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.
Ep 315: 5 Steps to Getting Paid Speaking Gigs with Grant Baldwin | Recap Episode
RV (00:03):
How to get paid as a speaker, always a fun topic, something I love talking about you may not know this, but you know, for me, this whole entree into being an entrepreneur and being a bestselling author and personal branding all of those things are byproducts that resulted from my initial desire and my initial vision and my initial dream, which was to be a speaker. That was something that I knew early on in, in high school. I saw speakers and, and I went to these leadership conferences and I immediately recognized that that is something I wanted to do with my life. And so this has been something, I, this is a profession that I have pursued my entire career, like before I was old enough to drive.
RV (00:59):
I love talking shop. I love talking business. And of course, what we do at brand builders group has evolved to be so much more than speaking. You know, we’re doing podcasting and, and positioning and branding and messaging and funnels and, and book launches and building your sales team and high dollar offers and online marketing and traffic and, and you know, all search engine. Optimiz like all the things that surround this and entrepreneurship in general and managing cash flows and building your sales team. But originally for me, my dream was to be a speaker. And that’s what sent me on this journey. And so getting to talk to grant Baldwin on this last interview, which was, which was a great one, it was a great one I’ve known grant for years and years at this point. And I remember when he first started out in the speaking business and, and someone had introduced us just because, you know, we were fairly young guys and, and back 20 years ago, there weren’t a lot of young people in the speaking business.
RV (01:56):
It was always very much like a pres you know, like a second or third career for a lot of people. And nowadays with, you know, the explosion of personal branding, it’s, it’s become something that people get into much earlier. So what I wanna do today is as always do a recap, but today’s gonna be a little bit different because I’m, I’m probably not gonna recap too much of what grant shared specifically in that interview. I’m actually going to share with you some of the things that we teach at brand builders group related to speaking, which are, are very much related to the things that came up in the conversation with grant. But people often ask, you know, can I, you know, can they coach with me? I get that question a lot. Hey, Rory, can I, you know, what would you be my coach? Would you be my mentor? And, and one of the things that we created is, is a program that’s very affordable, where I actually can coach people. And twice a month, I do these group coaching calls and people come on, they ask questions, they get access to all 14 of our courses as part of this program for the, for a price that’s less than the cost of what one course would cost.
RV (02:59):
But it’s a monthly membership program and they I, I teach, you know, twice a month and we’ve been in a mini series, a at this happens to be at the same time called how to get the gig, how to get the gig. And it’s like an eight part mini series. And so we’ve been talking a lot about this internally. Just, just recently with our, with our, with our members, with our clients, with our, you know, we call ’em Messenger’s mission driven messenger. So I’m, I’m gonna grab a couple of the highlights from that and share them with you here. And the first at one is, is something that one of my mentors, David Avrin taught me one time, which is so important. Like, if, if you wanna be a professional speaker, you have to understand this idea. And if you don’t understand this idea, like until you understand this idea, like you’re gonna struggle in this business.
RV (03:58):
I guarantee it, like, if this first idea that I’m gonna share with you here, if this doesn’t lock in place, you are gonna be in trouble. You’re gonna struggle if you are trying to pursue a career in speaking. And, and here’s what it is. And this is, you know, basically verbatim, as, as Dave told me, he said, Rory speaking is not the business. Getting the gig is this business speaking is not this business, getting the gig is this business. So what he means by that, right, is like people see the stage, right? And they see a speaker and they go, wow, that would be amazing. How do I get to be that person? Like, I wanna be up there inspiring people and encouraging people and, and, and adding value to their, to the, the lives of so many. And yet that’s the tip of the iceberg, right?
RV (04:49):
That’s the part you see, that’s not the business, right? Like that’s not the daily life. Like that is not the job. The job is getting the gig invitation, earning the right to be up there, putting in the research, the writing, but not, not just the content development, but actually the marketing and the sales and the messaging and the clarity of, of your own expertise of all of those things, working together to get invited onto that stage or to, you know, to sell your way onto that stage. And nobody understands that they all think that just like, oh, well, I’m, I’m a good talker. I’m a good, I’m, I’m good in front of people. I, I should be a speaker, but that’s not the business. Getting the opportunity to speak is the business. That’s where all the, the, the, the, the hardship is that’s all the, the beneath the surface, the behind the scenes.
RV (05:47):
And so everything we do at brand builders group is about that. And that’s the part that like, nobody teaches. Nobody talks about you don’t hear that often. Right? You just see the speaker and you, you never see what it takes to get there. And so when you try to figure it out, people fail, right. There’s a lot of bodies on the road to the dream of being up a professional speaker, cuz it’s not easy. Now, after 20 plus years of doing this, we figured out it is simple and we have structured it and documented it, diagramed it. And checklisted it. And templated it and F workeded it. And that’s what we teach at brand builders group is the step by step, not just of how to be a professional speaker, although that’s a big part of what we do. It’s, it’s a, I can’t even say it’s a big part.
RV (06:30):
It’s, it’s a, it’s it is a big part. It’s a big part of what we do. It’s but it’s just a part of what we do in terms of helping mission driven, messengers, reach more people get more leads, make more money, you know, through scalable revenue streams impact more people ultimately in the world. So you gotta understand this, that speaking is not the business, getting the gig is the business. And as from my mentor, Dave ARN, and the sooner you grasp that, the sooner you grab hold of that, the sooner you accept that, the sooner that you go, okay, I acknowledge that the sooner you can get busy doing the work, getting the coaching and doing the activities it takes to actually get the opportunity to be on that stage because the stage is a gift. The stage is a privilege, but the, the stage is an earned right to be there.
RV (07:25):
And it’s, it’s it, it’s not easy. It’s not easy, but it is very doable. And you know, many ways it’s guaranteed like the, we know the stuff that we do works because we’ve done it for ourselves for so long. And so many people at all different fee ranges, but that’s the, that’s the switch you gotta flip in your head. If you really wanna be a speaker it’s not what you do on stage. That is the business. It’s what you do off stage to get the gig. So that’s the, that’s the first thing. The second thing I wanna run through here is something that we just recently put together at for our, for our members, as part of this, this internal, you know, mini series that we’re, we’re, we’re coaching them on, which is seven different ways you get paid for a speaking engagement.
RV (08:14):
There’s seven different ways you get paid for a speaking engagement. And, and so even though the interview, you know, this interview this week, and what I’m talking about here has sort of been in the context of paid professional speaking. The vast majority of our 600 clients are not making full-time careers as paid speakers. They’re using speaking to sell their other things, which would be information, products, books, coaching courses or coaching courses, membership sites, assessments, certifications and there’s three different. There’s three different audiences that we sort of serve at brand builders group. The first are experts. Experts are selling their knowledge. And so we help them productize that as books, speeches, coaching programs consulting curriculums online courses, et cetera, that’s one group of our audience, but huge second group of our audience are just entrepreneurs. And they’re not actually trying to productize their knowledge.
RV (09:15):
They already have a service based business, or even a product based business where they’re we work with a lot of professional services though. They’re accountants, they’re doctors, they’re lawyers, they’re they’re financial advisors, they’re they’re chiropractors. They are all different, all different things. And in that case, they’re just using their personal brand to drive leads to their business. And that’s a great way to monetize a personal brand. It’s actually faster than an expert because you already have the business. By the way, we put direct sales people in that category of entrepreneurs as well. They already have the product and they already have a business opportunity that they can monetize. They’re just using their personal brand to drive awareness for the thing that already exists. Those are entrepreneurs. And then we have a third group of people that are clients of ours that are executives executives, executives, aren’t making money selling anything.
RV (10:09):
But what they’re doing is they’re raising their profile in their industry and in their company so that they get promotions, they get invited to be on boards. They get to speak on panels. They, they get to, to com to, to influence and impact their industry, their trade, their profession. And they, they gain visibility in notoriety, which typically shows up in, in more salary or stock options or, or, or just just recognition, right? So on, we have experts, entrepreneurs, and executives that we all, you know, generally classify as mission driven messengers. But if you look at this, the second two groups of entrepreneurs and executives, they may never get paid for a speech. That’s not the purpose of, of why they speak, even though we’re gonna teach them how to do this. And, and even experts, many experts won’t get paid for their speech itself.
RV (10:58):
They’re gonna get paid in one of these other seven ways. So let’s run through these the seven ways to get paid for a speaking engagement. Number one is a speaking fee, obviously, but believe it or not, that is the least most common way to get paid for a speaking engagement. That’s the least most common way. So if you can get that great, cuz here’s the thing, you know, the, the best of the, the best thing is when you get the best of both worlds, where you get a fee and you get all of these other six things which we’re gonna, which we’re gonna talk about. So, but that’s the least most common even inside of our own community, which are people who are saying, yeah, I wanna get my message out to the world. I mean, we have some of the highest paid speakers in the world that are clients of ours.
RV (11:44):
Like literally the highest paid speakers in the world. We have clients of ours, multiple clients who make over $70,000 a speech. We, we’ve got, you know, several clients that make, oh, you know, more than $30,000 a speech. And then a whole bunch that are in the 10 to 15. And then, and then there’s a whole bunch that are under 10 or free, which would be the largest percentage of our clients. Why? Because of the other six ways you get paid to speak. So the second one is leads. You get paid in leads. This is where I was saying that second classification of people that we work with, which are entrepreneurs. They’re not trying to get paid to speak. They’re also not trying to sell a book or a course at the end of their speech. The reason they’re speaking, whether it is on a webinar or a podcast or through on YouTube or live on social.
RV (12:37):
The reason they’re speaking is to drive leads to their business. They’re trying to drive leads to the, to the, whatever the widget is or the service that they already have to sell. They’re not creating a new one. And that is every one of our customers. In those first two categories, experts and entrepreneurs are driving leads to whatever it is their business is. Even if it’s recruiting it might be recruiting employees or recruiting team members. Certainly if you’re in direct sales, that’s a huge thing is we teach you how to use your personal brand to drive leads. That’s the second way you get paid to speak. The third way you get paid to speak is you, you get paid from customers that you generate on site at the back of the room. So this is selling a book or selling a course on site.
RV (13:28):
So you, at the end of your speech, this is how Rory Vaden earned his first speaking fees. I would speak for free. And then I would sell a $20 self-published book at the back of the room. And I quickly figured out that it was a lot more work to create books that I could only sell for $20 than it was to sell a ticket to a half day training with me, which I could sell for a hundred or $200. And so I quickly moved to selling tickets to other trainings. And then we started our first company and that’s how we did it. We used to speak for free and sell tickets. And then we figured out we could speak for free and we didn’t even have to sell a one day ticket. We could just sell right into a coaching program. And that was the business model that we used to create an eight figure business more than 10 million a year in revenue from this one business model, speaking for free to very small groups of like three to 10 people, and then selling our coaching program at the, at the end, anybody can do this.
RV (14:28):
Speaking is incredible. It, it, it is absolutely phenomenal. And, and that’s the third way you get paid fourth way you get paid video footage, video footage. There were times early in my career where I would take gigs for free or highly discounted just because I needed the video footage. The reason reason is, is because the number, the number one reason you get hired to speak is because somebody has seen you speak. That’s always the number one way you get business. But the, the number two way is that you have great video footage where people can watch you on stage. Well, it’s a chicken in the egg thing because it’s like, well, how do I get invited on stages when I don’t have a video of me on stage to get on the stage? And the answer is you go speak for free to get the video footage, and then you take the video footage and you use it to then get more paid engagements.
RV (15:25):
And inside a brand builders group, we have an amazing partner that we use who also does events where you can, that are, they are on a, you know, a half, a million dollar stage with full L E D lighting, six cameras, a live audience of few hundred people. And you can actually pay to get 20 minutes on that stage. And then, and then you have an, a, a video from it, by the way, if you want even, even if you’re not a member of ours, you can check out that partner. It’s if you go to brand builders, group.com/brand amplifiers, go to brand builders, group.com/brand amplifiers you can check out our partner that does that, but you, if you don’t have a lot of money, you know, you, that cost of money is very reasonable. It’s a, it’s an incredible program.
RV (16:15):
And in fact, we’re gonna, we’re gonna bring the, our partner onto the podcast probably, and talk more about that, but like the it still costs some money, right? But so the other thing is go speak for free or speak for discount, just to get the video footage of being on really nice stages, fifth way you get paid to speak. Testimonials, testimonials are huge, and I’ll never forget when Joe Calloway was a friend of mine. And, and I would say a mentor. He was a hall of fame speaker and, and Joe, we were talking about speakers bureaus one time. And, and I asked him, Joe, when’s the right time to contact a speakers bureau. Like when am I ready to work with a speakers bureau? And you know, there, there, there were two things that you hear a lot in this world about speakers, bureaus.
RV (17:01):
And we, we love speakers bureaus. We haven’t traditionally worked with a ton of them because the idea with speakers bureaus is you don’t need them until they don’t you don’t need them until they don’t need you or wait, how’s that go? Yeah. You only need them when they don’t need you, or they don’t want you. And then by the time they want you, you don’t need them anymore. Meaning that when you first start out and you need someone to promote you, they’re not gonna promote you, cuz no one knows who you are. And it’s a lot of work to sell you for a very low fee. And so they don’t make any money. And so it’s, it’s like, why would they do all the extra work and not make very much money? So they’re not really there in the beginning. And then, so you build up your own career.
RV (17:41):
And so then you get to where you’re making a lot of money. You got a lot of people asking for you and that’s when bureaus want you, cuz now their clients are asking for you, but you kind of don’t need ’em cuz their clients are asking for you cuz you’ve done a good job of building yourself up. So there’s great. There’s great relationships you have with bureaus and they can be a great thing. Really great thing. And several of our friends, our clients use them and, and work with them and, and we do work with a couple bureaus. But anyways, I asked Joe Calloway when’s the right time to approach a speakers bureau. And he said, when you can send them a killer demo video and a stack of a hundred testimonial letters, that was his answer. When’s the right time to speak.
RV (18:23):
When is the right time to contact a speakers bureau when you can send them a killer demo video and a hundred testimonial letters. And I thought that was really, really good. And Joe worked with a lot of bureaus during his career was extremely successful. And so you need testimonials. Now whether it’s working with speakers bureaus or not, if a client’s gonna hire you to speak, they need testimonials. And our, our, our personal brand national research study showed this is the number one criteria of people who will hire you is they want testimonials from other customers. So consider that a form of compensation and we would write it into our contract. If someone didn’t have our fee, then we negotiated. We say, well look, we wanna, we want a testimonial letter now. Sometimes we get it anyways, which is great. But if we’re doing it as a discount, we’re gonna negotiate that into the contract specifically to say, we want video footage.
RV (19:17):
We want a chance to make an offer at the end of the you know, at the back of the room we want testimonials, which leads to number six, which is referrals and introductions. The other way you get paid to speak, number six is by referrals to other people. And so the, again, hopefully this happens always in our pressure free persuasion course, which is one of our phase three courses on, on sales one-on-one sales. We teach scripts for how to ask for referrals. Well, the better job you do as a speaker, the more likely you are to get referrals. If you, if you do it and you know how to do it. So that’s a great, that’s a form of payment, right? You’re getting another gig outta the gig that you got. And again, sometimes, sometimes we will put into a contract or, you know, not so much these days, but when we first started out, we would say, look, if we come do this for a discount, we want three legitimate introductions to other people, you know, who run meetings.
RV (20:13):
You don’t have to guarantee that they’re gonna hire us, but a legitimate handheld like white glove email introduction. Now, you know, when we’re chasing down speaking gigs, we do that anyways. That’s all part of pressure, free persuasion, but that’s a way you get paid. And then the seventh way which people don’t do that much anymore these days. But you should because this back in like the seventies and the eighties, the sixties, seventies, eighties of the heyday of speaking, like people used to do this all the time, which is barter. You can barter things. AJ once bartered a couch, we have bartered, we have bartered two couches and an entire custom closet from one company that was one of our past clients. And it’s, they were very expensive. I’m talking about like each piece is tens of thousands of dollars. We would, we would never buy no matter how much money we had, but they were beautiful and AJ loved them and, and she bartered speaking fees for them.
RV (21:11):
So you can barter things. Why, because it only costs them wholesale, but it’s worth retail value to you because you would have to pay for that. But you can also barter for travel, right? Give me, give me you know, let my spouse come with me or my kids come with me or I want extra hotel stays if it’s in a really cool place or I want you to upgrade me to a nicer suite. You know, a lot of these clients already have to fill a certain number of room nights anyways. So they might as well use that as an incentive to help get you. And there you go, seven ways to get paid for a speaking engagement. And then finally the third takeaway from today is the one I wanna leave you with, which is kind of a tie back to the first one that, you know, speaking is not the business, getting the gig is the business, but follow up is the key follow up is the key follow up is the discipline of this whole business.
