Ep 412: Leveraging Technology to Scale Your Business with Josh Hotsenpiller
AJV (00:02):
Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode on the Influential Personal Brand. It’s AJ Vaden here and super excited to have my friend Josh on the show today. And I will give him a formal formal bio, a formal overview in just a second. But this interview is super special to both me and Roy and all of B B G because this is kind of the introduction of one of our strategic partners to our community and very high level. I’ll give you this little bit of background and then I promise I’ll introduce Josh
AJV (01:11):
And so I spent the better part of eight months pretty much trying out every single free demo that was available out there. Went very far down the line with some platforms that are great if you’re looking for that type of thing with like passion.io was one we went mighty Networks Pro is another. We went far down the lines, but we did a lot. And it kind of got down to the wire when I was about to sign on the dotted line with Passion io. And they revealed to me on this final call that they couldn’t do this one thing in our community that was really, really, really, really important to us. And about that time, very serendipitously very divinely one of our teammates, Jeremy said, Hey, you should check out this company called Juno. And I was like, what’s Juno?
AJV (02:00):
Long story short, now almost eight months later, we are about to go live with our own brand builders group app, the B b G app that has been totally created with Josh’s company, Juno, and their awesome team. And so Juan, I’m just really excited to have this conversation because I also know what it’s like to intimately work with your team and know your product very well, and be someone who is paying for your services
AJV (03:13):
AJV (03:57):
Lots in the a virtual event space, which I think he should also share some of his background that
JH (04:56):
Goodness gracious. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to share time and ideas and talk about the power of community and people.
AJV (05:04):
Yes. And I know you’re probably like, that’s the longest intro ever. You could have cut off four minutes, however, think this is gonna be a great conversation. So I’m gonna start in reverse order Okay. Of all of these questions. But before we get into that, can you just give people a little bit of insight of all of this awesome stuff that you’ve been doing for personal brands and companies behind the scenes. It’s like that bio does not do you justice whatsoever in terms of all the things that you’ve actually done. So help our audience get to know you.
JH (05:35):
Yeah. You know, I my bio is kind of over the river and through the woods. You know, you, I I quick bio grew up, the son of a preacher man was in that world, didn’t really know what else to do. I went and got my divinity degree in New York, right outside of New York City. Started a church at 23, grew up to about a thousand people. Started to feel like, gosh, like there’s what is, what would I do if I wasn’t doing this? Mm-Hmm.
JH (06:25):
And for me, it was a similar thing. I, what would I do if I wasn’t a pastor? And, and maybe you can relate to this as a listener, you grew up with a family that was kind of doing a family business, if you will. Mm-Hmm. You know, maybe it was my dad was in lawn care, or an engineer, or what restaurant business, whatever it was. And then maybe you go, wait a minute, maybe that’s not my story. Mm-Hmm. And so me and a me and a buddy, when we were 27, 28 years old decided we wanted to mobilize people to change the world. I know that sounds kind of whatever but we didn’t even know there was a space out there called the corporate social responsibility space. And so right during the 2007, eight 2007 and eight housing mortgage crisis, we launched a do good platform called Profits for Purpose that helped mobilize employees to give back time and money.
JH (07:11):
And yeah, we grew it up. We had over a million global employees accessing the platform. Those, a lot of those brands you mentioned, GoPro, Estee Lauder, staples, N F L, all sorts of groups. I always just believe in the power of community. And so I begin to build bra products for brands all around mobilizing people to do something. Hmm. So whether it was gl hp, we built the global sales enablement tool that to this day they still license and use it from one of my companies, the un they have boots on the ground all over this world helping fight genocide, hunger, poverty, and they weren’t able to mobilize those people. So we built a platform to mobilize ’em. And ultimately, my vision has always been how do you mobilize people to do amazing things and whatever that might be. And that’s the power of community.
JH (07:59):
I mean, that really is what it is. And so to me, we always had that big vision of how do we mobilize people? Tech was just part of it, right? It was just a thing. We always say, we’re not a tech company, we’re a values company. Tech is just a, is a, is a tool that you use to enable a vision. I love that. Yeah. And I think when you think about it bigger than that, you kind of missed the point and you mission drift and you kind of forget why you’re doing what you’re doing. And so for me, it’s everybody listening has a vision, has a community, has a vertical they care about. And the question is, what are the tools that we need to create radical change? And so tech has been that tool for me over the last 12, 15 years.
JH (08:41):
It’s, I’ve traveled the world, literally worked with amazing global brands, worked with a lot of really neat individual people, some amazing people. Like maybe some of your listeners know Lisa Turkers. We built her app. She’s one of the most phenomenal leaders I’ve never been around. We built Catalyst was a big group we built for a ton of their people. So we were in a lot of those faith-based spaces fortune 100 spaces. We’ve done it all from soup to nuts. And we’ve learned a lot from folks that have said, Hey, I’ve got an audience of 2000. You know, when we launched Lisa’s a app, I’ll never forget it. We trended number one in the app store for three days, which is an incredible thing to do for downloads. And you think about, you hear these things, oh my gosh, we trended in the app store. We did put 2 million people, active users on that app. That’s
AJV (09:29):
Amazing.
JH (09:30):
So, which remind me to come back to that because I think that there’s a, there’s a, there’s a strategic message I want to share about how and why to use technology. And I’m gonna use, I’ll use that as a use case cause I think it’ll help everybody listening. But yeah, we, we found that technology was a great tool. It was a great utility, which we’ll talk about in a minute to execute a bigger purpose. So that’s kind of what’s brought me here. I’ve done TEDxs, I’m a US state department, global ambassador for entrepreneurship. Oh man, it’s just been a wild ride all from just being the son of a preacher man. So it’s been a fun time. Yeah. Know
AJV (10:02):
What, you should really set smaller goals, you know, it’s like
JH (10:56):
Right. Right.
AJV (10:56):
They’re tools. Right. And it’s like they can be used for good or bad. It just all has to do with the intention. So why don’t we just kind of start there. It’s like you said this, it’s come back to like how and why to use technology. And I think that’s a good general place to start.
JH (11:13):
Cool. You know what’s funny about my mom and, and, and dad, they’re getting into that fourth quarter stage of their life. And I, I have a, I have a ritual. My folks live in Anaheim Hills, orange County. And so I have a ritual that every night I’m there, I drink whiskey with dad. And every morning I take walk with mom mm-hmm.
JH (11:58):
It’s not going away. And so now the question is, and so I raised 13 million from Insights Partners. It’s the largest software only BC in the world. They have 200 billion under management. And I, through total random Niff God we raised from their co-founder, a guy named Jerry Murdoch, who Richard Branson officiated his wedding. If that puts any context into like, you know, I’m raising money from this guy that like literally chases where the snow is
JH (12:52):
Well, I use my app, my, my Maps app. In fact, now it’s to the point when when I get into my car, it tells me it, it goes, you’re either going to the Crosby Club, which is where I golf, you’re going to Church of rb. That’s where our family goes to church. You’re going to star it knows based on time where you’re, where it’s Spotify is like, Hey, it’s Friday. It’s your country mix. It’s been a long week. Like, here’s some new songs that we think you’re gonna, like, what’s happening. Technology is becau it’s a utility. It’s a tool to make something happen and make your life easier. And so when you think about technology, you think about it from a utility standpoint. How is this a utility to help my community do something they already wanna do better, faster, more efficiently? I want to drive to this location.
JH (13:44):
This map’s gonna say, this is how you should get there in the fastest way. I want to listen to music. This app’s gonna tell me the music I don’t even know existed. I’m gonna love that in the fastest way. That’s what tech is. It’s a utility. And so you think about your community and your audience. So Lisa Turkish has told you I was going to use her as an example. She had, she’s brilliant. She had this idea, she’s like, I wanna do the first five. I wanna own the first five minutes of all of my audience’s day. Mm-Hmm.
JH (14:28):
But it was, it’s the most utility, one of the most utility apps we’ve done. And it’s, it’s still to this day, I think averages a couple million people on it actively, which is phenomenal to think about. But you gotta look at your audience and go, what is it that you are trying to accomplish? And what is the, the hammer and the nails and the screwdriver and the wrench that you need to do that? Mm-Hmm.
AJV (15:06):
So good.
JH (15:07):
That’s the question you solve that maybe you need an app, maybe you need an airplane, maybe I don’t know what you need. But the problem is we always think technology is gonna solve the problem. Oh, the problem. We haven’t even defined
AJV (15:21):
JH (15:44):
And it’s just, and and all of a sudden we’re like, my app sucks. The app, the company sucks. And you’re like, do I suck? I mean, who knows? Every, maybe everybody does. Maybe nobody does. Maybe we just didn’t identify a problem. Yeah. I was, I’ll never forget, I was sitting in the CEO’s office of a, I don’t know, me, half a billion dollar company. It wasn’t huge, but you know, big enough. And I was sitting in his office and he goes, Hey, I’m, I’m looking at signing this contract for this app, but I’m staring at this proposal going, I would never use this. And I said, my God, I’d hope not. I’d hope you’re too busy to use this, this you are not our target audience.
AJV (16:20):
Yeah.
JH (16:22):
You know? And he goes, oh my gosh, I never even thought about that. The question is not would you use this? The question is, would your audience use this again, icp, you know, our ideal customer profile, who is this person? Would they use it? And so when we look at your community, we go, what does your community need? Some of it might need leadership coaching, some of it might need emotion. I was just got off this podcast, AJ in this group called Happy. It’s phenomenal. They all they are is a listening for hire company. They’re not trained psychologists. You literally, at scale, they’re creating listeners. I love
AJV (17:00):
This
JH (17:01):
Which I can, I can open this, I can open this up to our AI conversation in a minute. But I was just on this podcast, these guys out of Manhattan, and they asked me to come on as an exec. How do you listen as an executive? And they go, we we’re literally scaling listening. Hmm. And you, their audience just needs somebody to listen. So it determines the type of app you build, the utility that you use. Is it just audio streaming? Is it video? My audience needs to be heard. Yeah. Well, my audience needs to be leadership coached. My audience needs to understand you know new law term, whatever it is. You gotta start with that mm-hmm.
AJV (17:48):
Hmm. That’s so good. And you know, it’s we had at this conversation, a good friend of mine has a custom app creation company called App name’s Amanda Mariachi. She lives in Denver. And you know, I had her on the podcast, I don’t know, a while back. And one of the questions that, you know, she had said is, the problem with building custom apps is that at the end of the day, it’s always gonna be more expensive than what you wanted it to be. It’s never gonna have a hundred percent of the functionality that you want. Sure. And somehow it’s always my fault, right. As the developer, as the builder, and Yep. Said, the truth is, is an app only works if you know exactly what you want it to do. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (18:38):
It’s over time. And at the end of the day, we’re like, we gotta call it, and then we finish an incomplete project. And she goes, yep. That’s often what an app building experience looks like. And it’s why we say no. It’s like, if you don’t know exactly who your audience is, what your business model is, if you can’t tell us that in the beginning, then we won’t work with you. And it’s exactly what you just said. It’s, it’s not do I need an app? It’s, could an app solve a problem that my audience has, because I know what the problem is and I know who my audience is.
JH (19:07):
And that’s how you grow an audience. I mean, it really is. It’s how, you know, it’s like anything. I mean, let’s go back to this listening group. You know, they, one of the things they brought me on, you know, they’re like, Josh, how many times do your exec, you know, your, your people just, I just wanna be heard. I just, I just wanna be heard. And, and I’ll tell a great story when I was I remember as the rise of Millennialism comes into the marketplace, and as a, as an ex, you know, GenX guy I’m wired a little bit different than millennials, but I’ll never forget this one guy came into my office and he goes we’re talking, and, and he goes, oh, I gotta tell you about this new company. I started, one of my employees in the middle of the day,
AJV (19:52):
Yeah. Tell me, tell me
JH (19:54):
You, you started a company. And he goes, yeah. So he kind of tells him about it. And I go, when, when do you work on it? And he goes, no. All throughout the day, I’m like, so wait a minute, when I’m employing you
JH (20:45):
Like, we feel responsible, like, yeah, you are here because I’m a thought leader in a space and, and I am the one you need to listen to. And so I’m gonna make a bunch of crap up and hope it’s right and every, you know, whatever else, right? And like, wait a minute, the art of listening is going to educate you on how to lead. Remember, you’re being paid to lead not to talk. And so a huge part of what you can do in leading is listening so that you know how to lead mm-hmm.
AJV (21:33):
That. But I think that’s, you know, we can apply that same conversation, not just to technology or an app, but, and anything, right. It doesn’t, it’s like even starting out, it’s like, I was just, as you were thinking as you were talking, I was thinking about, you know, the journey that we take customers on and brand builders group, and it’s like what we call finding your brand d n a are these six components. It’s the foundation of your personal brand. And one of those six components is what’s your business model? And are other words, what’s your primary business model? How do you make money right now? And then what do you want it to be in the long term? And it’s so interesting that for most people, most of that decision happens in a very small group setting that involves none of their clients. Mm. Mm-Hmm.
JH (22:42):
I don’t know where that came from. I’m supposed to know when you’re supposed to listen. That’s what you’re supposed to do. That’s what you, that’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re not supposed to know. Mm-Hmm.
JH (23:33):
We could do online learning, credentialing, where we could do community. Could you create that? And I remember I went back to my, my guys, I was like, guys, the customers asking us to create an all OnOne solution, we should do it. Now we’re in conversations with a big partnership with the company, and I was talking to their cfo F and they’re, I don’t know, they’re probably a half a billion dollar company. They’re worth multiple billions of dollars. And, and I said to ’em, I said, you know, it’s interesting when we got into this, I knew virtual only was gonna commoditize and evaporate. And so we needed a, we needed a more holistic solution. And he sheepishly laughed and said, we bought a company that we watched evaporate from 21 million in revenue to zero. Think about that. 21 million in, in, in, in, in revenue to zero.
JH (24:19):
Wow. Was I some savant that knew that I know that. Or did I listen to that? Mm-Hmm.
AJV (25:02):
I love that. I think that’s such a good reminder. Like I said, this is not just for technology or apps. This is just building your business, growing your business, leading your team. Listening, listening matters. Surprise. Right.
JH (25:14):
I know. Shocking.
AJV (25:16):
Surprise. Now on that, I loved what you said earlier, and I wrote this down, is, you know, it’s like technology really at its best use is helping people do things more efficiently. Do them where it’s, you know, easier, faster, smarter. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (25:59):
We, we, it’s like, and I love, and I don’t remember who told us this, but this was some interview that we had with someone who is smarter than us who said technology is only scary when you don’t know how it applies to you. Mm-Hmm.
JH (26:43):
It’s, so let’s go back to what we said. It’s not going away. So you can get scared and you can throw your hands up. You can talk about living in an al you know, an alternate community that doesn’t do parallel communities. I hear people talk about this all the time and I’m like, you know, all, all the conservatives will live over here and everybody else will live over here. We’ll just live in parallel societies. You know, it’s not gonna happen. Mm-Hmm.
JH (27:27):
You could walk down an alley in the middle of the day, you don’t thinking of it because you can’t see where it’s going. And that’s where we’re right now with ai. We don’t know where it’s going. And instead of seeing the good of it, the brain is wired to protect itself. And so we are seeing all the bad, right? Mm-Hmm.
JH (28:11):
Gimme the other thing, and I’ve been saying this to my wife for years ago, Kim, our boys, I have two boys, crews and Crosby, they’re 1113. I said, they are gonna have EQs through the roof because that is that, or they’re gonna be plumbers because those are gonna be the two jobs the future is gonna have. It’s gonna be working class trade jobs because you can’t machine learn that or it’s gonna be soft skills. And my mind bent this morning, I didn’t even, I got asked to be on this executive that listened thing from a big c e outta of Manhattan. And so I was like, yeah, sure, I’ll do that Ben, no problem. I get on and all of a sudden this guy gets on, he’s a c e of happy, which is this listening thing. And I’m like, dude, I’ve been saying for years future jobs are gonna get professional huggers listeners.
JH (28:58):
Like, because you automate these tasks. Yeah. What’s left? It’s hu it’s human need. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (30:02):
Other things in life? Yeah.
JH (30:03):
It doesn’t go away. I mean, do you remember, I don’t remember. It wasn’t there, but when the TV came out, I remember my parents saying, and I don’t, I mean I was raised like very religious rights. I don’t know how many did folks listen in, have a religious background or not. But this was how, you know, Satan was finally giving able speak to the whole world and introduce the mark of the beast or whatever. But tv here’s how it was radio first, then tv, and then the internet. And you go, okay, we can doom and gloom till we’re dead in the face mm-hmm.
AJV (30:44):
Totally.
JH (30:45):
Or we can flip the light on and say it’s, it’s a hallway, it’s an hour. I mean
AJV (30:49):
Yeah. I liken that too. It’s like, it does not matter what it is in life. It can be used for good or bad relationship. It’ll be, are healthy and unhealthy. Food is good and not good. It’s real and artificial. It’s like we can make anything good, bad, and honestly we can make anything bad. Good. That’s right. Bad is where I just, I had this podcast interview earlier today with a gentleman named Damon West and I loved what he said. He goes, the future is defined in only one of two ways, fear or faith. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (31:47):
It was we needed to consolidate Yeah. All of the different platforms into one. And that was something that our community has been saying for years and it’s something our team has been saying for years is when do we have to stop logging into one more place? Yes. Yes. And it’s cause like we were scrappy when we were building this. We don’t have investors, we’ve been self-funded and it’s like, well it’s not the best but it works for now and we’ll upgrade when it’s time to upgrade. And so it was consolidation and then organization. Mm. It was consolidation and organization of, you know, we just believe like regardless if we’re right or wrong, this is our belief is that people don’t pay for information anymore. Hmm. No, it’s for free. They don’t but they do pay for organization.
JH (32:33):
Mm.
AJV (32:33):
And they pay for application. Yeah. But it’s like, we don’t pay for information. You can get that for free, but often you don’t get it in the right order. And so you’re trying to piecemeal it together and you can do the right things in the wrong order and it will blow up in your Sure.
JH (32:47):
No doubt.
AJV (32:48):
And so that was our whole thing is like we need to consolidate and organize and then our team is the one who helps to apply and it would like, and that was like, that is why we built this app. And you know, one of the reasons we chose Juno is because of some of the AI components. Yeah. That did not exist in the other platforms. And yeah, one of the things that our community wants is they want a little bit of this done for them. It’s like, I don’t want to have to tell your team who I want to be introduced to. I wanna log in and I want someone to tell me
JH (33:21):
Like exactly
AJV (33:22):
Based on your profile, here are the five other members that you should connect with in this community. That’s so
JH (33:28):
Cool. Yeah. And let me share with, with our listeners, like how I kind of architect that engineered it because it’s gonna go back to the utility. So I created this thing called human interest modeling and, and what it was when it said, when you onboard onto our platform, we want you to declare what you’re interested in. Mm-Hmm.
JH (34:19):
Next thing you know, we’re on a rabbit trail of a yacht and the next thing you know, it’s more yachts and it’s golf. And next thing you know, if you look at that now that’s a complete profile of what you’ve discovered that you’re interested in. Not declared mm-hmm.
JH (35:05):
So it’s like, oh, I think I could really help with public speaking with research papers. I’m just making stuff up. And then somebody else comes on and goes, gosh, I’m the worst at research. I need to try to, I need to try to learn that. And all of a sudden the system’s like, Hey gosh, and AJ you guys should connect cuz AJ’s awesome at public speaking and you wanna get good at it and you’re really good at research and Jill over here really wants to get good at it. And all of a sudden, what is that? That’s utility that’s valued. To your point, that’s organization, that’s ai. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (35:59):
Yeah. It is. Back to, it’s like, and under, in order to use it, you have to understand it. You don’t have to know all of it. But it’s, I know that there’s a million ways that I could be using AI right now. I’m using it in five different ways, but it’s changing my life. It is giving time, back, minutes back that I can reinvest in other things that are important. Saving us money. It’s like there’s so many things that, you know, just to that point of it’s, you know, you only fear what you don’t understand. Even if it’s at the micro level of like, okay, I understand how I can use it for this one thing. Somebody is Yeah. And it, it that’s very much, you know, this conversation around technology in general and the app. And before I forget, cause I know we’re almost outta time if you guys are listening and you’re like, okay, I like this technology conversation and I’m curious about this app and that is something that I, you know, I, I do wanna explore, I wanna tell you guys where to go to learn about Juno.
AJV (36:51):
So you can go to juno live.com, that’s their website. So juno live.com. When you’re talking to their team, tell ’em that you heard about it through this podcast. We’re trying to do a really good job of tracking how we connect people. Don’t be surprised if there’s an AI component to this podcast in the near future that will do that for you automatically. That this is this one way to get connected to Juno. But Josh, if they wanna connect with you and they just want to follow you and learn more about you and learn from you, where’s the best place for them to go?
JH (37:23):
Yeah. I mean obviously jump on Instagram or LinkedIn. I mean those are awesome places to hang out. I do a a weekly email called Monday Motivation through I think josh hoen piller.com. You can sign up for it. I think we still have landing page up. I have a few thousand people that get that weekly. And it’s just honestly just my musings on leadership and life and, and things I’m learning on, on how to be a better listener, how to be a better leader how to build more utility in everything that we do. So yeah, come hang out, let’s get to know each other.
AJV (37:55):
Yes, and I’ll put all of that in the show notes too. And there’s so much to Josh that we did not cover today. This was so much about technology, but he has this awesome mastermind. You’re doing coaching, you’re doing so many, you’re speaking like you do so much more than what we talked about today. So we’ll have to have you come on another time to talk about, you know, part two of all things Josh, and you know, I just so appreciate you coming on and talking about this and for you guys listening one I just encourage you to, to learn more if, like, if you are trying to explore how do I use technology or an app to deepen the, you know, relationships in my community and isn’t app the right thing that I could just personally say, we’re paying for Juno, we’re using Juno. Highly recommend it. Their team has been awesome to work with. So you just get major accolades from our team, you, but then more than that it’s just to explore how technology can help you be better at what you do. Yeah. And I think that’s a really important thing. So Josh, thank you. Thank you for your time today. Thanks for your wisdom. Loved having you on. Oh,
JH (38:56):
Thank you. Pleasure was mine. And love everything you guys are doing and can’t wait to get to know you even more.
AJV (39:01):
Likewise. And then everyone else who’s listening, stay tuned for the recap episode that will be popping up later this week. We’ll see you next night.
JH (39:10):
Talk to you soon.
Ep 393: How to Break Free from Being Busy | Dan Martell Episode Recap
RV (00:02):
Dan Martel, my guy. I gotta tell you, I really enjoyed my conversation with Dan. And I am I’m actually reading his book. I don’t always get to read every book of every author, but I’m, I’m loving it. I’m about halfway through it, and I’ve just really enjoyed following this guy. You know, like the people I follow online, I, I like to really follow people I guess, you know, that I consider are practitioners like, that. They’re actually building really big things in real life. And, and, and it’s, it’s not so much just perception and that, but like, they actually have big businesses and stuff. So I love to sort of follow and learn from. And, and Dan has done that a lot and has a great reputation and we’ve become friends. And I, I really, really enjoyed getting to know him a little bit.
RV (00:49):
And, and and I’m, I’m a fan. I’m a fan. So, you know, obviously the, the theme of his book and everything about Buyback Your Time really brought up a lot of memories for me and around my second book, which was How To Multiply Time. So Procrastinate on Purpose, five Permissions to Multiply Your Time, which I don’t talk as much about these days anymore since we’ve you know, the company that we, we exited in 2018, we had spent more time talking about stuff there. And then Brand Builders Group, the last five years has really been focused on building people’s personal brands. But I thought I would take this opportunity to share some of my favorite time multiplication strategies that came out of my second book. And you know, sort of sync ’em up with some of the things that I’ve been inspired by Dan here, again, to help you get better control of your time and specifically for entrepreneurs, right?
RV (01:46):
And so that’s who this is really for, is if you are an entrepreneur and you’re busy and you’re buried and you’re overwhelmed and you feel behind and you feel like you’re, you know, drowning, or you’re struggling to keep up, like these are the three biggest concepts that you need to know that I think and I know confidently will change everything for you. And the first one is the ultimate premise of how to multiply time. So, by the way, my TED Talk, you can go watch for free my TED Talk. If you just, you know, Google Rory Vaden Ted Talk, you can watch that for free. Or you, if you actually were to watch the Ted Talk or if you were to read Procrastinate on Purpose, my second book, the premise of both of them is the same, right? They’re based on the same content. And to me, this is the, this is the singular big idea that you must understand as an entrepreneur. And if you don’t understand this, until you embrace this, you’re gonna struggle. You’re just, you’re gonna always keep working faster and longer buying into this lie that if you work harder, somehow it will create more time. And it’s not
RV (02:58):
About that. That is not what creates more time. The way that you multiply time is by giving yourself the emotional permission to spend time on things today that create more time tomorrow. You, you give yourself permission to spend or invest time into the thing doing the things today that create more time tomorrow until that switch flips in your brain, you’re gonna struggle, you’re gonna be busy, you’re gonna be buried, you’re gonna be behind, you’re gonna feel like you’re drowning. You’re gonna feel like like you’re going to, to to live consumed feeling like you’re never caught up. And it’s because you have to break free of the paradigm of just urgency. The paradigm of urgency is I have to work faster, I have to do more. And you have to shift to what we call the significance calculation, which is thinking not about, you know, urgency is how soon does something matter, but significance is how long does it matter?
RV (04:02):
What’s the impact of this activity on tomorrow and the next day and the next day? And so you have to start thinking in terms of significance, not just what fire needs to be put out today. You need to be evaluating your dec your, the decisions of how you spend your time through the lens based upon the criteria of significance. In other words, how is this activity, how is this use of my time going to affect tomorrow and the next day? So I can do it today, but if I do it today, I have to then do it again tomorrow. If I, however, forego doing it today, and instead build a system today that can do it, then tomorrow the system will do it and every day thereafter, the system will do it instead of me. And that is the switch that has to flip. This is one of the things that I wrote in procrastinate on purpose, is that the next level of results requires the next level of thinking.
RV (05:08):
What got you here to where you are today as a performer will not get you there as a leader. You, you have to shift. This is a paradigm shift. It is a mental transformation, right? And, and this is the crux. This is what we know is true, that if you don’t make this transition, you’re gonna struggle. And those of you that are members of ours, by the way, we, one of the 14 courses that you have access to from us is called Multiplier mentality. So you, you, if you’re one of our members, you already have access to this course, you can go through, it’s one of our personal development courses. We don’t talk as much about it these days cuz we’re so focused on like the tactical, personal branding stuff. But so that’s the, that’s the first thing is how do you multiply time?
RV (05:51):
You multiply time by spending time on things today that create more time tomorrow. Don’t just do it. If you do it, you’re going to trap yourself into a lifelong prison sentence of having to do it again tomorrow. So instead of doing the thing, build a system to do the thing. Spend your time today, build systems that do the thing, and then tomorrow you will live free. Because instead of spending your time doing the thing, the system that you have built will then do the thing. And there’s basically, you know, five parts to that system which make up the focus funnel, which is the content of my TED Talk and the multiplier mentality course and the procrastinate on purpose book. But that’s the premise. Okay? So that’s the first thing. That’s the big idea. You gotta understand. Second big concept you need to understand is the concept of time arbitrage.
