynote to a company, I need to make sure I find out first and foremost, who is the key decision maker? How is this decision made? I have a framework that I use that I’m gonna give you called predict selling. So predict selling stands for P is the problem. What problem are you solving? Okay? That’s the P You need to make sure you know the problem, okay? The R is really important. It’s, it’s the why, the reason why do they wanna do this? Okay? What’s in it for them? What outcomes it’s gonna help ’em achieve. That’s the, that’s the r stands for reason, okay? The E is engagement. Are they engaged? Okay, In other words, go get their cell phone. Here’s another, probably give you five, five tips on this one acronym. The E is go get their cell phone, get on the text thread, Ro you and I are on a text thread.
IK (42:40):
Now if even if I don’t have anything to ask of you, I’ll share a win, I’ll share a voice note, I’ll share a memo, right? Because I want you to think of me right in general and stay top of mind for you. You wanna do the same thing with your clients. Drive engagement, get on text, thread with them and have a relationship. Okay? D is decision maker and decision process. Make sure you are dealing directly with the decision maker that is above and beyond the number one in B2B way. You need to make sure you’re dealing with the right person who can say yes. And you need to understand their decision process, right? Does it have to go to a committee? When is it going to be decided? Do you have to do legal contracts? Is there a purchasing department? You need to understand, especially if you’re selling as a personal brand to businesses, there are many layers of approvals that people have to go through.
IK (43:23):
So that’s the second D in is decision process. Okay? The I is impact. If they work with you, what is the impact? What are the results? What is the payoff they’re going to get? Right? So show them the value. That’s the i is impact. The C is cost of in action. If you don’t do this right, what is that gonna cost you? Are you gonna continue to be in pain? What happens if nothing changes in the year? Right? Really get them to say, Hey, let’s say you do nothing. What is your life gonna look like in three months and six months in one year? Very, very powerful. Tony Robbins uses that quite a bit to get people to want to change, right? Cause ultimately sales is getting people to change what they’re doing. So what is it gonna cost you if it you, if you don’t do anything, right?
IK (44:03):
There’s hard costs and there’s opportunity costs. And then the last thing t is timeline. Why now why is it important for you to do this right now? What’s driving this on your side? Maybe there’s a product launch, maybe they’re hiring some new sales people, maybe you know, they, they’re getting married. What whatever it is, like find out why now is relevant for them to enroll in your service. So if you can go through, predict and have all those question answers, by the time you get to close, it’s going to be natural and you’re going to basically say, Great, well it sounds like we can help you. There’s a lot in it for you. The timing is perfect. Let’s go ahead and get started. All I need is your authorization, right? So then ask for the business, right? Which is basically ask ’em to buy, tell ’em how to buy and then ask them to buy, right?
IK (44:45):
A lot of people are afraid to just ask them. So you just be direct and ask them. And then if they hesitate, they need to think about it. Don’t get off the call, find out like, hey, we’re here now. Do you mind me asking plain and simple, what is it exactly that you need to think about? What is it specifically that is causing you hesitation? Sounds like everything we talked about is a great fit, but I believe in full transparency. Would you mind sharing what it is? So be really direct and get to, you know, the true objection and then address, address it, right? That’s the bottom line. Address it, directly work with them. Make it a win-win. And and ideally, if it’s not a fit and they walk away, you know what? It’s their loss, no attachment, their loss. Plenty of go after someone else, like, no big deal. Move
RV (45:25):
On. I love it. I love it. Predict, predict, predict. I love your framework. I see your modular, I see your captivating content, modular content method frameworks. I love it. Build, building out the so good, Ian is so good. Y’all again, brand builders group.com/ian cognac. If you wanna learn more about Ian, if you’re looking for some sales coaching, this, you know, Ian is, you know, obviously got a wait list, but somebody that we highly recommend. And n I just love this brother. I’m, I’m, I’m so excited about the journey. It’s been such a blessing to know you and see you early in your career, rising as a salesperson, a sales manager joining one of the top sales organizations in the world, becoming number one now, teaching people how to sell because you’re most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. And that’s you brother. So thanks for being here, Ian, We, we believe in you brother. And just keep going out there and, and keep, keep serving and keep selling.
IK (46:26):
Thanks for having me, Rory. And thanks for all you do, for everyone out there that’s trying to get their message for, for so many people. You’re making a huge impact in, in, in my life and in my families and all of my customers as a ripple effect of what you’ve put together. So I appreciate you just as much.
RV (46:42):
Thanks brother. Thank you so much.