RV (22:11):
AJ has always said, you know, one of the things I’ve learned from AJ is she always says, there’s no such thing as a no, it’s never a no, there are only, it’s not right now. There’s no such thing as a no, there’s only such a thing as a not right now. And what she means by that is sooner or later, everybody is going to buy, especially in the speaking business. Cuz if, if they’re have an event they’re putting on every year, they need speakers every single year. And so they might not book you this year or next year or the year after. But if you follow up and you’re nice and you build a relationship and your career is growing and you’re improving and you’re doing all the things we teach at brand builders group, sooner or later, they’re gonna go, you know what, let’s do it, let’s have you.
RV (22:57):
And so follow up is the game like follow up is the discipline. You gotta be willing to do the work of staying in touch with people. So there you go, three great takeaways, seven ways to get paid for a speaking engagement. These are just a, a couple tips, right? Whatever I’ve shared here I don’t know, 10, 15 minutes of, you know, more than seven hours of training that we have done because we’ve done seven seven or eight calls in our little internal training. So this is the kind of stuff that we teach inside a brand builder’s group. I wanted to give you a chance to get a little sample of that. But right here on the podcast, we’re so grateful that you’re here. Hope you’re enjoying the show, share this with somebody who’s trying to start a speaking career or somebody who is interested in
Speaker 3 (23:44):
Speaking or somebody who just wants to get out there and speak or could, or should speak to drive more leads to their business, even if they’re not paid. And if that person is you, please make sure that you request a call with our team at freebrandcall.com / podcast. And let’s talk other than that, we’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand podcast.
Ep 314: 5 Steps to Getting Paid Speaking Gigs with Grant Baldwin
RV (00:00):
To so a few weeks ago, my friend grant Baldwin introduced me to his audience. I was on his podcast and it had been a while since we connected. And he sent me an email thread that went back years and years of when we first connected and he was sort of making his climb through the industry. And it’s been fun for me to just sort of watch him you know, come into the speaking world, you know, kind of crack through. He never had a huge following or wasn’t like, you know, TV famous or something like that. And he’s built just a wonderful career for himself as a paid speaker and also helping other people get speaking engagements. And so he made that his entire business. He’s the CEO of a company called speaker lab which just recently found out congratulations. They’re on the in 5,000 list for the second time. He’s been featured in Forbes and entrepreneur in, in magazines, Huffington post, and has just been, you know, around hanging in the same circles, the national speakers association, et cetera, and also right here around Nashville. So we’ve, we’ve come across each other from time to time. He’s somebody that I think we’ve got a lot we can learn from. And anyways, welcome to the show grant. Good to see you.
GB (01:11):
Right. Thanks for letting me hang out with you, man. I appreciate it.
RV (01:13):
Yeah, brother. So let’s talk about your expertise, like getting some paid speaking engagements where do we find them? How do we, how do we go about getting them? Right. So a lot of people listening are, you know, some of ’em are coach a lot. A lot of our eyes is like coaches and speakers. A lot of ’em are like professional service providers and things like that. You know, or just entrepreneurs in general. And for us, personal branding, as you know, is not social media or websites. We think of it as reputation. And this is like, how do you build your reputation? So speaking is a huge part of that. It’s been a huge part of our career when you make that transition to go, I wanna get paid speeches. What’s the first thing that needs to happen or where do you go look?
GB (02:00):
Yeah, good question. So what we basically teach inside the speaker lab is a five step framework. We call the speaker success roadmap. And so it makes the acronym speak. And so maybe what we could do is why don’t, I just kinda like walk through at a high level, what that acronym is and kind of sure here’s the roadmap that we follow. And then we can kind of jump in wherever, but the first part of the process S is select a problem to solve. And so this comes down to two key things that everyone listening, you gotta get really, really clear on. You have to be clear on who do you speak to? And number two, what problem do you solve for that audience? Now this, this seems overly simplistic. And it’s like, yeah, yeah, but just like fast forward, tell us how to actually book gigs.
GB (02:35):
But if you’re not clear on these things, then you’re shooting for everything and nothing at the same time. And so what we, what we tend to see, and you’ve seen this as well, Roy is that whenever it comes to who do you speak to? A lot of times we wanna spread the net as far and wide as possible. So who do I speak to? I don’t know. I, I speak to humans. I speak to people. My message is for everybody. Right? Right. And the reality is, is like that just doesn’t work. And same thing whenever it comes to, what do you speak about? And people are oftentimes like, well, what do you want me to, to speak about? I could speak about sales or marketing or leadership or motivation or family or faith or on and on the list goes. And so what we tell speakers all the time is you wanna be the steakhouse and not the buffet, the steakhouse and not the buffet.
GB (03:11):
And what we mean by that is Roy. If you and I were going to grab a bite to eat, we were looking for a good steak. Like we have a choice. We could go to a buffet where steak is one of a hundred different things that they offer and they’re all mediocre. Or we could go to a steakhouse where they do one thing, but they do that one thing really, really, really well. They don’t do Pasa. They don’t do seafood. They don’t do sushi. They do steak. And that is it. And again, it’s counterintuitive because as speakers, we think that we need to spread the net as far and wide as possible. The more things I can speak about the more audiences I can appeal to the more opportunities that I will have, but people are looking for specialists and not generalists. So you don’t wanna try to speak on anything and everything to everybody solve one specific problem for one specific audience. So again, if you get that right, if you get clarity there, everything else in the process becomes much simpler. So that’s the yes. Elective problem to solve the B is
RV (04:01):
I wanna talk about that for just a second. So when you say a problem to solve, what are some characteristics of a great problem to solve? So like, you know, marketing is an example, is that considered like in your world, in your language, is marketing a problem that you solve or is it have to be something more specific than that? Like what, what are the criteria that something must pass in order for you to go? Yeah, that’s a clear problem that you can make money, like you can take to the market and solve.
GB (04:32):
Yeah, absolutely. And to your point there, like there’s an overlap there between what you’re interested in, what you’re passionate about, what your knowledge belong, what your expertise is in and what is it that the industry, or actually cares about because just because you’re an expert on something doesn’t necessarily mean that there are opportunities to speak on that thing. And maybe there are opportunities to speak, but not to a particular industry that you are looking for. So there’s basically, I think about like kind of a VIN diagram of three different circles here. Okay. and so we’re looking for three different things. One is gonna be your industry. So who exactly are you speaking to meaning that there are certain kinda like predefined industries within the speaking space? And so there, there are seven primary industries and within this, there’s a whole bunch of different kind of subcategories, but real quick, those are corporations, associations, nonprofit, faith-based government, military education K through 12 and college.
GB (05:23):
Okay. So again, within that, there’s a whole bunch of different subcategories, but those are typically the big seven categories that the majority of speaking engagements fall into. So you have industry, the other side of it is going to be integrity, meaning like, what are you actually qualified to talk about? What is the some expertise or knowledge now that doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to be the world’s foremost expert on this thing, but you need to know at least something on the topic, be knowledgeable on it, know something slightly, be slightly ahead of maybe where your audience might be. And then the third piece kinda what you’re talking about here, Rory is interest. So industry integrity and interest. And so this is a two way street. One is something that, that you are interested on. You’re knowledgeable on, you have some expertise on, but it also has to be something that that industry or that decision maker is interested in.
GB (06:04):
So let me give you a quick example of this. So years ago, when I got started, when I first reached out to you in 2006 or seven or whatever it was, and I was kind of figuring things out, I was doing a lot of speaking in the education space. And one of the topics that at the time that I was really interested in was the subject of personal finance. This was something that my wife and I like, we were going through some of Dave Ramsey stuff and paying off debt and, and going like, wow, this has really made a big impact in our lives. So if I could teach teenagers about this, like that would make a huge, huge impact for them. And one of the things that we found was that I was doing a lot of speaking in schools and conferences.
GB (06:39):
And if I interviewed a hundred different high school principals, all 100 of them would say that yes, teaching students about personal finance was really, really important yet. Nobody was really hiring speakers to talk about personal finance in a school assembly setting. So was it important to them? Was it of interest to them? Yes, but it wasn’t necessarily something that they were hiring speakers to talk about. But what I found was that oftentimes they were hiring speakers to help their students in a school assembly setting, make a successful transition from high school and to college in the real world. So I started doing talks around that. And within that, I would talk about talk about personal finance. So it wasn’t like this bait and switch or anything, but saying, Hey, here, what’s the thing that you are looking for, the challenge that you have, that you identify for yourself within your school, within your students that you have, how do I, how do I come at that and attack that topic while at the same time, maybe talking about this other kind of tangential type of topic. So again, the point being is you interest, is that two way street, just because I’m interested in, it doesn’t necessarily mean that organizations or groups actually hire speakers to talk about that.
RV (07:41):
Yeah. I think that’s a, that’s a really great a really great point. Like we think of it as like we would call that positioning, right. So it’s just like, how do you position this in a way that it is what you do, but in a way that it was hireable by, by somebody else? I think that’s, I think that’s great. Okay. So then, so now you pick your topic, your pop problem, right? Okay. So then what’s the P
GB (08:07):
Yeah. The P is to prepare your talk, prepare your talk, basically get really, really clear on what’s the solution that you are gonna be providing to this audience. Now, this can come in a lot of different ways, meaning that oftentimes when we think of speaking, we think of keynotes, we think of kind of this, this large stage type of environment. But as we both know, there’s a lot of different ways that speaking can look. So there are absolutely keynotes, there are workshops and breakouts and small small groups and large groups. And you may just do a, a one hour block. You may do a five day thing with 30, 30 people, and really go deep on a topic in this day and age, thanks to the pandemic. There’s massive amount of opportunities with virtual. So all that to say that, that whenever it comes to preparing your talk, it can look a lot of different ways.
GB (08:48):
And I think that’s also part of what makes the speaking industry interesting and unique is that there’s gonna be some people who are listening and watching like, Hey, I would, I would love, love to do 50, 75, a hundred speaking gigs a year. And other people are like, that’s totally unappealing, but I would love to do five or 10. And I just don’t know, how do I find those five? Or how do I find those 10? And what do I speak about how much do I charge and how did this work? And so it can look a lot of different ways depending on what it is that you are trying to accomplish. But again, the P there is to prepare your talk, prepare that solution to the problem that you’re solving.
RV (09:18):
Okay. So let’s assume that you’ve got those, which is a giant assumption. Those are both very, absolutely very difficult things. Now, now you have your product to sell what happens next.
GB (09:29):
Yeah. So the E is to establish yourself as the expert. And so there are two key marketing assets that every speaker needs. Number one is you need a website. And number two is you need a demo video. So in this day and age, if you don’t have a website, you don’t exist. It’s hard for people to take you seriously. A demo video is one of those things that also feels a little bit fuzzy to people’s like, what exactly does that mean? I’ve heard that a sizzle reel, that sort of thing. What do I put in it? You know, what doesn’t need to be in it. So think of it kind like a movie trailer, the point of a movie trailer, as you take like a, a two hour movie, you’ll boil it down to two or three minutes. And within those two or three minutes, you have an idea of who’s in it.
GB (10:04):
What’s the plot, what’s the theme. What’s the genre. And the point of a demo video and the point of a movie trailer is to make you want to see more. So you wanna think about it in this way. If I’m an event planner, if I’m a decision maker, I am in the risk mitigation business, meaning that if I hire you Roy, to get up on my stage and I hand you a microphone, and I’m asking you to talk to my thousand attendees at that audience, anything you say can and will be used against me. So I need you. I need to make sure that you make me look good. And again, you and I have both had that experience before where
RV (10:34):
You and don’t make me look bad. Like the absolutely the number one objective is to not suck.
GB (10:42):
If
RV (10:42):
You that’s true, you are not terrible. You’re, you’ve got a long way for that meeting planner.
GB (10:47):
Right? And so whenever they’re making that decision, oftentimes they are putting their neck on the line. They’re putting their butt on the line by hiring you and going to bat for you. No, no, we need to have the speaker trust me. And so they don’t need to see necessarily like a, an entire video or an entire full length presentation of your talk. They just need to see a few minutes of it in the same way that there’s a lot of movies that may be amazing movies that neither you or I have seen just cuz like I solved two minutes of the trailer and I just knew like that wasn’t my cup of tea. It’s not what I’m looking for. Maybe it’s an amazing movie, just not what I’m looking for. And so that’s for, for an event planner for a decision maker, they need to see a couple of minutes there of your presentation, especially if they’re going to pay you. But especially as you are growing in your, in your speaking business and wanting to share that message with, with bigger audiences and some higher profile stages, that demo video becomes more and more important.
RV (11:36):
So are most of the demos that you’re seeing and, and you’re using. And are, are they, are you saying they, most of them are two to three minutes.
GB (11:45):
Yeah. I recommend like short, less is more. You’re doing shorter
RV (11:48):
Ones.
GB (11:48):
You can, yeah, you can absolutely have you know, a longer video, a 10 minute video, a 15 minute video. But you think about from again from an event planner decision maker standpoint, whenever they are considering hiring you as a speaker, they’re not just looking at you, they’re looking at you and five or six, seven other speakers. And so they don’t have time to go through 30 minutes of video per speaker trying to determine whether or not it’s a fit. So they’re going to look at the initial kind of two or three minutes there and then they’re gonna probably whittle it down to two or three, maybe have a committee or board meeting to kind of determine who might be a good fit. And then maybe they wanna watch, you know, 10 or 15 minutes, but also think about it from the perspective of anybody watching any video.
GB (12:25):
Right? Anytime like someone just think about like a, a friend or a family member send you a video. Oh, I just saw this. This is hilarious. You gotta check this out. The first thing any of us do when we click on that link is we look to the lower left corner and look at the timestamp to see how long it is. If it’s more than a couple of minutes, like that’s an eternity in online video land ain. Nobody got time for that. So you wanna keep your video short, keep your video concise. So yeah, I think two, three, maybe four minutes is, is plenty to really convey what you need to, what you need to show to an event planner or decision maker.
RV (12:55):
Okay. All right. So demo video short to the like give them a sense of a taste of what it’s like to have you. And that’s what you’re saying between that and your website. You’re establishing yourself as the expert, which is the E
GB (13:07):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s a, there’s plenty of things that you could do, but as far as getting, going and getting your foot in the door with decision makers and event planners, those are two of the key tools that you really need.
RV (13:18):
And what about start looking, let me ask you specifically about the you know, like in the old speaker days they used to, it used to be the one sheet and it was like, you have to have this one page, you know, sheet on your talk and who you are. Do you still recommend that? Do you still see that being in use? Like, are you finding that that’s not really necessary anymore?
GB (13:37):
Yeah, I think personally I think it’s less and less necessary or relevant because I think that’s essentially what your website is. And so one thing that’s important for any speaker to think about is, and I’d say maybe personal brand is, I know for me, when I got started, all I was trying to do was book gigs, book, gigs, bookcases book, that’s all I wanted to do. So I wasn’t worried about, you know, being a podcast or being an author or doing a course or any number of other things. Like all I wanted to do was book gigs. And so my website was specifically designed around that. Whereas again, one of the nice things with speaking is that it it’s, it can be fairly flexible. There’s some people that wanted 100% of their business is speaking. And some people, 5% of their business is speaking.
GB (14:15):
It’s not, it’s not, not that one’s better, worse than the other, but you gotta be really clear for yourself on how that kind of fits in. Meaning maybe you’re just trying to book a couple gigs and speaking’s a very small percentage of your business. Then you want your website to reflect that. And so maybe it’s not on, on the homepage or it’s not kind of a priority thing. Maybe it is more of a secondary thing on a secondary page. That’s totally fine. But oftentimes what the, the primary goal is for you as a speaker needs to be reflected in your marketing assets.
RV (14:43):
Okay. All right. A,
GB (14:46):
Hey acquire, paid speaking gigs. Now this is the part that, again, that we wanna, we wanna fast forward to, but again, I think this is also a good chance to kind of stop step back, look here of going, okay. I wanna fast forward to this, but again, if you don’t have these other foundational pieces of place, it’s
RV (15:01):
A breakdown.
GB (15:01):
It’s really hard to book gigs. If, if you’re just gonna like, yeah, man, just tell me how to book gigs. Like, okay, well, who do you speak to? What problem do you solve? I don’t know. I’ll speak to one, whatever. How do I book gigs like that?
RV (15:09):
Well, and not only that, what I would say grant is it’s also not only is it difficult to book gigs, it actually works against you because you go to a speaker’s bureau or you go to an A-list client and you don’t have your stuff together. You might get one shot. I mean, I talk about this with podcast all the time. Like people come to me, can you introduce me to ed? My luck? Can you introduce me to Lewis house? Can you introduce me to a publisher? And I’m telling, and I’m going, I will do it when you are ready and promise. I promise you, you don’t want me to go too early, cuz they’re gonna give you one look. And if you don’t make it through the gate, the next time you come around, they’re gonna go. And I already saw them I’ll pass. Right? So it’s like, you gotta, when you get the shot, you gotta have your stuff dialed in and be ready. Otherwise it works against you to be there too early.