RV (06:46):
Time arbitrage basically meaning you, you, you make your win in the delta. So arbitrage is going, I’m gonna buy something, you know, I’m gonna buy something at X, but I’m gonna sell it at y, right? That’s basically arbitrage is going, I buy something at X, but then I turn around and I sell it at y and I make my money in the spread. I make my money in the delta. Well, that’s what multiplying time, a lot of multiplying time has to do with time arbitrage, specifically in the area of delegation. So the focus funnel from this, you know, the procrastinated purpose book, my How to Multiply Your Time, Ted Talk, and the Multiplier Mentality course, if you have access to it talks about five, the five parts of the focus funnel, eliminate, automate, delegate, concentrate, and procrastinate on purpose, which is where the title of the book comes from.
RV (07:44):
But in, in section three delegate, that is what time arbitrage is all about. Basically going, I am going to buy someone else’s time at X dollars and then I’m going to engage myself in activities that produce results at y dollars. Now, the concept for this, the principle that we teach is called M v o m v O T, it stands for the money value of t of your time, the money value of your time. Dan actually refers to a similar concept in his book. He calls this your buyback rate which is basically going, what is your time worth? So the way you figure out what your time is worth is you take every, you take your income, right? Like just go to your taxable income you know, or if you’re an entrepreneur, you might have to like add back some of your tax deductions to get to like what is your, what is the total amount of money you made last year personally, like for your personal time, whether it was salary or if it was commissions, or whether it was through your 10 K and it was profits or it was dividends.
RV (08:51):
Like if you just go, how much money do I make in a course of a year, all of the sources. And then divide that by 2080, which is the number of working hours in a year that will give you an hourly rate. We call that rate your m v o, the money value of your time, meaning every hour of your time is literally worth, let’s call it let’s just, let’s call it $48 an hour. Okay? So I think let’s just, well, let’s look, okay, a hundred thousand. If you made a hundred thousand dollars a year, okay, divided by 2080 doing this math on the fly here, that’s $48 an hour. I was right. Okay, so that means if you make a hundred thousand dollars a year, you get paid $48 an hour. So the concept of time arbitrage is to then say, what are all the activities that I am doing in my business or in my life that I could hire someone else to do for less than $48 an hour?
RV (09:57):
Then what I do is I go, I’m going to do that. I’m going to hire those people to do those things, right? And this could be everything from an assistant to manage my inbox and calendar. This could be someone to cut the grass, do the grocery shopping, cook for the kids c clean the house. It is doing my social, managing my social media writing copy, doing graphic design. Like what are all of the tasks that you can get done? And you make a list of those for less than $48 an hour. And then you actually hire those people and you go, great, I’m going to arbitrage my time. I’m going to pay them. Let’s say let’s, I don’t know, let’s just use $20 an hour. I am now going to pay those people $20 an hour. And with the hour that I now have where I’m not doing the thing that I hired them to do, I am now going to repurpose that hour into activities that generate me $48 an hour, like selling or like marketing or doing content creation or building relationships or what, whatever it is.
RV (11:04):
Like whatever are the key income drivers of, you know, or the key revenue drivers of your business or the key income drivers for you personally, I’m going to reinvest my time. So part of the issue, again, this is a mental block, this is a limiting belief. This is what holds entrepreneurs back is they go, well, Rory, I can’t afford to pay someone $20 an hour to do those things. I don’t have it. And the answer, you know, the thing that I I need you to know is you already are affording it. You are already paying someone because you’re either paying them at their rate or you’re paying yourself at your rate. So if you are doing that task, you are paying someone for it. You’re paying yourself and you’re paying yourself at $48 an hour, you’re paying $48 an hour for you to do the task instead of paying $20 an hour for someone else to do the task.
RV (12:02):
And so this is how you ratchet up, this is how entrepreneurs ratchet up their income. But if you never learn to do this, then you stay stuck doing tasks at lower rates of pay, and you never free up your time to spend time on the things that pay higher rates of pay, like, you know, selling and, and, and building relationships and doing strategic things and building content and building your brand and personal development and, and, and education and you know, all these things and building systems, right? Building systems is one of the, one of the highest value uses of your time because it multiplies time. So that’s what happens. The reason you’re stuck is you are stuck doing all this stuff both personally and professionally, and you’re paying, you’re charging yourself too much because you are doing it. So you already are paying the money.
RV (12:54):
So that’s the, that is time arbitrage. And it’s going, okay, I’m going to buy someone else’s time at $20 an hour, and then I’m going to repurpose my time into things that do $48 an hour. And this is what, you know, basically billionaires do. All you do is you keep ratcheting it, ratcheting it up, and ultimately you go, yeah, I’m gonna pay, you know, $250,000 a year for a C-level executive to manage this function of my business. That’s a lot of money. And you go, yeah, it is a lot of money, but if you can make a million dollars a year by repurposing the time you would be spending doing that, doing something else, not only are you buying your time back, you’re also creating jobs for other people and you’re buying your freedom. So, but it’s, it takes it’s risk, right? It is risky and you have to have the, you have to first of all get past the mental blocks.
RV (13:44):
You have to think differently. Just like I said, the the next level of results requires the next level of thinking. The way that Einstein said it was, Einstein said, you can’t use the same level of thinking that created the problem to solve the problem. You have to adapt, you have to evolve, you have to be around people who have gone on this journey before you. And I think, I feel like it’s a good time to mention, if you’re not one of our members at Brand Builders Group, you should go to free brandand call.com/podcast and request a call with our team so that we can talk to you about what it looks like because our services are insanely affordable, in insanely affordable. When one, you become a member, you get access to 14 of our courses for less than what most people sell one course for, right?
RV (14:30):
So you know, you, you have in your disposal, in your immediate ability you know, the opportunity to access this education that is worth millions of dollars. And it doesn’t cost nearly as much as you, as much as you might think. So request a call free brand and call.com/podcast and talk to our, our team and we will help you with the mindset piece. But then you have to have the actual discipline to actually go spend that extra time on the activities that drive more income, and that takes risk and that takes discipline. And oh, by the way, we have a course called Conquering Impossible Goals, and a book called Take the Stairs that helps you with that and helps you build your discipline and create your ultra performance plan. And if, if you, you know, invest with us at a certain level, you’ll have your own private coach, you get to come to our events, right?
RV (15:20):
So that is the, the, the, the example that is how time arbitrage works. And you reinvesting into your own personal development is an example of time arbitrage. You’re going, okay, I could spend 10 years of my life learning how to become a bestselling author, or I could invest a couple thousand dollars and brand builders group can teach it to me in two days and I know it, and then I have it for the rest of my life. That’s time arbitrage. Personal development, self-education is one of the greatest examples of how to multiply your time. It’s getting coaching and, and you’re, you’re compressing time and you could learn it on your own. You could do that, but how long is it gonna take? And what is the M V o, what is the money value of that time? What’s the hourly rate of your time multiplied times how long it’ll take you to figure it out on your own?
RV (16:13):
Can you pay to just compress that time, whether through education or hiring people, time arbitrage. If you can get, if you can get past this limiting belief, if you can, if you can unlock this, this new level of thinking, then your, your mind will operate in a state that allows you to create more wealth. That’s why if nothing else, go watch my TED Talk. It’s free, right? Pay 20 bucks and buy my procrastinate on purpose book. We’ll walk you through the whole thing or become a member of ours and we’ll coach you through it step by step. But you’ve gotta understand time arbitrage to get to the next level. The third concept that is huge for multiplying time is something called the 10 80 10 rule. The 10 80 10 rule. And many people talk about this concept, I certainly employ it. And the way that this works is when there’s a new project, you can’t just hire someone and go, okay, I hired them, they’re gonna do it, and it’s just gonna be perfect and fine.
RV (17:22):
It should be done. Typically, that’s gonna end up at as a little bit of a train wreck. So what you do is you spend the first 10% with them, right? You map out the project, you give them the scope, you, you give them instruction, you lay it out, then the middle 80% is what they do for you. And then the last 10% you come back in and you kind of give them feedback, you tie together the loose ends, you polish it up, and you can like send it out the door. Where people go wrong or experience frustration with delegation is they try to delegate and then abdicate. They try to go, well, I paid this person to just solve this problem and it wasn’t perfect. And so delegation doesn’t work. That’s just not realistic, right? Like, people need more coaching and probably because you have a specific vision of what you want this to do.
RV (18:20):
Now, mathematically, some people will say, well, that’s frustrating because I’m paying someone to do a job that I am still doing. And the answer is yes, kind of. You are still doing part of it, but 80% of it you’re not doing. And here’s the thing, you gotta realize, 80% done right by someone else is always better than a hundred percent done right by you. 80% done right by someone else is better than a hundred percent done right by you. Because even if they only get it 80% right now, you only have to do 20% instead of a hundred percent. See how that works? Like, yes, it can be frustrating to hire someone and they don’t, they, they, you can’t just abdicate it. You can’t just go take this and do this. Very rarely does that happen. But if they can get, if they can carry 80% of the load, you still gotta be there for 20%, but that 80% is freed up for you to now reinvest.
RV (19:32):
So even if you can’t outsource the entire thing, it still makes sense to do this. But this is where most people just can’t get their mind wrapped around it. And, and so, and it doesn’t mean they’re bad people, it it, but it, it means you’re, you know, like your income’s gonna be limited as an entrepreneur and, and you’re gonna be really, really busy. For those of you that have more of an employee mindset, which is fine, right? There’s nothing wrong with it. The beautiful, you know, the hard part about mon, the hard part about being an entrepreneur is you take all the risk, right? You pay out the money, and now you gotta go backfill and make a sale to generate that money, otherwise you’re in trouble, right? So, and you gotta repurpose that time into something that creates more time and more income tomorrow.
RV (20:16):
So you take all the risk, but with the risk con comes the reward. And that’s why you make more money if you’re successful, you make less money. If you’re unsuccessful, the, the advantage of being an employee is you get a consistent pay no matter what, right? The, you don’t take the risk, the, your employer is taking the risk. And if that’s you, that’s fine too. Totally fine. You know, employees are so valuable to everyone, especially to entrepreneurs. But if, if you’re an employee going, okay, I wanna raise my income, one of the things that I would be thinking about if, if I were an employee is going, I wanna be around people and around businesses who are multipliers. I want to be in the proximity. This is one of the reasons why Tony Robbins says proximity is power. I wanna be in the proximity of multipliers.
RV (21:12):
Why? Because multipliers are always going to be reinvesting and they’re always going to be growing. So they may not be able to pay you top, top dollar now, but whatever they pay you, if you can help that multiplier perform at a higher level, they’re gonna reinvest it back into the business, into the systems and into you. And the longer you’re around, the more valuable you are for them because the more you’re helping them multiply time. And so as they ratchet up, you are going to ratchet up with them. So you’re kind of like riding in their wake. And that happens a lot, right? You go, what does Elon mi, what does Elon Musk’s personal assistant make? Or his chief of staff? I don’t know, but my guess is probably a lot more than $50,000 a year because of trust. And, and you know, they know the systems and you know, they know what he wants before he asks for it and the time.
RV (22:07):
So either way, whether you’re on the entrepreneurial path or you’re more on the employee path, be around multipliers. And by the way, if you’re an entrepreneur, even if you’re an entrepreneur, you wanna surround yourself with other multipliers. Case in point, right? Look at our clients, Louis Howes, ed Millet, Eric Thomas, Amy Porterfield, our revenue and my income has gone up. As I have surrounded myself with people like that, as I have served them right, as I have added value to them, I’ve helped them grow. And as a result, they’ve grown and they’ve brought us with them because those people are multipliers, right? So you always want to go, how can I be in the proximity of multipliers? Being in the proximity of multipliers? These are people who are creating jobs, they’re taking risk, they’re paying for results, and their time is worth a lot. And so as their time becomes worth more and more and more, they are able to afford to pay more and more and more, which means they’re gonna hire the people that are in their proximity.
RV (23:15):
So those are, those are concepts that I wish I would’ve understood when I was young. Like I would’ve made so much more money, so much faster. I’d made so much more impact, so much faster. I would’ve surrounded myself, frankly, with a lot of different people than I did. Although I did a, a good job, actually, I’ve done a pretty good job of surrounding myself with successful people. But these are the kind of mindsets it takes to go from somebody like me, born in a trailer park, raised by a single mom. You know, we couldn’t afford boxed cereal to, you know, now six different multi seven figure businesses and two multi, or two eight figure businesses that we have built. It’s the mindset your mind has to change. And so to become a multiplier, you have to learn how to think the way that multipliers think.
RV (24:13):
So those are just three, you know, simple ideas as multiplying time. I mean, again, I wrote a whole book on this subject. It is powerful stuff. It has the power to change your life. So I hope you’ll request a call and talk to our team, get plugged into what we’re doing, or at least stay plugged in here, right? This is, we’re, we’re, we’re giving you free, free insights and inspiration as much as we can to help you multiply your impact, your income to the next level. So share this episode with somebody who needs to hear it. Somebody you know in your life who’s an entrepreneur, somebody who wants to build their personal brand, somebody who’s busy, buried behind, and overwhelmed. Send this episode. Will will you. And if you get a chance, leave us a review on the, on iTunes. That helps a lot of other people figure out if this is the right show. And keep coming back. And thanks for being here. I hope we’re gonna, I hope and trust and am committed helping you continue to multiply. We’ll catch you next time.
Ep 392: How to Build Your Own Media Production Team with Dan Martell
RV (00:02):
So straight up, you are about to meet one of my favorite people to follow online. And I actually started following Dan Martel before we became friends, and I followed him for like a year. I really loved his content because there’s certain people, and I, I follow less than a hundred people total online. And the people that I follow are people who I have deciphered are people who are achieving real results in real life, not just they have lots of followers, or they have a big personal brand, but I’m actually following people who are real life business owners. And I was able to, to, you know, sort that out quickly with Dan. So he is an angel investor. He’s a, he’s an influencer, YouTuber thought leader. He’s also the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of this book. It’s called Buy Back Your Time. And we’re gonna talk a little bit about that.
RV (00:55):
But before that, he founded Scaled and exited successfully three different technology companies within a 10 year period. So in two, in 2012, he was named as Canada’s top angel investor. He invested in companies like Intercom, Udemy, unbalanced all very, very successful companies. And now he runs a SaaS academy and is basically, he has one of the largest coaching companies in the world. He specializes in talking specifically to SaaS founders, which I am not, but we are a recurring revenue business because of coaching. And we also, you know, have a membership component of that, which is like the online version of ours. And so a lot of the principles that apply to SaaS companies apply very much to any recurring type of revenue model. And so I really, really love, love Dan. I believe in his stuff. And then I saw his book, came out, hit the Wall Street Journal, and then he was doing an event in Nashville, and I was like, man, I want to come over and meet you. And we met up. And so anyways, here he is the man, Dan Martel. Welcome to the show, buddy
DM (02:02):
Rory, it’s an honor man. I’ve I’ve been a huge fan of your work and you know, just congrats, man. Like watching all my friends that you work with, the support you, you give them and the, the results they’ve gotten. It just is a testament to the mastery that I know you focus on, you know, when you, when you deliver for people, and it means a lot. I think there’s a lot of folks out there, you know, selling stuff and not delivering, but you know, I could tell within our first conversation that that’s that’s not you. You’re somebody that over-delivers and it’s awesome.
RV (02:35):
Well, thanks brother. And I we really do my wife AJ says this all the time, she says, utilization equals retention, utilization equals retention. And she just is always about over-delivering and getting people using it. And even though, again, we don’t do SaaS, I know that like so much of what you teach is just around that same thing of providing a quality product, making sure people have a great experience using it, training the team to sell marketing. Like all, all, all in. And so I want to talk about buy back your time, okay. The book, but I wanna talk about it specifically to personal brands, which you’re uniquely equipped to talk about. And one of the things that you were sharing with me before we started was how you’ve been applying this principle to your new life as a YouTuber and a influencer. And you know, you’ve gone from being you’ve gone from being an entrepreneur to being an investor, to now also you’re, you, you said, you said something to me, you said, right now you’re really investing in media. So I’d love to hear about what that means and also why at this stage in your career, do you suddenly care about investing more into media?
DM (03:54):
Yeah, it’s an awesome question, Roy. I mean, my, my quick arc was, you know, I, I grew up in a really tough environment, got in trouble with the law at a young age, diagnosed with a D H D, you know, ended up in prison twice by the time I was 17. And in rehab, actually taught myself to code. And that, that literally became my new addiction at that point. It kind of filled the hole that a lot of the you know, the addiction I was, I was suffering with you know, left. And then I got into entrepreneurship, which is this like, beautiful forcing function for betterment, right? Like, if you think of like getting big, like growing a business, if you wanna be more successful in a business, you gotta go look in the mirror. So my, my, my message for a long time was about, you know, like growth and mindset and all these things.
DM (04:44):
And the problem was I struggled with disconnecting from the obsession of building, right? I had two failed companies right out of the gate, 17 again at 19. And it wasn’t until I was 24 that I hired a business coach that essentially showed me how to operate scale, begin with the end of mind, a lot of the principles that are fundamental that I just was lacking, right? I just thought we’d build a product, people buy it, you have a business. And it was through that experience in my third company that made me a multimillionaire that I essentially like crater my life because I was engaged with a woman that it turns out, you know, to have, to have a successful relationship, you actually gotta be present. And I just wasn’t, I, I didn’t know any better. I was so scared of failing because of the momentum I’d built that I I just kept working a hundred hour weeks and I wasn’t present.
DM (05:36):
And eventually I came home one day and I found her in tears in the kitchen, and she just took the ring off and walked away. And it was about seven weeks before the marriage. So that was my wake up call to all of this. And that’s really where the buyback principle, which I teach in my book, which is, you don’t hire people to grow your business. You hire people to buy back your time, because if you do the second, you get the first, but you don’t necessarily get the, you don’t, you know, most, most entrepreneurs build businesses. They grow to hate. So I, I started coaching companies I invested in 15 years ago, this core principle, right? Like I had to learn it for myself. I exited that company, sp and then I went to Silicon Valley and built two venture backed companies and really understood scale and leverage.
DM (06:23):
And I started tweeting and blogging. And that’s kind of the beginning of like the, if you want to call it influencer phase, but I did it as very much from a marketing point of view. You know, it’s like, oh, if you have an audience, you can hire easier, you can get customers, you know, inbound marketing started to pick up back then. What shifted for me recently was, honestly when the book came out a few months ago and it became a Wall Street Journal bestseller, I underestimated the value of a book by 10 x. Okay? Like, and, and Rory, you know, this better than most. It is one of the easiest way to build credibility. So like, I had all this business success, but I don’t know, there’s just something about a physical book that all of a sudden now people see me in a different light.
DM (07:09):
And then what happened as I was doing all this media stuff like Instagram, social media, I have about a million followers across all my platforms, but I was, I was doing just enough. Like I wasn’t, I wasn’t like thoughtful about it. I wasn’t, I would say investing in it. And there was just like perfect tsunami of some friends of mine that I watched essentially, like grow their audiences and see them get access to opportunities to impact people on a level I couldn’t even imagine. I was like, how did that happen? How did you get on national tv? How did you, you know, get a New York Time bestseller? How did you get these, you know, 50 k speaking opportunities, et cetera, or even access to deals, right? And it, it just occurred to me that the, if my goal is truly to, to have an impact to serve at risk youth, which is near and dear to my heart, then it’s, it’s irresponsible of me to not lean into it.
DM (08:03):
Like, it, it, it kind of doesn’t make sense if you tell me your goal is to help people and you intelligently look at how can you help people? Well, the, the, the trade of putting out content and serving literally millions of people and it costs you nothing huge leverage. I’m all about, you know, buy back my time. And then, and then from that opportunities tip of the spear for me to buy companies, which I do with one of my private equity companies I’m involved in, or like coach in SAS Academy or, you know, travel the world and speak, or, and it’s funny cuz you mentioned reoccurring revenue in coaches. That’s actually a big part of the people that have reached out recently because they’ve seen me scale not only SaaS Academy, but like helped other friends of mine in coaching industries just understand the dynamics that are present and just natural in software as a service SaaS, right? So that, that was what shifted is just this realization if I wanna help people investing, you know, dollars and cents into building a media team. And that’s, that’s the identity shift for me. It went from being a marketing function to a media team. So I look at myself as a media person, not as a talent in a marketing function.
RV (09:16):
So, so, so hash that out for me. And, and, and, and also this applies to how does the buyback principle apply to creating lots of pieces of content, which is something that, you know, I’m watching, I’m watching you do, and watching you uplevel sort of the, the quality of what you’re putting out. And so I’m really curious to hear what, what is representative of that mindset shift from marketing, you know, function to media company, and then also in addition to the mindset shift, what is the, what’s the tactical expression of that in terms of how many people are you hiring? And like, what does that mean you building out a whole studio and you’ve got like, tons of producers and like script writers or, or like what does it mean exactly?
DM (10:05):
Yeah, I mean, I, the other thing where I wanna be careful that I wanna scare people away, right? So I’ll give you the like, like low budget version and then I can share what I’m doing. Yeah. But I’m also not ignorant to the fact that, you know, I have dollars and cents to invest and some people may be trying to make more money, but even
RV (10:22):
Though you do have limited of money, you’ve still stepped into this. You, even though you’ve had money, you’ve stepped into this. Totally.
DM (10:28):
Yeah. Yeah. I, I think it’s, it is literally one of the best trades any person can do with their lives. And I think, you know, you’ve seen people like Gary V and many others been screaming at the mountaintop about this and it, and I’ve known Gary for 14 years and it took me this long to finally get, and again, the book was the catalyst, the book came out and I was like, whoa, how, how is this thing helping tens of thousands of people? And I’m not like, talk about leverage. So here’s, here’s the first thing is the whole idea of just capturing what you do, right? There’s this great book called Show Your Work by Austin Cleon. It’s for artists, but I, I really, I read this book and I leaned into it. So for example, I have two cameras on me right now, like on my desk, they’re, I don’t even know what kind they’re, but canon something, whatever.
DM (11:15):
And all my meetings from coaching calls to all hands to investor reviews to this podcast I just, I just click a button on my laptop and it records everything and then it saves it to a Dropbox that synchronizes, right? And it puts it up into the cloud. Now then I have a team that goes through all that footage and they decide like, oh, that was actually interesting. That was not right. So to me, the whole idea of just like start capturing stuff right, is just such a basic idea. A lot of people I know are doing audio podcasts, but they’re not recording video. So, and, and it’s fascinating to me. I’m like, well, you’re already talking to the person, just like, do it on a platform, do it on Zoom, and then just grab that video content and put that out, you know? So that, that was like the easiest thing to do.
DM (12:03):
And then what I started doing to level up the capturing side is now I just hire freelance videographers in different cities. I predominantly go like LA or Vegas or you know, in my own city when I’m doing speak engagements or, or coaching sessions and they’ll just come and, and video record just me. So just now asking for permission, so like when I have clients fly in for, for a v i p day the rule is, is like the videographer will be there, he’s recording me, but not you. And, and none of your stuff will be in the video. Well, all of a sudden I, I’ve take a, you know, a, a six hour day and produce 50 pieces of content that I didn’t have to like go into a studio and shoot right now. Some people are gonna have a hard time with that cuz I don’t think they actually know what they’re talking about.
DM (12:55):
So their content ain’t that interesting. I mean, Rory, that’s the truth, man. They don’t, they don’t know how to tell a story. They don’t know how to make a point. So some people will be like, I feel like I am not as good. But the truth is, is a good editor a good what’s called a times stamper or Clipper, they will find the nuggets, right? And you, and over time what’s cool is like I only see my social media content that gets put out there. Once it goes out, I literally have a creative director that takes care of deciding what he thinks is, is appropriate or not inappropriate and, and puts it out. So I get to consume it at the same time as my audience. But it acts as a feedback loop because I can see what they think is interesting. I can then see what works on social media and then I can go, oh, that message seems to resonate so I can think about that when I’m sharing or talking or doing other stuff. And you can be
RV (13:43):
Surprised by your own brilliance. Occasionally you’re like, wow, I can’t believe I said it. That was really freaking
DM (13:48):
Good. The editing skills, they literally, they’ll take 20 minutes of me rambling and just like punch it into a 35 second reel and I’m like, wow, it made me sound so smart. But that’s, that was good. Yeah, I think, I think the key is just start capturing and then, and and have essentially a videographer and an editor, ideally the same person, like on staff part-time. I think it’s, you know, as much as you have a bookkeeper and you have an assistant, you should probably start thinking about getting a full-time or a part-time videographer slash editor.
RV (14:17):
Yeah. So talk me through the specific like team members. So is that, is it really just, do you think it’s, it starts with one person who’s like a videographer and an editor on staff?
DM (14:27):
Yeah, I think, I think there’s, there could be two components to this. There’s the, the creating the, the reels, the video assets, and then there’s publishing. So there’s the copywriting and publishing side. So you know, at the easiest level following my own, you know, advice in the buyback principle, I would say your assistant can probably write first drafts of a lot of the marketing collateral, right? Like, especially if you have a body of work they can go look at and say, oh, this is how you wrote your newsletter, this is how you write a caption. I mean, truth is with chat g p t, you get a transcript of your video and you ask AI to do it, it’ll get it 90% good, right? Like better than you could write it. You can even say in the tone of somebody you admire like the Rock or Joe Rogan, you can literally ask it to write in a certain tonality that’s appropriate for you.
DM (15:14):
And then you can just come in for a couple hours once a week and just edit that stuff, right? But again, my process is do something till it becomes, you know, timely. So if you’re trying to produce at scale like I am then you start hiring people that are just a copywriter and somebody that manages your social media posting schedule. Because I mean we’re, we’re taking all that raw video and we’re producing LinkedIn posts, we’re producing email copy, we’re producing Facebook posts. We’re literally, all social media platforms are driven from that raw capturing of video for written format and, and email.
RV (15:52):
So, okay. And I’ve heard you mention a couple different terms here and what I hear you saying is version 1.0, it might be a part-time videographer slash editor and your assistant, and maybe your assistant is taking the transcription of the video and using chat G B T to help write the captions.
DM (16:11):
Totally. Yeah. And then scheduling it on social media for publishing the publishing
RV (16:15):
And like they have to go in and schedule it or log in and post it or whatever. So then what about, but then you, you have copywriter, you have like a social media scheduler person, video editor, and then creative director. So at this, at this point then, is that at my
DM (16:34):
Scale? Yeah, at my scale. Because again, the amount of content I’m putting out, I think three reels a day. We’re, you know, I’m spending probably 15 k a month, right? So like a major investment. And I’ve got my creative director, we’ve got one or two video editors. We have one person that just does timestamping. They literally go through because I’ll produce, you know, today I probably have about five hours of capture from all my different calls, podcast interviews. I just did a keynote. So, so somebody’s gotta go through that and just timestamp the clips of what’s interesting to cue it up, up for the editors. And then we have a copywriter, I’m assuming on retainer. Again, my creative direct today cuz I’m all about, and you know, people read my book, I’m all about delegating outcomes, not tasks. I’ve delegated the whole thing to my creative director.