GB (15:55):
Yeah, absolutely. And, and so and in fact we were just talking a little bit before we started recording here about the the NSA convention. It was a national speakers association or national convention happened to be this year in our backyard here in the national area. But at the, at the event I was catching up with a speaker friend of mine that has done very, very well. And he was wanting to get in with a bureau. I’m, I’m good friends with a a bureau here in town that I think you do some work with as well. And so I was talking with the, the president of that bureau and, and I was talking with this other speaker and I said, Hey, do you want me to make an introduction? Me knowing that this guy’s ready and he could, he could absolutely connect with him, made the introduction, they hit it off.
GB (16:33):
They continued to keep in touch. And I think they’re gonna start doing some work together. But again, the point being is I think especially early on speakers are going, like, how do I get in with a bureau? How do I get in with the agent? And it’s kind of this catch 22, where, where that if you’re not already consistently booking gigs, especially at a decent fee, then bureaus, aren’t gonna be interested in you. And typically once you get going and you build some momentum and you’re doing a lot of gigs then you don’t necessarily need a bureau or an agent. And so one of the best things that you can do whenever it comes to acquiring paid speaking gigs is learn how to do this on your own, rather than being dependent on some other group or organization. That’s just going to do that.
GB (17:11):
So it there this, and far as booking gigs, I think it’s, it’s easy to kind of create some type of mystique around it. Like there’s some like secret code that you have to have to be able to connect with people, but it, it’s not. It’s a matter of having a system and a process to consistently reach out, to follow up with decision makers and event planner. So if I reach out to an event planner, who’s working on a conference and you know, next spring, I’m not trying to convince them that they already that they need to have a speaker. They’re already planning on having a speaker. I’m just showing them why I may be a good for, for that event. So so having a, a system and a process to reach out to events, to follow up with events, not just say, Hey, I, you know, I have my website, I have my demo video, and now I’m gonna sit back and I’m wait for the phone to ring, or I’m gonna post some such some stuff on social media, or I’m going to post some create a podcast or I’m gonna post some YouTube videos.
GB (18:01):
And then I’m going to reactively. Hopefully people magically find me like that. Doesn’t work. Speaking is very much a momentum business. And so there’s a a, a, a friend of mine in the, the speaking space who always says, the more you speak, the more you speak and whenever you speak, it does tend to lead to some of these organic opportunities of repeat business of word, of mouth, of referrals, amongst other speakers or event planners, or attendees that are in the audience. But you have to start to plant some seeds to in terms of booking gigs, instead of again, just building a website and hoping that people magically find out about you.
RV (18:36):
So this is effectively sales. You have to identify some prospects, you have to contact them, whether it’s by, by phone or by email or by referral introduction or they see you, or they see you somewhere. But like you have to reach out to them, tell ’em about your product or service, and then follow up with them to help them make a decision. I mean, that, is that what you’re saying? There’s not like a secret
GB (19:00):
A thousand percent. Yeah, absolutely. I, I don’t think there is necessarily some, some magical secret. It it’s stuff that that absolutely works. It’s worked for years and years and years. It’s just one of those things that most speakers don’t enjoy or most speakers don’t want to do. Like, yeah, I just wanna, I just wanna stand on stage. I don’t really wanna do sales. I don’t really wanna do marketing. I don’t really want to talk about myself. I, I get that. We all understand that, but like that’s part of the business. There reminds me a lot of there’s a book emo by Michael Gerber and he talks about the difference between huge, the illustration of someone who is an entrepreneur who owns a bakery. And he talks about the difference between being a good baker and running a bakery. And those are two different skill sets.
GB (19:41):
Meaning maybe you make the best breads or cupcakes or cakes or whatever it may be. You’re an amazing baker, but being a great baker, that’s not automatically translate to you being running a great bakery. And the same thing is true with speakers. There are so many speakers that are amazing on stage. They have phenomenal content, but a big part of being a successful speaker is the sales is the marketing is following up, is being amazing off stage, which has little to, nothing to do with how you present on stage. And so you have to recognize that that a big part of being a speaker has nothing to do with you being on stage giving a good message. Does that matter? Absolutely. That stuff is super important, but a big, I would say a bigger part of being successful as a speaker is what happens off stage in terms of the sales and marketing efforts that you put in.
RV (20:28):
You mentioned social media, how much does social media just getting your honest opinion here in assessment of speaking fees, getting the gigs, you know, how much does social media play into this? Is it, is that how you get gigs? Does it matter with your fee? Is it completely irrelevant? Is it, you know, all that matters? Like, just give, give me your, your opinion on that.
GB (20:52):
Yeah. My 2 cents would be I think it depends on the event planner and it depends on the industry and kind of what their, their criteria are. Okay. So lemme give an example. So there are some event planners, some decision makers who are gonna put a lot of stock into what someone’s online, social media clout, and platform is going to look like, right? In some cases that’s gonna be a big deal, other event planners, depending on the nature of what it is that they are looking for, may not care about that at all in the same way that some event planners may be looking for a speaker who has, you know, some a significant accomplishment or achievement that the audience is gonna recognize. Maybe they, you know, won a gold medal. They played in the NBA, they play some type of professional sport.
GB (21:36):
They have climbed Mount Everest blindfolded in their shorts. You know, they, there’s some type of specific thing that they’re looking for. And so it kind of depends on the event. And so for me personally, I don’t, I don’t put a ton of stock in social media. And again, that’s just kind of me personally, does that help or hurt me? I’m sure. In some cases it, it does hurt and that in some cases it doesn’t matter. And so it’s kind of, you know, we were talking a little bit about this before we started recording of as entrepreneurs. There’s a thousand different things that you could do in your business that move the needle, right. And as an entrepreneur, you can’t do them all. And so you have to kind of determine and prioritize. What’s going to have the biggest impact in your business.
GB (22:19):
So let me give you a quick illustration of this. I remember several years ago my wife and I were interested in doing some real estate investing, didn’t know a ton about it was kind of intrigued by, it reached out to a friend who had done a, a ton of real estate. Investing, knew all about it. And I said, Hey, man, I’m, I’m just getting into this world. I’m trying to learn here. And I said I said, you have all these different types of real estate investing. Okay. You have single family homes and, and multi-family homes and apartments and mobile home parks and raw land and commercial properties. And short-term rental Airbnb on and on and on the list goes, and then I said, which one is best? And he said, yes. And I was like, that’s not helpful. And I was like, what do you mean by that?
GB (22:56):
And he’s like, they all work. What you won’t find though, is you won’t find someone who’s doing everything. And so we can both point to a speaker right now who’s killing it, using Instagram or a podcast or Facebook or Twitter or social media and someone else who’s absolutely killing it. Who’s not touching any of those things. So it’s not necessarily that you have to do one or that you have to do the other, but ultimately I think determining for you for what it is you’re trying to accomplish based on the in addition to the industry that you’re in which you’re speaking on and determining if that’s something that, that is a big part of what it is that you’re trying to do and, and build.
RV (23:31):
Yeah. Interesting. All right. So we have to acquire the gig. We’ve got everything put to place. We gotta go find these people. We gotta follow up with them, reach out to them, follow up with them. What’s the K
GB (23:43):
K is no when to scale, no, when to scale. And what we mean by that is people who are interested in speaking are also probably interested in a lot of other things. They also probably want to do coaching or consulting or write a book or do a podcast, or do a course. And so you can do any number of things, but you can’t do all the things at once. So something’s gonna come first. Something’s gonna come last. And this is where I think you do such a great job of teaching. How does speaking fit into the mix of the, in of the bigger pie and what it is that you’re going to accomplish? Cause like we touched on, there are speakers who do five gigs a year and speakers that do 50 gigs a year. And it’s not that one’s better, worse than the other, but you’ve gotta determine for yourself where does speaking fit into the mix of what it is that you are trying to accomplish?
GB (24:21):
So again, just realizing like you, you can’t do it all. And, and but being clear on, Hey, this is how speaking fits in, or this is how speaking is a, a driver for other parts of my business. So let me give you a quick example of this. There’s a, a client that we worked with a while back and they were doing they were doing 20 or 30 speaking gigs a year, but they were doing it as lead generation for their coaching business. And so they would do a lot of free speaking engagements, but for the right type of audience and they were generating literally hundreds of thousands of, of dollars in revenue for their coaching business. But the whole thing was built upon the Legion that they were getting from these speaking engagements that they were doing. So again, the point being is, is for them, it made sense to do a lot of free engagements, but for the right type of audience, cuz that’s what was building their coaching business. Whereas for someone else, like it may, may not make sense to do as many free gigs. And so again, just determining like how does speaking best fit into the mix of what you want to accomplish?
RV (25:19):
Mm-Hmm
GB (25:53):
Yeah. At a simplified version. Yeah. There, there’s certainly a large element of that, of, of identifying potential decision makers, event planners, reaching out to them. Some of it is to your point of figuring out who actually is the decision maker. So you know, just because you, you know, just because someone is a, a VP of whatever doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re the ones that are, are ultimately pulling the trigger. Another thing to think through and be aware of when you’re reaching out to people is what’s the timeline for when they are making decisions about speakers. So for example, if we’re recording this right now and in the summer and you come across an amazing event, that’s happening next month there’s a high likelihood they’ve already picked their speaker for. So reaching out and saying like, Hey, I saw this event that’s happening next month.
GB (26:36):
You should totally hire me. It’s like, no, no, like you already missed the boat on that. So another thing that we always work with speakers on is to really have a long term perspective on this, that you are in the relationship of building business. And the reality is that relationships take time. I think, think of one particular event where I, I reached out to for five straight years with this event planner and just following up, Hey, we booked another speaker. Oh, that’s cool. Remind me what you’ll start. It looks like you’ll start reviewing speakers again for next year’s event, you know, in a couple of months. Awesome. Is it okay if I follow up with you then, and then following up with them then did that for five straight years. And I don’t know if eventually they just ran into options, but eventually they, they hired me.
GB (27:15):
But I think again, having a, a, a long term perspective on this to reach out, to follow up so often what happens is if you reach out to an event planner decision maker and, and, and they say, well, we’re not looking for speakers right now, but feel free to check back with us in four months. They don’t expect you to follow up with them. They don’t expect you to reach out. And the, the reality is, is like most speakers don’t and most speakers are just kinda leave the ball in their court of just saying like, well, Hey, if you know, if you ever need a speaker, I hope you think of me like that just doesn’t work. If they say, Hey, we’re gonna start reviewing speakers in November, then you would say, Hey, is it okay if I follow up with you in November?
GB (27:49):
And they’re gonna say, absolutely, and then have a system in place, whether that’s a CRM or, or post-it note or whatever you need to do, have a system or process in place that you’re going to follow up with them in December. And there’s a lot more we could, you know, dig into or in November a lot more. We can dig into exactly what to do exactly what to say there, but again, having systems in place to reach out, to, to follow up with people so that whenever they’re ready to make a decision that ultimately they’re thinking of and, and deciding on you,
RV (28:14):
Mm-Hmm
GB (28:52):
All right. I’ll give you a bunch of different answers on this. And so first of all, lemme give you a shortcut answer. So we have a, a free speaking fee calculator. So if you wanna check that out, it’s over at my speaker, feed.com, my speaker feed.com. It’s totally free, but you basically just answer a couple multiple choice questions. There it’ll spit out a number of what you could be charging there. And, and Roy, as you well know, speaking fees are much more of an art than a science. There’s a lot of variables that go into it. I’ll give you a couple of variables. One is gonna be your industry. You can charge more in some industries versus others. You can charge more speaking to corporations than you can to nonprofits. Typically you can charge more to colleges than you could to elementary schools.
GB (29:26):
It’s not that one industry is better worse than the other, that each pond kind of has its own kind of different fee ranges that they’re used to another factor of variable is gonna be your marketing assets. So we talked about your website, your demo video earlier, whether we like it or not, whether we want admit it or not people judge books by their cover. And so if you are a, you know, let’s say you’re a 10,000, $20,000 speaker and your website, your demo video don’t look sharp. They don’t look professional. And specifically they don’t look on par relative to other speakers who are in that same range. Then an event planner may be looking at or deciding between it’s hard to take you seriously. So it doesn’t mean that you need to have spent tens of thousands of dollars on your marketing assets.
GB (30:04):
You just need to make sure that they look sharp and professional. Another variable is just going to be your your speaking experience, meaning if you’re a brand new speaker, just getting started and you’re just kind of getting your at bats, getting your reps there. You probably won’t be able to charge as much as someone who’s been doing this for five, 10, maybe 20 years. And it’s probably just a better speaker. The way that you get better as a speaker is that you speak, it’s the same way that you get better as a writer, as a podcaster, as you do the thing. And so you and I happen to be decent at speaking, not because we have anything, any special gift or ability, but because we’ve given hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of presentations and all different environments and settings and some that have gone incredibly well and some that have been a complete disaster, but the each time you speak, you’re getting that real time feedback from the audience that helps you to refine your message and your presentation skills.
GB (30:50):
So those would be a couple of the different variables that go into your speaking fee. And let me piggyback and, and kind of answer another kind of similar question there, which is is it okay to speak for free or speaking for free a bad thing? And I think oftentimes that that speaking for free has like this negative connotation that if you are speaking for free, you’re not a real speaker or people aren’t gonna take you seriously. And so what I would say is it’s okay to speak for free caveat, as long as you know why you’re doing it, don’t just do it out of the goodness of your heart. You are running a business and you have to treat this as a business. And so one of the things I heard early on actually from a mutual friend, Jason Dorsey, he said, when you’re speaking for free, you’re providing something of value.
GB (31:33):
And so you need to receive something of value in exchange. And that thing that you receive in exchange may or may not be in the form of a check. So there’s a lot of different ways that you could receive value that may not come in the form of currency. Okay. So it may be, for example, let’s say that you go speak at something. And I mentioned this client earlier, who does a lot of coaching. And so, you know, if you go speak and you have some type of backend book or product or service or coaching or consulting thing that you offer, you go speak at the right type of audience and it generates significant sales on the back end. Speaking for free may make a ton of sense for you. Maybe it makes sense to speak for free. If you know that this is gonna get my foot in the door with this client, and it’s going to potentially lead to a bunch of other events.
GB (32:15):
I remember a few years ago, I was speaking in an event and I took a, a slightly lower fee, but I, I made an arrangement with the decision maker and said, Hey, assuming I’d do a good job. And the whole thing’s predicated on me showing up and delivering doing my part. Then I want you to introduce me to five other event planners that you think would be a good fit that you and I both agree I would be a good fit for. And if you can make an endorsement recommendation and a personal introduction to them, to that decision maker, it means nothing. It costs them nothing, but to me it’s worth something. So another quick example would be a friend of mine spoke was invited to speak at something in Europe a couple years ago, and he doesn’t do a ton of speaking.
GB (32:53):
So we were kind of talking through speaking fees and I said, Hey, here’s, here’s one thing you could do is you can negotiate to have them also fly your spouse over your wife over and extend the stay for you at the, at the place where they’re gonna be doing the event. You can turn it into a European vacation on their dime. So again, the point being is there’s a lot of different ways that you can receive something of value that may or may not involve a whether or not you got paid and got a check for it.
RV (33:18):
Mm-Hmm
GB (34:10):
Thanks buddy. I appreciate it.
Ep 311: The Fastest Way to Become a Paid Professional Speaker with Kindra Hall | Recap Episode
RV (00:07):
Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon.
RV (00:54):
What is the fastest way to become a paid professional speaker? That was a big part of the topic of conversation. Of course, in this recent interview that I did with Kindra hall, who is a friend, a colleague, someone who I have now known for years, and it’s been delightful to see how her speaking career has taken shape. I met her when she first started out and I just love, I love seeing people who are winning and who set that, set a goal and create a vision and go out and knock it down. And so it’s great to reconnect with her and and bring some of this. Some of these highlights in education to you and not everybody wants to be a paid professional speaker. Now, if you are in, if you are one of our brand builders group messengers, if you’re in one or one of our clients, you know that we talk about presentations a lot, because we believe that presentations are both your best first product and your best first piece of marketing collateral.
RV (01:57):
We use presentations and speaking as the number one way to drive leads into your business. Now that doesn’t mean you have to be paid to speak. And it also doesn’t mean even that you have to do it on stages or even in person. A lot of times it happened through webinars and podcasts and social media lives and, you know, just little YouTube videos and things like that. But we believe in speaking, but this episode specific to the business of paid professional speaking and that is really a, a very specific thing. And so in our world, one of our, one of our courses is called full keynote calendar, which is where we teach the entire business. It’s the, the whole two day event. Or if you do it as a course, you know, or you do it at a private strategy session with us is completely dedicated specifically to the business of paid speaking, which is what the topic of this conversation was with Kindra.
RV (02:55):
So I wanna share with you a couple of my highlights and takeaways from Kindra and also share, you know, just add in some of our other tips that, that we know of from the, from just from spending a career doing this. So, first of all, one of the things that she said, which is incredible advice, it is completely true. I totally agree. And if you hang out around like the national speakers association or other kind of paid professional speakers a lot or aspiring speakers, you will hear this. This is, this is sort of age old wisdom. And in the, when it comes to the business of speaking, there may not be a better piece of tactical advice than this, which is speak at associations. That is where you start, you start your speaking, your paid professional speaking career, and, and unpaid, you can also do this for, for free speaking engagements for lead gen, right?
RV (03:50):
But you start by speaking at paid, sorry, not that start by speaking at associations. If you are wanting to build a career as a paid professional speaker, why? Okay. Because a few reasons. So first of all, think about it. Associations bring people together who all work for different companies. So associations exist entirely for the purpose of having meetings. That is, that is why they exist. It is, it is for the purpose of best practices and, and networking and creating community among a profession. So associations exist like solely to have meetings, to create encounters with people who are from different companies, but are inside of the same industry. That is why they exist. Now, anytime you have meetings, you need speakers. So that’s the second reason why is in order to incentivize these people to come together collectively, one of the best ways to do that is to provide education.
RV (05:00):
That is a VI that will, will benefit all of them, which means they need speakers. They need educators. They need people who can add content to their program, to their lineup, to create and enhance the value of that meeting, which is inherent and, and necessary and essential in getting people to even show up for the meeting in the first place. So they are desperate for speakers. They’re dependent on speakers. That’s very different from a company, right? Like a company, people are all there gathered every day in the same place. Anyways, they may or may not have a meeting. And if they’re having a rough year financially, one of the first things they probably cut is a meeting, but associations can’t cut the meeting like that is the association is getting people together and they gotta have speakers. So that’s the second reason why they are great.
RV (05:46):
The third reason why associations are great and why you should target speaking at associations first is because they typically don’t have a lot of money.
RV (06:47):
So, so they, they run on a tighter budget, which means that it’s less competitive. Why? Because the higher paid speakers who are typically more established who are world renowned, who are the whatever bestselling authors, the, the, the, the, the people with lots of notoriety or followers or high profile executives, et cetera, they’re competing for higher paying gigs here at associations. Like a lot of times, you know, like these days, honestly, for me, I don’t speak at that many associations. Why, because my fee is outside the range of what most associations can pay. And I am getting as many speaking gigs as I desire to have. So you know, that’s an example. You’re not gonna compete against experienced speakers as much in the association market. So it’s a great place to get started. If you’re trying to speak at, you know, apple or Oracle or, or, you know, the million million dollar round table.
RV (07:45):
Now that’s a, that’s technically an association. That’s a huge one. It’s one of the most illustrious and famous in the world. That happens to be one I am speaking at, in a couple weeks, as a matter of fact in Australia. So there are, there are really, really huge ones that are very, very competitive, but, but the higher end ones have more competition. So when you’re just getting started, it’s good to go in places where you can get momentum and win. So that’s the third great reason to speak at associations. The fourth, great reason to speak at associations is because you are in front of a lot of potential prospects. You’re in front of a lot of potential prospects. I never get more spinoff opportunities than when I speak in front of an association. Why? Because every person in the audience is from a different company.
RV (08:35):
They’re from a different, you know, location, they’re from a different organization, which means all of them are potential people who could hire you compared to when you speak at a company, right? All of those employees work for the same company. So it’s less likely that somebody there is gonna say, Hey, come let me hire you to speak for this other company, because they all work at the same company. Now we’ll talk about that in a second and how to, how to make that work for you really well. But those are four great reasons to speak at associations. And then the fifth reason to speak at associations is because they are easy to find because they’re easy to find. You can just go search association in any industry. And it, it, they’re not that hard to find now narrowing them down and figuring out which ones are, are, are the, you know, the best ones that takes some time.
RV (09:29):
In fact, one of the benefits that we provide to our members and our monthly community at all levels, it’s just inside of our portal. We have a proprietary software that scrapes the web. It’s a, it’s a search tool that scrapes like 60 different search engines. And it’s, it’s set up to have all of these advanced ion logic searches to help you find associations. So if you’re one of our clients make sure you go and, and use that tool in the portal, because it does a lot of that legwork for you, like in a, in a, literally in a split second, but in general, associations are easy, easy to find. All you have to do is ask people, you know, are you a part of any associations and people who are professionals will say, yeah, I mean, this association, that association, you can Google it.
RV (10:12):
There’s directories of them. Like they’re, they’re, they’re trying to be found. So they’re easier to be found. Whereas some companies don’t try to you know, make that much of a public, a public play in terms of who they are. So those are great reasons why to speak at associations five great ones. Okay. So that is where you wanna start. It is the fastest way to get traction. Now you might have to speak for free early on and in general, that’s something we believe in when you’re starting out is you speak for free until you can get until you generate enough demand in the marketplace to speak for a fee. But often you don’t have to cuz the other thing is, even though associations don’t have a lot of money, they have a budget for speakers because they’re essential to the organization.
RV (10:59):
So many of them do have money and they’re willing to, to, you know, spend it with you cuz this is why it exists. So they’re just really, really the great place to start for all of those reasons. And you know, I think that’s what you wanna look at. So it’s interesting to hear Kindra talk about that. Something that we have done, we do, we teach you know, our paying clients and then obviously talking about here, like just for free, it’s a great idea to, to do that. Alright. The second tip, the second takeaway. This was less of something that Kindra said and more of something that something she said reminded me of this is that you wanna learn to work in both horizontals and verticals. You need to learn to work in both horizontals and verticals. And this applies to any profession.
RV (11:49):
Okay. Any, any, any, I would say B to B business to business, any B to B type of environment. You need to learn to work horizontals and verticals. What are horizontals and verticals? Okay. Horizontals applies to the divisions inside of one company and verticals applies to the other companies that are in the same industry. So let me give you an example. Horizontals is if, if I get booked to speak at a huge organization like I’ll give you a good example. Mass mutual was one of, one of our, one of our best speaking clients of all time. I got booked to speak at this mass mutual organization for a gentleman named Michael book, who I became friends with and was someone we profiled in procrastinating on purpose, my second book. And so we spoke for his team inside of mass mutual, but that was just one team inside of mass mutual.
RV (12:49):
So then what we did and, and when I say we, this was really like AJ and, and, and her team. This is part, part of the brilliance of what makes AJ an amazing salesperson is this kind of thing is she then went horizontal and said, what are all the other divisions that mass mutual has? And big companies have many divisions, right? Like they might have, there’s an HR, there’s an HR annual conference. There’s a customer service, there’s a sales conference, there’s a leadership, you know, executive meeting. There might be incentive trips, like big companies have not just one meeting a year. They have lots and lots of meetings across lots of departments or divisions. That’s working horizontally. It’s, it’s going okay. I spoke at this one event for this organization. Let me, let me work laterally in what other departments or divisions does this company have meetings.
RV (13:40):
And rather than, you know, you, you, you do internet research to start all of this, but once you get a little bit of momentum, even, even like two or three customers, you can immediately start doing this and you’ll get way more traction faster because they’re all gonna know each other. And they’re gonna say, oh, Rory did a great job for our HR conference. You guys should look at ’em for your customer service meeting. Boom. Now, now I’m in, right. They, they, even if they don’t know each other inside of a large company, it’s so much credibility to, to be in that organization. Like I, I spoke for Google here, not that long ago. And we’re not proactively hunting keynotes right now. We’re just working inbound. But if we got back into that mode, Google would be one of the, a great example where we would go, oh my gosh, they, they got 25 different divisions probably that have meetings every year.
RV (14:28):
And you could make a, a year or maybe a career just speak into that one company. I had a good friend named Paul early in in my career. This guy spoke at, at just Aflac meetings. Like he, he did so many, he was a mentor and a friend and loved, loved this guy, but he made a great living and he just like dominated Aflac. And he spoke for all these different Aflac. He did other stuff too, but it was like, that was sort of his bread and butter and, and they all knew him. They all got to know him. That’s working horizontally now working vertically. He is working inside of an industry. So that would be like, okay, let’s say I spoke at mass mutual. Then I would say, okay, that’s a financial institution. Then I would say, what other financial institutions could I speak at?
RV (15:11):
Right. Northwestern mutual. You know, I could go to speak to all, all the different insurance companies, because I’m gonna get to know that industry very well. And even though they don’t know the other people at other companies often they do though, because they meet ’em at associations. But even if, if they don’t, they’ll recognize the companies and go, oh yeah, those are reputable companies. They have a lot of the same issues that we have that must mean, you know, something about this industry. And so you get momentum by working horizontally inside of an organization or working verticals inside of an industry. So those are some really tactical, strategic, like important and you know, valuable tips that that will make an immediate difference in terms of your ability to get your speaking career off the ground. Right? So I want you to pay attention to those.
RV (16:03):
And then the third tip, and this definitely was a takeaway from Kindra which, which is more related to her most recent book, which is, you know, she’s sort of an expert on storytelling. And so she teaches how to tell stories and use stories for different things. But what I loved about her second book is it talks about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and this applies to everybody, but it certainly applies if you’re trying to become a paid professional speaker is you have to ask yourself, what is the story? I’m telling myself about myself. If I’m saying, oh no, one’s ever gonna hire me. I don’t have enough credentials. I don’t have enough experience. I’m not famous enough. You know, I’m not funny. I’m not good. You know, I’m not, I don’t have charisma or like, whatever those stories are. And I loved, I loved kind of the, the method she laid out as this little three step method.
RV (17:01):
And she said, first of all, just ask yourself, is that story serving you? Like, does, does that story serve you to tell yourself that if it doesn’t serve, you drop it, stop saying it, stop propagating. It, just drop it, right? Like you don’t have to like try to lie to yourself. You just drop it and go that story’s not serving me. I’m just gonna let it go. And then step two, your job is to choose better stories. So you tell yourself you know, look, you could say no one will hire me because I’m inexperienced. You also could easily tell yourself an authentic truth, which is the inverse of that to say people are gonna hire me because I’m a fresh face, which is leg legitimately true. Like many of our longest standing speaking clients are always bringing things to me and they’re going like, Hey, do you have any fresh faces?
RV (17:52):
Like, because you know, some of us speakers been around for a while. And so they, they get to kind of, you know, people have seen ’em and they’re like, we’re looking for some fresh faces or media will say, we’re looking for some fresh faces. You know, success magazine asked me that. And I remember candy. Valentino was one of our brand builders group clients that I introduced her to them and they love her. Right. And that she was just in their magazine and like she’s doing other stuff with them and they, they, they nominated her for this award and just like really awesome. Because they’re looking for fresh faces and you know, that’s one part about being great inside of brand builders is we see a lot of the fresh faces we’re trying to, we’re trying to help. ’em Right. We’re trying to make, ’em become the household name.
RV (18:28):
So your job is to choose better stories. And then you need to, you need to reinstall and repeat the new story, right? So drop the old story, choose a new story and then reinforce or repeat that new story over and over and over. And you say, you know what, I’m a deal, right? That was something that I used to tell, tell people, and, and it is like, Hey, it’s a deal. I still feel that way about myself. I’m going, Hey, in a few years, my speaking fee is going to be outrageous. Like this is the best time ever to hire Rory Vaden. Because my fee is only going up, like I’m on sale. Like I, this is the best time. And that is true. Like if you’re listening to this podcast, if you’re one of our members, if you’re doing the things we’re teaching you, your fee is going up for certain, like, there is no question about whether or not the stuff we teach works.
RV (19:21):
It a hundred percent works if you follow it, it is G like it it’s guaranteed to work. The question is how fast and just, you know, when and how fast, but you you’re on sale, right? Like I’m on sale. I am, I am, I am the cheapest. It is the cheapest to work with me right now, either to hire me as a speaker or to hire me as a personal strategist. Neither of those things I would say are cheap. Right? they’re definitely lots, lots more than they used to cost when I first started, but I’m still on sale. Like it will never be more affordable to work with me than it is right now. And to work with our company, right. We do price increases over time cuz we get better at what we do. There’s more demand. And, and the price goes up, but so you need to remind yourself of that too.
RV (20:04):
Like just inflation alone, the price is going up. So it’s the best time ever to hire you. You are on sale right now. So those are a couple ideas to help you. Those of you that are interested in a paid professional speaking career, but they also apply, even if you’re not interested in professional speaking, but just going out and speaking to drive more leads to your business and to your personal brand, which is a huge part of what our audience does. And it’ll change your business, getting out there and being in front of people and speaking and just giving them a sample of what you do, it’ll change your business. So that’s what I got for you today. Thanks for being here on the influential, personal brand recap, share this episode. Would you please like who do you know that you, you think, Hey, they should be a speaker or they wanna wanna be a speaker, share this episode with them and be like, Hey, you, you need to tune into this cuz I think it’ll help ’em so as always, we love you. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand podcast.
Ep 309: How to Grow a Personal Brand and Build a Real Estate Empire with Vinney Chopra | Recap Episode
RV (00:07):
Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon.
AJV (00:54):
All right. Y’all welcome to the recap episode of my conversation with Vinney Chopra. Y’all he is just like a little pile of joy. Like it’s like, you know, you meet these people and it’s like, how do I bundle all of that up? Put it in my pocket so I can access it every single day. That’s just a contagious joy that he emos. And if you haven’t listened to the full episode, I will not do it justice. Please do. But in an effort of giving you the cliff notes version of my conversation with Vinney that’s what you’re here for. So let’s, let’s do this, sorry. Here are my three key takeaways from my conversation with Vinney Chopra. So here’s the first thing I loved this and it was such a great reminder. They said that teaching is just choice learning.
AJV (01:47):
That is so good. It’s like to be a good communicator means you need to be a great student, right? To be a coach, a consultant, a speaker, a podcaster, anyone who is conveying information to another human being. I E a teacher, an educator, an informer or a communicator. There has to be a level of choice learning. And although that was so good, and that happens in a variety of different ways. And we live in a unique era, a time in history, where information is at our fingertips to the better or worse of what that brings about, but fits there. So choose to use it for your betterment. It’s like, you can be listening to podcasts. You can read books, you can listen to books, there’s blogs, there’s social media, content posts, there’s courses, there’s webinars, there’s coaching consulting. There’s just so much out there.
AJV (02:37):
And perhaps that’s, sometimes the challenge is with so many options. It’s not easy to choose one, but to be a great educator, a teacher, right. You’ve gotta be a great student. And I love that was such a great reminder to me, of like my job is to learn right, as a human being, as a parent, as a business owner, like a huge part of my job is to be a great student, a great learner of information. So that was my first takeaway. The second is something that I’m just really fascinated with, which is real estate syndication, right? And so I loved this conversation. I’ve been having with him off and on through text and through conversations ever since he and I reconnected just a couple of months ago. But that this is somewhat of a newer concept to me of right.
AJV (03:24):
It’s pooling your money with another group of like minded individuals to be able to invest in larger things. And this is something that he has done extraordinarily well over the last seven years almost 700 million with real estate assets. And so much of that is through syndication. And I love it’s like, I may not be able to buy a 25 million multifamily complex, but I could be a part investor in one. And I love just the whole concept of right, if your money is sitting idle right now, sitting in a bank somewhere, it’s literally losing its value due to the rate of inflation right now. And I, I am not a financial analyst or forecaster. I’m not an economist, but I think there’s some certain things that we can all just consider is true, which is we are going to see the impacts of the choices that our government has made through the pandemic.
AJV (04:23):
Not making a side either way. It’s just choices always have consequences, the choices, bad choices, they all have consequences. And if we’re, we’re gonna fill the ramifications of that at some point in the next 10 to 20 years, if not sooner. And so it’s like how you’re investing your money, spending your money right now is gonna make a huge difference. And so investing into real estate is something that I’ve really gotten a lot of passion about learning, right? It’s a topic I’m learning a ton about right now. And syndication is just a really fascinating way. Then he has courses. He’s got books, he’s got podcasts on this. We barely scratch the surface of this today, but it’s pulling your money with another group of like-minded individuals who are all investing in the same thing to get more people’s money working together for you in a quicker fashion.
AJV (05:12):
So just fascinated about this concept. I think sometimes investing in those types of things can be intimidating, but this is a less intimidating way to go about it, at least through my lens. The third thing I love we talk about is the third, the three tsunamis that are impacting the United States today. This is so good. Like the whole conversation could have been around this. So here are the three tsunamis and a cliff notes version. The first tsunami is the gen Z and millennial tsunami. Right. and basically what that is, is the, the growing number of millennials and gen Z who don’t want to own properties, right? They are turning the country into a renter’s nation along with these other two tsunamis. And I think this is fascinating because it’s like, I have so many friends, I am a millennial, I’m an older millennial, but I have so many friends who are in this gen Z and millennial, you know, generation who don’t see the value in owning.
AJV (06:10):
They don’t want to they wanna be able to rent and hippity hop all over the country or all over the world. I was talking to someone today. The last time I talked to him, he was in Amsterdam today, he’s in Tokyo and I’m like, wait, what? And it’s like, it’s just this transient lifestyle, this laptop living this virtual work environment where we can do things from pretty much anywhere. And we’re seeing that grow and grow with the pandemic. And probably not going back to full time in office jobs for a lot of companies. And so you’ve got this first tsunami of gen Z and millennials who don’t wanna own anymore. The second one is the silver tsunami, right? The growing number of people who are turning age 65, there are 10,000 people every day in the United States that are turning 65.