DM (17:27):
They manage their team in budget and then they’re the conversation I have in regards to feedback on, hey, this worked really well. I remember my, my creative director the other day, his name Sam, he goes he goes, Hey man, he sent me a text message with two, two videos. He’s like, there’s this video and this video. And it’s like, this one was good but not great. This one went viral. He goes, you, you need to calm down. And I go, okay, well first he’d asked if I was open to feedback, which the answer’s always yes, but I love his approach
DM (18:23):
So he now is giving me feedback into topic content. Like things that are like, hey, talk more this way. Tell more stories use more feeling words. Like it’s just this beautiful feedback loop. And I think if anybody wants to just become better at communication in general, it’s kind of a life hack because it creates an audience that you can serve, costs you nothing. Especially if you just capture the work you’re doing already. And it is a forcing function and a feedback loop for you to become better at a skill that will transcend anything you could do. I mean, becoming a world-class communicator in the moment where you’re able to pull vocabulary and tell stories and just be on point. Like that’s, that’s the thing that is the X factor, right? When you look at your clients, you’re like, man, they’re really great at what they do.
DM (19:17):
It’s because they practice. They had, they had reps. And that’s what I, that’s the way I look at it is like, it’s just this beautiful kind of feedback structure that just keeps feeding every other project I’m working on in my life. It makes everything else I do easier. I mean now, I mean we we’re adding thousands of people per week on my Instagram account. N now I’m getting people I’ve wanted to connect with start following me cuz they’ve seen something I put out there. I mean that, just talk about speed. I I it’s just, it’s fascinating that it took me this long to figure it out.
RV (19:50):
So, and coming, so coming around, so you have a creative director, a video editor, a times stamper
DM (19:56):
Who, a copywriter and a copywriter. Yeah, and a
RV (19:59):
Copywriter. So four, so really four at, at your current level of scale, you got four. And those are all full-time people.
DM (20:08):
Copywriters part-time times stamper is per hour editor is per project. So yeah, they’re not full-time. I mean you can, again, there’s different levels of quality. You can do some people, you can get people to produce videos for you for like 25 bucks a video, right? Or 15. I mean I’ve seen people, I mean my DM and I’m sure yours are too, they’re just full of people offering to do edits. So you, you don’t have to spend that much, but you’ll also, you know, the results are in what you invest. So if you, if you wanna, you know, have a conversation with, and that’s why my creative director is the ultimate hire because I need somebody that’s really trying to understand the platforms and what’s popping now and gimme that feedback so that we can kind of iterate cuz it’s not just about kind of a set it and forget it. It’s a very creative process.
RV (20:56):
And that person’s full-time the creative director. A
DM (20:59):
Hundred percent. Yeah.
RV (21:00):
Gotcha. And then what about graphic design?
DM (21:03):
Yeah, it’s part of the editor stuff. I don’t even know
RV (21:06):
The video editor does the graphic. Yeah, I
DM (21:08):
Think we have, we have a really strong design template structure that my designer, so I have a part-time designer Rich, who does all my design work. But he’s given like kind of like an asset library to the, the video team so that they can pull from so they don’t have to ping ’em every time.
RV (21:24):
Yeah, I love that. That’s, that’s super helpful just to, to see. But yeah, that’s a big in, I mean, 15,000 a month is a big investment even with chat G B T and everything else that you can use like, and and yeah and doing video editing so you know, you’re, you’re in a couple hundred thousand bucks a year and so you gotta have a way to monetize that. And in your case you do that with coaching. So I’d love to hear how have you applied the buyback principle to scale the coaching business? Cuz obviously that’s the thing that’s gotta pay for this cuz you’re not making, you’re not making $200,000 a year on brand deals and stuff like that. You’re not messing around with that as much as you’re not yet.
DM (22:02):
I mean this is funny, right? It’s like what? Yeah, the amount of opportunities now, like, you know, speaking fees, I think if you can sell tickets to an event, I mean you, you’re in the 25 k plus level, right? 50 K speaking. It only takes a few opportunities to kind of justify those expenses. The brand deals I don’t do yet, although, you know, my videographer or my creative director keeps talking about it cuz like there are certain products that I do love and I just happen to share often because it’s in my world. So like anything you can do to subsidize a media production I think is an interesting thing to consider. Again, financially it’s a different game for me. But you know what’s interesting is I actually don’t monetize my personal brand directly for SaaS Academy SaaS Academy’s. Kind of like how, I mean the, I think there’s two parts of the question.
DM (22:49):
How have I applied the buyback principle to the coaching business? There’s a few ways I will, I will tell you this Rory cuz you know, I’ve, I’ve had a lot of friends that coach, right? It’s, it’s because it’s easy to do. It’s like real estate agent or a social media expert. Like there’s not, the barrier venture is pretty low except most people get stuck in one-on-one coaching, right? And they don’t have an audience, a lot of their customers are through referral. So there’s always this feast or family because a customer comes in, they help ’em get a bunch of results and then they feel like they run outta runway and they go some results. So what I’ve gotten really good at because of my software background, is understanding how to design programming for my coaching clients and, and essentially productizing the coaching in a way that would allow me to buy back my time.
DM (23:40):
So for example, I actually did a video the other day about this. Like I now have a instructional designer that creates all of my growth playbooks. You know, you came to my event at that event two day event, I’m only on stage for an hour and I’m teaching, right? And that even that training at my scale, cuz you know, we have over a thousand clients, it’s a very big organization. I’m not creating that training now I know people listen to that, that, that coach are like, so what somebody else can coach my clients. My answer is yes at scale. Like I just, I just think I wanna bust the belief that coaches think that your job is to be the emotional container for your clients. Your job is to create a framework that your client can see themselves in and then from within that framework understand where they’re starting and give them the sequences of success for them to execute, get feedback on and move forward, right?
DM (24:44):
And I’m just, I’ve always been somebody that like, you know, I read this great book called The Goal Eliah Gold Rat, I believe is his name if I’m pronouncing it right, but it talks about manufacturing and systems design and that’s just, that’s how my brain thinks. So it’s like I always go left to right, raw material, finished product, even if it’s in coaching. Okay, what part can I then get support on? So like in the early days of coaching, it might be having somebody else, you know, onboard the client right? And set the expectations and schedule them up and send the invoices and schedule the next call. So like just having an executive assistant or an account manager help you out, right? Buy back your time from doing 10, 15, 20 hours a week on that kind of stuff. And then over time you might say, well I’m gonna hire somebody to help me on the marketing stuff.
DM (25:32):
Well, we just talked about, and and eventually you might have somebody like, here’s, here’s a great example. My buddy Motown one day he called me up because he was just like really stressed out the amount of work he was doing for all his different coaching clients. He had just did this big launch and had like a hundred new clients. And in that offer he, he talked about like helping them set up and, and you know, work on their Facebook ads, right? It’s just like this amazing offer. He, him as a coach, he’s a business coach, but part of that was the Facebook ads and he was just like overwhelmed. And I asked him a simple question. I said, do you know anybody else that’s a consultant, a freelancer that’s better than you, than Facebook a on Facebook ads? And he goes, yeah. I said, how much would you have to pay that person for their time?
DM (26:18):
And he goes, I don’t know, like a hundred bucks an hour. I go, cool, you have a hundred clients that paid you tens of thousands of dollars a coach with you. You can just pay somebody else to do that part of it and you can still be involved, right? What I call the ten eighty ten rule. The first 10% on the ideation, the creativity side of like the position, the other 80% of setting up the ads and the landing pages and the lead capture and all that stuff. Give that to the, your buddy and then come in at the last 10% to do the review. And that’s the 10 80 10 rule. And I mean this is, this has been around forever. This is how Andy Warhol built the factory of how he painted so many paintings back in the day. He was notorious for it. It’s how you know Tom Clancy, even though he is passed on, still writes books like people, there’s ways to capture the magic and then create systems around having other people support you on different parts of it. And that’s, that’s for me, even in coaching I think is a missing art that would allow a lot more coaches to scale and support more people if they got themselves and their beliefs out of the way.
RV (27:24):
Can you just give, hit us with the buyback principle directly? Cuz we kind of skipped over it and jumped, jumped right into it. Just, just like, what’s the main premise of what does it mean to buy back your time? And cuz you, you’re touching on it in different ways, but I’d love to just kind of get it
DM (27:40):
Straight up. Yeah. The buyback principle states, we don’t hire people to grow our business. We hire people to build buy back our time. So that’s fundamental to everything I do. Okay, what does that mean? It means it’s a calendar, not a capacity problem. Most people hire folks to do work in their business, video editors, copywriters, et cetera. But they don’t start with the first principle, which is look at your time, look at your energy and, and buy back things that suck your energy that are low value to pay somebody else to do. So that’s why that’s the buyback principle. But the process is this thing called the buyback loop, which is, which is essentially anytime you feel like your calendar is at capacity, right? And that might be anybody listen to this? Then you do three steps. You go audit, transfer, fill. Okay, audit is doing a time and energy audit on our calendar over the last two weeks.
DM (28:34):
You look at it and there’s a whole process for doing this, but I wanna look at what things light you up. Cuz some things could have lit you up and now take your energy and things that light you up are not there, right? So like look at your calendar for like red or green. Is it red takes your energy green, it lights you up and then put a dollar sign to those tasks. Is it $1 sign? Meaning that, you know, you could pay somebody very little like $15 an hour to do for you? Or is it $4 signs, which is like hiring somebody to do your job, like a c e o type pay and there’s a gradient in between, right? Whatever that is. If you just then take everything that’s in a in the red, that’s a low dollar amount to pay somebody else to do.
DM (29:14):
Typically, if this is the first time you’re doing it’s an executive assistant and you bring all that off your pa your plate, that’s the audit side, then you transfer all those tasks to them. And I teach that in the book. I mean, we can dive in as nerdy as you want to. I love this stuff. And then, then we fill it with things that light us up that make us money. Like I really believe that if people just gave themselves permission, right? Some people feel so guilty asking somebody else to help them, right? Or they have anxiety around having somebody else do things on their behalf delegating, right? They, they in their, their soul, it’s just like they’re so scared somebody’s gonna embarrass them through their work or whatever it is. And, and these people get stuck usually around three, 400,000 a year. They’re, they’re really great at what they do, but they never grow a business.
DM (30:01):
And then the next level is about 2 million a year where they hit this, this ceiling of complexity that they can’t break out of usually about 13, 15 employees because they, they gotta fu you gotta fundamentally change, right? So once you audit your time and calendar and you do this as frequently as you get at capacity, transfer that to other people, then you fill it with things that are going to either one of three things. Either build your skills, like uplevel your skills. So some people are like, well I don’t know how to do that thing. I don’t know how to build a media team. Cool. That’s a skill. Google it, search the books, read the books, go to the seminars, find the experts, learn then it’s beliefs. What are my beliefs around the world and my scarcity mindset and my money beliefs and my people beliefs that are stopping me from expanding, right?
DM (30:46):
Because at the end of the day, the world doesn’t get easier, you get better. So we have to expand our mindset and our worldviews. Then there’s character traits, right? In regards to, you know mental toughness, consistency positivity, your communication skills. These are all character traits of who you are that maybe you just haven’t become the person who can get to that next level. So the whole point of buying back our time is not to go do a four hour work week. It’s to actually become more. And that’s why like for me, I want creators to create, I want people to build mini empires and an empire. My language is somebody that creates a life of unlimited creation. They never have to retire from. That’s, that’s what I want. For every person out there that feels like an artist or a creator or a visionary, I want you to do all of that to the highest level with no hand break on. But the only way you’re gonna get there is if you understand how to buy back your time.
RV (31:46):
Yeah, man, I love that. I, I think even just giving yourself permission to just, I mean, one, one of the one of the biggest epiphanies for me as an entrepreneur was realizing everything that I hate to do someone else loves doing. And they would, they would be happy to do it and just be paid to do it for me. And just like, once you have that, that epiphany, it’s like, man, you are providing jobs, you are transferring money, you’re making your life better. And I, I think it’s, it’s just it’s a, it’s a completely freeing breakthrough in realization to, to when you start doing this and you start really buying back your time. So I love this. I think this is, this is so fascinating, interesting. I don’t want to let you go without asking you a little bit about this is a little bit off topic related to the book, but or maybe it’s not, but I, I wanna talk about retention and, you know, your expertise around SaaS companies and their valuation and going, I have to think that what’s really driving a lot of these valuations is reducing churn, reducing the amount of lost customers every month, the people who are canceling.
RV (33:11):
And I know you’ve seen so many of these, and so I wanted to just ask you a couple, like, if we talk about how do we reduce churn in any type of subscription business. So whether it’s a SaaS company or obviously you obviously have a coaching business, it’s gotta be the same. Like you’ve gotta have some thoughts and some strategies for how to reduce churn. Yeah,
DM (33:35):
I, I really wanna encourage people like pause and go get a pen. Okay? Cause I’m gonna, I’m gonna share it, but
DM (34:24):
Okay? So, so if you collect that information over a dozen clients, then what’s beautiful about that is every product improvement shouldn’t be made unless it improves retention. Okay? First and foremost. So if, so, like, what’s cool is you don’t have to be that smart about how do I make my product better? You literally just have to say, well, the people that didn’t stick around, why did they leave? And use that to ideate around those opportunities. The other thing to understand is there’s this thing called the growth ceiling, okay? And the growth ceiling. If you have a subscription business, I can tell you to the day, Rory, this is what’s crazy cuz it’s math. I can tell you to the day when you’re gonna hit your gross ceiling, meaning that your ability to grow is gonna be capped because as a percent of customers that leave every month, your ability to add new customers to just replenish that pool decays.
DM (35:21):
Like you, you’re just not able to spend fine channels to replenish. So there’s this point, and I can tell you the day and I can tell you the dollar amount, your business will, will essentially hit the ceiling at at that point. And so essentially, based on your current numbers, I know what size of business you’re running, right? It doesn’t mean you can’t make it better, it’s just this is it, right? If I, if I know how many new customers you add, I know how many customers you lose every month, how many you have right now, what you charge per month on average, that gives me that data, right? And it’s a spreadsheet that we’ve created. So then what you do, once you understand why people are leaving, you need to understand what’s a normal churn number, okay? Because, because trying to get a hundred percent retention is impossible and it’s, it’s actually unrealistic and there’s a point of diminishing returns.
DM (36:11):
But in your industry, trying to understand based on the way your model works, what is normal. So if you sell to small to medium businesses, it’s different than mid-market or medium sized businesses or larger businesses, they’re all different. Larger businesses churn less, medium churn a little bit more than large and then small turns a lot higher. So once you understand what the norm is for your world, then you just try to fix it to get to normal. Okay? So that’s like step two. It’s like wire canceling. Let’s fix that to try to get to like kind of best practices baseline. Then there’s this thing, I don’t wanna lose everybody, but it’s a term called expansion revenue. Okay? Expansion revenue is the dollar amount that a, a group of people will end up spending with you. Either through their expansion into a high level program that counteracts what’s called contraction revenue, which is cancellation in downgrades in your world.
DM (37:08):
So if you think about it, you might have a hundred people in January, out those a hundred people, how many people left? How many people downsize, how many people expanded? So if you think of that group of people in January, by December, you know, you wanna get to a place where you are at least, I mean I wanna, I know our numbers, which are the best in the industry just cuz this is my world, but I mean, for most coaching organizations, they wanna be at about 70 to 80% revenue retention, right? Meaning that out of those a hundred customers in January, by the end, if they spent a hundred thousand a month, you’re at 80,000 a month for that group of people, right? So, so that’s where you gotta start thinking about what’s 12 months later. You talk about 12 months later. Yeah, 12 months later.
DM (37:52):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Within an annual period. Cause cuz that’s gonna give you some insights into what we call the, the strategic P three s, the product positioning and packaging, right? So like, what are you selling? How are you delivering it? How are you positioning, who’s the customer? Cuz some people have high churn, they’re selling stuff to the wrong people. And then what’s your packaging in regards to like how your packages work, right? So pricing strategies and kind of like the plans you might put together and like, that’s the next area to focus on. So to give you a sense of like, what’s the gold standard in software, it’s 130%. Okay? So companies like Slack, Salesforce, HubSpot, et cetera, they’re in the 120 to 125% revenue retention. Meaning then that’s why software is so valuable in the market is because if you fix these problems and you really dial this stuff in, it does become an annuity, right? No different than insurance plan or whatever. It’s like it will continue to pay dividends based on a customer. You might have to pay a little bit of money to acquire them today, but your product expands with them and they, they spend more every year, which is a, a really cool thing to watch happen. But that’s, that’s the model.
RV (39:05):
And so you’re, you’re saying, so 130% would mean cuz you’re saying a hundred percent isn’t realistic, but that’s because if you lose 20% of the people in
DM (39:15):
Coaching, yeah, it’s very rare in coaching you’re gonna get that. I would say if you are at at least 80% revenue retention, you’re in the top 1%, 5%,
RV (39:25):
But you could through expansion revenue. So even though 20% of your customers leave the other 80% that stay, if some percentage of those are upgrading to something else, the net revenue number of those of that, like kind of
DM (39:41):
It could, I’ve never, I’ve never, I haven’t seen, yeah, I haven’t seen it yet. Usually what you’ll see is what’s called logo churn versus revenue churn. The logo churn for most coaching organizations, I would say the average is about 40% per year, if not 50% per year, right? That’s the average. Like most people are not good at retaining customers. If you can retain 70%, so you’re churning 30%, then revenue expansion will make up the rest of it. That’s where I get that 85, 80 85 revenue retention. Does that make sense? So I’m taking into consideration accounts leaving and expansion into higher level upward mo motion. But like when I look at most programs, the way they’re structured, you know, a third of the people in this program are gonna upsell into this next level, but that thing’s usually twice as more expensive. But again, there’s still cancellation contraction in that program.
DM (40:32):
So it’s actually an interesting thing like to, to figure out for your business is like as a coaching organization that focuses on subscriptions what is your growth ceiling? If you understand the calculation, like where do we essentially, what’s the, what’s the highest potential output of this engine that we’ve built? And do we wanna invest another four? Like, I mean, I see people all the time, they call me and they’re like, Dan, we’re thinking of spending like hundreds of thousand dollars building this thing. It’s like, for what? They’re like to improve this. And I go, what does that mean long-term? Is that realistic? Like, what’s your ROI on that? And they’re like, well, I don’t really know. That’s the whole point. It’s if you have decent numbers, then the plan is to operationalize that and don’t break anything, right? And maybe add more people. But if your numbers aren’t good, then fix that, then scale back up. But at a certain point, most organizations, especially coaching organizations, there’s gonna be this natural place where they, they end up, right. Some people that’s 60 million a year, some people that’s 6 million a year, right? That’s just the way it is,
RV (41:31):
Man. I love that. I knew you would have awesome thoughts there. We could do a whole nother episode sometime maybe on just coaching retention. But this has been awesome. Y’all, the book is called Buy Back Your Time, wall Street Journal, bestselling book. Dan, where do you want people to go if to connect with you and, and learn more about what you’re up to?
DM (41:51):
Yeah, Instagram’s my favorite. Dan Martell two ELs a Martel, find me on Instagram. That’s my favorite place. I’m on other socials. And then, you know, if you do get the book and it serves, please leave me a review. The team and I are creating a movement around buying back your time. It’s like my, as you know, it’s the topic I’m most passionate about. I don’t think there’ll ever be a day where I’m not excited about trying to teach people how to get their time back to go create more in the world. Cuz I think that’s, that’s what we’re here to do. We’re here to become better versions of ourselves and then share ourselves with the world through our business, through our community, through our church. And I really wanna see people kind of elevate that for themselves using this process.
RV (42:29):
I love it. I love it. Well, I can’t recommend you enough, my friend. Thank you so much for being here and we wish that you the best of luck and I’ll, I’ll, I’ll be following you and cheering you on.
DM (42:40):
Appreciate it, Rory. All the best.
Ep 385: Online Marketing Funnel Fundamentals
RV (00:02):
I love talking about funnels,
RV (00:59):
And of course, you know, that was the topic of the conversation here recently with my friend Lauren. And so I wanted to share with you some of my own thoughts related to funnels and constructing funnels. And I, I thought I would start with a definition of like, what is a funnel really, because there’s a lot of, that means a lot of different things to a lot of people. But in the world of marketing automation and in brand builders groups speak, right? For our company, what is a funnel? Like to me, a funnel is just a series of automated emails with links in them that you can click on that take you to landing pages where you can watch videos which allow you to learn about something to where you might then click on something, click on another link, and then buy something, right? It’s just an automated system of nurturing somebody to making a decision, a financial decision to do business with you.
RV (02:01):
But, you know, there’s a lot of over complication that happens around funnels. I mean, at the end of the day, these are emails that you’re sending that have links in them, right? So you, what are the components of a funnel? They, they’re emails with links. When you click on those links, it takes you to pages. Those pages have videos on them. So you’ve got emails, links, pages, and videos, and ultimately that’s it, right? And then you click another link, it takes you to another page where you put in a credit card information. So the, the, the strategy matters way more than the technology. And that’s a brand builders group mantra that we talk about is, is just the strategy of, of going, how are we laying this out and, and what are we doing? And, you know, before we even get into the strategy, what I wanted to share with you, e even before that would be, is my philosophy. It’s our philosophy. It’s this part of our culture at Brand Builders Group. But our philosophy about not just funnels,
RV (02:58):
But selling online in general and, and, and selling in general, but specifically in the world of content marketing and marketing automation. And it’s, it’s something that we call the rule of 10. And it’s based on another mantra that we believe, which is this trust must take place before there’s a transaction. Trust must take place before there’s a transaction. If you want someone to buy from you, you can’t just think about what are the tactics and the tricks and the technology that I need to use to like get someone to buy. And what you really need to be thinking about, which is the bigger conversation, which like almost nobody is talking about, which is the entire sale, is that before there’s a transaction, there has to be trust. You have to build trust, they have to trust you. They have to like you, they have to believe in you.
RV (03:51):
They have to believe that you can help them. And I think maybe they don’t need to believe this, but I would want them to believe this and I would want you to want them to believe this, which is that you should want them to believe that you actually care about them. That you actually give a crap about them succeeding. That it’s not just about you reaching your hand to their pocket and pulling out their credit card and taking money from their account and transferring it to yours, but that you, you’re concerned about a transformation taking place in their life. And so you’re focused not on just creating transactions, you’re focused on creating trust. You’re not just focused on creating customers, you’re focused on creating fans. You’re not just focused on like creating conversions. You’re, you’re focused on creating transformations for people. And so we, I, I think of this, or we call this, we refer to this as the rule of 10 because you can, even if you get all the technology right, and you do the sequencing, right, and you write the emails properly, which is a big if, right?
RV (04:58):
There’s a lot of bad copywriting out there. And even people who will charge you for copywriting that really don’t know what they’re doing, and, and, and they will, can charge you a lot like and there’s a lot of people who will charge you a lot of money to build funnels and they really don’t know what they’re doing. So there, there’s a lot of, there’s a l a lot of potholes here on this journey, but like before all of that, I want you to aspire, or at least consider this to aspire for the rule of 10. The rule of 10 says that I am gonna provide to you 10 times the amount of value in advance of me charging you for something. Which means if I’m gonna sell you something that costs a hundred dollars, I’m going to try to provide a thousand dollars worth of value to you before I ask you for the a hundred dollars.
RV (06:01):
If I’m gonna try to charge you $10,000 for something, I am going to try to give you a hundred thousand dollars worth of value. And if I’m gonna charge you a hundred thousand dollars worth of value, or, or excuse me, if I’m gonna charge you a hundred thousand dollars price, right? If that’s the cost, then I’m going to aspire to make the value of what I’m providing to you worth $1 million. And I think too many people are in this space just trying to go, how much money can I get for the least amount of value? And, and you don’t have to do this. I’m not saying that doesn’t work in the short term like that. You can’t create money that way. I mean, you can, but it totally runs out, right? Like eventually, it, it’s not how you build your reputation. The way you build an incredible reputation is you charge for 10, but you deliver a hundred and, or you deliver a hundred before you even charge for 10, right?
RV (07:00):
Or you, you know, deliver 50 and then ask, and then, and then ask for 10 while you’re delivering another 50. But, but it’s the rule of 10 that people are always getting 10 times the value of what they’re paying for. And it’s just, it’s, I don’t know, it’s just a, it’s a philosophy that we have and, and it’s not the only way to make money. I know plenty of people who make lots of money from what I would consider taking advantage of people. I think it’s the opposite. They, they deliver to people a 10th of the value of what they charge for. They, they charge, they charge a hundred thousand dollars and they give them like a thousand dollars product. Like, or they charge $10,000 and they give somebody something that is like really worth a thousand dollars. I see that a lot. But that’s been our pH our philosophy is not that, our philosophy is the rule of 10 the other way.
RV (07:47):
And, you know, it’s worked out well for us. And that’s all I all I can share. And like, you know, that’s why we, we, we only teach what we do. We only teach what we actually practice. But I think part of the power of this, you know, honestly, there’s value to your consumer. There’s value to your, to your avatar, to your customer, to your prospect. And that’s a good reason to do it. But part you may not realize, which is equally as valuable, is it’s valuable to you. Because what I have found, if you’re a true mission-driven messenger, right? If you’ve found your way to this podcast, this episode, you’re still listening. You’re like following me and AJ and our team at Brand Builders Group and the stuff we do, and you’re, you’re starting to like be introduced to the philosophies that, that we have.
RV (08:29):
You’re probably a mission-driven messenger, which means there’s a part of you that goes, I do wanna make money, but I don’t wanna just make money. I’m not okay making money at the expense of somebody else. I’m not okay taking advantage of people. I’m not okay using tactics that are a win for me, but they’re a loss for someone else. If that’s you, you’re a mission-driven messenger. And here’s what we know about you, because this is us. We sometimes struggle to sell. We sometimes struggle to promote. We sometimes struggle to have the conviction to say, you should pull out your credit card and buy this because we’re so nervous about taking ad you know take not wanting to take advantage of people or overpromising and underdelivering or just, you know, not being vain. We don’t wanna be arrogant, we don’t wanna be conceited. And so, but what happens is you need to be an avid promoter in order to create revenue.
RV (09:21):
And so the way you do that is you create the rule of 10. And so you go, what gives you the confidence and the conviction to do it is because you know that it’s worth it, right? And you know, there are people who pay me a hundred thousand dollars for like a couple days of time. And I know for some of you that might be like insane cuz it is for me, honestly, right? Like growing up in a trailer park, to say that out loud is like a weird thing to go man from where I was to, to where where I I I am now or we are now is wild. But it’s because what they’re gonna learn and what we’re gonna build with them is not only worth a million dollars, but probably millions of dollars, right? Because we’re helping them construct a company or create strategy or develop a sales team or a sales plan, or launch a book or write a keynote or, or, or create a whole ecosystem for their, their their personal brand.
RV (10:18):
Those are worth millions of dollars. Millions of dollars, right? And I’m completely convicted in it. And so it’s important that you are convicted in, in what you’re selling. Now most of our clients at Bra Builder’s Group don’t pay anywhere near that amount of money to us. Like nowhere even near that. But we’re always priv providing the rule of 10. So people know that like, hey, our goal is to offer 10 times the value of what you’re paying for. And it gives you conviction to sell when you operate that way. It’s also really great for your customers, right? It’s great for your reputation, it’s great for altruism and service and impact, but it’s also great for your own conviction. And that’s part of the part of what I, I wanted the point I wanted to make. And it, it helps you increase your conversions because you have more confidence.