AJV (07:01):
That’s huge. He said, there’s another 6,000, every single day that are turning 70. And then another 4,000 that are turning 80. Y’all, that’s huge. This comes down to what is the quality of living and life gonna be like for our parents, for grandparents in the next 10 to 20 years with everyone living longer they are, there’s going to be additional requirements for when this person can no longer sustain living in their home alone. Maybe just due to the upkeep that’s required. Some of it may be to illness or sickness or, you know, some sort of injury or handicap, but a lot of it is just due to the upkeep of they don’t want to anymore, or maybe they need to sell so that they can downsize. And there’s this huge, huge era of what are we gonna do with the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who were living well into their seventies, eighties, nineties, in terms of their living arrangements.
AJV (08:01):
And I love any passion around reimagining and redefining what senior housing senior living looks like. And this is probably what I am most passionate about. Learning about. My dad is about to turn 71. He is nowhere near meeting this sort of thing, but if he ever would, I wanna put him in a place that is fun and awesome, and somewhere that he enjoys and he doesn’t consider it being in a senior living home. It’s like, no, this is like spring break for someone in their eighties. Right. and I think that’s a huge thing. This is a huge tsunami that is impacting this trend towards a renter’s nation here in the United States. And then the last is the immigrant tsunami, the amount of people who are moving to this country on a variety of different statuses. But they are moving here and they are not able or eligible to buy a home.
AJV (08:54):
So there is forced renting. Right now in the United States, there is a 20 million how a 20 million home housing shortage right now. That’s extraordinary. And what does that look like in five years or 10 years? And the difference between renting and owning and multifamily and single home and all these different concepts that make up, you know, all the different ways that we can be investing in real estate is a way of making our money work for us. And this was just such a powerful interview. And the reason I wanted to have Vinnie on the show was to talk about like, when your business, when your personal brand is growing and succeeding and you’re making money, because it will, it will do that. Like, you’re probably already doing that now. It’s like, how are you then reinvesting that money so that it’s working for you.
AJV (09:41):
And I just, I wanted to have him on, he’s got amazing podcasts and books and courses. He’s got this amazing personal brand, but simultaneously he also has this really powerful, real estate investment side of him, of a real estate syndication and senior living and multi-family unit housing and hotels and all these different things. And it just got my mind thinking of how are we investing our money and there’s a time and a place for Roth IRAs and 401ks, and then there’s another time and a place of, yeah. And what else am I doing? And I just thought this would be a really great opportunity to talk about as your business scales. How do you make sure that you are scaling up your investment strategies? And just a, a brilliant mind who was doing this exceptionally well? Both in the personal brand space and in the investment space. So I have not even scratched the surface here. There is so much more to talk about, check out this interview follow Vinney Chopra. You can go to Vinney chopra.com, VI N N EY chopra.com. If you go to Vinney chopra.com/free book, you get to get a free copy of his book. The E version check him out, follow him. Y’all just was so good. Hope you enjoyed it. And coming back next time on the influential personal, see you later.
Ep 305: What You Need To Know To Hire The Right Talent with Matt White | Recap Episode
RV (00:07):
Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon.
AJV (00:54):
All right, y’all welcome to the recap episode of my conversation with my good friend, Matt white who is a culture index advisor and works with tons of CEOs. So this isn’t gonna be my five minute recap. I’m gonna time myself.
AJV (01:36):
And I mentioned how I love Ariana Huffington’s perspective on this. And she said, it’s not so much the great resignation as it is the great reevaluation. And I just believe that, and there’s this old saying that people don’t leave companies, people leave people. And although I do believe that to be true I also believe that there is a, a new form of resignation that’s happening right now. And it’s not company resignation. It’s not leader resignation, it’s job resignation, right? They, they have reevaluated that I don’t love what I’m doing. And even though I love who I’m working with and I, I love the company and I love the values and I really do like my teammates and I like my boss. I’m not happy with what I’m doing. And I feel called to do something else, or I’m not using my brain power or I feel stagnant or stuck.
AJV (02:28):
And I think that’s a lot of where we’re experiencing right now is people want a different job environment. They want different skill. They want different to put their skills to different uses. And that’s why I wanted to have Matt on to talk about the culture index, which is a it’s an assessment tool specifically designed for company leaders to create the ideal job position. And then you have your candidates take it. And what you’re trying to do is figure out based on the job that you know, needs to be done. And based on this person’s natural skill sets, how much of a match are they or not? And I think it’s really important that you know that, but also that they know that I’ve had interviews in the last year where I literally, they, somebody, I, I can think of this specific example.
AJV (03:12):
I was looking for a new EA about six months ago. And so I had my profile filled out. I knew exactly what I was looking for in an EA. I know what skills and you know, like what their natural, you know, talents need to be. I know how they need to problem solve and what their motivator should be to work well with me. And I remember this one girl filled this profile out and she filled this out. And in the interview, I like really liked her. She was very sales, mind, marketing minded, all these things. And I was like, that’s a lot of what I want. I want someone super proactive. And it’s like, if I hadn’t have done the culture index survey, I probably would’ve hired her, but she filled it out. And on our second interview, I said, I’m gonna make this a really short interview.
AJV (03:55):
You’re not a fit for the job. And you’re not a fit for this kind of role ever. So I would encourage you not to take it. And I said, here’s your culture index profile. And I’m telling you right now, you would be miserable doing this job, even though I really like you. And I know that you say you could do it. I need someone who wants to do this, not treat this as a stepping stone. I, I need someone who wants to do this for the next three to five years, not for the next three to six months. And I said, but you have the profile of the ideal salesperson. You need to go find a sales job. That is where you’re gonna thrive. It’s where you’re gonna succeed. It’s what you’re gonna love. And I actually reached out to her just a few weeks ago for an open sales position we have.
AJV (04:31):
And she said, it’s actually finding, I took a full-time job actually in a sales position. I’m so glad that we had that conversation. And it was such a blessing to both me and her of going, I know what I need and that this ain’t it for her. And it’s not it for me. And so getting really in tune with that I think is really important and a great reason why you should listen to this. And then there’s two other quick things that I’ll give you that I think are really important. And it was at the very end of my conversation with Matt. And we were talking about how, like, people don’t leave companies and sometimes they don’t even leave people. They leave jobs, they leave jobs that they’re not happy and they don’t feel fulfilled in anymore. And so how do we fix that problem?
AJV (05:08):
And it’s by knowing what they want, like, what are their natural behavior drivers and how do we fit that within a job that works for them. And then it got me thinking about I think people often come to companies because they believe in the values and the missions of the company or the leader, right? The leader is super inspiring and has visionary skill sets. But at some point there has to be a transition of your team members, believing in what you believe in to actually believing in you. And I think at the end of the day, that’s what really helps you retain great talent. That’s what helps you retain people is that there’s been a transition of, we started with, because we shared the same beliefs, but today I just believe in you and whatever it is you do, I wanna be a part of it.
AJV (06:02):
I, I, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing. You could be digging ditches. You could be building skyscrapers or helping people build their personal brands. But I believe in you, and I know if you’re doing it you’re gonna take care of me and you’re gonna help me. And you’re gonna believe in me too. And there’s this trust that’s developed and it’s gotta go from, they believe in what you believe in to. They just believe in you. So making that transition of helping your team get to know you. And the last thing I’ll share is that a quote by ed Mylet who am a, I’m a recent follower of, but I love this. He was in an interview and they introduced him as this self-made millionaire, right. A hundred millionaire. And he corrected him and he said, no, no, no, nobody is self-made anything, especially not me. There is no self-made man. There is only team made, man. And that is what I wanna leave you with. It’s like yeah, we cannot do this on our own as entrepreneurs, business owners leaders we require people. So we are self made nothing. We are team made everything and using culture index is a great tool, great way for you to help build a team around you. So thanks for being here. Thanks for being a listener. Go check out the full episode and we’ll catch you next time.
Ep 277: How to Build Your Business with Radical Confidence with Lisa Bilyeu | Recap Episode
RV (00:07):
Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know the there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from Martin team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon.
RV (00:55):
Anytime I come across someone who has sold their company for a B billion or has made a billion, it grabs my attention. I have to admit not because I want anything from them. It’s just like at that scale, you’re talking about somebody who has done something real, real big, and that is what Lisa BIU did as the co-founder of quest nutrition with her husband, Tom Bilyeu, who I have recently become, I guess, friends, acquaintances of, of ours through a various number of different things, not the least of which is Lisa’s recent book launch, which is what we were just talking about here and had a chance to interview her on and, and to give you access to her, which is pretty awesome. It’s not, not easy to get access, you know, sometimes to, to people that are, are high profile like that.
RV (01:48):
And I, I loved it. I have loved my interactions with Lisa and Tom. There haven’t been a ton of ’em, you know, little messages here and there. That was probably the longest dedicated conversation. I had with Lisa about her content specifically, and, and I, I had never really heard the full story from her. I had interviewed Tom years ago on my old podcast that we sold a few years back, right. When they were started, but never really have had a, a focus conversation like that, like just did with Lisa and man. She’s awesome. Like I started had fallen her on social. I mean, she’s spicy,
RV (02:48):
And we come across a fair number of ’em actually at brand builders group. We’ve we’ve had a few of ’em on our podcast. Jamie cur Lima is another friend that comes to mind. We interviewed her, she sold her company for a billion dollars to L’Oreal. And that was also amazing story. And actually Lisa and Jamie are friends. So you know, small circles, it’s a small world especially I think the, the more successful you become the smaller the world, the, the world even gets. So I wanna share with you as part of this recap, these three of my takeaways from this specific conversation that I just had with Lisa, which are things that I’ve, I’ve never have never hit me in, in things that I’ve heard her say or, or learned from her before. And so I’m excited to share those, share those with you now.
RV (03:36):
And the first one is so simple, but this is so important and so powerful. And so edifying to what we teach all of our members. And, and it’s, it’s such a small thing that you probably missed it in the conversation, but that’s why I want to come back right now. I wanna highlight it with a big mental high. I wanna make this a salient point to go. Don’t miss this. This is huge. It has huge implications. It’s so small though. It’s so easy to step over this and you’re gonna, you’re gonna think I’m silly, cuz I’m making such a big deal out of this, but I’m telling you, this is one of those things that you will here. You won’t notice it. And yet this one little tiny tidbit can change everything for you. And here’s what she said. She said, when we first launched our product, which was quest these health bars, she said, we sent them to people for free.
RV (04:41):
We sent the, we sent influencers free product and it was fascinating to me because those of you that are in our, you know, monthly members of ours or you do private brand strategy sessions with us, you know how we’re saying all the time, the fastest way to take someone from a complete stranger to lifelong fan is a one hour presentation. And so what you have to do is you have to go speak for free. And this is what I did. I spoke 304 times, 304 times. I spoke for free before I ever got paid 300, four times. And we used this analogy in inside of our, our train inside of our course, like our official coursework. And we talk about chicken on the chicken, on a stick, right? Because when you go through the food court, they give you a piece of chicken on a stick, which why do they do that?
RV (05:34):
Because if you’ve never heard of me, you’re not familiar with me. If you don’t know my product and as it relates to your personal brand, if I don’t know who you are, if I’ve never seen you, I, I Don recognize you, letting me sample you for free is the fastest way to make me a believer. And so you have to give your product away for free. Like you have to give your service away for free. And it’s like, when people first start they’re, they’re so nervous about like, no, I, I, I have to sell this to everybody. And it’s like, when you’re just beginning, it should be the opposite. It’s like, you’re just begging people and you’re giving it away for free. And my, of Damon, John I heard Damon John, one time, we shared a stage at an event about a year ago.
RV (06:23):
And, and Damon was telling this story about how he got LL cool J to wear FUBU. And he just like gave it to him and then took a picture of him wearing it. And it was like such a pivotable point in their journey. And like, you have to, you have to give away your service for free. The newer you are. And the lesser known you are, the more that this matters. And it’s so simple, right? And we overlook it. But when you don’t get paid in money, you get paid in testimonials, you get paid in feedback, you get paid in credibility, you get paid. And you know, sort of like this, these early test pilots that you can, you can adapt and, and, and modify your offering and you get paid in referrals. So if you’re just starting out, you might have to flip this switch and, and, and go from like, how do I sell everybody to instead going, how can I give this away for free?
RV (07:17):
And just get a lot of people, just get a lot of people hooked on this. And, and that applies whether you’re selling, you know, FUBU as a clothing line. And you’re Damon John, whether you’re Jamie Kern, Leman, you’re selling makeup, whether you are Lisa BIU and Tom BIU and you’re selling candy bars, or whether you’re a personal brand, trying to get someone to book you for a speech or hire you for coaching. This is our whole model at brand builders group. Like you’re you’re, you don’t pay anything for this podcast. It’s extremely difficult to get someone like Lisa bill, you to, to, to spend this time. Like we spend a lot of money and a lot of energy and a lot of resources trying to bring people like this to you for, and then on social media, it’s free. And then we have all these free trainings.
RV (08:03):
And what does all of our free content do? It drives you to request a free call with our team. We do the first coaching call for free. Why? Because we know that if you don’t know us, you’re not familiar with us. We don’t have millions of followers, but if you, if you hang around long in a, after you go, you know what? I actually like what these people are about. I think I am gonna talk to them. I think I am going to request a free call, which by the way, is@freebrandcall.com slash podcast. You can request your free call and we do the first free call. We do the first free coaching, first coaching call with everybody for free so that they can get a sense of what it means to work with us and how we can add value. You gotta do the same thing.
RV (08:45):
People gotta sample you. They gotta, they gotta taste your product. They gotta know who you are. They gotta have an experience with you. And so that happens with content marketing. It happens, you know, with speaking, I mean, I don’t speak for free very often anymore these days, but I’ve been doing it for 20 years. But in the beginning, that was all we did. That’s how we built our, our whole first company was an eight figure business. Our whole model was that we sent people out and they would go speak for free in, in offices, like to small groups of five people, people, three people sometimes, and they would speak for free for a chance to earn trust. And, and I just don’t miss that, right? Like, especially if you’re just starting out the earlier you are in your process, the more this matters or the earlier you are in a new product or a new revenue stream or a new business venture, this really, really, really matters.
RV (09:38):
The second big takeaway for me. And this came up several times in the con conversation in several different ways. And you know, I’ve kind of heard of this idea before, but not so sharp and not so keen as when Lisa was talking about this, you could hear, you could hear that this was like a part of their philosophy. Like this is a part of their culture and it hit me cuz I was like, wow, that’s, you know, this is important. I know it’s important, but I’ve never quite, you know, captured it like this. What she’s saying, you know, is, is she said in her words, when she was talking about their nutrition bar, she was saying, how do you make something yummy for people to eat? That actually happens to be good for them.
RV (10:24):
Which actually is good for them. And then later when she was talking about how they started with the, the, this, how they started impact theory and this whole new, this whole new brand and this whole new company, it was basically about this idea of how do we create enter? How do we create content that’s impactful and inspiring and yet make it so entertaining that people want to watch it? What, what a great as what a great it’s kind of like going, how do I create the, the cure for cancer that tastes like chocolate? How, how do I you know, we, we kind of try to do this with take the stairs with my first book which still to this day, of course I speak a lot on and that’s the message of self-discipline and we go, how do we make self-discipline more, more palatable and, and easier, you know, more digestible and, and, and easier and fun even for people to embrace.
RV (11:27):
And that’s really important because there is, there’s the truth, like there’s principles that change lives and there’s truths that make a difference for people. But then you have to package it in a way that makes it digestible. You have to, you have to solve the real problem. Right. And a lot of times that requires work or at least discipline, or at least the unfamiliar, right. To change your life, you have to do something different. But the, the part that’s so inspiring here is in their, in their sense, it was, it, it wasn’t just the physical packaging, but it, it, it was the physical packaging. And then also the taste right. Of the actual bar. So it’s like, how do you take your business? I, and your personal brand, which solves a problem in the world and how do you put it inside a rapper, right?
RV (12:18):
Like it might be medicine. This, this makes me think of, you know, how do you get a dog to eat medicine? You wrap it in peanut butter, right? And so the dog eats the peanut butter and they take the medicine. Or, or you, you do the, you could do this, you do the same thing with kids, right? Like you mix the medicine up inside of something else. So you gotta have the, the transformation in people’s lives. That’s your content like that’s the inside of the book. But then the, the title of the book has to be enticing and your whole branding, your whole positioning. I remember talking to Louis, how one time about photography? You know, somebody asked him this question. I, I was actually, I, I, I wasn’t a private conversation. I was in a room and he was, he was speaking. And somebody asked him, what’s the most IM like, what’s the most important part of building a personal brand.
RV (13:06):
And he said photography. And that blew me away. I was like, what? That’s, that’s crazy. Like what a weird answer. And, and he talks about it because he think the photography you know, the way that he thinks about it is it is, it, it, it captures this energy, the, the, the image portrays emotion and energy, which is what communicates, what the brand is all about. And I was like, wow, that’s deep
RV (14:02):
How, how do you, how do you make it to where it’s, it’s, it’s what they need, but it’s also what they want. And to me, this is sort of the difference between you know, for those of you that are brand builders in finding your brand DNA, where we do talk about finding your uniqueness. We refer to all of that as internal Mar moniker, internal messaging, internal alignment, your uniqueness is internal. But then in phase two, we talk about marketing, which is external, and that’s the marriage of this, right? It’s, it’s sort of like to use the quest nutrition bar since that’s the topic here is going there is there’s the guts of the bar, but then it’s wrapped in chocolate and then it’s wrapped in beautiful packaging. And that’s what you wanna do for your message for your, you know, for whatever your personal brand is like for the, for the most part, success is fundamental.
RV (14:52):
Success is built on fundamental truth. And so you’re finding a way that’s, that’s the art of marketing is wrapping fundamental truths in a new and exciting and enticing way. So I love that. And then the third thing, the third thing was when Lisa said, even to this day, she’s the chief creative officer at impact theory and hearing her talk about her passion for storytelling and movie making and, and video editing hit me hard. And I, and I think I’ve missed the boat here. I’m, I’m quite confident that I have the least not I’m nowhere near the way that sh she thinks in her mind is, you know, like when we create content, I’m going, how do we create useful content? But she is going, how do we edit this in a way to where it changes people’s emotion. If you go back and listen to the recording, she said, what I love about V is you have the ability to change a person’s emotion with video, right?
RV (15:59):
So she’s not just, she’s not just asking the question, what’s the most efficient way to transfer an idea. She’s also saying, how do I transform their emotion? And that is like, almost like science and art, right? It’s going, I wanna, you know, I’m, they’re in the business of, of helping people with great ideas, but it’s not so much that the idea itself is maybe, you know, original or, you know, groundbreaking, at least it’s not, it’s not like they’re sharing things that nobody else has ever said, but they’re doing it a in a way that is in literally inspiring. It moves people emotionally. And, and so, you know, this is, this is where the connection point is for us, where in our world class presentation, craft training. So we’ve got, you know, all together inside a brand builders group, we have 14 different two day trainings, 14 different two day experiences.
RV (16:54):
One of ’em is called world class presentation craft, where we talk about how do you construct the perfect keynote? And one of the, you know, the, the central premise of, of that whole training is that you have to learn to move the audience emotionally. You have to move them emotionally. There’s these things that you, there’s so many things you can do with a speech from the way it is structured to the way that the slides are laid out, to the way you use the stage, to the way you tell the stories, to the way you develop the characters, to the way you, you write jokes and add punchlines to the way that you use your voice, your body, your facial expressions, there’s all of these things. And we go through all of these different techniques. And the reason all of them are there is they are arrows in your quiver.
RV (17:36):
And the objective them is to move people emotionally. But the thing that has never quite clicked in my head like it did listening to Lisa was going, oh, that same level of meticulous crafting that I would do with the speech that I’ve been doing my whole life with speaking is the same amount of crafting and effort and energy that needs to go into video editing. And I’m going, yeah, I I’ve been missed the boat there, right? Like, to me, I’m just going, how do I get someone to like, edit this video and like put a bumper on it and, and some music underneath it, but not thinking about it as like, what is the real art here of what is the emotion we’re trying to create? And how do we use imagery and text? And what’s being said, and voiceover and transitions and all of the things, and you can just tell that how, how much she has crafted and, and how much she, you know, they think their, their team and in their brain.
RV (18:38):
And, and that they’re, they’re doing the art of not just communicating information, but doing it in an inspiring, inspiring way to get more views sure. Of, of course, to get more subscribers. Yes, of course. But it’s deeper than that. It’s to actually make an impact. The reason you have to work so hard at crafting your message is because the more well crafted it is the, the better packaged it is, the more entertaining it is. The more likely it is to get through the, the more likely you are to break through somebody’s defense mechanisms in their walls and these barriers that they put up, and the more likely you’re able to impact them. So, and that takes work and energy and, and craft. It’s not just, you know, throwing something up. It’s, it’s, it’s actually thinking about it and constructing it with, as a gift for the person who’s receiving it, not just spewing out like what’s on your mind, but actually reverse engineering, the construction of your message so much to the extent that it is a gift for the other person on the other end, who’s receiving it.
RV (19:53):
That’s beautiful. That is art. That is personal branding at its finest, far above vanity, far above likes and far above just information. It’s truly being centered on the mission of serving people and changing people’s lives. So I hope that you see a rising commitment from our team and a desire at least to be creating content that is moving and useful and powerful and practical and applicable for you in your journey here on this podcast, every single week. I’d love it. If you shared this episode or any of our episodes with someone who you think needs to see it that you’re checking out our free trainings that we have at brand builders group to.com and then you just stay plugged in until you’re ready to request a free call. And then hopefully our team will get the privilege of talking to you@somepointafreebrandcall.com slash podcast, and then that we get a chance to help you start to craft your personal brand journey. Thanks for being here. We love you. We’re grateful for you. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand podcast.
Ep 263: How To Grow a Million Dollar Membership Site With YouTube with Jonny May
AJV (00:02):
Hey everybody. This is AJ Vaden. One of the co-founders and CEO at brand builders group. Welcome to another episode of the influential personal brand. And today I’m so excited. And also just quite honestly, I’m so honored to have a personal friend on this show. So I’m gonna introduce Jonny in just a second, and really today is kind of one of those episodes that if you are building a digital business of any kind, if you are trying to grow your audience trying to scale your course, create online content. This is an episode you do not want to miss. So do not fast forward. This do not get off or early, make sure you listen to the whole thing. Take notes, listen to the recap episode and then go follow Jonny because this is exactly the episode that was built for you.
AJV (00:54):
So this is very, a very specific invitation of bringing Jonny onto the show to share some really cool expertise. So let me formally introduce you to my good for and Johnny May. So Jonny is an internationally acclaimed pianist. He is a pianist educator, founder of piano with johnny.com, which you should go check out which is an online piano course platform with more than 10,000 active monthly members across the world. He’s also a viral YouTuber and his videos have earned more than 70 million views with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of followers. He’s also one of the youngest or the youngest ever a pianist to perform at the Disneyland main street as a main street pianist. He’s also just an awesome human being with a heart and just all things good. So welcome to the show, Jonny.
JM (01:49):
Wow, AJ, thank you so much. That was an amazing introduction. Thank
AJV (01:52):
You. I should be like a professional introducer one day. You’re good
JM (01:57):
At it. Yeah, you should start
AJV (01:58):
Business, future business. So welcome. I’m so excited to have you on, because I know that so many of listeners are trying to build their digital platform. They’re trying to grow memberships courses increase their recognition online. And that is something that you have done extraordinarily well and really a short amount of time. And so we ask this question to everyone who comes onto this show and what we really wanna is how did you get to where you are? And so personally knowing a little bit of your background, what I really want everyone to hear from you is how did you go from being a professional musician to a membership site that has 10,000 monthly members, and you have grown a multi seven figure your business in a really short amount of time by leveraging your skillset as a musician to teach others how to do the same thing. So we wanna know how’d you do it.
JM (02:57):
Thank you so much. Well, you did a great job again leading into this. And so my story is so I was a professional musician. I still play professionally, but I did basically, I giggled for a living starting at age at age 18. I got, well, actually before that I was gigging at 16, like little like local restaurants and bars. And then I landed the Disneyland main street ragtime gig. I did that for nine years. I was hired at age 18 and love a gig. That’s a long time, long time. Yeah. Nine years. Yeah. Right. It’s like a little career. And I just like hustled as a musician and I, I remember playing seven nights so a week and I was playing restaurants and hotels and weddings and private parties and just bust, you know, really working hard.
JM (03:46):
And, and I, it was a lot of fun. I loved it. And basically around this time, it was 2012. My brother-in-law, who’s also a professional musician. He had just graduated college, graduated college, and we were driving home from a, a date night, a double date with my sister. He was dating my sister and then my, my girlfriend girlfriend at the time who was later become my wife. And he said, Hey, why don’t we record some of your piano lessons and put ’em online and sell them. And it was like, at the time, not a lot of people were doing this right. 2012 to was one guy who was doing it piano with Willie. So we said, well, we’ll call it piano with Johnny. And so we that’s awesome. Yeah. It was like, okay, you know, whatever cool. So he kind of put things together.
JM (04:33):
He arranged the session and we hired a friend of ours. You know, he set up the cameras, we went to my brother-in-law’s old college, his almond modern, and we recorded three courses and we had no idea what we were doing. I had never filmed like that. So I literally, AJ, I could not talk on the camera. Like I could not just talk the way I’m talking to you right now. I was stumbling over my words. I didn’t know what to say. My brother-in-law had to write out cue cards. And I was like reading these cue cards. It’s like super obvious. But it was just fun. It was like this cool idea. And I was teaching a bunch of private lessons at the time and it was like, Hey, why don’t, why don’t we try this? You know, it was just an experiment.
JM (05:14):
And so we made these three courses. We were like, okay, we gotta make a website. So we went on WordPress and like built basically like kind of pieced it together and hired a couple guys, but it looked horrible. Like it was like tons of texts. And we had, we had these three courses and we made a boogie woogie course, a blues course and a rag time course. And we started a YouTube channel called piano with Johnny. And I started putting up like performances of me, just me playing. And then little, we put up like a free version of the courses, like a 10 minute version. And we, some, we sold a course. We’re like, we’re like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. How much was it for 40? I think it was 40. And I was like, woo, woo, big money. You know, being a musician.
JM (05:59):
And, you know, I was all excited cuz it was like passive a little bit passive. And so we just kind of kept selling courses and my brother-in-law would call me and say, Hey, let’s make another course. And we ended up filming in his apartment. He had like a one bedroom apartment with a grand piano in his living room. And I actually have a, a picture. Maybe I can share it with you, but like I’m teaching at this piano. And he’s like, he’s got the two dining room, table chairs with the tripod legs. And he’s like, looking over me, it’s super awkward, but we had so much fun and we just went for it. It was like, let’s do it. And so we just kept making more courses. And I remember there was a big moment for me. It went from, okay, this is just a fun, little hobby to like, oh my gosh, like this could be a real business. And it was in the summer of 2014, we did our summer special and we made $4,000 that month. And I was like, what? This is, this is awesome. You know, that was a big deal for a musician be making that kind of money. And I just, oh,
AJV (07:00):
On that note, I think this is really important. I think you shared this like your best year ever as a full-time professional musician you made how much?
JM (07:09):
Oh my gosh. I think my best year and I, I took every single gig. Every single, I think I made $60,000
AJV (07:18):
Thousand in a month,
JM (07:20):
4,000 a month. Big deal. That was a big deal. I mean, that was like almost what I was making anyway. And it was a big deal and, and I, but I just remember something went off. I was like, oh, this, this could be a business. This isn’t just like another gig, another side thing. And so I started taking it more seriously. And then basically a few things happened that I lost a couple gigs at Disneyland. They like closed a showdown and they like changed the performers and I suddenly didn’t like, didn’t have work. And I had to like go scramble for work. And I kind of realized, you know, I had been at Disneyland for nine years and like, I, I really did not want to be playing piano at a theme park, you know, in 30 years. And so I had a, a lot of deep interest, a lot of prayer, as you know, I’m a believer and really turned to God said, you know, what, what do you want me to do with my life?
JM (08:06):
And I loved teaching and I had this opportunity and then we had the summer sale and long conversations with my wife and just like, what’s your purpose? And I, I was like, you know, I really, I really think I wanna be an entrepreneur. And it was like, okay, like, wait you’re gig musician. No, no, I I’m still a gig musician, but I wanna do, I wanna be an entrepreneur as well. And so I kind of fused together. These two things that I had always loved as a little side note when I was 16. No, no, no. I was younger. I was 13. I started an eBay business selling pirate at software. And I did that for a couple years. I made like $10,000. So like ripped off soft software. I was like copying these CDRs. I like Napster
AJV (08:52):
The days of Napster.
JM (08:53):
Yeah. It was the days of Napsters downloading music and copying games and making labels. And it was so illegal and this guy emailed me one day and he was like, I’m turning you in. This is like, he, I, he bought one of the products and I was, I emailed him back and I was like, dude, I’m only, I’m only 14 years old, man. I’m so sorry. You know, I’ll never do this again. I was like apologizing and my parents had no idea that I was like running this like illegal eBay business from like my bedroom. But I was always an entrepreneur. I always like liked creating things. And so, you know, as a, you know, I left Disneyland when I was 27 and I had this, like this desire to start a business, this like unfulfilled potential. And I was like, I think this is the time to do it.
JM (09:35):
And so I struck out from Disneyland, we sold our condo. And oh, so this was a big part of my journey as I went back to school to learn business, cuz I was like, I don’t know anything about business, you know? And so I went back to college. This was in 2014 and I got my business degree while running piano with Johnny. And it was really, really hard to do by it. I, I did it. And then we just kept making courses and kept learning from our audience you know, growing, using YouTube. And we launched a membership that was a really big deal for us is we were selling courses up till 2015. And we were like always like running sales and Hey, you know, buy the blues course, whatever. And we were like, Hey, why don’t we just have a membership? And just people can pay for access. That was one of the smartest decisions. And I think when we did that, we had like a hundred members right off the
AJV (10:23):
Bat. Oh my gosh. OK. So I wanna pause right here. Cause I think there’s three things about your story so far that I think are pretty significant to people who are listening to this. Is that one you really built your business leveraging YouTube.
JM (10:37):
Yes, absolutely.
AJV (10:38):
Okay. So, so let’s pause and like talk about that for a few minutes of like, what were some of the keys of building your YouTube following? And like even today, now it’s like YouTube is still like your primary social media platform, right? It’s like, that’s where your go to is. So for those of us who are going, okay, I really want to leverage video and YouTube and I wanna use that to build my business. Like how do you do it? Like, what are some of those insider tips and secrets of growing and utilizing YouTube?
JM (11:07):
Yeah. I mean, you’re so insightful. And this is when people ask me, like, how did you do it? How did you do it? I say YouTube. It is YouTube. Like literally like to your point from 2012 to 2019, we did zero paid ads, zero paid ads. It was all on YouTube. And we, I think we grew in 2019, I mean the business was almost a seven figure business by that point. So YouTube is huge. I don’t think people realize if you get a video that goes viral, it’s the traffic is incredible. So here’s what I’ll first start off by saying is we did not do YouTube very well when we started, when we started well we did some things well, so as a performer that drove a lot of the traffic, but we did not do a good job making content for YouTube.
JM (11:52):
So what we were doing, we had these courses and then we, we would take like 10 minutes from a course and we would do like a demo version and then it would like fade out and say, Hey, you want the full course and the YouTube channel. I would say didn’t grow as quickly as it could have until several years later that we started actually making content for YouTube and making weekly content. So that’s a big, big thing is our YouTube channel did not really take off until we started making weekly content and it was for YouTube. So, okay. I’m gonna make a 10 minute video and it’s gonna feel really good for the rather than give 10 minutes of a larger course, I’m gonna make content for that audience. And I’m gonna get to know that audience really well. That was a big deal. And we started doing that much later in 2019. So
AJV (12:35):
I have a question. You said we created content for YouTube,
JM (12:40):
Correct.
AJV (12:41):
What does that look like?
JM (12:42):
So it’s, it’s knowing the YouTube audience, knowing the content that they wanna see and then creating a short video that they get to the end of the video and feels they, they have this great sense of satisfaction that they learned something. It’s I, I guess the, to me, it’s not as promotional. I think the demos were more like, Hey, it’s a little piece, but you really need to watch the course. This was like the feeling I think for the user was, wow, this is like free like, oh my gosh, this is great instruction. And it was really hard to get to that point because I was like, wait, I’m not gonna just give away my knowledge. Like, no, you have to buy the course. You know, I had that attitude like, no, I’m not gonna give and I cannot tell you how wrong I was about that. As I started giving more, I received more. And that was like so bizarre. Like I would make longer videos for YouTube and like make them really like put everything I had into these videos. And then the, the videos would do really well. And so that’s, I guess that’s what I mean is they weren’t promotional. It was like, it was, I was really actually giving for free and not, it
AJV (13:46):
Was like truly curated content on how to, right. So it wasn’t like here’s a little preview by the course. It was like, no, I’m gonna give it all to you. Here’s a, how to video on X, Y, Z.
JM (13:57):
Exactly. And then of course I would say, Hey, if you want to go deeper check out course. But I, it was like, I think a lot of it was like an attitude thing of mine. And I, I imagine that it came out also in the way I taught in those videos, you know? And then the other thing is a lot of the courses, you know, we weren’t releasing a course every week. We’d really, of course, every two months. So I was only putting out one video every two months. Oh wow. My new strategy was like, oh, I can make a 10 minute video every week. And that’s, I guess the second piece is so not only making content free content with the intention of it being free, but secondly is you have to put yourself on a schedule. And I I’ve talked to so many people who they’re like, yeah, you YouTube, I’m doing this, but you know, I’m not sure what to post and I haven’t posted a month or two. And I always say to them, like, you need to post, this is my opinion. You might disagree with it, but post every week post something. And a lot of the reason people don’t post is they’re nervous on camera, you know? And so you, but you overcome that as you post more, it’s like, well, you need to do the thing that you don’t wanna do to overcome that. And so anyway, I just made a habit of that and that’s when the channel really took off on YouTube. So consistent,
AJV (15:05):
Consistent weekly. It’s like, yeah, I would say daily, weekly, just make it like consistent. So people know when can hear from you. Right. So it’s like consistent but free curated content really to just give like, ultimately give value on how to, for YouTube. I love that. And then every single person we talk about talks about consistency. Right? I think it, I think it was Gary V maybe giving credit to the wrong person here. You said, content may be king, but consistency is queen.