RV (11:03):
The second thing about funnels that I really wanted to, to share and underscore for you is have realistic expectations. Have realistic expectations. And I thought I really, you know, I I sort of threw this question at Lauren in the interview, which is a tough question to answer. You know, to put someone on the spot to go, Hey, hey, if I, you know, if I did hire you and you did all this, like, what’s the conversion here? And you know, the the, and the number I used, I said, if you have a 10,000 person email list, how many are gonna convert? And you know, I really appreciated the way she did it cuz I, I feel like she did a, a good job, like an honest, an an honest job. But you gotta like understand when, you know, there’s this like dream of like, oh, I’m gonna, I’m gonna sell thousands of courses, or I’m gonna, you know, have a membership with thousands of people.
RV (11:51):
Or, you know, I might have a mastermind with dozens of people painting these top dollars. Those are good dreams. They’re, they’re great business models. We do a lot of ’em, we’ve done a lot of ’em, our clients do ’em, we know them really well. They’re, they’re great things. But what you gotta really understand here is the minuscule total conversion percentage, right? If I have 10,000 people on an email list, if I send that email, first of all, only 20% of the people are gonna open it. So that’s 2000 people, right? If I’m lucky, I would get 5% of those people to click on the email. So that’s 2000. So 10% of 2000 would be 200 people. So, so if I got 5% of those people to click on it, that’s what, what did I say? 2000? Open it. So, so then 10% would be 200.
RV (12:43):
So a hundred people click on it, which means I got a hundred people coming to a registration. Page five. If I have a a 50% conversion on the registration page, that means I have 50 people who opted in for my training. If I have 50 people who opted in for my training, if 50% of them showed up, that’s 25 people who have showed up. And of the 25 people who have showed up, if I I, or shown up, I’m not sure what the proper English is there shown up if, if 25 people have shown up for that training, even if I convert 20% of that audience, so let’s call it 25 people. So 10% would be two and a half, so 20% would be five people. So even if I con convert, quote unquote 20% conversion of that audience, that means I sold five people, but I sold five people out of 10,000, 10,000.
RV (13:38):
Like, like, notice how 10,000 so quickly becomes five. So I just want you to understand like, the reason we’re so passionate about sales in addition to marketing is because we know that if you have conversations with people, you’re probably gonna close like 20 to 30% of people that you talk to when you talk to ’em one-on-one. And there’s like an infinite, you can sell a price point of anything. Like you could sell a hundred thousand dollars, 10,000, 5,000, you know, 2000, like whatever it is because you’re having a, a conversation. So we love to create real life human conversations to people because they accelerate trust. Well, so we’d love, we love digital marketing also, right? We love social media, we love podcasting. I mean, here I am, like pouring our, pouring our heart and soul and a bunch of money into creating all this free content for you, right?
RV (14:25):
So we believe in those things, but you just gotta realize the reality of the minuscule conversion percentage of how fast those audiences dwindle. And it can take a long time to build a 10,000 person email list. I mean, like a legitimate one if they’re real people. So there’s ways to increase that. We talk about, you know, a lot about that stuff, but the real way to increase it is with trust, with adding value, right? Trust must take place before the transaction and then have realistic expectations. And so don’t be hard on yourself. If you launched something right and you had one person buy, or two people buy, or five people like, you might be getting better conversion percentages than the, the biggest personal brands and the biggest online influencers and the biggest information marketers and digital marketers and social media marketers in the world, like percentage wise.
RV (15:14):
So it just, it takes a high volume to convert. And so that’s why so much of what we do is like use the tools to automate trust, right? That’s we, we have a, a, a course called revenue engine or a topic, right? Like in our, in our coaching curriculum that we walk people through, which is building your revenue engine. And the idea is to use these tools of the day to automate trust. And then typically if you’re a small business owner, we say, Hey, request a free call because on a free call, you can then sell ’em something that costs a lot more money and you’ll convert a lot more of those people. Now, long term, that’s not scalable either, because you can only do so many free calls, but you can hire more people and you can do more. So anyways, it’s just have realistic expectations.
RV (15:57):
Is is all I want you to understand, right? So like a lot of people feel like they’re failing and and they’re really not. And again, you know, we teach this stuff and I shared on the interview like some of our highest performing funnels, a five to 8% funnel conversion, meaning if a hundred people signed up for it, like, you know, got to the page and signed up. So that means like maybe 200 people got to the page, right? We would get like eight calls out of that, but then we would, we would probably, we would our team, you know, we typically sell like 30% and that’s because by the time someone’s on the phone with one of our strategists, they already trust us. We’ve already added the rule of 10. They already have so much value. So that’s what you want to create is reputation and trust and add value.
RV (16:40):
And, and by the way, I know that these funnels are a headache for you. And we’re, we’re building, we’re building templates. We’ve been working for years. I’m talking about like multiple years creating something that we’re about to launch that’s called Instant Automation Toolkit, where we’re just gonna give you our funnels and you can just buy ’em. And we, you can have hours, like you can buy them and make them yours. You can rent them for also like very, very cheap. And like you can start using them to build your entire business gi and we’ll give you our exact templates, not like what we do, but like the exact ones and then you just swap out and change ’em. So we’re working on that and that’s, that’s coming. And the last thing I wanna leave you with here on just understanding funnels and online marketing and digital marketing in general, and information marketing, all things we love, all things we do, all things we believe in.
RV (17:32):
But another philosophy we have that’s really important. And, and again, I just wanna encourage you to try this on and consider it for yourself, but this is what we try to aspire to is, and, and we encourage our, our members, our mission-driven messengers, our members inside of our brand builders group community is to realize, and that to realize that the sale isn’t finished when the cash is collected, the sale is finished. When you deliver the result, the sale isn’t finished. When the cash is collected, the sale is finished. When you deliver the result, when you, when you and your team or your product or your service help the customer get the transformation that they wanted originally, like the job isn’t done until then. And anything less than that is just a self-centered way of operating. And so service centeredness, which is what we believe in service centered selling, is about following it through to completion, being driven and focused and, and, and being committed to helping your prospects and your clients and your customers experience a final result.
RV (18:47):
And if you do that, if you have that philosophy, if you have that mindset, if you have that mentality, all I can say is that it works out. Like eventually you will get paid. Eventually your reputation, your reputation grows, eventually people buys. Maybe it’s not the fastest way to put in a dollar in your pocket, but I’m telling you, it’s the fastest way to get rich. It’s the fastest way to build a reputation. It’s the fastest way to get famous. It’s the fastest way to become influential. It’s the fastest way to build relationships with, with people who are doing big things in the world because people trust you and there’s just no dollar you can place on compromising trust, right? There’s just no dollar value you can place on compromising your reputation. So pursue the rule of 10. Remember that trust must take place before the transaction.
RV (19:36):
Be committed to over-delivering and, and remind yourself and build a culture and a community and a, and a team. Or just carry it as a personal philosophy that you’re, that the sale isn’t finished when the cash is collected, the sale is finished when you deliver the result. I hope you’re getting results from listening to this show. I would love it if you would share this episode with someone who you think needs to hear it. Keep coming back. We’re so glad to have you. And it’s our privilege and honor to, to, to be pour into you as much as we can and in hopes that one day you will trust us enough to invest your dollars with us and trust and believe in yourself enough to invest in your dream. And let us coach you up to the next level. But in the meantime, keep coming back, sharing this with your friends, your families, your colleagues, people are important to you. We love you. We’ll catch you next time on the Influential Personal Brand Podcast.
Ep 384: Using Funnels to Drive Revenue Growth with Lauren Cannon
RV (00:02):
So I had a very awesome opportunity for about a year in my career. So when we started Brand Builders Group, one of the clients that we had fairly early on was a gentleman named Glen Stanford. And Glenn, it was the billionaire founder and owner of exp Realty. Well, while we were working with Glen, he actually had opportunity to buy Success Magazine and he bought Success Magazine and asked me to come over and be the interim editor. A lot of people don’t know this, but I was the interim entrepreneurship editor of Success Magazine for like a year, and I really loved it. It was the first time I actually worked inside of like a traditional media company, like on the backend. I had written articles and stuff, but never like sort of seen the backend. So I was there at Success Magazine. While I was there, I got introduced to an amazing woman named Lauren Cannon, who you are about to meet.
RV (00:55):
Lauren has worked at Success Magazine. She worked for a while with Brendan Burchard. She now has her own mar. She, she now has her own marketing agency. And she does a lot in the world of marketing automation and funnels. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today because I really like her and she like me, I think is a fellow nerd, but she doesn’t look like a nerd. She doesn’t act like a nerd, but she is so smart and so brilliant at what she does. I just felt like you needed to have a conversation or listen into a conversation with me and Lauren, her agency’s called Make it Pretty. And so anyways, Lauren, welcome to the show.
LC (01:36):
Hey, thank you so much for having me. I am so excited to be here.
RV (01:40):
So how did you get into the world of marketing automation? Mm-Hmm.
LC (01:52):
I have, yeah. Almost 10 years now. So I started with project management. I just, success had brought me over and we were launching new courses and we were doing events and they needed help organizing it. And at the time, I was the project manager of all things and process engineering. I love figuring out how things work and how to make them work better and more efficiently. And through the course of doing that, I just started learning every single skill there was in marketing everyone’s role to where I developed to be able to do it. And then I started to put myself further and further into marketing positions.
RV (02:33):
Mm-Hmm.
LC (03:10):
Yeah, I would, I would say, you know, specifically, especially with, with the world that, that we’re in, the industry we’re in as you say, the mission driven messengers, it’s a, it’s a vehicle for delivering that mission and that message in the most effective and efficient way. We wanna make sure that someone is spending more time and energy on developing that mission and developing that message and less time and energy on the delivery of it. Mm-Hmm.
RV (03:56):
Yeah. And I, that’s, I love that. And I, I feel like, you know, when I think about it, it’s, it’s going in a tactical sense. You’re driving people to your website or to a landing page, typically you’re offering them some type of value and now, you know, some type of a lead magnet, a free asset mm-hmm.
LC (05:00):
Yeah, absolutely. You know, there are so many people who, like you said, they can funnel hack, they’ll hack a funnel, you know a big launch that just happened in, in the space was Marie for Leo’s Copy Cure. She just opened that up so you can sign up for her lead magnet, get all the emails, see the sales page, and then, you know, ultimately buy or not. But essentially you have the whole email. So now you’ve hacked the funnel, let’s say. But there’s so much more that happens outside of that period of time that Marie has done to develop that sale. And so that’s what really a funnel is. It’s a whole launch system that is year round and your business delivering content in different ways and segmenting your audience in different ways so that you’re delivering value to what that specific person needs.
RV (05:53):
Mm-Hmm.
LC (06:39):
Mm-Hmm.
LC (07:43):
We’ve done quizzes and things like that. So getting these people into your email list is always number one. And then from there, it’s really inviting them into this conversation with you. So not necessarily selling right away, just say, you know, Hey, I’m so glad to connect. Here’s my best content and you wanna deliver, you know, three to five excellent pieces of value content and just get them to keep opening your emails. And you just build these nurture sequence along the way. And then as you have offers that are related to that segment, starting to build in the sales sequences,
RV (08:21):
Uhhuh
LC (09:23):
Yeah. Typically the sequence I would I follow is they enter your email list, they saw you on stage, they enter your email list, the first email they get is a personalized, thank you, I’ve got you here. This is the tool, this is how you’re gonna make the most of this tool. And you know, I’ll be checking in with you tomorrow and see how things are going. And then that second email that is, you know, automatically kicks off in your sequence. It is gonna say, again, following up on the tool, saying, I really hope you’ve seen this and this, and the tool, here’s how, you know, I have this piece, this video that really shows how this tool can effectively make your life better. And then, you know, there might be a Ps I’ve got more coming soon, just kind of teasing that you are going to sell them, but you’re still delivering content.
LC (10:17):
And then that third email is gonna be another piece of value content that you’ve already got written if you’ve got blogs or videos. And it’s also gonna be a bigger teaser that’s like, Hey, you know, if you’re interested, I’ve got this program that I’m gonna tell you more about tomorrow. Stay tuned, keep your eyes on your inbox. And then as you get into email four and five, you can start to build that sale up. And it really depends on what your offer is. If your offer is something in the 20, you know, it’s a low ticket, 27 to 1 29 kind of offer, you can start to build that in around email three and four. If your ticket is something that’s really high in let’s say a thousand dollars to $5,000, you’re probably gonna be doing what we call lead stacking. So you’re gonna have almost another lead magnet that they’re gonna raise their hand for that’s gonna give them a little bit more of a sales sequence in it. So a webinar or something like that. And then you’re gonna put them into that sequence.
RV (11:26):
Got it. Uhhuh,
LC (11:44):
Yeah. It’s a lot of people, you’ll, you’ll throw together a lead magnet. You know, you need to build an email list and you know, you need a lead magnet to do that. You see opted pages and that is the best way to build your email list. But a lot of things that I see where we need to go and fix some funnels is they have the wrong lead magnet for what they offer. So you need to make sure that what lead magnet you’re showing people is going to align with your offer. Because if it doesn’t, it’s gonna create a lot of misaligned connection points in that you may not have a properly segmented audience. So y your lead magnet may attract an audience that can’t afford your offer. And then your lead magnet content has nothing to do with your offer. So some of the things, you know, I see lead magnets as a sliding scale in terms of their perceived value and how it connects to your offer. So if you have a high ticket offer, an ebook is not gonna be the best lead magnet. Cuz going from a free, let’s call it 20 page e-book into a $5,000 program, that’s a really big jump. So you wanna, the more interactive and hands-on you are in your lead magnet, the higher price your offer can be.
RV (13:06):
So what are some examples? So, so I love that. So, so basically the higher the price of the offer, the more valuable the lead magnet needs to be.
LC (13:19):
Yes.
RV (13:19):
Okay. And then when you mention, you say the lead magnets are like a sliding scale of perceived value. So if you have it, if so, if an e-book is on the low end mm-hmm.
LC (13:48):
I would do a live webinar, but for something like that I would do the lead magnet stacky method, where you may have someone, especially if you’re going with cold traffic, you have this six month coaching program and, and they haven’t heard of you yet. They bought into what you have to offer, what your mission is, and they, you need to build that trust and rapport still. So you may start with a quiz or an ebook, something that is on the lower end of the perceived value chain. And through that you’re gonna say, okay, I’ve given you value. I, I know this about you, and so I know that X is gonna help you even more, which would be your main lead magnet and a live webinar. The higher the ticket, I would do a live webinar. If you’re, if you’re looking at something that’s maybe 2,500, you could do an on-demand webinar, but something like 6,000, I would do a live webinar. Because what happens in those situations, one of the best ways to convert someone into something like that is a live transformation. So we have people that we see that go live on Instagram every single day and do free coaching, but what they’re doing is they’re building this, this audience that sees these live transformations happening and they can fill up their mastermind of it or something like that. So the more you can create that live experience, the more people will pay.
RV (15:25):
Interesting. So, and when you say on demand, when you say like, on demand webinar, just to be clear mm-hmm.
LC (16:18):
Yes. Yes, I would. And I would spend that time, you know, you may say it’s a, an hour long, I would spend that time, the first, first bit of time teaching, have it, make sure it’s a, a masterclass on, you know, part of your framework. And then, then you wanna open it up to be able to interact with that audience and provide coaching transformations. And all along the way, once you get to that segment, you’re starting to infuse what you sell and say, you know, in my coaching program we go deeper into this and, and starting to, to build into that message
RV (16:59):
Uhhuh
LC (17:35):
Yes. Mm-hmm.
RV (17:36):
Gotcha. Yeah. Gotcha. How do you use the funnels in the follow up sequence? So like you know, I mean, I guess I would just be curious, like let’s say you did that, let’s say you built all that out and you go, okay, I’m speaking and they’re getting this free thing, and then they’re showing up for a webinar, or they’re here live, they watch this live coaching experience. Like in your experience, do most of the people that are gonna buy buy right on that at that moment when you make the offer? Or is there a follow up that happens afterwards?
LC (18:10):
There’s a follow up that happens afterwards. And I would say from doing, we’ve built so many launches over the years, ed, there’s really this, this sweet spot when it comes to your launch. And even if you’re doing an evergreen, it follows the same type of sequence. It just turns on and off. And so you’re gonna get about 20% of your sales from that webinar. So 20% of the sales you do in your launch are gonna come from the webinar.
LC (00:04):
The rest of your sales are going to come in the last 24 to 48 hours of your launch. And that doesn’t mean that, uh, you can have a two day launch and the rest of your sales come in the next day. We actually have found the best launch timeline is 12 days. And so that creates this ability for you to share more stories and transformations as you lead into that final close down. Uh, and so in those last 48 hours, about 70% of your sales are gonna come in and you’re gonna send probably somewhere between five and six emails. A And so throughout that 12 day period, you’re sending most like an email every single day. But they’re very prescriptive. Uh, you want to tell them what they’re, you wanna focus on a feature that’s in your program, but highlighting it through the benefits language. And you also wanna have emails that act as your faq. But when you ask questions and your email marketing, you’re not answering questions like, how many video modules is this? It’s more of, this is what I have going on in my life. How is this program gonna fit in my schedule? And so you’re, you’re thinking of what are the sales objections someone’s gonna have? And you’re using those as the questions and doing FAQs through that. And then you’re sharing more case studies and stories of testimonials through that 12 day window.
RV (01:40):
Uhhuh
LC (01:49):
Yes.
RV (01:50):
Yes. And then, and you said you send something like six, six emails in the last 48 or out, so usually like two emails on the second to last day and then like four emails on the, on the LA on the last day, the day of,
LC (02:02):
Yes. Yep. Mm-hmm.
RV (02:58):
Ah-huh.
LC (04:10):
Yeah. Yeah.
RV (04:11):
How many
LC (04:12):
Yeah, exactly like that. H
RV (04:13):
How many, uh, I know this is a hard question to, to ask and to be pinned, to be pinned down on, but like if you go through this whole process, right? Because this is like, it’s a lot of work and it’s time and it’s money, um mm-hmm.
LC (05:16):
Yeah. So I would say, and I’m not great at mental math, so you may have to help me here. Okay.
RV (05:21):
I can help you do,
LC (05:22):
I’ll do the percentages
RV (06:40):
Yeah. So, so like 5% basically of, so we, we, we call that term funnel conversion percentage, which is the 500 mm-hmm.
LC (07:21):
Yep. So we’re all natural born procrastinators, uhhuh, I mean, like you say, procrastinate on purpose. So that’s why that those last days, that’s why the, the timeline is the timeline cuz people are going to wait until that very last minute. And even then, and that’s what’s the hardest is co telling people do not stick to your word. Do not open that cart back up when you close the cart. Because I’ve done it myself where I’ve had FOMO on, on a course and I’m like, oh I know I saw the 27 email that I got from this and it was gonna end, but the next morning I was like, I’m ready to buy and it’s gone. You just, you have to stick to it because you’re gonna open it back up and, and that integrity you’re building with that person is going to convert them. Mm-hmm.
RV (08:08):
LC (09:10):
That’s how it works. And you’re doing good. And I mean, that’s a big part cuz it kinda like you said, you’re building a lead magna, you’re building pages, you’re putting people through a webinar, you’re doing, you’re doing so much and people burn out from it. And, and that’s be, you wanna maximize your work and not your effort. And so it’s like you, you have to create all these things, but once you’ve created it once, you can just recycle it. I mean, I can’t tell you with, there are certain funnels out there that they launched twice a year every single year. I’ve gotten the same exact emails in that sales sequence for three years in a row. Hmm. You know, and, and it took me two years before I ended up buying that program. And so it is that like you put in a lot of work and effort to build this funnel, but you can keep it on, tweak it as you go and, you know, everything should start with your program and what you provide, the value you provide and be extracted from that. So if you’ve got a coaching program, take one piece of the framework that you’ve already created and just tweak it a little bit here and there and turn that into your lead magnet. Yeah. Or turn that into your webinar script and then, you know, there’s just so much repurposing and reusing people start from scratch and you should never start from scratch.
RV (10:31):
Mm-hmm.
LC (10:39):
Evergreen and on demand? I would keep the, I usually like to use those as like my mid ticket kind of funnel. Like if you’re gonna have, if you have multiple offers in your offer suite, I like to use those in my mid ticket price and low ticket. Um, evergreen is, I feel like it’s this unicorn people chase and they think that they’ll sustain an entire business on an evergreen model. Uh, but it, it, you, you need those launches infused there to get those like big pickups of revenue. Uh, and then forever Evergreen. I, we’ve, we’ve run them in the past where, uh, and we have one currently running where it’s to a book and then to a minicourse and to, you know, their entire offer sequence. And the, the secret to it is making sure you build and nurture sequences along the way. So when you do that, say you come off of a sale, you wanna make sure you have about four weeks of just value sequences and it’s not an email every day, but you’re, you’re providing value and then you’re leading into the next thing. And that’s how you can kind of turn that evergreen
RV (11:48):
Uhhuh
LC (13:05):
I think one of the most important things to know if you’re thinking about this and you don’t know where to start, is focus on providing as much value as possible in the front end. Do not be afraid to tell people what you do and lift the curtains and, and they wanna buy the how. So people will hold back on how much value they share, but they wanna buy, they wanna buy the how. So always provide that value and then knowing that your product is not your offer. So really focus on how are you helping someone apply and accelerate their results. And that’s gonna be your offer. Once you have a solid offer, then you’re ready to launch.
RV (13:53):
Mm-hmm.
LC (14:39):
Awesome. Thank you Rory.
Ep 381: My 3 Favorite Email Marketing Tips | Nathan Barry Episode Recap
RV (00:08):
Let’s talk about Email Strategy. You know, it’s funny, after all of These Years, email is still kind of the king when it comes to monetizing an audience. And, and I actually Just got off a call With our internal marketing team talking about the irony of how our email list we’re. This is very rare. I Think this is incredibly rare. Our email list
RV (00:33):
Is about twice the size of Our social media following, Like Most people, like almost all of our clients, it’s the Opposite. Where They’re social media following is like, you know, much larger, and then there’s some fraction of those people on their email list. Ours is the opposite. Our email list is, Is Like pretty massive, definitely massive compared to the Size of Our social media following. Most people
RV (00:57):
That have the size of our email list Are probably the people Who would have millions of social media followers. And so
RV (01:03):
Part of why that is, is it’s just where you place your focus, right? It’s like, what do you focus
RV (01:08):
On? And so I’m excited to share With you Three of my favorite email marketing strategies Of just Kind of like how we think about email in terms of the Way that we use it. And these are like my, my three favorite email marketing tips,
RV (01:26):
My three Favorite email marketing strategies. Of course,
RV (01:28):
This was inspired a little bit by my recent interview with Nathan Berry on our, on our recent podcast Episode. And So I just wanted to kind of share with you some of my philosophies and our Philosophies at, At brand Builders group About how we approach this
RV (01:41):
Subject and treats this subject Because frankly, like we do this pretty Good. I mean, I, I didn’t really, I don’t really Think of us necessarily of like, oh, we’ve got the World’s biggest email list, But it, it Did hit me and go,
RV (01:56):
Wow, That’s amazing. Like so many people are focused on growing their social media following and then trying to like convert that to a, to an email list Where The email list is really where the money is, right? Like the, the, that, that’s where The real long-term relationship happens. And that’s where a lot of the Trust takes place is, Is, you know, somebody’s email. So Let’s Dive into my three favorite email marketing strategies.
RV (02:21):
So the first strategy Is actually understanding something that we call the Four Types of email marketing. And this is actually something that we teach formally inside of one of our lessons inside of one of our courses.
RV (02:34):
So Our building your revenue engine course, Which is where we Teach our entire content marketing machine and how we convert it and nurture leads and automate trust.
RV (02:45):
There’s A section, a very specific section on email, and this is one of the things that we talk about. So this is a little bit of a, a preview for you if you Haven’t ever been through that. If you’re not one of our customers, and if you are one of our members, it’s A good refresh for you. So
RV (02:58):
Four types of email. The first type of email is the one that we all think of. These are broadcast emails, okay? So what is a broadcast email? It’s where you take your entire list or something that we would not recommend doing. We would never say, send it to your whole list. Take a segment of your list, you’ll have much more success with that. And you send everybody in that group the same message at the same moment. So whether somebody signed up for your email list today or 10 years ago, they’re all getting the same message at the same moment. And we used, we used broadcast messages to speak about things that are either timely or they’re big announcements. Those are like the two biggest reasons we use those. So timely, meaning it’s something happening in the news cycle, or it is something happening in the like like a holiday or something, right?
RV (03:53):
And we go, Hey, we wanna just like send out love about this, or it’s, it’s a big announcement. So, you know, we’ve done this recently a couple times in recent years where I can remember we’ve sent out big announcements when our clients have had huge wins, right? So we’ve had 13 clients that have hit the New York Times with a Wall Street Journal bestseller list. So whenever that happens, we’ve sent out some pretty big announcements. We’ve had now five clients go viral with TED Talks. I, we, we, we have another one that’s coming up the ranks that also could be taken off. And, you know, we, we celebrate client wins a lot of times and say, you know, cheer on everyone, Hey, check this out. So that’s broadcast email. It’s also used in launches would be another time that you would use that where you’re specifically saying, Hey, everyone show up for this free training or this, you know, webinar, or, Hey, we have a new whatever, a new podcaster, something like that.
RV (04:48):
So you’re, you’re launching something. So that’s broadcast email. The second type of email is something that people often think of, which I’m gonna call it long-term nurture, long-term nurture sequences. So this one is, you know, if you ever heard the term drip marketing or drip emails or funnels or automated emails, that’s kind of like this is going, you’re pre-scheduling out a series of emails where if you sign up today, you’re not gonna see the same, you’re not gonna get the same email today as someone who signed up 10 years ago, but you’re gonna get the same email that that person got on their first day, like hypothetically. So you’re the, and the, the number one way we use this is for long-term nurture, and specifically we use it for, we call it Evergreen magazine or easing, right? That’s kind of where that term easing originated from is to go, we’re gonna take your best of content of like what’s been on your blog post or what, what you’ve posted on your blog, and we’re gonna convert that.
RV (05:58):
We’re gonna turn that in to a greatest hits series. And so, the way this happens, right? If you think about a blog, every time you post something on a blog, whether it’s a podcast feed that you’re posting, like on brand builders group.com is where we post all our podcast episodes, but on rory vaden blog.com is where we post all of my blogs that I do every week. And so both of those, in both of those cases, they both get pushed down. And so some of the best content is from a long time ago, especially if you’re following one of our B B G mantras, one of our BBB G mantras is save the best for first, save the best for first. Always put out your next best piece of content as free content. Because what you, you don’t need to be worried about people consuming everything you have and then not buying from you.
RV (06:43):
You have to be worried about your content not being good enough that no one ever comes back, no one ever shows up again. So you’re always pushing yourself to get better and better and better and push your best stuff forward. So some of our best posts, a great example of this for me is you know I built my keynote speaking career on this story called Be the Buffalo, and it’s about buffalo’s versus cows. And you know, I, I published this intake the stairs in 2012. A lot of people use this, you know, use this. But I’m the original author of this story, and I was, I was telling this 10 years before it even showed up in my book, which was now 10 years ago. And that’s like a very popular story. People love it. And you know, it’s, it’s, it’s like one of my most highly trafficked pages.