JM (15:37):
Mm. Right. Absolutely.
AJV (15:38):
Content only goes so far. Cause we need to have that expectation of when are you gonna give me more? But then you mentioned something else about when a video goes viral and I know that at this point you’ve posted thousand and thousands of videos. So I’m curious to know, it’s like, do you guys have predictions and indicators of what you think will go viral? Or is it kind of like, who knows? Wait and see,
JM (16:02):
You know, it’s funny, AJ, I’ve not solved the puzzle of YouTube. I’ve been doing YouTube eight years. Right. And just tons of videos. I still, it still blows my mind. I’ll do a video on like, man, this is the video. Oh man. People are gonna love the title and the thumbnail. It’s perfect. And then it’s like, w wa you know, it’s like, and it’s so disheartening too, you know? And then, and then I’ll do a video and I’m like, Hey, like I barely like take any time. And it, it like gets hundreds of thousands of views or millions of views. And so I, you know, there, there are certain things that I do. I mean, yes, absolutely. That I’ve learned that do better, but I wouldn’t say like, well, here’s like the formula I’ve noticed. I mean, I can, I can offer your audience some tips that I’ve
AJV (16:46):
Yes, please. I’ve
JM (16:47):
Realized. So the thumbnail is huge, you know, keeping the thumbnail really simple. And in using images, I’m sure you’ve talked to your audience about this, but try using less text and images to represent whatever you’re trying to say. I try to keep the word, I do put words on my images, but I, I usually try like five words, six words, because it’s that it needs to be that guttural thing, cuz people are St scrolling and it’s the first thing they see. And then actually you shared something that was very profound with me last year and it actually helped my thumbnails. I don’t think I’ve ever shared this with you. Oh,
AJV (17:21):
I’m so in, I’m sorry. I’m trying to hear what this is.
JM (17:23):
Yeah. You, you did, you shared it with me when we were in the Florida retreat, but you said for the thumbnail, it needs to be the, I want to, right. I want to, and I was like, oh, like I never thought of it that way, but that’s true. Right. It’s the, I want, and so I started restructuring the thumbnails that way and I noticed an increase. So it needs to be that, that gut thing, I want to play jazz piano. I want to and so that’s worked well. And then there’s a lot of strategies for like the title, but short titles, not too many emoticons. I like the, the carrot at the end of the stick. Like here’s how to, you know, improvise, you know what, something with this or the top thing I do it like, it’s like, well with that thing. So creating a sense of curiosity. And then I wouldn’t say we’re the best that our thumbnail, our thumbnails don’t look amazing. They’re very simple. But I would say there is definitely a strategy behind the video itself. I can talk about too. I don’t know how deeply you want me to go.
AJV (18:21):
This is so helpful. It’s like titles, thumbnails, the video themselves, like all, whatever you have bring it on.
JM (18:26):
Well, okay. So it’s branded around me, you now with Johnny. So I’m in every video, that’s it doesn’t have to be that way, but that’s a decision we made. There’s always a keyboard because Hey, you know, we’re about the keyboard, but then we don’t do fancy backgrounds. Almost every one of our thumbnails. It’s the same angle. It’s, it’s not like we do a lot of production. One of the advantages of our production is it’s incredibly simple. So we don’t do a lot of product. And you know, we don’t have a lot of camera angles. It’s just me at the camera. I’m usually holding an object pointing to something and just trying to convey a very simple message. Then so, but this is actually in some ways, not what matters the most. Cuz people get to the content. If it’s good, they stay. If it’s bad, they go right.
JM (19:07):
And so really like those are gateways. They’re entry ways to the content. The content has to be excellent. Right. Wow. You know this right? And so we try to make 10 to 15 minute videos. Sometimes they’re 25. We just did a 27 minute video. That’s fine. We’ve done six minute videos. I think the key is teaching. What needs to be taught no more, no less. And then what I found that really works, and this is for me as a pianist is the moment people open the video, you need to show them something they really want. And in my case, it’s like, Hey, I wanna play like that. And you need to show authority. You need to show credibility. And so almost every video, I try to open with me playing something, just like freaking awesome. Right. And I wanna hook them in and then go, ah, I wanna play that.
JM (19:55):
That’s awesome. And I see a lot of YouTube YouTubers start their videos with talking. I think that’s cool. But I just think if you can establish that hook right away, that’s extremely important. And then I structure the inner, I always say, Hey, you know, do you want to learn this thing? Usually it starts with a question to engage them. And then I’ll say, and then rather than give ’em the answer, I’ll say, well, many teachers would say this or a lot of students think this, right. It’s kind of challenging in an assumption. I, again, this is a very like general way of presenting a video and then I’ll go into, but actually this is the case, but no, no can do it this way. And then I’ll say, but you need to learn this thing, right. Again, the, the carrot, right? You gotta keep them engaged and excited about.
JM (20:41):
Right. So, and then I transition to the teaching and then for my staff teaching, I try to get right to the point. I try to, you know, people don’t wanna sit there and listen 15 minutes. So it’s a weird balance of getting to the point, but like having, having more. And so this has taken a lot of time for me to learn, but in the video you always need to be like saying, well, I’m going to, I’m gonna show you this other thing, like in a little bit. Right. Or like, okay, I’ll show to put together a little bit. And so, so it’s a real art I would say to the teaching, but how
AJV (21:10):
Did you learn all of that? I know you’ve been doing it a long time, but for those people who are going what you just said could change my business. How do I learn how to do that better? Like how did you do that? Like, did you watch videos, courses, classes, trial, and error. Watch yourself. Yeah. What’d you guys do
JM (21:27):
Well, I’ve watched a lot of other guys do what I do. Like I’m very aware of the competition. I, I see what works and I try to integrate it. I’m a big Steeler steel so much like, yeah. I mean, I mean, think about it. Like I’m playing the freaking piano, like a sea. I didn’t invent a sea major chord. Like all this stuff I’m teaching like I’m regurgitating, right? Yes. I think what we need to do, this is really relevant for your audience is you need to repackage information, sorry. You know, you’re, you’re not inventing what you do. You learned it somewhere. Another thing that comes to mind is you, is it’s important to coin language. A, a lot of what I’ve done as a pianist and as a teacher is make up my own language around what I do. Because there’s certain chord progressions that there’s not a name for there’s certain scales or techniques.
JM (22:12):
And so there’s real opportunity. I think all of your listeners who, you know, maybe your field is beauty or your field is fashion or your field is, you know weightlifting or whatever. You, there are opportunities to, to sort of own a little space of that field. I mean, I’ve literally made up words for a, I made a, a scale. It was called the major blue scale. Right. It’s kind of a technical name. And I was like, it’s the gospel scale? Right? It’s the gospel scale. And literally it’s now like people search the gospel scale.
AJV (22:43):
That’s awesome.
JM (22:44):
And it was like, you know, I’ve made up, I made up a a technique called pops, Sten. It’s like a pop chord progression and an AA, which is like a boring, kind of a boring classical term. And I was like, it’s, but it’s a pop Sten, like, you know, the sentimental chord progression. Like, so my point is like, I think it’s important if you’re building a brand is to actually build language
AJV (23:05):
Absolutely.
JM (23:07):
In that space that you can kind of own, right. If you’re the first person to coin it. And I certainly wouldn’t go about just doing it, you know, willynilly or just for the sake of it, because you know, there’s a, there’s an advantage to having the language. But I think in every field, there’s what I’m trying to say is an opportunity to kind of use your own language.
AJV (23:23):
Absolutely. I love that so much. I’ve never heard you say anything like that, but I think that’s a whole point of put your uniqueness on what you do. It’s like the, so many of the things that all of us do are commoditized. And the only thing that makes us different is us.
JM (23:40):
Yeah.
AJV (23:40):
Right, right. The, the beauty of what we’re doing and what we’re talking about at brand builder’s group, and what you’re talking about is if you simply be you, what you do is unable. Cause no one else is you. Right. Right. And it’s like, the more that you can infuse you into the language, the culture, the imagery, the feel, the essence of it. No one can copy it. Right.
JM (24:01):
Totally. Totally. Yeah. We call it, you know, barriers to entry in business. Right. I don’t own, I mean, I do have copyrights on my sheet music, but my biggest beer entry to entry is there is no other Johnny Mae. Yeah. And you’re totally right. Like all of your listeners, you know, each one of you guys are watching this, you possess a very incredible and unique skill and you need to own it 100%. Like I’ve never, like, I like, I, I wear this type of shirt, like as a collared shirt. And I’m just, I’m like, you know, the, I just do it. Like, it’s my thing. And, and I think if you can own that and build, as I said, language around it, don’t like, copy’s like the worst thing you could do. And I know I just said how much copying works, but I think in terms of, it’s like a weird balance, I guess. Yeah. You want to copy and you also want to be yourself.
AJV (24:49):
No, I, no. It is a unique balance that it’s like to some degree it’s like, no matter what you do is copying a little bit. It’s like, what is really new today, but it’s how you put your spin on it. Right? Your take your unique perspective and view. And I, I love that those are so many really good little nuggets there. Y’all, it’s like simplicity in the thumbnail. Right? Keeping it about the imagery, the way that you start getting quick to it creating those little cliff hanger moments where it’s like, but stick around because in a minute, we’re gonna talk about and we, we shared this a lot that it’s like, you, you said it and I love that you brought this up and it totally, it was like, ding, ding, ding, ding in my head. Because like, you know, you always hear people say like, save the best for last. Yeah. Our philosophy is you always save the best for first, like lead with your best content lead with whatever you have. That’s going to like grab people’s attention and suck ’em in. And that’s exactly what you said. It’s like, no, it’s like lead with your best stuff. Show ’em what you got. Bring it and bring the heat from the beginning.
JM (25:50):
Oh my gosh, AJ, I need some like organ music right now. Like you’re preaching it girl like that. Like it is so true. And it’s like, it’s like a relationship, right? I mean, when you are courting a customer, you want somebody to post a customer. You, you show off your best, you dress off your best. And then you build a relationship. Like that’s another mistake. I see. So many people ache like in YouTube is they, they ask for a lot before they give, yeah, you need to not only give, but you need to give over a long period of time. Our sales cycle is not based on YouTube. I am not looking for a sale from YouTube. I’m looking actually for their email. That’s the most important thing, cuz email’s a little bit closer to their heart, right? We’re all we will. As consumers, we will subscribe new channel, whatever.
JM (26:32):
Right? It’s not a big deal, but, but who gets my email address? Not many people. Right? You’re a little more protective of that. And so it’s, it’s gradual. And then once I have their email, it’s we drip the content and honestly be people won’t become a customer customer of ours for six months because they’re getting this content weekly and it’s like, okay, you know, you need to build trust with these people. So to your point, give your absolute best. And that should be the first thing they experience. I did have a couple other things I wanted to say about YouTube that I think are really that have helped us. And it, I guess it actually relates to this, but when you’re making a YouTube video, start with the easiest ask, don’t start with a big ask. So, you know, a, a big ask in my case might be by a or sign up for the membership.
JM (27:19):
I will always start usually two minutes in with, Hey, if you like this video hit the like button and subscribe, right? It’s like no big deal. Then the second is generally related to an email address. And then the third is related to a course. And so I follow, if you watch my videos, I almost always follow this structure is very easy. Ask to you know, putting the, the carrot out there. They may or may not wanna get the course, but I think some people ask for a lot early, they’ll start promoting their, like their thousand dollars membership. Two minutes in it’s like, wait a second. I don’t even know you dude. So
AJV (27:51):
It’s building that. Yes. Momentum. So, Hey, if you like this, yes. You’re conditioning their behavior from the get go. It’s like, like this, subscribe to this sign up for this. Oh and Hey, by the way, you can buy this core. So it’s like that gradual conditioning.
JM (28:06):
Exactly. Yeah. You have to be very, very mindful of what you ask from people. And especially if they don’t know you, it’s like, well, you’re just another guy on YouTube making piano videos. You have to build a relationship and there’s so much trust involved. You know, we sell our, our membership is a, you know, 40 bucks a month. It’s not a product, but you you’ll be amazed how long people wait to sign up for a $40 month product or the $300 annual membership. So, you know, I just wanna drill this point to all of your listeners is build a relationship with your customer and don’t ask for the full buy on the front end, defer it, defer it as much as possible. I’d say at least six months. And it depends on your product. If you have a thousand dollars product, like it might take a year, that’s a big, that’s a big chunk of money for people.
AJV (28:53):
Yeah. You know, it’s so funny. There’s been this like ongoing growing conversation and the brand builders group community around. I just thought I would be at a certain place by now. I thought I would have this many followers or this many ERs or this many members. And, and it’s I think this is such a great reminder. And I’ve heard maybe this message is from me today because I heard this from like four people today about the importance of patience.
JM (29:18):
Yeah, totally.
AJV (29:20):
It’s like, it’s like, you gotta win the trust. Then you win a relationship. But that take time. It’s like you wouldn’t ask, you know, your girlfriend to marry you after, you know, six weeks. I don’t know. Maybe you would, but for most people it’s gonna take a little bit of time, but it’s like, why are we asking our customers to buy the moment they show up on our page? Where’s the relationship, where’s the trust. And there’s just some things you can’t expedite so much. And those are such good reminders and a little bit of patience is a good, healthy reminder to all of us, no matter what we’re doing. That’s so good. So, okay. So I have two other quick things for you. Cuz I know that we I literally could continue this conversation. It’s like, I’m gonna have to steal you for coffee and talk more about YouTube.
AJV (30:06):
Cause that is not, I would say our, our wicked skillset, it’s not YouTube, but we want it to be, so I really need to steal some of your brain. But you said two other things I think are really important. You went from a course format to a membership format. Yes. So I’d love for you to talk about how did you make that successful transition because you don’t just have a membership format, you have 10,000 active monthly members and a multi seven figure business. Yeah. And that’s, that is what so many people in this community are trying to do. And it’s like, how do you do it? Like, so what are some of those like simple steps, maybe not easy, but they’re simple.
JM (30:43):
Yeah. It’s a great question, AJ. I would say if you wanna build a a membership business the first, well, the first thing is you gotta have enough content to justify a membership, right? You, you have three courses, you know, it’s like really I’m gonna pay monthly for this. I just wanna buy the course. But for us, the breaking point was about 20 core. Okay. It was about, you know, Hey, you’ve got 20 courses, we’re selling them 40 bucks, a pop that’s $800 of a worth of a catalog and sell to sell someone. A actually, when we launched our membership, we were selling it at $15 a month. It was pretty cheap. So I don’t know if that comes out too, but that’s like, you know like 200, 200 and it was like, well, okay, that makes sense. Right. I’m I’m paying $200 a year for $800 worth of content.
JM (31:27):
Right. That’s like a no-brainer. So I think you have to get to that point, you have enough content. I think you need to be making regular content. A lot of people make their flagship course and then it’s like, they’re done. It’s like, no, if you’re gonna have a membership, people expect, you know, you go on Netflix, you expect new movies. And so we were, we were making about one new course per month. That was, that was a big thing. Let’s see. What are the, what were the big things? I think those, those were key. Just having the content. We didn’t have a lot of people, like a ton of people sign up for it, but we had a hundred and that was kind of pre of concept was like, okay. You know, and then we just kind of grew it from there
AJV (32:08):
Four year membership site. And this is like a pretty technical question. What, what do you guys use in terms of payment processing and a membership access, do you guys use like an LMS or what do you use?
JM (32:21):
We use member mouse.
AJV (32:23):
Okay.
JM (32:24):
We and great. They integrate really well with WordPress. So then there’s a bunch of platforms out there. And there’s ones that make it a lot easier. You know, it’s interesting when we started the business there weren’t teachables and Cajas and all these platforms, you know, we just kind of to do it ourselves. So we have a custom built website, but it was like by necessity, I would say to a lot of people, like don’t spend a ton of money, like just use one of these. You can build a membership site on, on a lot of these platforms and get started there. And then if at some point you need a custom site. Great. But don’t go spend $20,000. Yeah. Don’t do it.
AJV (32:59):
If you use member mouse, then there’s like Meum Thinkific, teachable Cajabi okay. So that’s cool. And so, okay. Another question I have I’m trying to think of all the questions that we get. Yeah. In our community. It’s how did you set your pricing? Like how did you, and then, cause you said it, you started off really cheap and then you’ve increased it. So how did you said it and then how did you decide when to increase it?