RV (07:29):
Well, if you sign up for my email list today, you’re not gonna see that blog post, that blog post was five years ago. So it’s pushed way down. But I know that’s gonna be one of, that’s something that everybody loves. So I’m gonna take it and I’m gonna force it to you, and I’m gonna save the best for first. So just like we save the best for first with our kind of like blog strategy or podcast strategy going, what’s the next best thing I can put out fresh today? We’re also going to convert that into an a long-term nurture sequence of a greatest, basically, it’s your greatest hits. And we’re going, okay, I’m gonna take my my best blog post ever and I’m gonna make sure that everyone signs up, whether they sign up today or that was, you know, they sign up in six months, or they sign up in two years from now, they’re all gonna see this piece of content that I know everybody loves.
RV (08:14):
It performs really well. And I go, great. I wanna push my best stuff forward even to people who are showing up brand new. And so that’s how we use the, the long-term easing strategy. And so a lot of times, or not a lot of times, this is what we do, is we push our greatest hits into this email nurture sequence so that if you sign up for our list today, like you are gonna see all of our best stuff in addition to seeing some of our fresh stuff, which I’ll talk about in a second. Every month you’re gonna get one email, which is the greatest hits, and that’s the frequency that we do that is once a month. The other part that this does is this, make sure I’m talking to my entire email list at least once a month. So, and, and every time they get something from me, it’s, it’s not new content that I’m sort of like testing out and I’m hoping it works and that everybody likes it.
RV (09:04):
It’s like it’s proven, it’s time tested, we know. And so that’s automating trust, which is what we’re trying to do with our email list. We’re trying to automate trust. We’re trying to add so much value that people trust us and they go, you know what? These guys aren’t just trying to make money off me. These guys aren’t just trying to pitch me their next thing. Like, they actually give a crap about helping me succeed and they actually know what they’re talking about and they can help me. And so as I make money, I’m going to invest with them and, and hopefully they’re helping me make money, and then I’m investing, and then they make, help me make more money and then I invest more with them, right? Like, that’s the relationship we want to have with people, is we’re giving them free content to help them make money.
RV (09:42):
Hopefully they’ll make some money, they’ll invest it with us, then we’ll help ’em make more money, they’ll invest it more with us, right? And we’re trying to like, grow, grow with people. So anyways, that, that means that we have an email going out on autopilot so I can sleep at night just knowing my entire email list is gonna get one awesome email from me every month without adding any additional time to my calendar. Zero. So that’s the second type of email. The third type of email is one that you don’t hear very often and people don’t think about. And this kind of boggles my mind, and this is RSS email rss. What the heck does that stand for? RSS is a technical term, it stands for a real simple syndication. What it means in common sense language is every time I post a new article to my blog, automatically send an email to my list.
RV (10:33):
And this is amazing. First of all, it’s automating something for you. So you go, if you’re we have a whole nother process we teach called the content diamond, which you can go, you can go [email protected], I did a whole free training on this, on the content diamond. Well, if you’re doing the hard work of creating a content diamond every single week, then you want to tell people it’s out there. So we create this RSS so that automatically emails you. And, and by the way, if you can sign up for ours, right? If you go to, you can sign up for my [email protected], and we give you other, we give you a free training as an incentive for you to sign up for it. And then you get, you get free training every week, right? So we’re sending you this free video for me once a week, every single week.
RV (11:20):
And they’re like these little five or seven minute videos that I do and their articles, we convert ’em into articles. And so now that’s on autopilot. We also do [email protected] slash podcast because Brand Builders Group doesn’t have a blog, but it has our podcast. And so we post all of our podcasts there every week so people automatically can sign up to be alerted. And so RSS is this technical, you know, piece of code that you put on your website behind this form that people can say, Hey, I wanna automatically get notified every time you post something new and boom. And so this is cool because it’s automated, but unlike the long-term nurture, which is your old stuff of your greatest hits, it’s all your newest stuff, your freshest stuff, your like most hyper-relevant thing that you’re talking about today, and they’re automatically getting that.
RV (12:10):
So that’s also how we sort of balance the, like staying relevant and super current with our email list along with making sure they’re seeing our greatest hits of all time. That’s like the timeless, you know, principles and stuff like that. So that’s the third type of of email and it’s easy, I mean, easy to set up. So we do that, that’s standard protocol in both internally and also what we teach in building your revenue engine, which is where we teach all of this in social media and getting on podcasts and speaking engagements, et cetera. So, and then the fourth type of email, the fourth type of email is short term nurture sequences. This one actually is more commonly associated with the term funnel. So short-term nurture sequences mean that only a targeted set of your email list is going to get a series of pre-written emails that are hyper-relevant to a behavior they’re engaging in now.
RV (13:05):
So again, out of revenue engine one of the lessons we talk about is building funnels and, and how do we, we actually dissect and show people behind the scenes of our actual funnels that we use to run our entire business. And we talk about the different one. You know, we’ve done summit funnels and we’ve got video funnels, and we’ve got webinar funnels, and we’ve got, you know, just a pdf like download free, free download and free call funnels. We have all these different funnels that we use and we show behind the scenes of each one and how we, how we, how we build them, right? So, but if you, if you, let’s say you sign up for one of our webinar funnels what would happen is you sign up for a free training and then it’s going to say, Hey, thanks for signing up.
RV (13:48):
Here’s a link to the free training you requested. And then what it’s gonna do is we use marketing automation to that can tell us, did you ever actually click the link in that email and watch that free training? If you didn’t, it’s gonna automatically send you another email, like 24 hours saying, Hey, by the way, little reminder, thanks for signing up for our free training. Don’t want you to miss out, you know, here it is as promised, you know, when you have a minute, check it out. Boom, right? And then we’ll send a couple reminders to, to watch the free training. Now, as soon as you click that link and you watch the first couple minutes of the training, again, we’re using Mark marketing automation here, which is what we, we teach people do, and we also actually build templates to help you that we actually can do this for you, right?
RV (14:32):
So we’re building all these templates right now to actually do the programming and coding for you. So what would happen is it’s then gonna shut down that, that we call that the the training sequence, or sorry, we call it the the watch sequence, which is, you know, emails that are designed to get you to watch, watch the free training that you signed up for. So let’s say that you watch five minutes of it. Well, as soon as you watch five minutes of it, we’re using marking automation to shut off that sequence that’s reminding you to watch it. Cuz now we know you already started watching it, but then it starts a new sequence, which would be invisible to the untrained eye that says, let’s say you watch seven minutes, but then you abandon the video, it’s gonna start a new sequence called the finish sequence and it’s gonna say, Hey, we noticed you started watching the video, cuz we can tell, but don’t forget to finish because here’s some of the great things that come at the end.
RV (15:24):
And so then we’ll send ’em a few reminders to try to get them to finish watching. And then if they finish watching, but then they don’t like take the action, whatever the action is, we’ll say, Hey, you know, here’s a couple reminders of like whatever the action was that we’re trying to get them to take. And so you’re using these short term you’re using these short term sequences to move them along, and that’s the fourth type of email. So everybody is, everybody in that group is seeing the same emails similar, it’s like, it’s like kind of a, it’s kind of like a cross of all of these because it is a nurture sequence, but you only get put into that nurture sequence in a very specific moment in your journey where you have clicked on a video or requested a free call, or you’ve watched something or downloaded something very, very specific.
RV (16:14):
And so, you know, like one of them again if you go to, if you go to rory vain.com, there’s a free training section and there’s a, you can download our trends and personal branding national research study. So if you download that, that’s a lead magnet. It’s a free lead magnet. It’s incredible. It’s like this 60 page study, this of all this data that we paid tens of thousands of dollars to get, we give it away for free and then it, it starts a nurture sequence. Right? So everybody who, the only people who ever see that are the people who downloaded that specific thing. So it’s amazing. So anyways, those are the four types of email. I know that’s a lot, but, and that’s, that’s, you know, advanced, but that’s the kind of stuff we’re teaching and that’s like super, it’s advanced, but it’s simple, right?
RV (16:57):
But you go, you gotta build out all these different types. So it’s not just, you can’t just think of, oh, I send emails and that, or I send an email once a week. It’s all of these, it’s at least four major types of email that make up your overall email strategy. So you gotta like understand what’s the mix of these, and also the technology and also the timing of how they intersect, right? So that’s one of the templates that we provide to people is the actual marketing automation campaign that goes, Hey, make sure you’re not emailing people too much. And, you know, give them a chance to opt in and outta stuff and, and, you know, make sure they’re not getting, you know, a bunch of emails all at the same time. Which leads to number two, okay? So this is the number two thing that I wanted to talk to you about.
RV (17:40):
So my second favorite email strategy, which is really important is control the email opt-outs yourself, not the platform. So what do I mean by this? It means that every email marketing tool doesn’t matter which one you use, right? And, and we use all of ’em with clients and we like all of ’em, like we’re kind of like, you know, there’s certain ones we like more than others and whatever, but, but to us, the strategy is what matters more than the technology. The strategy matters more than the technology. And for example, all of the email marketing tools have an opt-out function. They have to, by law, this, this law is called gdpr, right? GDPR compliant. There’s, there’s all of this, this compliance now with how emails needs to be sent and permission-based marketing and all this sort of stuff. So they have to, when an email goes out, there has to be an option to unsubscribe.
RV (18:32):
Well, if you send an email to your list, let’s say you send a broadcast email, and let’s say you send it to 10,000 people on your list every time you send a broadcast email, by the way, people unsubscribe every single time. They always do. So don’t be offended or upset by that. And that’s not a bad thing, it’s not a bad thing when people unsubscribe, it’s a good thing. You only wanna be emailing people who wanna hear from you. But if people just hit that unsubscribe button, it starts to affect sort of like your ranking with the email service providers. And so what we like to do is, is we like to just, we give an opt-out function. But what the, the, the, the, we make a, we actually make a more noticeable link for people to opt out somewhere above the default one that is built in and tied into the tool where we say, if you don’t wanna hear from us anymore, click here.
RV (19:24):
But we also con control the languaging, which a lot of times you can’t with the default setting or not as much. And we’ll, so we’ll say something like this, if you say, Hey, if you want to hear from us less often or more often, click here to control your preferences or unsubscribe altogether, something like that. And then they click on it and then it takes them to a, a form where they can now manage. And we usually give them like four options in our standard suite it. And, and option number one says, you know, I’m a super fan, email me every time you have something new for me. And when they select that, it’s gonna apply all the appropriate, appropriate tags for them to get the broadcast emails, which we send once in a while, the evergreen monthly easing, which is on autopilot once a month, and the r s s feed.
RV (20:10):
So that means they’re gonna get at least one r s s feed every week and one email once a month. So that’s five. And then broadcast emails whenever we send them, which might be once every other month or something like that. So they could get maybe six emails in a month plus any other short-term nurture sequences that they are in. If they get into one of our, you know, free trainings or something like that, then the, the next button down would say something like this. They would say it would say something like I only wanna hear from you once a week. So we go, okay, no problem. We’re going to remove them out of our Evergreen magazine and we’re just gonna add them to the rss. So they’re just gonna get the most recent stuff once a week. And it’s like, download our most recent podcast, watch our most recent video or, or read our most recent blog posts, which are all kind of the same thing.
RV (20:58):
If you’re running the content diamond in and it’s just gonna push ’em to our blog feed and you go, great, once a week, the next person says, ah, I really only want to hear from you once a month. Okay? So that’s option number three, just once a month. So now they’re going to only get our oh, and by, and by the way, on that second one I wanna hear from you once a week we would say RSS plus broadcast, which we send once in a while. And if they say, oh, I really wanna hear from you once a month, we go, okay, great, once a month, let’s unsubscribe you from our RSS feed so you’re not hearing from us every week, that’s too much for you. And we go, but you do wanna hear from us? So we go, great, let’s, let’s put you on the evergreen nurture.
RV (21:33):
Now you’re hearing from us once a month but we are, we’re also gonna keep you on our broadcast e e email, not not, yeah. So our long-term nurture, which is our, our monthly easing and the broadcast e email, which sends, you know, sporadically once in a while. So those are the top three. And then the fourth one will say, ah, you know, it’ll say something like this I only wanna hear from you once in a while, you know, once in a great while or whenever you have something big to share. And so we go, great, unsubscribe ’em from rss, unsubscribe them from long-term nurture, easing, unsubscribe them from oh, but keep them subscribe to the broadcast tool, right? So we’ll keep them on the, the broadcast tag. And then the last one would say, I never wanna hear from you ever again.
RV (22:18):
Please stop emailing. So I guess there would be five options counting that, right? So boom, boom, boom, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So now what’s happening is, first of all, we’re controlling their preference because a lot of times people don’t wanna unsubscribe completely. It just might be like, they’re like, bro, you’re overwhelming me, ro like, it’d be like, Rory, I love you, but dude, I don’t wanna hear from you twice a week. Like, that’s too much Rory in my life, which I can, I can appreciate. Well, I’m not offended by that, right? Some people are like, gimme all the Rory, you can give me like I need, I need, I want motivation, I need inspiration as much as I can get it every day I am like, yeah, you know, great my people, but it’s whatever your threshold is, right? And you have some people like to hear from you for different things or it’s just, what do they have going on in their life?
RV (23:02):
What do they have capacity for? They re they might be in a season of like, man, I’m not trying to gum up my whole inbox. And you know, you just, a lot of it doesn’t have to do with you, it has to do with them. And they’re just going, I wanna be able to read what you send me and maybe I don’t have the time, or your topic isn’t so hyper relevant at this moment that I’m gonna make time to read everything you’re sending me and now you’re annoying me and so I’m just gonna unsubscribe, right? So you’re, you’re wanting to give them a chance to sort of choose their own adventure here. And that’s what we’re, and that’s what we’re doing. So control the opt outs yourself, l and and then the other thing is if they hit never talk to me ever again, we add an unsubscribed tag that anytime we send an email to, we filter against that tag.
RV (23:42):
So we literally opt them out and we will never, we will never send to them again. But it’s not hurting our rankings with our email service provider. And so that’s part of why we do that. And you know, anyways, so that’s that. And then the, my third favorite email tip is super short. It’s super clean, it’s simple, but if you’re not doing this, make sure you’re doing this every single time you send a broadcast email, which is send to the unopens, send to the un unopens. So what does that mean? Well, okay, we’re talking about broadcast email, remember, with four types of email broadcast, long-term nurture, RSS and short-term. So we’re talking about the first type here, which is broadcast email. By the way, I hope you’re not listening to this on two x speed, cuz if you are, this is going really, really fast,
RV (24:25):
So anyways, when you send a broadcast email, which is to a wide swath of your list all at the same time, boom, everyone gets a launch email or a a, a timely email or something like that. One of the ways to like literally double your opens is you send it to all these people, however many it is, a whole bunch of the people aren’t gonna open like some, usually something like 80%. So if you send an email to 10,000 people, okay, typically like 20% are gonna open and 3% are gonna click through roughly, right? Something like that. So that means if I send it to 10,000 people, 8,000 of ’em aren’t even opening the email, right? So 20% are opening the email and then 17% are opening it, but not clicking Well for that 20%, you know, they saw your email. So we go, let’s not annoy them, right?
RV (25:19):
They, they, they already have it. We know they’ve seen it, but most of the good email service providers will tell you this, 80% or these 8,000 people never even opened your me email. So what does that mean? That means it’s like they never got the email, they never even saw it. So you’re not ano you’re not annoying anybody to send an email to people who never opened it the first time because for them it doesn’t e it’s, it’s not like, Hey, you’re bugging me, you keep sending me the same email. They’re going, no, they, they never saw it, right? Like, you sent the email, they never saw it, they never opened it, they don’t even know that you sent an email. So you send just to the unopened. So you would just send to that segmented list, you could send the exact same message. We, we do, we we literally go send, send a broadcast three days later, take everyone who has not opened the email and send it again.
RV (26:11):
Because if they haven’t opened it within the first three days, they probably not gonna open it, right? So we send it to 8,000 people, the exact same email, and guess what the number of opens in total, it’s gonna be like 20% of 8,000. And, and sometimes it’s higher, sometimes you get a higher percentage on, you often get a higher open rate percentage on a smaller list. That’s almost always true. So you might get another 2000 opens off of your send to 8,000. Well, the net effect there is instead of 2000 opens from your email of 10,000, you got those 2000 plus you got another 2000 from your email to 8,000. And you could actually keep doing this saying, okay, well now there’s, you know, roughly 6,000 people who didn’t open that email I could send to them. So you could keep doing it. We usually just do it twice.
RV (26:57):
Sometimes we’ll do it three times, but if they’ve never opened the email, they, they never saw it. Like, you’re not annoying anybody. So at least do it once. Always, always with broadcast emails and it’s so simple, right? Then these are things where you just go, man, of course like that makes so much sense, but you don’t know until you know, right? And you know, if you don’t have a strategist like us, you know, our team walking you through it, you just literally leaving money on the table, that one thing could literally double the income of your entire next launch or promotion or thing by such a simple tactic, right? Imagine adding up all of those tactics over and over and over again and y’all, this is, this is what we do. So at any point if you want to talk to our team, I would encourage you to do it like we have so much to share and teach you.
RV (27:46):
And so you just go to free brand call.com/podcast to request that call. If you’re not ready to do that yet, I would encourage you, as I said, go to brand builders group.com/podcast and subscribe there and or go to rory vaden blog.com and you could subscribe there and we’ll send you lots of free stuff so that you can be growing your business and building your income and, and increasing your mindset and your motivation and your productivity and all the things that we teach and talk about to help you make more impact in the world. And then hopefully you start making some money from that and you go, all right, I’m ready to level up. So when you’re ready to level up, request a free call free brand call.com/podcast. In the meantime, share this episode with someone who you think would l benefit from it and listening to it. And just thanks for being here, right? We’re, we’re, we’re trying to add more and more value to your life constantly, whether you’re paying us or you’re not, our whole goal is to just add value to everybody as much as we can. And the fact that you’re listening gives us the opportunity to do that. So we appreciate you being here. We’ll catch you next time on the Influential Personal Brand podcast.
Ep 380: Advanced Email Marketing Strategies with Nathan Barry
RV (00:02):
I have to say that one of the most powerful forces in the world, I think is marketing automation. And we hear about social media and we hear about podcasting and we hear about YouTube and all stuff. But man, the thing that has changed my life in terms of the digital landscape the most in the last 10 years is email marketing, marketing automation in general, and specifically email. And we’re gonna talk about that today with someone who is definitely an expert on the subject. We’re talking to Nathan Barry. He is actually the founder of Convert Kit, which is one of the largest and most well-known and respected tools among creators for email marketing. And so we’re gonna talk a little bit about that. Just so you know, he’s also an author himself and Convert Kit, you know, as an entrepreneur is a tremendously impressive success story.
RV (00:54):
So they’ve got over 25 million a year in annual recurring revenue, over 3 million in profits. They’ve got almost 60 team members. And they bootstrapped the company 100%. So this was not where you had millions of dollars of investor money, like from Silicon Valley flooding in. They built this for creators and Nathan was a successful blogger before and just kind of created this himself. So he’s also the dad of three boys, which I can appreciate. I’ve got two, so anyone who’s got more than me, I’m like, man, I don’t know how you do it. But brother, you’ve done a bunch of awesome stuff and thanks for making time for us.
NB (01:31):
Yeah, thanks for having me on the show.
RV (01:33):
So I’d love to just hear the story of Convert Kit, like your personal journey. Cuz cuz you started as a blogger, right? And then all of a sudden you kind of were like, saw the need for this and then how, I mean, how to, how to go down.
NB (01:44):
Yeah, so my like traditional skillset is software design. I got started web design and then started building software for the web. And then when the iPad came out in 2010 I was working on a team that was trying to have an iPad app out the day the iPad was released, which was a fun challenge of like designing and trying to test an app, like all in the simulator. Like, you don’t act, the device doesn’t exist yet. And it was fun like going to the Apple store and like buying a dozen iPads, you know, like on launch day and testing our software and all of that. So that was a, a fun world. And I got pretty deep into, you know, iPhone and iPad app design. And then from there I had this idea that if I wrote a book about designing iOS apps, then people would wanna hire me to be the one to design their app.
NB (02:34):
And I, I thought I’ll make money from this book too. Like, this isn’t a charity, but the main thing that I want is design clients. Sure. Right? You wanna hire the guy who wrote the book, obviously. Of course. And so what I did, I built up a small pre-launch email list on MailChimp, got to 800 subscribers you know, teased that, wrote the book, self-published it. And my goal was to make $10,000 over the lifetime of sales for the book and see how many clients I could get. I ended up launching it and I made $12,000 on the first day and never took on another design client. Like, just like, nope, that world is, I’m not a freelancer anymore, I’m a content creator and this is what we’re doing going forward,
NB (03:25):
It’s not around anymore, but there’s other apps that do similar stuff. It was just for building a streak. And I had this streak of writing a thousand words a day. And so after I published the book, my app popped up and said, Hey, you’re gonna write a thousand words today. And I was like no, I’ve, I’ve published the book, but it was like I saw 80 days in a row and I didn’t wanna break the streak. So I was like, you know what, I’ll write a, a blog post about the book launch. So I did that, shared the numbers. And then the next day the app did what it did and popped up was like, are you gonna write a thousand words today? And I was like, no, I don’t have anything to write. And it was 81 days in a row I was thinking like, ah, you know what?
NB (04:03):
I’m gonna write another book. And so I wrote another book on designing web applications. So similar topic, different medium, and wrote like edited and published that in like just over 90 days. So it was self-published, also self-published as well. Okay. Made 26 grand in sales on the first day from that. And I was off to the races, but in that process I really got obsessed with email marketing and I was seeing that all of the sales were coming from the email list, you know, and that was where like giving away a sample chapter, getting people the email list and then dripping out emails and then them coming back and buying the book. All these things were working super well and it was driving more sales than like Twitter and Instagram and everything else combined. And I told this to a friend of mine who’d been in online marketing for long time, what year is this?
NB (04:53):
2013. Okay. Yeah. So talking to this friend who’s been in online marketing forever, I’m like, Hey, email is driving more sales than every other channel combined. And he just looks at me and is like, yeah man, we’ve all known that since 2005. Like, do you want a gold star? Like
RV (06:04):
That’s really awesome, man. So congratulations. Like that’s no e that’s no easy feat. I mean to do, to do, you know, eight figures in 20 million plus in, in re recurring revenue is really, really powerful. So I wanna talk about email marketing strategies specifically. Especially, you know, in today’s era, email marketing has been out a long time. Yes. Email marketing automation has been out a long time. You have something that you talk about just sort of like a general strategy you were telling me about it fly, you call it flywheel for clients.
NB (06:44):
Flywheels.
RV (06:45):
Yeah. So I, I’d love to hear about this cuz cuz here’s, here’s one of the things that, you know, sort of like annoying and frustrating to me is even in just the world of email, one of the things that we teach our students is there’s, we think of emails like there’s, there’s four type four different types of emails. So there’s like, you send a broadcast email, everyone at the same time gets it. That’s what we think of. But then we have r s s emails, which are, every time a blog gets posted, that’s gonna automatically send an email. And then we have like these short-term nurture sequences where you’re someone’s in like an active selling situation and you’re like nurturing them to watch a video or, you know, buy something, there’s a closed card or something. And then you just have like your long-term automated nurture sequence. And suddenly what happens a lot is you end up going, you’re emailing people so much and, and you, you can even lose sight of track of like, oh my gosh, how are they, they’re in all these different sequences getting, so how do you kind of like pull all that together into a, like a, a more cohesive strategy?
NB (07:51):
Yeah. Well the first thing is that a lot of people end up in a position like I did where they realize how powerful email marketing is and then become obsessed and they go like way off the deep end and it’s so fun and it probably generates a lot of money for your, for your business. And then you get to that point where you’re like, oh, now all these cool automations that have set up are starting to step on each other. Like, it, it’s maybe the person that I hired on my team moved on and I now have a new person. And it’s way too hard for them to understand and like, it’s not documented well. And so I think keeping things relatively simple is a good way to go. Like one example that I really like is doing something called an Evergreen newsletter.
NB (08:34):
And this is where instead of sending, well let’s say half your content that you send out is really timely, you know, hey, I’m going on book tour podcast episode’s coming out. Or you wanna like respond and comment to recent news that just happened or, or ride some wave of some conversation in like mass media. Maybe we send that email as a broadcast every Tuesday. But then there’s also, like, you and I have been writing for a very long time. We’ve produced, you know, hundreds of thousands, you know, may maybe millions of words at this point of content. And like if someone signs up today and they’re getting, Hey, this is what I write every Tuesday, like, there’s this crazy back catalog that they’re never encountering. And so one thing that I like to do is set up an evergreen newsletter sequence, and I might send that out every Thursday.
NB (09:24):
And that is actually a sequence time to when you join and it’s like, Hey, here’s my best content over time. They don’t really know that one is the same email to everyone at the same time. And the other is like timed just to them. They’re just like, I don’t know, Nathan kept like, every Tuesday and Thursday he sends me great content. And so I could have an Evergreen newsletter sequence that’s 50 emails, a hundred, you know, 104 emails long, and I got two two years of content and that’s just working for me. And I go, oh, this is a great article that I’m really proud of. I’m gonna put that like in week five instead of week 100 where it would naturally sit. And so you end up making these systems that work for you. So that’s the first thing that I would do is really love it, really simplify that.
NB (10:10):
Another one, maybe if we talk about Flywheel for a second oh, when was this? Back in 2008, I got the opportunity to do like some public works projects in Lisutu, which is a little landlocked country inside of South Africa. And one of the things that we ended up doing was working on installing this well at an orphanage there. And so if you think about like, as a kid, I went camping and you know, there’d be like this hand pump to like pump the water at the campsite. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so that’s a, this like up and down motion and if you stop doing it, the water stops flowing immediately. And that’s the old, well at this orphanage had a pump like that and we actually replaced it with a flywheel, which was my first exposure to a flywheel. And so what that is, is this big metal wheel that sits on top of the well and it’s super heavy and it turns in place.
NB (11:05):
And like I remember when we got it all hooked up and we were like, okay, let’s get this going. And I tried to turn it and it was too heavy, I couldn’t turn it by myself. And so like another friend was on the other side and we’re pushing it as hard as we can and we got it turning and as it got momentum, it got, it turned easier and easier and faster and faster. And what it, it got to the point is that like my friend stopped helping and I could stand there and with like, you know, one finger keep this thing spinning and it’s just pumping out tons of water for this whole orphanage. And that’s the idea of a flywheel is having something that’s not a bunch of separate activities. Like it’s all the activities put together into one flow and like you get to continue that momentum and we can apply this concept to newsletters and to creators really well.
NB (11:50):
So there’s kind of three rules of a flywheel. Okay? The, the first one is that each, all these activities have to flow nicely one into the next. Okay? So if we apply that to marketing, you might think, okay, when I publish a an article, I’m like, okay, you know, how do I, we’re we’re, where am I gonna promote this new essay or, or this new article? And you might sporadically promote it a few places. But it’s really different if you say, okay, this is my playbook every time. This is what I do every time I publish an article and here’s maybe where I ask for ideas to give me concepts on what to write next. Right? It’s like, it’s a defined process that that happens smoothly. The second rule is that each rotation of the flywheel should be slightly easier than the previous one.
NB (12:42):
Okay? Right. So as you’re building that momentum, it gets easier. So here’s an example. Most people have an a newsletter where they’re sending out weekly content because what happens? You have to write that content. I know that’s not brutal, that’s not easy. And so a a little tweak is you go from the content that you’re writing, you know, your weekly newsletter like new subscribers are coming in and in that automated welcome sequence that you’re writing, let’s say email three, email four, you have a question, there’s a, Hey, what’s your let’s say we have a marketing, you know, we’re teaching people marketing. I ask, Hey, what’s your biggest frustration with marketing in your business right now? And by asking that question, everyone’s replying to you. Like, hit reply and let me know people are replying. We categorize those replies in a label in Gmail and now every Monday at 8:00 PM when I’m like, shoot, I don’t have a email ready to go for Tuesday yet, what am I gonna write about?