JM (33:23):
So a lot of the price setting was just the market. Like what are other people charging? We, our strategy has been not to be at the high side, not to be the low side. We don’t want it cheap and people will, will equate the value to the price. If we put it for a dollar, people go that’s cheap, you know, $60. Right. It’s, it’s somewhere in the middle. I think for a lot of people, you have to be aware of the market. People would disagree with me and say, no, you, you gotta price it to what you think it’s worth, but you’re competing. There’s other places to learn piano. So so $15 just seemed like a reasonable price. If seemed affordable, like it was like a lot of things at the time were 15 bucks like Netflix or Spotify, it was like, yeah. 15 bucks, whatever. What changed for us was it was actually, I was doing a presentation in my college program and I had all these like investors, you know, CRI critiquing it. And several of them were like, you’re undercharging. And I was like, really 15, really? Like, it’s like passive income. Like it’s just so great. They’re like, no, it’s worth 40.
JM (34:22):
And I was like, like really people pay $40 a month. That’s a lot of money. Like, that’s not your like, you know, Spotify music, right. That’s like, that’s like a gym membership or something. And sure enough, I, I couldn’t believe it, but we’re like, let’s try it. And we, you know, if you still business, we talk about, talk about elasticity, right. And the getting the right price points. Like if you raise the price, do your sales go down, our sales didn’t go down. And so it was like, oh my gosh, like we can charge 40 people. We’re still buying our, you know, profits went up and you know, we could have gone up and there’s other people who charge 60 a month or 80, but it’s just, you know, fell it right. It felt like, okay, this is worth 40. And then it gave us some also wiggle room. This is important for your, for your audience is you need to have, if you’re gonna run sales, like you need to, you be able to drop it. And so it’s kind of a sweet spot for us. We can do we can do sales based on that and still feel happy. I will say to your audience, you need a set of a, a base, you know, for us, we never go below 15. We have never offered our membership for $10. That’s where we just say it’s, it’s worth it.
AJV (35:29):
Not worth it. Yeah. So it’s interesting. I have two thoughts here on this. So a part of this is going, how much content curriculum do you have, where people would stay. And then it’s looking at how much are you charging for each piece of content and going, what would be worth it? So I think about like, even like our content and brand builders group, we have 14 full two day curriculums and to come to our two day event it’s a $3,000 ticket, right? We’ve got 14 of those and our flagship program’s a thousand bucks a month. So it’s 12,000. I’m going. Maybe we’re undercharging. Right. It’s like, whoa, there, that was a big light bulb for me of going what we’re literally giving you 50, $60,000 of curated education for 12, right? Yeah. So part of that is like that spectrum. But then another part of it, what I hear you saying is like some, and I, I think this is true for any business owner, for any entrepreneur.
AJV (36:27):
I think most people undercharge, they undervalue what they’re doing, because that’s just the nature of what we do is like we don’t see our own value. So having outside people weigh in to give you perspective, and I can think about this one very particular time and mine and R’s speaking career. And this was like, I don’t know. Our first work came out in 2012. So this month we celebrate 10 years of our first book coming out, which seems impossible. But I remember like three or four years after that, we were meeting with a really good friend and he was sitting down and at this point, like the book had hit like the New York times list and it was doing really well. And he was like, so what are your speaking fees? And we were like $7,500. And he literally said, get up outta your seat, walk out of this room, increase your fiefs to $15,000 and come back, I’m getting a P a cup of coffee. A, we were like double our fees. Are you insane? Yeah. And it was like, the rest of that day was convincing us of how like, no, like $7,500, like that is not 70. That that is not what you should be charging. Totally. We were terrified. We increased our fees to $15,000. Nothing else changed. And we were book solid. Yep.
JM (37:38):
Totally. But
AJV (37:38):
It was some by weighing in and carrying that confidence and seeing the value that we did. And so for everyone listening, it’s like, who are those wise counselors in your life that can give you wise Sage business advice on how you’re doing, what you’re doing and what you’re charging. Right. I think that’s really important for all of us.
JM (37:59):
Well, oftentimes we lack that perspective of ourselves, right? Absolutely. We tend so critical of ourselves, but absolutely. Yeah. You need to build, you need to build like your tribe of people around you. You know, we can, we wouldn’t have gotten to 10,000 members, if not, for all of the support, encouragement, I mean our wives and just a great team. That’s another piece of all of this is you can’t do it alone, like you to, you need the right people. So
AJV (38:22):
I love that. Okay. I have two last questions for you and I promise I’ll keep this on time. So I wanna know, how did you guys grow to 10,000 members? Right. So it’s like you started, I mean, clearly something happened along the way that was like, okay we figured out something, do you know what that, something was like, was there a moment a trigger? Like how did you go from a hundred to a thousand to 10,000?
JM (38:48):
I’m so glad you asked AJ, this was a big piece of it. I think your listeners all should. I mean, I think it’s helpful for them to know this because it was really slow growing. Like I remember we started launched the membership in 2015, in 2018, 2018. I think we had just hit a thousand members. Okay. So we’ve gone from a thousand in 2018 to 10,000, like three years later. So we did three things. Okay.
AJV (39:15):
Everyone write this down.
JM (39:16):
Okay. Write this down. The first is what I already said, which is we started making weekly YouTube content. Our, we, our YouTube channel had about 10,000 subscribers in 2018. And now it has 250,000 subscribers it’s because we started making weekly content make content weekly. And if you think it sucks still it because you’re gonna get better at it. So that was number one second, we launched a funnel. Okay. And I copied this company that all of you guys should be aware of called jump cut. Okay. That’s two guys that were YouTubers and they teach people how to become famous YouTubers. And they had a very successful funnel and I studied it. I analyzed it. I read every email. I watched every video and I took notes and literally copied their format with my words. So that’s what I mean by copy. Look at the people, doing it well and copy them.
JM (40:08):
And so we launched a 10 day blues challenge and we started running ads on Facebook and Instagram. And it was like, Hey, you wanna learn? The blue were free, sign up, you get five free videos, stream, email inbox. And basically we used lead pages for that. It was really easy to set up my business partner. And I literally made the pages ourselves and then connected it to MailChimp. Like we, we did it ourselves. We’re not computer guys. We’re like musicians and then made the email automations. And then at 10 days, Hey, you get 40 per sent off all the sales stuff. And that grew, so our strategy with that, AJ was not to make money. Our strategy with that was to break even and build our email list.
AJV (40:48):
Yeah. Preach.
JM (40:49):
That’s when our email list went from 10,000 to, to like, I mean, we have 150,000 now on our email list because of that. Right. And so the, the funnel was really helpful started doing paid ads. And then the other third thing was we, we needed a new website and we took out a loan for a website at that point. Wow. Yeah. I know, like we didn’t, it was like 20, it, I think it was $30,000, but like we didn’t have the money. And so that was a smart, a decision for us because we had a much better experience. And so those were the three things in 2019 that kicked us up into, I think, 3,400 members. By the end of that year, 2020, we were up to almost 8,000 members. Yes.
AJV (41:33):
Doing the same thing,
JM (41:34):
Doing the same thing we’d always done. But with the paid ads, with the weekly YouTube content, we still have the same website. Of course we’re making improvements on it, but there is a fourth thing. And it’s something that was not in my control, but we were ready for, it was COVID. Yeah. You know, every, everyone stuck at home. And so we did a quarantine offering, like the month of proof, like terrible. It’s like, you’re stuck at home and your life is miserable, but you can learn jazz piano. That’s. And so we gave away a month membership and we had a huge influx of people who came in, it was like, Hey, I get a month for free. And then, you know, people who liked it stayed. And so we were just kind of positioned for that for that event. And so right now the membership’s still growing.
JM (42:16):
It’s not growing as kind of hockey puck as, as we were. But yeah, I would say to your audience is it’s those three things is get the, get the organic traffic right now. We’re actually focusing a ton on SEO. In fact, we just hired a full-time SEO blog writer. But I, I would just really encourage your audience if you’re doing anything, visual people go to YouTube. In fact, if people search on Google for something, Google pushes all the YouTube videos to the top. So you’re not only getting all the traffic from people on YouTube, but you’re getting all the Google traffic. I mean, that is like the world, right? So, so video, I think is key. And then second is the paid is like paid ADSS, you know, funnels all that.
AJV (43:00):
Oh my gosh, this has been so insightful on so many levels. And I love to your humility and all of this goes, and I asked you if you wanted to come on the show, you’re like, I mean, what would I talk about? Like, are you kidding? Like this, this has been so brilliant. So, so awesome. So if people want to connect with you and I’ll put all of this in the show notes for the listeners, so make sure you go to brain builders, group.com/podcast. You can get all the show notes with Johnny Mae but just go to piano with johnny.com and it’s J O N N Y piano with johnny.com. And then if they wanna follow you to see how you’re doing this on YouTube what’s your YouTube channel?
JM (43:45):
Well, we have two, we have the piano with Johnny channel. It is exclusively piano education. So it’s literally me teaching all the, all the time. I have a second channel. That’s Johnny May, it’s just my name. And it’s just me playing the piano and I’m playing on a rooftop somewhere and I’m playing on a hill somewhere and I’m playing a beautiful, like sparkling grand piano. It’s all performances. And I imagine a lot of your audience, you know, if you wanna learn piano, go to piano with Johnny, but if, yeah, if you just like enjoy piano music, then go to just look up Johnny Mae and you’ll have tons of piano videos to your hearts content.
AJV (44:16):
Oh, I love it. All right. So here’s my last question for you. And totally gonna catch you up guard, but where do you see this business going in the next five years?
JM (44:27):
Oh my gosh. That is something I think about every single day. And to be honest with you, it’s something that I, I don’t really know. I, I think right now piano with Johnny has I don’t know if it’s hit, like it’s sweet spot and it’s something to just ride out. I think for me being an entrepreneur and loving the building process, I want to take it to the next level. Something that really, it sites me is taking our model, taking our system and making it accessible to other teachers. It’s like, oh my gosh, I was able to grow this seven figure business. It’s like, why? Like I see so many talented musicians struggling. I’m like, ah, I wish I could help them. It’s like, what if I could like white label what I’m doing for them? And so I, I toy with that idea, but I think minimally getting other teachers involved is quite exciting. We’re actually starting to hire other teachers. So yeah, but it’s like, it’s the journey. It’s the fun part. It’s like, ah, I don’t know. I don’t know. Where do I want take this?
AJV (45:25):
It’s the blessing and the curse of being an entrepreneur. And I think the here’s what I, and here’s why ask this question for all of you. I, I don’t know if you’ve picked this up, but there isn’t a whole huge staff and team. Like you guys are a pretty lean mean operations and production team, and you guys have built a multi seven figure business. You have 10,000 plus members, you have viral videos with millions of use. And you have done that off of being consistent and having exceptional content.
JM (45:55):
Yes, absolutely.
AJV (45:57):
Everyone listening can do that too.
JM (45:59):
Right. And I will say to your audience, you know, you might look at piano with Johnny and go, oh wow, you have this big team. Do you know that we have three full-time employees? That’s it, three full-time employees, our growth, our business has been around great content and doing what I love and sharing it with the world and being authentic and, and being mindful about the business. But I think to your point is your audience has everything it takes right now. It is unbelievable how many resources you have at your fingertips. I didn’t have almost 10 years ago that are plug and play. You just need to do it. You need to take the first step.
AJV (46:32):
Oh my gosh. I need to have be back on the show again, too. This was so good. It was so insightful. Thank you so much for giving us some of your time today. I so greatly appreciate it. This was an incredibly valuable episode and I hope everyone listening comes back, shares this, likes it connect with Johnny and then make sure you come back to listen to another episode of the influential personal brand.
JM (46:58):
Thanks AJ
AJV (00:02):
All right. Y’all AJ Vaden here on your recap episode of the influential personal brand. Here are my key takeaways from my conversation with Johnny May and Johnny and I are really good personal friends. We both live here in Nashville, Tennessee. We are both in EO, which stands for the entrepreneur organization. He’s in my forum, which means I get to spend an entire half a day with this genius every single month. Just learning and sharing best practices in business. And I’ll tell you what, like, this is like one of those conversations that I had and I pinged him after and I was like we’re are gonna need to continue this conversation over coffee or dinner. So how can I bribe you to continue this? There is so much strategy and wisdom and firsthand experience and expertise in this interview.
AJV (00:57):
Y’all if you were trying to do anything on YouTube or you’re trying to grow and scale a membership model, this interview was literally built for you so highly, highly recommend it specifically if you are trying to grow and scale on YouTube. So here’s just a couple of my key takeaways and I’m gonna heavily lean into, please go listen to this entire episode. It is one of my favorite episodes. It’s so tactical and so strategic and so much firsthand experience and wisdom in this Johnny Mae. So, all right, here’s the first thing. I kind of feel like at brand builders group, we are very new beginner novice when it comes to YouTube. That is not probably our strongest, strongest skillset and terms of leveraging that to grow and scale our business. So this is probably why I’m also so inclined to listen and re-listen, and then re-listen to this episode again.
AJV (01:56):
So first thing as talks about the massive importance of thumbnails and titles, and it’s like, in theory, I get that. But it in practice, are we actually doing that? And he goes simple works, right? Keep the titles very short so they can fit and you can read ’em. He says he keeps his, all of his titles, five to seven words, max make sure that the images are something that actually demonstrates what the video is actually about so that people know, make sure the titles lean into what you’re gonna get from this video. So the first thing was just very strategic tips around your thumbnails, titles and images in the thumbnail. So really important, subtle, but significant. They’ve been at this game for over 10 years. They have a eight figure memberships. And what I mean by that is they have more than 10,000 recurring monthly members, a seven figure BI business of people who are subscribing to learn piano lessons from Johnny piano, with Johnny.
AJV (03:02):
And so he goes like, literally, like our full time thing is focusing on what titles work, what thumbnails work, what goes viral and what does, and he goes, that’s our full-time job. So this is what I’m doing all day every day. And I love it, right? He’s doing it, not as a, an agency, but as the actual business owner. So the importance of titles and thumbnails keep ’em simple, keep ’em clear, make sure that they demonstrate what the video is actually about. Make sure that the title is short and is also very indicative of what you’re gonna get in the video. Loved it. That was the first thing. Second thing is the video itself, because you always wanna start the video, not out with some introduction of who you are or what you’re gonna get. He goes, no, you immediately wanna start the video with a sample of what you’re gonna get.
AJV (03:46):
Then pause, explain it, do a little introduction and tease them of why they need to stick around. He goes, but most people you get into their video and you say, Hey, this is AJ Vaden. And here’s what we’re gonna do today. He goes, they don’t want, you want to get right in and go, all right, this is what you’re here for. Let me show you and get to it in his case, it’s a very tangible show cuz he is teaching piano. But for so many of us, it’s like, how can we start with the best stuff that we have, right? That’s a saying that, and we have a brand builder’s group. As you save your best for first leave with lead, with your best content, that’s gonna catch ’em right in the beginning. Then you can introduce yourself. Then you can explain what’s happening, give context, but then tease why you need to stick around to the very end.
AJV (04:32):
So the first part of this, like, you know, successful three tip trio here is titles and thumbnails. The importance of that, the second is actually how you start the video. I think that makes a really big difference. And then the third thing he talks about is you have different types of videos. Some videos need to be just for content, that’s it? No ask, no offer other videos. You wanna make sure that they’re there to build your email list. He goes, that’s the most important thing we do. He goes, we invest all of our paid traffic, not into converting them into calls or converting them into sales. It’s converting that fan, that follower into an email on our list. He goes, that is what we’re doing. They have a hundred more than a hundred thousand people on our email list by just doing this. And so again, it’s how much of your content is strategically just to provide value.
AJV (05:25):
How much of it is to give something away for free, where you can get their email. And then there’s a separate type of video where there’s the ask, right? He goes, but all the content that we’re making for YouTube is YouTube specific content do not repurpose. He goes, we make content for YouTube. We do not make a piece of content and then repurpose it and all the different channels. He goes, no, we make, we make our content for YouTube. So be intentional about that. And he goes, and we create a ton of free content and we’re monitoring what goes viral and what doesn’t that has to do with the value of the content, the titles, the, the images, how they lead with it. But all of those things are this very, you know, somewhat simple, but yet complicated formula of how do you build your business on social in this particular case on YouTube he goes, build your content for the channel.
AJV (06:21):
That’s really uniquely important. He goes, this is content specifically designed for YouTube. And we have three different types of content. We have content that is just for value just to get people interested. Some is to help us collect emails so they can get ’em onto our list. And then some it’s encouraging them to sign up for our membership. But the majority of what they’re making is unique content just for value, add specifically built for YouTube. Again, I cannot tell you how many more ideas and tips and strategies just like this were in this episode. So if you have listened to this and you’re like, huh, that sounds like me. I would you to go listen to this entire episode. It’s extraordinarily good. You can also follow Johnny May on YouTube or on Instagram to learn more, see it firsthand of what they’re doing. And then please always come back, check out another episode on the influential personal brand. We’ll see you next time.