NB (13:37):
I go into that label in Gmail and I go, what are, what are people frustrated with? What are they not understanding? And I pick one out that seems interesting and I write a response to that and then I change it a little bit. So it’s for everyone. And then there we go. And so now in this flywheel, like I just made each rotation easier cuz now my new subscribers are feeding me content ideas. And that made that rotation easier. Mm-Hmm.
RV (14:08):
Totally. Yeah, no, I, I love that. I mean, and the, the whole thing of like, you know, having to write a newsletter once a month or once a week, I mean it really, the, the problem is, it’s like inconsistency is the kiss of death and Right. The one thing marketing automation can do is like, solve that problem permanently. How, like, I want to hear number three, but I’m, I’m, I’m curious how many emails a week is too many? Like the, is like, you’re talking about kind of a cadence here, which is you’ve got your one long-term nurture going and then you have like one broadcast a week. Is that the actual cadence that you sort of follow as like two a week and, and you know, both what have you seen for yourself, but then also when you look at your, you know, your top clients, are they sending more frequently? Are they doing more broadcast? Are they doing more evergreen? Do you know, do they have multiple things happening? Like I’m just sort of curious like in the modern day, what’s the, what’s too much volume or what’s the right, what really what’s the right amount of volume?
NB (15:12):
Yeah, I think the right amount of volume first it comes down to expectations that you set with your audience. Uhhuh. So when, if you sign up for Seth Godin’s newsletter or I think it’s actually just a blog, I don’t know, that’s a newsletter, right? Just RSS to email. He, he posts every day always has, always will like clockwork. You know what, some, some of his posts are like four sentences long. Some of them, you know, might be a couple hundred words. They’re not super long, but you expect that every single day you’re gonna get a note from Seth and you knew that when signing up. And so he’s matching expectations. So is seven days a week or five days a week, whatever, he does too much. No. Cuz he set that expectation and it’s bite-sized enough that you can consume it. I think you need, when you think about cadence, you need to make sure you can maintain two bars. One, can you always match this ca cadence that you set? You’re like, Hey, a daily email, but I miss half of them because I’m busy. Or like, the kids got sick or whatever else. Like, no, don’t do that. So if you, if you hit a, a email once a week every single week like clockwork and you can get ahead, perfect, that’s a great cadence for you. And then the other thing is what cadence can you maintain quality?
RV (16:26):
Ah,
NB (16:26):
Like if you can’t write great content once a week, you know it’s a lot better than that is great content once a month, right? Pick a cadence that you can always hit and say, I will always be able to meet the expectations I set for my audience and I will always be able to put out content that I’m proud of. And some people do it every day. I personally like twice a week of the ev the balance of the Evergreen and the live, cuz I want both formats. And so I do an evergreen email on Fridays and a live email on Tuesdays and that I know I can hit and hit every single week and hit my bar for quality. Yeah. Some, sometimes it’s hard. We are like,
RV (17:08):
I love that I’ve, I mean I’ve heard, you know, I’ve heard the like consistency one, but that’s a really good about the quality metric and and that’s, I I’ve, it’s funny cuz I feel that way about books. It’s actually been several years now since I’ve had a book come out. I’ve written three, but it’s been, you know, we sold our co the last book I wrote was 2015. We sold our company in 2018. And so then it’s like, we basically been rebuilding for five years and you know, people are like, when are you gonna write a book? And I’ve always, you know, I’ve, I’ve had mentors tell me, you only need to write one book and you spend the rest of your career talking about it. And I, I really believe you can do that if you, if you do it right. I’ve had other people say, you need to write a book every two years, otherwise you’ll become irrelevant.
RV (17:50):
And I also can see the case for that. And so I think where I’ve landed is just, I’ll write a book when I have something significant to say. Yeah. And you know, to what you’re saying, it’s like, do the same thing with your email cuz I guess it’s, you know, I guess the big problem is going whether it’s once a week or once a month, the big issue is not that they’re not hearing from you frequently enough, the big issue is that they stop listening to you. Right. Because either the, the, the rhythm is inconsistent or the quality is, is inconsistent. That’s
NB (18:20):
Good. Yeah. They either forgot about you or they decided that you’re not worth listening to.
RV (18:24):
Yeah. I want to ask you about that too, in terms of how do you warm up a cold list? Because that’s a lot. Like, we have a lot of clients who will come to us and they’re like, eh, you know, I have an email list, but I haven’t sent anything to them in like a year. And especially, you know, a as, as a, you know, an email service provider. There’s a lot of rules there too, I think that you guys have to manage on a global level of her deliverability and all that. So like, but like what do you do? You go, these people opted in, like they wanted to hear from me, I was writing to them for a time, but like, I haven’t written to them in a minute. I mean, what would, what’s the, what’s, what’s the right way to to, you know, follow the rules and warm it up and like make use of it? Do you just scrap it and start over or like, what do you say?
NB (19:10):
Yeah, so what you do, one, don’t scrap the list and start over unless it’s been like a decade. It’s
RV (19:15):
Been a decade. We’re not gonna do that. Even if you tell us to anyways, we’re still
NB (19:20):
We’re gonna try to resurrect it somehow. Yeah. So the first thing is to, to try to look at what do you know about these people is there’s some cohort, let’s say we’ve got a list of 10,000 people, right? Is there some group that you think for one reason or another is more engaged than others, right? Maybe they bought a course from you, maybe something else. So if you email all 10,000 people at once, a bunch of people are gonna be like, make the news Nathan, I don’t remember him at all. Right? And they’re going to Marcus spam or whatever or not engaged. And the inbox providers, so like Gmail, Yahoo, et cetera, are gonna see that and be like, Ooh, this did not go well. And then my reputation, my domain reputation that I have is gonna go down, right? My Nathan barry.com domain will not be as respected by the inbox providers because of that and I’ll have a harder time reaching the inbox. So what we wanna do instead is warm this up. And so I’m gonna look and say, okay, instead of sending all 10,000 at once, I’m gonna start to build this reputation so that I’m not showing up, you know, with to, with 10,000 people at the party all at once. And the host is like, ah, I don’t want this. You know, so instead what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna say, okay, 500 of of these people bought a course from me.
RV (20:35):
Yeah. You know,
NB (20:36):
I’m gonna email them first and am I, am I right one, hey, I’m back email. Now you can expect a once a week or email from me. Here’s what’s going on, here’s what’s next. It might be the same email, but I’m gonna send it to only 500 people first and the the 500 that I think are the most engaged based on how that goes. Then I’m going to take a slightly less engaged group that I might sylvan, maybe they showed up to a meetup once. Like all of these things that I think there’s a bit more of a connection with. And I’m gonna gradually expand that circle and then people who don’t engage or I’m gonna say, say something in there and say like, Hey, if you don’t want to be on this list, like click here to unsubscribe and I’m gonna put that right at the top of the email.
NB (21:21):
I’m gonna make it really easy for someone to hit unsubscribe rather than spam. I do not want someone marking this is spam. That would be very bad. And so then really what we’re doing is watching that engagement. If people don’t engage, I’m gonna delete them off of the list cuz I want, I wanna take that 10,000 who may not have heard from me for a couple of years and I want to trim it down to whatever number of people that’s really engaged and wants to be there. Let’s say five to 7,000. And I’m gonna do it gradually and warm up that reputation. There’s other things that like get more advanced that our like deliverability team at convert it can help with, which is like making sure that your domain is authenticated correctly. And and we can put together a whole warmup plan or this, but that’s the basic concept is reach out to the most engaged people first and then gradually layer in people who are a little less known.
RV (22:13):
Yeah. Yeah. I love it. So you kind of just like start with the warm circle, work your way out mm-hmm.
RV (23:00):
Like it doesn’t actually work it and it has a lot of negative, negative impacts. This is kind of like what I hear you, what I hear you saying. So I have another question. I do want to, I want to hear number, I want to hear your number three of your flywheel or your three rules of the flywheel. But here’s another thing is when it comes to creating conversions, okay, so we’ve been, you’ve been talking like what’s your long-term nurture strategy, but let’s say you’re in a launch of some type, like a book launch or a course or a product or you know, or if you’re just making a fourth quarter push, we have a lot of professional service providers that work with us too. You know, they’re doctors and lawyers and chiropractors, whatever. And they’re just trying to drive leads into whatever their small business is.
RV (23:43):
So what about when you’re, when you’re trying to do like a quote unquote close cart situation? Yeah. Does, does, what do you know about effective email strategies there? Does the volume increase? Does it change? Like is there anything that you know about this? If you, if you’re trying to use email to actually sell, like not just build trust and add value, but like in the moments where you’re going, I need people to buy, like this is my moment where I pay my expenses for the year. How do we treat email differently in those seasons versus just the normal?
NB (24:22):
Yeah, you, you send more emails that, that’s the quick version of it. So let’s say we’re doing a a cart close right? Course launch any, any activity and we’re saying, Hey Friday at 10:00 PM like, that’s it, you can’t buy this anymore. A lot of people, you know, Friday at noon would send the last email, right? Or they’d be like, I don’t know, I told them on Wednesday it’s gonna close on Friday. So I probably like, they knew that, so I probably shouldn’t send another email like, no, no, you should definitely send an email. Probably the three things that I would do is I would send an email Friday morning saying today’s the last day and I might even kick in some bonus that I’m gonna give to everybody who bought. But I’m like, Hey, if you bought today, I’m a, maybe I wasn’t talking about it all the way along, but I’ll do this extra little thing to, to kick it over. And just make sure to give it to everyone else that way someone who’s like, Hey, I bought like day one. Yeah.
RV (25:17):
Early words got screwed.
NB (25:18):
Yeah, you don’t want that. Oh, another thing that helps in, in any kind of launch is being able to have multiple deadlines. So let’s say it’s a five day launch, I don’t know, opens on Monday, closes on Friday, you want something that goes away Monday end of the day, right? So that you can do a cart close on Monday, the, it’s still open, but like this extra bonus went away and then, so you’ll get this spike. Or maybe you do, actually I’d probably do that on Tuesday. Now I think about it because Monday gets you all this hype. Everyone who’s excited Tuesday you get this, Hey, this bonus is going away, so let’s let’s you email twice that day cuz you’re like, hey, the bonus goes away. And then that in the morning and then that evening you’re like, this is about to you know, you’re about to lose this back in sales.
NB (26:12):
Find some good educational re reasons to email on Wednesday and Thursday and then Friday morning as like, hey, we’re we’re closing tonight. Here’s some testimonials, here’s things that people have gotten. And then I, I would send an email like the last hour, you know, this is the, you have one hour left to buy it. And then the final thing, cuz you’ll see a bunch of sales happen then, especially from the people who are like, oh yeah, I’ve been watching this, but like every time I’ve gotten an email I’ve been doing something with the kids or you know, whatever Austin, you’re like, okay shoot, I actually have 52 minutes left to do this, you know, and throw a countdown timer in the email. That’s the feature that’s built in to convert it makes it really easy.
RV (26:52):
Well that’s really cool to not have, you don’t have to like put a little third party widget or something in there. You drop a native. That’s cool.
NB (26:58):
And then the last thing that I would do is on Saturday in our fictional example, I would do a down sell where I would say basically send the people who are interested in the launch but didn’t buy. So make that custom segment and then send them an email and like offer something different. Maybe it’s if you’ve had all of this stuff for one package in your, in your course, maybe you’ve trimmed it down to a lighter version and you’re selling that and say, Hey, if that wasn’t a good fit, maybe check out this other thing and it’s to a smaller group and you’ll drive another maybe 10% of sales off of that. You could also do an email and just say like, Hey I noticed you really engaged but you didn’t end up buying. Could you let me know what the reason was?
NB (27:47):
And a bunch of people will come back and be like, oh, it’s too expensive. I didn’t see the value. Like there’s some really good customer research that happens in there and, and you could even have like your assistant go through and be like, oh, well if it’s too expensive, here’s this option. Or if you didn’t see the value, here’s some of their case studies and you know, someone would be like, oh, well that’s, that’s sales, that’s not scalable. And it’s like, okay, but if I, if it takes me another five minutes to send a custom email to make a $300 sale, like yeah, that’s pretty scalable to have a team member
RV (28:15):
That. Especially if you can copy and paste that email 25 times and like pick up, you know, pick up more sales. So, so basically in that, in that theoretical example, you have something you’ve probably been adding value the week before. Yep. And then when you
NB (28:30):
Actually, and you have to build up to the launch, like yeah, it’s so important.
RV (28:33):
Okay. And then when, when, when you open the cart, you have like one email on Monday.
NB (28:43):
I I would, I’m, a lot of people will send more emails. But yeah, I’m gonna end up sending eight emails in five days basically. It’s kind of the cadence.
RV (28:53):
Yeah. So you got basically one on Monday, you got two on Tuesday with like that Oh, the early, basically the early bird bonus. Yeah. And then one on Thursday, one on, or one on Wednesday, one on Thursday. So that’s five and then three on Friday. That’s like eight.
NB (29:07):
Yeah, two or three on Friday and then definitely one on Saturday. One on
RV (29:10):
Saturday. Mm-Hmm.
NB (29:13):
You’ll get unsubscribes. Another quick little tip is this is another thing that converts good at is putting a little link in there and j just saying like, Hey, we’re gonna, we’re, we are talking about this product all week long. If you don’t want to hear about it, but you don’t want to unsubscribe, click this and won’t, I won’t send you another email this week and like next week we’re back to our regular scheduled programming and it’ll just pause that for them. Cuz someone will be be like, look man, I’m not gonna buy it, you know, for whatever reason, but I love your content every week and you just don’t want that person to get annoyed. And so right at the beginning and actually the week before, you could say, Hey, we’re we’re rolling into launch week for this. I remember talking all about it. If you don’t wanna hear about it, click this link and we’ll skip next week and or, you know, and I’ll see you later or I’ll see you soon and that’ll save a bunch of unsubscribes and let people kind of control their preferences.
RV (30:07):
Mm-Hmm.
NB (31:11):
Yeah, the third rule is that every rotation of the flywheel should produce more results than the previous rotation. Mm-Hmm. So going back to the rules, right? It needs to be in sequence, these can’t be scattered tasks. The second rule is each rotation needs to be easier than the previous one. And the third one is that it has to produce more results than the previous rotation. So if you think about that, like, wait, our rules are that rules two and three together is like, it has to get easier over time and it has to produce more simultaneously. Like that’s kind of a high bar to hit. But there’s a lot of creators that have done this. So let me give you an example. There’s a creator his name’s Sawhill Bloom and he writes a lot about habits and mental models and business and, and you know, all of these kind of things.
NB (31:55):
And he’s popular on Twitter. And so he’s built up a good size following on Twitter and he drives a lot of subscribers from his email or from Twitter to his email list and then from there into automations. And he’s got a few things going on here. He he does a referral program where he says, Hey, if you refer three friends to my newsletter, then you get this extra guide that I wrote for free. And so that means every subscriber that comes in, you know, maybe 10% of ’em refer friends. And so that turns into, you know, every one subscriber turns into 1.1 or 1.5 subscribers, and that goes from there. The next thing that happens is he’s got paid products that he is selling that’s pretty normal. So, so he is making money off of every subscriber from there on, from there he is in something called the Convert Kit Sponsor Network, and that’s where we sell advertising sponsorships for his newsletter on his behalf.
NB (32:50):
And so he is making a good amount of money from that, and he’s actually taking all of the money that he makes and pouring that back into advertising to grow his newsletter faster. And so what happens is, if we put some actual numbers to it at the beginning or like February, 2023, he had 200,000 subscribers on his list. And that’s growing at a pretty decent pace from, from social, but he was able to sell sponsorships and make tw about $25,000 a month off of selling sponsorships on his newsletter. He attends twice a week and he is taking all of that money and putting it into something called the partner network that a company called Spark Lu has. And that’s where you can sponsor other creators and like pay them $2 per subscriber that comes to you.
RV (33:42):
What’s it
NB (33:43):
Called? The company is spark Loop and we have a partnership with them. So you get it for free if you’re a converter customer. But it’s their partner network. And so basically you can say, Hey, I’ll pay $2 for every engaged subscriber that someone sends to me, and then creators can go browse it and say, oh, I like Nathan’s stuff. I’d happily get paid to send subscribers to him. So now instead of me going out and like paying Mark Zuckerberg on Instagram
NB (34:43):
So his list grows faster. And so every rotation, this is actually getting easier and producing more results. So I think he started the year in January at about 150,000 subscribers and today what is it, April 20th or so he’s at 300,000 subscribers. So he is, he’s doubled the list in Q1 by like running the flywheel very aggressively. And he’s a great marketer, but that’s how you can kind of put these things in sequence and then make it so that the flywheel, you know, it’s like a snowball going downhill. It’s like picking up more snow as it goes. It gets bigger and bigger faster.
RV (35:16):
I love it. Yeah, that is really cool. How do you do the referral thing where you say, Hey, if you, if you refer three people to my newsletter, I’ll send you this bonus, which, I mean, does that basically mean you have to set up like an affiliate link for every single subscriber and somehow it has to track if, if if that subscriber sends it out and three people convert on that land? I mean that’s a, is that how that’s being done?
NB (35:42):
Yeah, so basically what it is in, in the same way that we’re all used to affiliate programs, you know, it’s similar this tool, spark Loop has that built in. And that’s something that people get for free with convert Kits Greater Pro Plan, and that’s where it’ll set up that system. And in the footer of your email it’ll say, Hey, here’s your link. You’ve referred two people. Like refer one more to unlock Nathan’s free guide to whatever. Right? Or it could be an email course, it could be maybe if someone’s like, Hey, if you refer 10 people, you know, I’ll send you this shirt. If, if you refer 20 people, I’ll give you this invite. Like you get to come and do this like one day workshop or you know, something else, right? You could, you can offer any kind of custom bonus. And it’s a really effective way of getting your best like your biggest fans to refer more, more people.
RV (36:36):
Interesting.
NB (36:37):
But it’s all, it’s all automated. You set it up once yeah.
RV (36:41):
And this is
NB (36:41):
Basically, I’m obsessed with flywheel and automation, so there’s no way
RV (36:43):
Is that like an HTML code you drop into the email and then it’s basically reading like how many people Yeah, exactly. Subscribe to and pulling that through. Wow, that’s interesting. That’s fascinating. Well, okay, so I don’t wanna let you go before we talk a little bit about, about Convert Kit. And, and I, I’ll tell you like I love all the marketing automation tools and I also struggle with all of them cuz there’s like certain things that they do and like you guys have some really, really awesome features. First of all, a lot of our clients use you and they say it’s very easy to use. It’s like, it’s not super comp, like it doesn’t feel overwhelming and complicated. And so a lot of clients really like that, especially if they don’t have like developers or a lot of team or like a lot of time for the tech stuff.
RV (37:27):
One of the features that y’all have that I don’t think I’ve never seen anybody else have, and I told you this before and I was like, it’s really an amazing feature, is to send emails based on zip code radius to say send an segment my list by people who are all within some radius range of the zip code, which is huge for anyone that does any type of events event marketing and for book book tours and stuff like that. Or even if you’re a speaker and you’re like, go, I want to have a meetup in all these different places. It, I mean, it’s a really, really cool thing. So anyways, w what would you say are like, let’s say, let’s just take three, so I’ve given one what would you say are like three of your favorite features about Convert Kit? Maybe they’re things that you, you guys either do that other people don’t do or you think you do better or it’s easier. But I would just love to hear like, what are your, your top three kind of like favorite features of On Convert Kit?
NB (38:29):
Yeah. First the location based one. I absolutely love, we have a bunch of clients that are musicians. Yeah. So like Tim McGraw and Land Bridges and Mandy Moore and a bunch of others. And their teams are doing that whole thing, you know, they’re like, oh, we’re playing this show, either a huge stadium show or something smaller and it’s like, look, you know, we want to email people within 200 miles of Dallas Fort Worth. Right? Super easy to do. Or another example is you get these customers who are selling like food products, right? Maybe you’re you know, you have like the recipe blog or there’s one that there’s a, a blog called Hey Grill Hay. She runs this fantastic barbecue blog and she’s just getting into selling her own like sauces and rubs that are getting carried in grocery stores.
NB (39:15):
Okay. And what she does I think is just brilliant is if she gets carried in a new grocery store, like they’ll just run this little test like, okay, we’ll see if people, like, if consumers want to buy your product, she’ll be like, cool, what what store did
NB (39:56):
She’s like, yes, you should. I agree
RV (40:47):
Can edit embedded links after you’ve sent them out.
NB (40:51):
Yeah, and I, as far as I know no other email tool will let you do that.
RV (40:56):
That’s cool. I don’t know of another tool that does that. I mean, that’s, that’s pretty awesome. I mean it was like one you hope you’d never have to use, but man, if you
NB (41:05):
Didn’t need use. But if you do it’ss there
RV (41:06):
For you, it’s pretty, it’s pretty clutch. Yep.
NB (41:08):
Like we’ve got your back. There’s a bunch of other fun things and like you know, like we’ll automatically check to see if any of your links are sending you a 4 0 4. We’ll check your subject. Like we’ll do a bunch of stuff like that for you automatically before you hit send. But probably the picking three, I love automations like as a feature and it, and pretty much every tool, email tool is gonna have automations. Things that I like about ours is you can click into an email sequence and see all the emails listed down the side so you can move between them really quickly. And so it’s easy to see like, oh, what did I send them last week? Or what was yesterday? And you’re not like backing out and going back in or opening a ton of tabs, you’re just like clicking between them. It’s really fast. I’m
RV (41:56):
Not gonna, that’s handy cuz a lot of the time you lose is just in the extra clicks when you’re building these things is like, click in here and then click in here and then click in here to edit it and then click back out. Click back out. Yeah.
NB (42:07):
Yeah, so making things load really quick. And then really like these advanced things that you’d have to be normally be like a marketing automation expert to implement. We’ve got all these recipes like shared automations inside of Convert It. And so you can go through and be like, okay like gimme the book launch template and let me load that in and then just edit it from me. So it’s really like, how do we take something that before only the experts could do and make it so it’s approachable for
RV (42:36):
Yeah. You mentioned that like the, you you mentioned that like deadline sequence, sort of countdown timer inside of an email. That’s a cool thing cuz normally you’d have to use like a third party plugin or like
NB (42:45):
Yeah. How do you install it? Like, paste in this html nobody knows how to do it, no one wants to, so it’s like click little plus icon, select countdown timer, set the date you want it to countdown to hit send on the email.
RV (42:56):
Yeah. That’s really cool. That’s awesome, man. Well just so everybody knows, like if you go to brand builders group.com/convert, that is our affiliate link for Convert Kits. So we are, you know, been fans of Nathan. A lot of our clients use Convert Kit. I wanted to have ’em on the show so you could like, hear, you know, his story and what they’re about. We’ve heard great feedback on it. Some of these, some of these features are really, really hard to find. So Nathan, this has been awesome. Like what’s, what’s the vision for Convert Kit from here? Like where do you, where do you, where do you think you guys are going? Like are there any big things ahead in terms of like what you’re working on or, you know, what’s, what’s that? What’s in the future?
NB (43:42):
Yeah, so our company mission is that we exist to help creators earn a living. It’s deeply personal to me. I grew up in a family where money was really scarce and when I learned about making money on the internet, I was like, does everyone know this? Like, like, I wanna make this accessible to as many people as possible. And so everything that we’re coming out with whether it’s our sponsorship network that we’re building and still in the early days or work at Commerce where you can sell digital products or even this new partner network that we’re working on with Spark Loop, those are all about like, Hey, how can we make it easier? Like, how can we get creators paid? And so that’s really what we’re building is like turning all of this into a flywheel that someone can sign up and say, Hey, whether you have like 500 subscribers or 50,000 subscribers, there’s a lot of great ways to make money. And so that’s kind of, kind of next, that’s the North Star. How much money can I pay to creators every single month? And then whatever crazy ideas I can dream up that makes that easier.
RV (44:44):
I love it. Well, thanks for what you’re doing, man. Thank you for supporting creators. We’ve got a, we have a sh a shared united passion for, we call ’em mission-driven messengers, but like we you know, and the tools, the tools matter a bunch and, and they’re making a big difference, man. So we wish you all the best. We’ll stay connected again, go to brand builders group.com/convert if you wanna learn more specifically about Convert Kit and you know, Nathan, I’m sure I’ll talk to you again soon.
NB (45:11):
Sounds good. Thanks for having me.
Ep 376: How to Build A Credible Personal Brand with Dr. Mariel Buqué
RV (00:02):
I am delighted that you get to meet a newer friend of mine, but someone who I absolutely adore and I feel is really, really a special soul. And this woman is a true expert and a total class act, and you probably have already seen her on social, but I predict that she’s, she’s gonna be one of the most influential personal brands in the mental health space in our era. So her name is Dr. Mariel Buque, and she is a Columbia University trained psychologist. Okay. So she’s an actual psychologist, a trauma expert. She’s the author of a book coming out called Break the Cycle which is from Penguin which is my publisher, Woohoo. Go Penguin. And she’s been featured on CNN and the Today Show b ABC News, and she does corporate wellness workshops to companies like Google and Twitter and Capital One and Facebook.
RV (00:57):
Her and I shared the stage together at Louis How Summit of Greatness. So she was one of the other speakers, and that was how I met her. And I immediately was like, Aw, I just love this woman. She’s awesome. And so we got to connect a little bit and I want you to hear her story because, you know, she, she was a psychologist and she had a practice, which we’re gonna talk about, and she’s gone from that to over 700,000 followers online. Huge following on both, both Instagram and TikTok. And so I want to hear about some of what her strategy’s been with social media, how she kind of went from, you know private practice to personal brand and just kind of hear that journey. And then also, you know, maybe, maybe we’ll get some free trauma counseling out of it along the way. So Dr. Mariel Buque, welcome to the show.
MB (01:49):
Thank you so much. Rory I’m such a fan of yours just from a professional standpoint, but also you’re just such a wonderful person and so I’m, I’m delighted to be with you here today.
RV (02:00):
Well, thanks buddy. I, so, so tell us your story. So you go to Columbia, you become, you, you’re a classically trained psychologist, and then did you immediately, like, start a, a private practice?
MB (02:13):
No, actually I started a private practice in the pandemic, but even prior to, I was already offering some education online as a student. So part of the reason why I decided to start offering information was because I was seeing so much of this information floating through these ivory towers, right? We have like these peer review journals and all these places where we place information that’s really important for the public to know, but it wasn’t really out there. And so I was like, okay, social media is a public space that can be a space where people can gather some of this mental health information. So it kind of all started even before I graduated, about a year or two before that. And then I transitioned into being a psychologist at Columbia University Medical Center. So I was a staff psychologist there in addition to also holding some courses. I was a professor in the medical center and in the main campus. And then within a year’s time, that’s when I developed my private practice. So I was very busy.
RV (03:17):
Wow. Okay. All, so you actually started while you were still in school, so you were still, you were a grad student mm-hmm.
MB (03:31):
That’s
RV (03:31):
Right, yeah. And then went into private practice. So, so talk to me a little bit about social media, like the journey on social media, because I think there’s a lot of, a lot of people say, well, I’m not an online influencer, and I don’t know if social media applies to me because I don’t wanna do dances on TikTok, or, you know, I don’t really want to do hashtags. And our audience, you know, we describe as mission driven messengers mm-hmm.
RV (04:17):
But I’m a, I’m a really firm believer that if you just share your expertise, there’s gotta be a way to make this all work. And when I look at, when I follow you and I go, oh my gosh, you have blown up so massively. So can you just like, tell us how did you get started on social media? What are some of your philosophies there? And, and also like, yeah, just like your mindset of going, you know, you’re a Columbia trained psychologist, but yet you’re on social media and, and, and going, there’s a little bit of a dichotomy there of like credibility mm-hmm.
MB (04:55):
Yeah. You know, it’s so interesting that you say the, that there’s that dichotomy because when I first started off, I actually, I was really hopeful that none of my professors would find me on social media,
MB (05:11):
Cause I thought, you know, this perhaps doesn’t present as professional. They might have some sort of view on what, how I’m presenting the information to make it more accessible to the general public and not feel like this, like very dense clinical information. And so there were so many things that I had to think about in, in reference to how to make the information feel like it was reaching the places that I wanted it to reach. And interestingly enough, I’m actually going to speak at Columbia this week. So it’s, it’s very, very interesting how that, the reason why I’m going to go speak at Columbia is because of the visibility that I’ve been able to amass based on social media. So it, it’s just coming back so full circle where, where,
RV (05:57):
I just think it’s funny cuz it’s like, normally, you know, people post stuff online and they’re like, I hope my parents don’t find out, or I hope like, you know, my, my boyfriend and my girlfriend doesn’t see. And you’re like, yeah, I hope my professors don’t see, I think
MB (06:12):
You know, it was in part because it was so new, like, I was one of the, the first therapists and therapists in training that were coming into the social media space. So we didn’t have a blueprint for how we were supposed to be showing up into these spaces. We were just doing it based on our own personal style. And this is one thing that I, you know, I’ve, I’ve learned even through looking at your work, shout out to Lewis House also, like looking at how Louis shows up to the work itself as well. And I, because I show up from a place of wanting to serve in addition to wanting to be very authentic in my delivery, I think that’s worked out really well for me. And it’s something that people have gravitated to because they appreciate the authentic expression of the things that I say.
MB (07:01):
Right? And like being able to connect with the real human, but then also because I show up from a place of wanting to serve every day, I present information that is driven towards like, helping the public to better feel, better educated, and feel healed. And so that allows me to step into these spaces without having to overthink how it is reflected upon me. So I think that that’s been really helpful and being able to see the folks that I’ve been able to connect with, like you and Lewis and others, and also just bring in my own element of authenticity into this work. And I think that that has contributed to the, the amalgamation of like, you know followers across all these social media spaces.
RV (07:46):
Mm-Hmm.
MB (08:42):
Mm. Ooh, I love this question. Content creation has been a combination of a few things. The first of which is a unique approach that has been very, very much a part of what has driven like my mission to show up in these spaces. And what I mean by that is, I have this way that I present information with something that I do every single day, which is drink tea. And so I present the information like I’m having tea with someone and I’m breaking the fourth wall and I’m engaging the person. And when I started doing that, I started getting the feedback that people were actually feeling like they were landing in a gentle place where they can actually like listen to a tip that felt doable, accessible. And so when I started hearing from my community that that was the case, I started doing more of those very unique types of videos. In addition to that, in terms of the cadence, I believe that right now algorithms are a little bit influx, but what matters is that people notice your presence. So I have had a steady flow of information for now almost seven years.
RV (09:56):
Wow.
MB (09:57):
Yeah. It’s been a while.
MB (10:52):
Like, I presented information about grief the other day and how grief is connected to healing. That’s something that a lot of people, my followers were like, wow, I never thought of it that way. This is something that I’d like to sit with. Right? And so the fact that it’s new information, or at least my, my interpretation of how healing can look is allowing someone to take a step back into their life and really think about their healing work in a different way. So I try to add that element in there too, in addition to the other pieces. But I have realized that when you show up with consistency, people that digest your information are really grateful for the fact that you’re willing to do that.
RV (11:38):
When you say daily, break that down for me, like mm-hmm.
MB (12:21):
Yeah. So I must say there is one day where I’m no longer posting, and that’s because I’ve looked into my insights and that day isn’t a very highly engaging day, which is Friday. And so every platform’s different, every account is different. So I would urge anyone that is like hoping to understand how their users are digesting their content to look into their insights. So Fridays is the day off, basically, but on my bigger platforms on Instagram and TikTok, there is a, an almost daily presentation of information in some way or another. There’s a carousel post, there’s a video, there’s some sort of a repost of somewhere where I’ve been. And I have also restructured, especially my Instagram into being break the cycle of trauma, that being one account, which is primarily the information that you’ll find in my upcoming book, and like information that can be digestible around trauma.
MB (13:23):
And then there’s my main account, Dr. Dot Mario Bouquet, which is where I present some information about what I have going on in addition to some mental health tips. So there, I, I’ve actually just recently broken them out instead of having everything live in one space. And the reason being is because I wanted there to be a space where people can go to and then just digest the information and a space where pe where that would be more branded in, in reference to my own personal brand. Now typically what the posts look like are carousel posts or reels, given that they’re so popular now with a boom of TikTok. And whenever I’m doing a tee time video presenting information in that way, that’s typically presented like on a weekly, now two times a month basis. And I, I find that presenting the information in that way gives people an, an opportunity to look forward to the information and to really digest it even more. Versus when I was posting a video on tee time and trauma every single day, I felt like I was oversaturating my audience and it wasn’t being received in the same way. So I did do a little bit of internal studying of what has worked, what the feedback I’ve received in the comments section, dms, I get emails every day. So all of this, I’ve kind of created my own self case study, if you may, and it has led me to figure out what the right cadence is for me on each of these platforms.
RV (15:01):
Mm-Hmm.
MB (15:07):
It is, it’s an approximate minute of me inviting someone to tea, offering up a, a bit of information about mental health, providing a mental health tip that they can try for the week, and then closing out the segment within a minute’s time. I don’t know how I do it, but it, it gets done.
RV (15:25):
Okay. And so you do that, you do that only once a week?
MB (15:28):
Once a week, sometimes twice a month, just depending on whether or not I can actually provide my team with the video that they need to chop up and make into a tee time. But yes, once a week.
RV (15:42):
Okay. But it’s, it’s only a 62nd video.
MB (15:45):
Yeah, it is. Yeah. But it, it’s, it’s about seven minutes before it’s chopped up.
RV (15:50):
Oh, it’s a seven. So it’s a seven minute video mm-hmm.
MB (16:02):
Yeah, because it’s a, it has a certain style, so it’s chopped up in a certain way where it’s inviting, it’s a little bit on the therapy humor and but it brings us back into something that’s a little more serious, so it has a flow to it and the editing behind it you know, requires for me to have a little bit more B-roll.
RV (16:21):
Got it. And then the rest of that, like every day you’re doing just a carousel post with more of like just text copy and tips that way and, and then other personal stuff or re-sharing things that you’ve been up to. Mm-Hmm.
MB (16:36):
RV (16:38):
Mm-Hmm.
MB (17:28):
Yeah. So I absolutely first started with doing it every, doing everything myself. And interestingly enough, when I was doing interviews for publishers, like shopping around publishers to determine who I was gonna go with for my book in every single meeting, and I have 15 of these me meetings Wow. Within a two day span. And in all of those meetings, everyone asked you do all that yourself. And I said, yes, I do. And so they actually couldn’t believe it, but I realized in that moment, I need to outsource. I’m clearly doing much more than what I need to be doing. And what I learned in that journey is that people have an area of expertise in their respective area that can help burgeon your platform that you may not have. And outsourcing is actually one of the wisest things that you can do in order to really build a platform beyond, you know, where you are.
MB (18:22):
So right now, my team is still relatively small, but it’s a very mighty team. And so I have a brand manager someone who is a, a content creator and facilitates a lot of the brand elements of what is forward facing to my followers. I have someone who manages more of the financial side of things and helps me in orienting me around those moving pieces. Someone who in essence oversees everyone else who is more of a business manager and oversees also all of the moving pieces of the business, including speaking, although I am transitioning into speaking via a speaker’s bureau and which is it, it’s still tentative who I’m gonna go with. But I have been managing all of that on my own, on the backend with my team. And so there is a person that helps me to make sure that everything is like running smoothly.
MB (19:28):
So it’s been, in essence, more of a, with myself included four person team, which I think given how much I have on my plate is most of what I can manage. But I do believe that having someone that oversees everything has freed up a lot of my own space to be able to be creative, know what kind of content I wanna put out, because I still very much am tied to that part of the work. And the reason being is because it’s such sensitive material that I have to be closely connected to it, whatever goes out into the public. And so it, it gives me an opportunity to do that, to write and to think about, you know, the evolution of what will be out there in the future for, for all of us, for my business.
RV (20:12):
Mm-Hmm.
MB (20:20):
RV (20:21):
When, when you first started, you, you, you were a counselor, right? So you, you, you, you were taking on clients and that was how you were bringing in most of your money mm-hmm.
MB (20:45):
MB (21:48):
And so all of that actually helped me with the financial setup to be able to then create a team and have an actual funnel of income to individuals that can help me to build what, what I really desired, which was an evolution of my expertise in the authorship and speaker arena, right? And so now that’s where I am now. I’m, I’ve been able to build that out. I have a really solid book deal. You know, I have a strategy for how to move forward. And so all of that is now in place because I first started off with doing all those other things, right? Like all the things that are in your traditional kind of psychology trajectory, being a clinician, being a professor, and consulting here and there, but not as much as I’m doing now.
RV (22:39):
Mm-Hmm.
MB (23:36):
I go in at least once a day to make sure that I’m connected in some way to community and see it, especially if there are any comments that I feel, feel like might need special attention, however, and, and also with people that DM me that wanna build with me in some way. There’s a lot of people like that, and I, I don’t wanna miss those messages, but for the most part, the, the, my team member who is managing a lot of the content side does have a good way of being able to connect with people in a way that is my voice in many ways. A lot of us are doing now. Because sometimes these platforms just get way too big and it can be a bit overwhelming to manage it as one person. So I try to stay connected to the community. And even through my newsletter, like in my newsletters, people email me still via the newsletter when they receive it, and they’ll tell me it’s a newsletter that helps people with coping skills.
MB (24:34):
And people always tell me like, this one really helped me. I’m gonna use this one this week. And so I try to be responsive there as well. However, because of the enormity of these platforms, now I, I can’t respond to everyone. And before, when I first started off that first and second year, every comment was attended to every last one, even when I was at, you know, 10, 20, 30,000. But now it, it’s almost impossible to do. But I do try and make sure that if there’s ever any sensitive material or if there’s anybody who feels a little bit more tender and sensitive or like they really want to connect that they’re being attended to, because one of the things that is really important for me is for a person to feel like when they come to any of my platforms, they feel a sense of security, safety and like they’ve landed in a soft place. And if I can make that even, even though I can’t please everyone, if I can make that a core part of my mission, then I’ve been able to really fulfill a lot of what I’m, I feel like is a part of the work that I’m here to, to do. So the, the comment section is an important part of my work, but you know, the more that we grow the, the harder it gets to mm-hmm.
RV (25:58):
MB (26:41):
They can go to dr marielle bouquet.com, which is my website. And there, there’s just about everything that I’m up to, but I’m Dr. Dot Marielle bouquet on all socials, and so they can find me in that way as well.
RV (26:55):
Uh huh
MB (27:49):
I would say bring your authenticity and your voice. So find whatever it is that it is your voice within this space, within your own respective health space, and bring that in. Like, there are people waiting to hear from you. And I think we oftentimes, we’re, we’re so caught up in our own process of how to make it happen, that we forget that there’s an audience that’s there that’s waiting for our voice. And in addition to that, I know you mentioned TikTok videos and dancing. I just wanna say I don’t dance and I don’t dance on these videos,
RV (28:42):
I love it. Well, we will link up to dr mariel Buque.com [email protected] slash podcast in the show notes. So you, that’s an easy way to find her if you, if you don’t find her on your own. And Dr. Mariel, this is so wonderful. I, I love connecting with you. I’m excited to follow your journey. I’m absolutely confident that you’re just going to go so far and, and continue to impact millions and millions of people. So thanks for making time for us friend, and we wish you the best of luck.
MB (29:10):
Thank you so much. I appreciate you.
Ep 369: How to Build Recurring Revenue | John Meese Episode Recap
RV (00:02):
How do you build massive recurring revenue? That is the theme of today’s show. And recap, this is sort of based off the interview that I did with John Meese talking about how to build massive membership sites, and we’re gonna talk about some of those highlights. But really, I wanna zero in on some of what our, what we believe our keys are to building massive recurring revenue and, and even just understanding what recurring revenue is and why does, why does recurring revenue even matter? And I wanna just kind of start with a little bit of a track record here. So you know, this is something that we know something about. Brand Builders is a recurring revenue model. I mean, our core business is a one-on-one coaching or, and training product that people pay a subscription for. And that’s our, our flagship program includes you know, coming to two days of training every month, and also one-on-one coaching every single month as well.
RV (01:04):
And then there’s a, there’s a, a, a, a do it yourself, like a self-study version of it, which is you get access to all the online training, and that’s a lower, a lower version. But we are a membership site, or not a membership site. We’re a recurring revenue business. And the business that we sold in 2018, a huge component of that business was also recurring revenue. So this is something we know a lot about and have a lot of experience in. And I first wanna talk to you about why would you even consider recurring revenue and, and, and, and what are some of the, some of the strengths and some of the reasons to have recurring revenue. One of the great things about recurring revenue, so this is some of the, you know, selling subscriptions, is because every month you don’t start on zero, right?
RV (01:48):
Like every month you’re not automatically on zero every month, you automatically come into the month with revenue contracted. Now, not always does a hundred percent of that come in, but you always have a, a, a, a large number, a large proportion of revenue contracted. And so that’s really, really valuable. And y you know, just in terms of taking the pressure off, because what recurring revenue does is it allows you to kind of predict for the future. It’s, it’s, it’s more predictable. And so because it’s more predictable, we can say, okay, well if, if we can grow our revenues, you know, we’re always factoring for churn. So some percentage of people are gonna leave, and hopefully we’re gonna seal that back door with retention, which we’ll talk about. But the the other thing that we will we’ll try to do is we’re always bringing people in the front door and, and then the snowball is growing.
RV (02:44):
And so it’s a snowball that gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So the revenue is steady, it’s consistent, and then you can plan for growth. You can say, gosh, you know, hiring this person would be a little scary right now, I don’t know that we could afford them, but assuming some basic metrics. And, you know, if we can look back and say, Hey, statistically our, our revenues grow at this rate, we can sort of forecast more predictably and more comfortably in the future to say, yeah, there’s probably some investments we could make, whether it’s technology or personnel or you know, equipment or whatever you know, software tools you need or services you need done to go, I think we, we can, we can swing it based on, you know, our growth trajectory. The other reason why recurring revenue is so valuable is it’s, it’s literally more valued in terms of business valuation.
RV (03:35):
So when you look at the financial valuations of a business, this is a super deep dive by the way that in our, one of our phase four courses is called eight Figure Entrepreneur. And we really teach the real mechanics of, of, you know, the, just the, the basic foundations of finance and acumen, cash flow and things like that that most entrepreneurs don’t get, not even in business school. You know, I have an M B A and I would say I, there was so much practical information I I never got. But when you look at how businesses are valued, businesses are valued based on an estimated stream of future cash flows. So in other words, they’re saying, what’s the likelihood, the way I describe it is pretend that you, here’s how you, here’s how you value a business. Think of it as a money machine.
RV (04:22):
And if, if I had a money machine that printed dollar bills and I said, Hey, I have a machine here that prints a $1 bill every year. How much is, how much would, would I sell this machine to you? And what would you be willing to buy this machine? And we go, well, we know it’s, it’s probably worth at least a dollar cuz it prints a dollar every year. And you know, if you don’t do anything to improve the machine, if it’s a reliable machine, there’s probably gonna be a dollar next year. So that would be $2, you know, in, in three years from now, it’s gonna be at least $3. Now the machine could break down. So that’s part of what as the buyer is assessing as what’s the likelihood that machine’s gonna break down or the strategic, A strategic buyer is somebody who says, Hmm, I know how to take $1 machines and I can turn them into machines that print a dollar every month.
RV (05:09):
I have some expertise or some skill or some people on my team who can take that machine and make it per print more, either $1 bills faster or can print dollar bills that are not a dollar, but $5 or $10 or $50. And so that’s what, how businesses are valued. It’s like, what’s the, what’s the reliability of the revenue coming in the future and saying, I’m willing to, when someone values a business and buys a business, they’re saying, I’m gonna, I’m gonna basically buy three years of your future cash flow now and assuming going, I’m gonna take the risk of going this machine. I’m buying from you. I’m going to, it’s gonna take me three years to earn my money back, but then after that, I’ll make more money. Or because I believe that I can pay, pay you three years worth of earnings for your machine now.
RV (05:59):
And I think I can, I can increase the productivity of that machine. And that’s effectively right there is how businesses are valued, which they really overcomplicate in a lot of, you know, academic institutions and schools and just people don’t understand it in general. Well, so then why is recurring revenue valuable? Because recurring revenue is predictable, and as predictability goes up, the valuation of the business goes up because the likelihood of those cash flows being there, every single month goes up when it’s already contracted versus when I have to go out and sell a whole new bunch of customers. So recurring revenue companies have higher values, they’re literally worth more because they’re more consistent and more the revenue’s more consistent and more predictable. You know, and if you look at SaaS companies, software companies, a lot of times those companies are valued based on a multiple of their revenue.
RV (06:51):
Whereas most companies are valued on a multiple of their profits. And so it becomes highly valuable when you have recurring revenue because it, it’s enticing to a potential buyer. So the demand for that money machine i e a business is, is higher. So those are some of the reasons to do recurring revenue. The, one of the other reasons why we love recurring revenue, and, and here’s a good way so in our, our phase one course one which is called finding your brand, d n a, one of the things we help people do is, is figure out what their primary business model should be. Your primary business model. Is that the revenue stream to which all others are subservient to that one. And we talk about when you should choose a course versus when you should choose a membership site. And there’s all these factors.
RV (07:39):
Well, one of the factors is to say, if you are good at constantly finding new customers and you’re good at it and you, you, your talents lend themselves to it and you want to do it, you go, a course is a really good option because once the course is built, you don’t have to change much. You can focus your time on just finding new people to buy the existing thing. But if you struggle with marketing and sales and you go, man, I struggle to find new customers, I’m not as, as talented at as that, then we go, well, sometimes membership sites are better because what you can do is you can spend less time acquiring new customers and spend more time creating content to service your existing customers. And so that’s kind of what we do. I mean, we like to think we’re good at both marketing and sales especially is like kind of our expertise.
RV (08:30):
And, but, but we don’t love having to sell every single month just to like hit the budget, right? So we love having the recurring revenue and going, you know, at least for me, I think one of my superpowers is creating content. So it’s easier for me, even though I love marketing and sales, and we’re good at marketing and sales, and that’s what we teach people how to do. I, I, my superpower I think is even more so in creating content. So it’s easier for me to go, yeah, let me, let me find a few customers who will be in a continuity with us and let’s serve them in a deeper way. Now, at Brand Builders Group, we currently have over 600 active clients that are in our, our our monthly training, you know, and coaching program which are our flagship programs. And there’s like a self, you know, there’s a do-it-yourself version, and then there’s a one-on-one version, which also includes our live training events.
RV (09:25):
And then we have, we have like 300 private clients on top of that who just hire us for private projects and private, you know topics at at at less consistent. Those are more like, those are more like sales. They’re not recurring revenue, they’re bigger hits of revenue. When someone just says, ah, I really wanna like, focus on my podcast, just hire us to help you with that. Or writing their book or launching their book or their keynote or building out their funnels or, and it’s more of just they’re hiring us for, in a more expedient way to focus on a burst. But those are ones like, you have to be selling new ones every month versus the recurring revenues going, Hey, when you’re on a recurring membership, we give you all of those things, we give you access to all of ’em, and we’ll step you through ’em as you need to.
RV (10:06):
So that’s a little bit about why recurring revenue matters and understanding how it affects business valuation. Again, if, if you look at the difference between a company valued on revenue versus a company valued on profit most companies are valued on, on, on profit or ebitda earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, which basically just means profit, which is, you know, to use my money machine analogy which by the way is an analogy I came up with of, of just thinking about a business just as a simple m money printing machine to go, okay, a dollar, if my money, my money machine prints a dollar every year, that’s the profit of, that’s the final output. But and most companies, you know, depending on a whole number of factors, but let’s say you were getting a just a five multiple meanings, if someone were to pay you a five multiple, that means a buyer’s gonna basically come in and say, I’m gonna pay you five years worth of profits, five years worth of future profits today to buy your money machine.
RV (11:08):
So I’m gonna, if, if you have a dollar in profit, I’m gonna pay you $5. I’m a multiple of five, I’m gonna give you $5 today knowing or feeling confidently, like I will at least get my $5 back over the next five years and hopefully faster if I can do some things to improve the efficiency of the operation or if I have other strategic reasons to make that acquisition. That’s how most business deals are done. It’s a multiple of profits or multiple of ebitda, but recurring revenue, like SaaS companies often are valued on revenue. So if, if you get a, a value of let’s say you get a, a multiple of five, but instead of on your profits, it’s a, it is on your revenue. So, for example, to use this same example, a company that produces a dollar in profit every year, let’s say their revenue is $10, so that would be a company operating at a 10% profit margin.
RV (12:03):
So they generate $10 in revenue, they gotta pay all their expenses, their salespeople, their marketing, their overhead, you know, the product acquisition, their taxes, their insurance, their, you know, everything. And then at the end of the day, maybe they have a 10% profit. Like, and you go, okay, I generated $10 in revenue, a dollar in profit. Normally it’s a a five multiple would say, oh I’m getting, I’m gonna get $5 for that business, five times, $1. But when you’re valued on revenue, it’s a game changer to go, I’m, if I got a, if I got a a, a multiple of five on revenue, it’s not five times $1, it’s five times $10. So that company is to buy that company is not $5, but $50, five times 10, the multiple of five times the revenue of $10. So that’s five years worth of revenues.
RV (12:55):
I’m valuing, valuing that company based on revenues that that company is worth $50 instead of $5 because it’s five years of future revenues versus five years of future profits, right? One of the dynamics that makes companies more have a higher enterprise value is, oh, and be more likely to be valued on revenue, is the consistency of the revenue, which is, you know, happens with recurring revenue. So that’s probably more than most of you wanted to know, but I, I mean, I literally went through MBA school and never understood that basic core concept. It wasn’t until years later as an entrepreneur that I, I, I had a mentor finally explained it to me, sort of in, in simpler English. And it’s important to understand that. And, and that is, even if you plan on never selling your business, I mean, this is again, another principle.
RV (13:45):
We teach an eight figure entrepreneur, is that a business worth selling? Looks a whole lot like a business worth keeping. You know, a business worth selling is a business that operates without you with consistency and produces loss of cash flow inevitably into the future. Well, a business that does that looks a lot like a business worth keeping. I mean, if you have a money machine that prints money every year and it doesn’t require a lot of your time, and there’s not a lot of risk in, in those, that money machine breaking down, you go, why didn’t I just keep it? So the money machine’s just printing money and I’m just keeping the money every year. That’s the way to think about it. Recurring revenue increases consistency, thereby reduces volatility or reduces risk, thereby increasing the valuation of that business, whether you sell it or you keep it.
RV (14:25):
So high level, that’s why recurring revenue is such a good idea. Now, how do you create great recurring revenue? Couple of the key things, if you’re wanting to create recurring revenue of your business, and John talked about this a little bit in the, in the interview, but if you really wanna create a quality recurring revenue product, the question that I would pose for you to answer is this, what is the problem that I can solve that never goes away? What is a problem that I can solve that never goes away? In other words, the need for it continues on month after month after month, which causes people to want to continue paying for us. Accountability is one of the, one of the core problems that we solve. Now, technically the problem we solve is obscurity. We help people who are struggling to be more well known to, to do that.
RV (15:24):
And we teach them a set of information and strategies for how to do that. And all the tactics that we have now used to launch, you know, we’ve had 12 clients that have become New York Times or Wall Street Journal bestsellers. We’ve had four clients create TED Talks that have gone viral with over a million views. We’ve had over we, we just had our, our fifth client generate more than seven figures growth in their annual revenue. So they’ve grown their revenue more than a million dollars a year since being a client of ours. So we have a set of knowledge that we teach people to do that. But what the need, the, the, the problems that never go away are accountability, community and access to great vendors and as well as inspiration, right? You, the inspiration is like never, it’s a, it’s something that never disappears.
RV (16:13):
So those are the, some of the problems we’re solving. So you gotta sort of think about it if you’re gonna create a membership site or if you have one and you’re going, how do I, how do I get the snowball rolling faster? Be thinking about what are the problems that my clients have that never go away? And how can I serve those needs better? All right? So that’s my first key for how to grow your recurring revenue. The second, the second key, and this one is directly from the, from the the mind of AJ Vaden. So AJ talks about this all the time with our team internally, is when you’re growing recurring revenue, it’s sort of a two-part game. You need new people coming in the front door. But the big thing that everybody misses, which is really the, like, the more critical one I think is you have to seal the back door.
RV (17:05):
You have to like, you have to be so sticky that people aren’t leaving. Otherwise, you literally have a treadmill or this revolving door where you got people coming in as fast as they’re going out, or if they’re leaving faster, then you’re bringing ’em in, then you’re going backwards, right? And that’s negative churn. So y you, the, the, the first real job is to go, man, even before we perfect bringing in new customers, it’s going, how do we close that back door? In other words, how do we keep people from canceling? And when I say key people from canceling, I don’t mean like locking them in to, to, to, to being forced to stay to something that they hate. It’s not like going, Hey, you gotta have, you know, these contract terms that are just relentless. And it’s not that, here’s the key, the key is retention or, or excuse me, here’s the, here is the key to growing your membership site.
RV (18:00):
Utilization equals retention. Utilization equals retention. This is what AJ is saying all the time. Utilization equals retention. Meaning the way to serve your current customers is you have to make sure they’re using whatever the thing is that you’ve given them. And this is a distinct mindset shift. A lot of people think that sales is done once the sale is made. And when you have that mindset of like, oh, I closed the sale, I’m onto the next, I’m onto the next, that doesn’t work. We don’t think that works, period. You know, in one of our phase three courses, it’s called pressure-free persuasion. We, we talk about how the sale is not done when the sale is made. The sale is finished. When the client experiences the result that you promised the sale isn’t made, or the sale, the sale isn’t finished. When the sale is made, the sale is finished.
RV (18:55):
When the client experiences the result that you know, you promised or that you were both working towards you probably didn’t promise it. I would recommend you don’t promise results. Just like you can’t, we cannot guarantee results even though we’ve had amazing results. And that’s why our client list continues to be amazing, right? I mean, we’re working with Ed Millet and Louis Howes and Amy Porterfield and, and you know, Eric Thomas et the hip hop preacher and Peter Diamandis and all these amazing people that are, are now clients of ours, cuz we are really getting amazing results. But utilization equals retention. So the sale that you have to make every month is not so much to a new customer like you might with more of a commoditized model, like a course offering, let’s say the sale you gotta make is to your current customers to use the thing they have.
RV (19:45):
So you always have to be selling, right? You still have to be selling, you gotta be selling them on making sure they’re using what you’ve given them. Utilization equals retention. If your people are using your program, if they’re using your service, if they’re using, if they’re accessing your portal, if they’re utilizing your tools, they’re gonna stay. If they’re not using your tools, they gonna leave, right? They’re not going to pay for something they’re not using. Even if what you’re providing is amazing world class best in class, even if your solution is the best there is, if your clients aren’t using it, they are bowing out, they’re gonna be leaving, right? So I’m not so focused, like if I were gonna buy a recurring, if as a, as a, as a business acquirer, if I were gonna go buy a company who had recurring revenue, I would be looking at their u the utilization.
RV (20:40):
Are people using the thing they’re paying for? If they’re using it, even if the product is crappy, I go, it’s, that’s great. I can make the product better. That’s not that hard. But if people aren’t using it, then I go, you just got a bunch of people paying for something here that are, you know, it’s a parking lot that no one is using and going, that’s not gonna long term, that’s not gonna work. We gotta get people using the thing. So utilization equals retention. And there’s a couple key things here for how to increase your utilization. So first of all, you gotta have a journey. You need to have a map, you need to have a visual that outlines what the process looks like. For those of you that are listening that are members in captivating content, which is our phase one course two program, that’s what we help you do.
RV (21:26):
We help you extrapolate your unique expertise and experience into a proprietary methodology, a body of work, a visual journey of, of illustrations and frameworks and flow charts and, and, and chart and tables that that show. This is the process. If you’re a member of ours, you know, we have the brand builder journey. It’s our four phase process that we walk you through from going you’re completely obs obscure and unknown to world famous and world recognized eight figure entrepreneur, best-selling author, hall of fame speaker you know, all the things that we have done and helped people do. We’ve got a four phase, a simple four-phase process that we push people through. And it works. Part of the reason why people stay is cuz they can see the whole journey. You gotta show them this, it’s this step and this step and this step. Don’t just assume that they’re gonna hang around blindly not knowing what, what it takes to actually get to where they’re trying to go.
RV (22:23):
So you wanna show that, talk about it, keep that in front of them so that they’re seeing like, oh, okay, you know, yes, it’s hard right now, but this is just a step and I’m gonna go to the next step and the next step and the next step, and that’s how I’m gonna ultimately get to where I want to go. So you gotta have a journey. The other thing is you gotta have data. You gotta have red flags going on, firing off in, in your, in your business. Meaning if somebody’s not using your stuff, you need to have dashboards and tools or reports or people who are monitoring that, who send up an alert to say, Hey, this is, and at, at at Brand Builders Group, I’ll just tell you transparently, we have something called an at-risk report where we’re looking at all of the people who haven’t been doing a certain number of activities.
RV (23:11):
So in our case, they haven’t logged into a portal in a certain number of days. They haven’t been to a course been to one of our live events in a certain number of days. They haven’t showed up for one on their one-on-one calls in a certain number of days. They haven’t, you know, been inside of our, our Facebook community, our private Facebook community in a certain number of days. And so we’re, because part of what we’re providing, part of what they’re paying for is frankly is accountability and inspiration. And this is how we track that, is go like, Hey, you’re not showing up, like you’re not doing the work. Like if you’re not coming, you’re not doing the work, which means you’re not getting the results, which means even though it’s not our fault that you’re not getting the result, the fact of the matter is you’re not getting the result, which means, means you’re not gonna keep paying.
RV (23:46):
So even if everything we do is perfect, if they’re not using it, it doesn’t matter, they’re gonna cancel. So we have to set up triggers and, you know, red flags and this at-risk report of all of these things. And we’re using automation tools to do this. And we’re using some of its manual reporting, some of it is customer surveys, some of it is manual outreach and check-ins, like to constantly go make sure people are using this. And, and here’s here’s another question that I would encourage you, you know, to, to ponder as it relate as it relates to this. Ask yourself this question, how can I serve my current audience in a deeper way? How can I serve my current audience in a deeper way? Because utilization equals retention. And if I’m serving them in a deeper way, then I’m, I’m speaking more powerfully to their immediate needs.
RV (24:40):
I’m providing the tools, the templates, the checklist for them to do it. Here’s a recent example for us. A lot of speakers struggle with how much should I charge? This has been, you know, gone on for decades, like what’s the right price to charge? And people throw out all these weird numbers. We created this, this speaker fee calculator. It’s, and it’s a simple set of questions you answer and it spits out not only what your speaking fee should be, but what your virtual fee should be and your half day fee and your two day fee and your international fee and your interview fee and all of it, it all spits out and it takes you like two and a half minutes to fill in this, this thing that is now a tool that solves a problem. We then also have a, a a a toolkit that is our speaker press kit and we go, you know, your speaker press Prescott needs to have a fee schedule.
RV (25:28):
Well, we just solved that problem, but then what about the rest of your speaker Prescott? What are all the things that need to be in there and how should it be structured and how should it be laid out? And we go, great. One of our incentives for people when they sign up I I think it’s, if I think if they sign up and pay for a year in advance, is we give them the template that we actually use for our own speaker press kits. And then you can like, model off of it and you can just build it, boom, up and running. So everything that we’ve been doing at Brand Builders Group for the last few years has been basically creating the education and all the educational resources. Now we’re moving much more aggressively and a assertively into how do we give people tools and templates and checklists to help them execute and implement what they’re learning faster.
RV (26:10):
And internally, our team is going, how are we monitoring utilization? Because utilization equals retention. Utilization equals retention. So that’s the second thing you really gotta do. Now the third thing is you gotta keep people coming in the front door. You gotta keep people always coming in the front door. And it’s just, you know, sales, sales solves all problems, right? Like if, if we, if we can figure out how to constantly generate new sales, then we’re gonna always have cash flow coming in that we can use to solve other problems or to hire people who can solve problems. The question is, do you have a consistent engine for driving new leads and new customers into your business?
RV (27:00):
Think about that. Just just think about that question to yourself for a second. Are you confident that you have an engine that consistently produces new leads and new customers for your business every month, every week, every day? Do you know exactly this is, this is how my machine works, we do this and then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens and that brings somebody who finds us here and then they do this, and then they do this, and then they become a customer and then they stay because they’re utilizing the program. And you, if you aren’t confident on that, like if you aren’t crystal clear on what is your process, what is your system, what is your method for perpetually continually, constantly never ending, always driving new leads and new customers into your business? If you’re not clear on that, go to free brand call.com slash podcast right now, free brand call.com/podcast because you need to talk to our team because this is one of the things that we specialize the most in, is helping you create a, a set of mechanisms and systems and processes in your business to keep people coming in the front door.
RV (28:13):
They’ve gotta be coming in the front door because they’re always gonna leave out the back no matter how good your program is. And no matter how much you focus on retention, which, you know, as I just said, utilization equals retention. So we wanna close that back door, but even if your program is the best in the world, people are always going to leave. So you just gotta make sure you’re bringing in new customers faster than the older one, than the old ones are leaving by. And so you’re adding value to them and you’re also constantly refining and perfecting your new customer acquisition strategy. If you don’t feel confident or you’re not clear on how you get new customers and new leads on a regular consistent basis, you need to talk to us. I mean, I’m, I’m serious. Just go to free ran call.com/podcast, fill out the form and talk, talk to someone on our team because this is what we specialize in and this is why we’re doing it, right?
RV (29:07):
And I, you know, i i I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a total jerk, but like we, we just launched another seven figure business inside a brand builders group in like the last year. So we, we now have five different seven figure, multi seven figures businesses that we’ve built and two eight figure businesses. And it’s by following the same principles. All of these principles are are very straightforward, they’re not easy, but they are simple and they do work if you follow the system. So that’s why we’re here. We’d love to talk to you. If you’re not ready for that, hey, share this episode with somebody who needs to hear it. Obviously anything you can do to, to leave reviews helps us tremendously, but also helps new listeners so you know, rate and review and help us that way. And no matter what, keep coming back every week so that we can be keep pouring into you and giving you as much as we can Right here for free on the Influential Personal Brand podcast. That’s all we got today for how to build massive recurring revenue. We’ll catch you next time. We love ya. Bye-Bye.
Ep 368: How to Build Massive Membership Sites with John Meese
RV (00:02):
Well, today we’re gonna talk about a really important topic, membership sites, and a favorite topic of mine. And you’re gonna get to hear from one of my favorite people in the world on that topic, John Meese. So I’ve known John kind of loosely for years because he’s, he’s helped multiple people build membership sites. These, you know, six figure seven figure membership sites, specifically Platform University, which used to be owned by Michael Hyatt, who of course is good friend of ours, of mine, and AJ’s, Michael and Gail. And we’ve known Michael for years and he’d been a mentor and a friend. And so that’s how I met John. And Michael sold Platform University a few years ago. And I think around that time is when John started taking his expertise out and helping coaches and, and trainers and consultants and just anybody who’s out there to build wealth by starting an online business. And specifically, I think, you know membership sites. So he’s also the author of a bestselling book called Survive and Thrive, how to Build a Profitable Business in Any Economy, including this one. He’s bilingual in Espanol, and he just moved to Puerto Rico where he’s saving money on taxes, although that’s not why he’s went there primarily. But anyways, buddy, it’s good to have you here.
JM (01:23):
Thank you, Rory. It’s good to be here. It’s good to be here. Is the interview today gonna be bilingual or are we stick in English?
RV (01:28):
Yeah, no, I, yeah, we’re gonna do it in Spanish, man. Yes, you and me. It’s gonna be a back very, very short interview.
JM (02:02):
Yeah, so there are a lot of subscription type businesses, so I think it’s probably helpful to start by saying that my focus is generally helping people turn wisdom into wealth by building a thriving online education business. And so that’s a lot of the same work you do Rory, with Brand Builders Group of helping people build personal brands where there’s an educational component sometimes that looks like a course or coaching program or a life event or books. But memberships are the subscription version of that. And so some of my favorite membership sites that I’ve been a part of myself you know, you’re typically paying a monthly or annual fee to be part of a community where you get access to a combination of training, support, community. It’s more, there’s definitely more of a peer element than if you were maybe in like just watching a course.
JM (02:48):
Cuz often courses online courses are typically very kind of, you’re consuming it. And then that’s kind of it, like, there’s not usually a lot of community interaction, but community is a key part of membership sites. So there’s really two primary reasons to want a membership site in your business. One of them is kind of the obvious one, which is that when you build recurring revenue, now all of a sudden, every month you get to start knowing that you have a reliable recurring revenue coming in from customers who’ve subscribed to pay you automatically. I, like John Orlow calls this the the automatic customer, and I like that idea. I was just saying like, that’s a great book, you make the sale once. Yeah, it’s a great book. And, and it’s a great concept too, of just the idea that each month you’re like, well, I automatically have customers, I don’t have to start with zero.
JM (03:31):
So that’s huge. And recurring revenue can really grow over time to become an incredible source of generating wealth. But the flip side of that is also, it’s a phenomenal way to serve to serve your clients, to serve your customers and your audience. Because the reality is what, I mean, the academic churn is typically MOOCs or massive open online courses for like, what we know is like an online course where you buy it, it sits on the digital shelf somewhere, maybe you watch it. And historically, the, I mean just kind of industry-wide, the completion rates on online courses are very low. And the success rate of someone taking an online course and actually going to do it, actually do the work and succeed, which of course is what you want, not just their money. That’s also very low. Membership sides allow you to take the same kind of educational content and scalable educational content you might put in a course, but add ongoing community and support that allows people to stay connected to ongoing transformation. How
RV (04:26):
Do you do the community part of it? Like Yeah. Is is it, is it mostly a Facebook group? Like is it I mean, do you, do you, do you see that most people are using a Facebook group as their mechanism for hosting community? Or is there some other way that they’re achieving that? The objective of getting the members? Cuz that is a huge part of it is yeah, who do you meet and supporting people and meeting other, like referral relationships, et cetera, et cetera. How do, how do you facilitate that?
JM (04:58):
You know, Facebook groups at one point in time were kind of just the standard for membership sites because it’s kind of where everybody is or was. But I would say these days it’s still an option, really. The, the software you’re using or the platform you’re using is really secondary to the strategy for how you’re interacting with people. That said, I don’t really know, I can maybe think of one or two people I know with successful membership sites that are still on Facebook groups. Most people have used an independent platform that where you have a lot more control. There’s a lot of popular ones, but honestly I think the best one by far is circle. And so that was created by some of the early people at Teachable, which, you know, is like the biggest course platform in the world. And some of them spun off and created Circle, which is you know, essentially it’s your ability to create a private group. They even added courses within that now. So you can have courses community, you can, well, as much as I love Zoom, which you and I are talking in right now, you can actually replace Zoom by doing live streams or, or meetings through Circle as well. And they have a mobile app. And so there’s really the software secondary to the strategy strategy, but I would say Circle is like an all in one for having a great membership site.
RV (06:01):
Okay. That’s interesting. So kind of in the vein of, of retention or, or yeah, like of community is, there’s a retention, right? So the, the, to me, when it, when somebody starts a membership site, they go, oh man, recurring revenue. Like, yeah, you know, why, why, why sell a course for $500 when I can get people to pay me a hundred dollars a month and then they’ll stay forever. But I feel like the thing that we see pretty consistently is that people are gonna drop off around month three or four. So what do you think are some of the keys to retention? Because if that happens, if you were gonna sell a $500 course and now you’re just doing a hundred dollars a month membership Yeah. And now they’re only staying three or four, you actually have, you’ve gone the wrong direction, right? You’re losing money by converting it. Now there’s some other benefits of, of it, but I, I mean, what are some of the things that you see that help the retention component of this? Because to me, that’s really where the magic is, right?
JM (07:05):
Yeah. Well, it’s worth talking about your question’s. Great, Victoria, because it, it kind of illuminates sort of the ugly truth about membership sites. Cause we started with sort of the beauty of membership sites, right? It’s just recurring revenue. Your customers are getting transformation all the time. You’re getting recurring revenue all the time. That’s like the nice side. But the between the membership sites is that the minute you start a membership site, it’s upside down. And by that I mean the same way that you can be upside down at a house where you owe more than it’s worth. The minute you start a membership site, you have members who are paying, you have some members coming to pay, but for you to deliver a high value membership site, you have to give ongoing value. It has to be re not just, it’s not just kind of an on-demand library.
JM (07:43):
There has to be some sort of value giving on a regular basis to get people to stay. Because really the measure of success, the membership site is not that somebody joins, it’s that it’s retention, as you said Rory, it’s that they stay for a long period of time. Right? So I guess the first thing I would say is that if you’re looking at different products and considering a membership site, I actually don’t recommend you start with a membership site until you’ve already built a successful flagship program. Like a coaching service or a group coaching program or mastermind and a gateway product, like a low price course or a book or some, or a workshop or some other, you know, those really, those two anchors of the flagship product and the gateway product, they allow you to both bring in new customers on a regular basis, but also be able to create massive transformation in the flagship program at a, at a premium price. What those two things do is not just the revenue piece and the audience growth piece, which they do that, but they also help you refine your understanding of your target customer, their problems, their needs. And the way you sell a membership site versus the way you sell any other product that has a one-time purchase is completely different. Mm. And so it’s, it’s because are are you familiar with the concept of the the Infinite game by any chance? Rory?
RV (08:57):
I mean, you mean Simon Sinek’s book?
JM (09:00):
So Simon Sinek has a book on this, but the concept is not unique to him. But yes, his book
RV (09:04):
Is a great, no, I don’t even know what that, I don’t even know what that book’s about. I, I have read his others, but I’ve not read that book.
JM (09:09):
It’s a phenomenal book. And there are other great resources on this subject, but that’s usually the book I recommend is The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek. But the point of this concept is that essentially that there are finite games. Like for example, what’s your favorite sport, Laurie?
RV (09:24):
The spot here. Oh, we’ll, we’ll go, we’ll go, we’ll go with, we’ll go with soccer. I’m Nashville Soccer Club season two. There we go. So now I’m, now I’m soccer man.
JM (09:32):
There you go. All right. So soccer or football as we call it in Puerto Rico, but that’s a whole other thing.
RV (10:01):
Yep.
JM (10:02):
Most things in life are not finite games. Most things in life that matter are infinite games. Like how do you win at marriage or raising kids or building wealth or growing a business. There’s definitely milestones along the way where you’ve achieved success, but there’s not really a finish line unless you create one arbitrarily that says you’re done. You can’t just say, all right, honey, that was our, that was our winning date night, actually. We’re done, now we’ve won the game. I’m just gonna kind of coast through the rest of this marriage. Like that does not work. I’ve been very for about a decade and I’ve already learned that lesson. So the point of this, the reason why I bring this up is kind of bring this back into products, is that when you sell like a course or a book or even a group coaching program, typically what you’re selling is a finite promise by this thing.
JM (10:50):
You will get this result, right? Like if you join my seven figure school accelerator, my flagship program, the promise is that I’m gonna help you build a personalized playbook to build a seven your seventh Figure school, which is an online education business that generates a million dollars a year from three core products. But I’m also gonna help you scale a flag share product to six figures. That’s a finite promise, right? And then when you sell a book or a course, if the course is how to get a thousand email subscribers, for example, that’s a finite promise. The only way to sell a membership site effectively and grow retention over time is actually to sell an infinite promise. Because baked into it is this idea that it’s ongoing. If I sell you a membership site, it’s like, Hey, just pay $10 a month to join my program and I’m gonna help you lose 20 pounds Immediately your brain kind of got off go, like, gets us like kind of like full break, full stop, and you’re like, wait, what? Lose 20 pounds, then I’ll just cancel the membership. Like why would I e even before you body, you’re already talking yourself out of staying as a member. Mm-Hmm.
RV (11:50):
Mm-Hmm.
JM (11:51):
Interesting. But if instead, and instead I approach that same exact membership and I say it’s $10 a month and as part of this, you’re gonna get access to all of my, all of my training and support to help you to help you build and live like a fit, a fit body and a fit life. Or I like the phrase to transform your I’m, I’m expecting my fourth son in April, so I’m definitely have a dad bought, but I wanna transform my dad bought to a father figure. Like I’ve heard that phrase a couple of times and that stuck with me. Mm-Hmm. Right? That’s, but that’s like, that’s an ongoing thing. That’s an infinite game. And so a key is you have to make an infinite promise. And so that’s, that’s really the first key to retention is really just upfront. You have to be clear on what transformation are you promising.
RV (12:31):
Yeah. I mean that’s in, that’s interesting thought. You know, cuz we’ve like of course our, our core business as you would say is a membership model. I guess we’re really a coaching company, so peop like we, we do coaching and training, but people pay a recurring fee. We don’t charge like an upfront fee. And like, you know, I’ve wrestled with, gosh, it’s so much easier to sell like a course where you go sign up for this, you’re going, we’re gonna teach you this, it’s gonna give you this result and boom is done. Whereas like, you know, we’re selling building an influential personal brand and like that never ends. It gets bigger and bigger, but the game. But sometimes I’ve wondered, should we be selling more terminal points or, you know, checkpoints along the way cuz like, you know, we’ve had 11 clients that have become New York Times or Wall Street Journal bestsellers. We’ve had four clients have Ted talks that have gone viral. We’ve had, we’ve had four clients who have, you know, grown multi seven figures, the, those kinds of things. Where it’s like, so it’s, it’s a fascinating to think about. You’re saying that it’s actually a good thing to align a membership site with more of an infinite promise, something that there’s no finish line.
JM (13:42):
I am, but I’m, but I also want to wanna say that from my experience, it is more difficult to sell some an infinite promise. And you’re probably have seen this with a coaching program like you just said. Like, yeah. And it’d be convenient if we could do, you know, a finite promise. I will say this is not on the membership side necessarily, but in my accelerator program, what I do is I really focus on selling the finite promise of my 90 day program. And then on the back end, it’s like as soon as you achieve those results, it’s like, okay, great, let’s keep working together in a mask line group. And that has an infinite promise attached to it. And so I would, I think there is a way probably to do some sort of hybrid of like taking your coaching services and figure out, okay, is there maybe a 90 day promise or a 30 day promise we could make? And you can see how that affects your conversions. Cuz my hunch is it’ll actually be a lot easier to sell. Cause that’s the thing you can go back and justify to your your bank or your spouse or, or your business partner, whatever, to say like, I’m gonna invest this money and I’m gonna get this result. That’s a finite equation. You can’t really run that math on a program that never ends. And so I Yeah,
RV (14:41):
Yeah, no, I follow, I follow you there. So let’s on the, on the topic of selling membership sites. Yeah. Another thing I want to ask you about is, is about urgency, right? So the, the the the, you know, if you think of like, so many launch models are based on this closed cart idea that’s like, yeah, you, you gotta buy it between this window or else whatever, you lose bonuses or the price goes up or, or, or whatever. When you have a membership, I mean some people keep like our membership is open year round, right? So people can come in anytime, some people only open it for certain windows. Have you seen any like best practices around how to create urgency if you leave it open year round? Do you, do you recommend one way or the other? Like how have you navigated that with mem different types of membership sites?
JM (15:31):
Yeah, it’s totally, I’ve seen done both ways and it’s totally either one’s totally legitimate. I do have my preference in what I do as well as what I’ve, I’ve done that’s done well. And it’s sort of essentially to leverage the urgency factor, especially when you launch the membership site to get your core membership base. Cuz remember, because your membership site does start upside down, you wanna get as quickly as possible to the point where you have enough recurring revenue coming in to offset all the overhead that it takes to run a really good membership site. And I don’t just mean expenses, there’s not a ton of expenses attached to running a membership site. The biggest expense is gonna be your time or your team’s time, depending upon how you’re doing that.
RV (16:09):
Cuz in terms of finite and infinite, that’s the other problem here is when you create a course, you have a finite expense, you create the course and you’re done. When you create a membership site, you have the infinite, the infinite expense
JM (16:22):
JM (17:01):
But my founding membership launch for my membership site, I did the full month of September. And so I, when this is recently, you know, I recently launched my own membership site after doing this for other people enough times that I wanted one my own. But I did that for the full month of September. And so I, throughout that month, I could just emphasize that, hey, this is a founding membership opportunity. A some people are just attracted to the idea of being an early adopter because they know they get to help shape a product. There are plenty of people who are not right. There are plenty of people who say, Nope, I’m not an early adopter, I’m gonna come back when it’s done. But I typically like to reward the early adopters as well by offering a founding membership price. Now with the membership site, I do think you have to be really careful about discounts.
JM (17:39):
They can get really complicated with the exception of when you launch it, when you launch it, you sort of have this one time opportunity to say like, Hey, here’s the normal price of membership and here’s the founding membership price. And my, what I would do here then is actually only offer the founding membership discount on annual membership. And so, for example, thrive School Pro, my membership is a hundred dollars a month or a thousand a year, but during my founding membership launch, it was $500 for the year for founding membership. And so that got a lot of these like highly invested members to join, establish the core foundation of the, of the membership of the group. And so that’s one of the things I would recommend. In terms of urgency beyond that, I do think you need to look at how a membership site fits into your full product strategy.
JM (18:24):
And so yes, urgency self for sure, but a membership site is not about converting someone from being on the fence or not knowing who you are to being, you know, all in a membership is really about nurturing your raving fans, your super fans. And so the gateway product or multiple gateway products, I do think that is a great way to really lean on urgency of having a course or a book or a workshop that’s only available for a short period of time, leaning into that, getting people into that experience. But then it’s much easier, again, for people to buy a product with a finite promise and then be able to like get that experience and choose from then if they want to go further into your membership site. So I, I’m a fan of what you’re doing, Laurie, which is keep your membership open all the time. With the exception of having a founding membership launch I can share a real life example with some numbers. Would that be helpful in terms of like Sure. How these products kinda fit into each other?
RV (19:16):
Yeah,
JM (19:16):
So in September when I knew that I was launching my membership site, at this point, I’d already scaled my flagship product so that it was doing very well. I was funding my lifestyle and I had, you know, I had a bestselling book and another gateway products in the pipeline. Then at this point I did a couple you partner workshops. So I wrote it to my own audience, but I also convert Kit asked me to come teach a workshop to their audience about my seven figure school strategy. So they’re like kind of pro, I had to put a big pause here. They’re proc creators,
RV (19:55):
You do have four kids, so you’re a procreator also.
JM (19:57):
I’m a procreator, I’m a procre and I’m a professional.
RV (19:59):
Yeah, you’re you’re a double a double procreator.
JM (20:02):
I’m a double dipper. Yeah, for sure. But convert side, so I taught this free workshop and then in the workshop I met, I kind of explained this concept of having these three core products, gateway membership with flagship. And then I said, Hey, let me create a gateway product for you live as a demo just to show you how easy this is. So I, of course, I planned this, right? So I created, I opened convert IT commerce, and I created a little order form and I said, okay, here’s the product. It’s called five Figure Flagship Earn $10,000 in the next 30 days from your existing expertise by creating and selling a flagship product. It’s a hundred dollars. And then I put a little image on it, just a slide, and then I dropped a link in that chat and I said, this is for real and it’s for sale and it’s, I’m teaching it live next week.
JM (20:45):
And out of that workshop, there were a little, a little over 300 people there, 35 bought the workshop right then. And so I had made over $3,000 live from that workshop. Who bought that course of the 35 who bought that course? Nine of them in my follow up with them upgraded from $400 to my, my founding membership offer for my membership site. So remember it was, it was $500 a year, but I said, Hey, you already paid a hundred for this course. I’m gonna credit that towards this. This is a campaign just for those people. So nine of them upgraded to my membership site, one of them upgraded to my accelerator program for $10,000. So that one workshop that I taught, that audience of 300 people made me over $20,000 very quickly in terms of when you start looking at recurring revenue and the fact that many of those customers are still in my pipeline. Another one I just noticed just on my membership last week, even though that workshop was several months ago. So this is kind of, that’s just one example, but I think you can see now how the products, the products, the urgency really play into each other. It’s not just the membership site. There really has to be ecosystem.
RV (21:47):
Yeah. So let’s talk about that for a second. Yeah, that, what you’re describing there is like a concept lifetime value, right? Customer lifetime value, L t v, which is what Yeah. You know, very sophisticated digital marketers and people understand that. It’s like, okay, the, the, the whatever, the 35 people that bought you a hundred dollars, but then nine of ’em upgraded from there and then one of ’em upgraded to to $10,000. How do you calculate lifetime value and and how do you utilize that when you’re managing a membership site?
JM (22:27):
Yeah, so I mean, the civil way of calculating left hand value is, it’s easier said than done. You know, first of all, it’s just saying like, how much has someone paid you over time and adding it up. You know, I some of this Stripe, like if you’re using Azure Hanger Pro, they includes some of this data in there. I actually have a custom, you know, I call it a people profits pipeline, essentially a custom CRM or custom way to track my customers. That’s, I built a notion and that tool, basically, I have a, this is a little nerdy, but I have a Zap set up with Zapier that says whenever someone buys something, it automatically updates their lifetime value there. Now, I’ve seen some people do this really well and convert Kit and other email service providers and just having all your data there.
JM (23:09):
But lifetime value is one of the ones that I wanted to pull out, especially because I do have an actual direct outreach sales strategy to sell into my accelerator program. And so it’s not just email marketing funnels, there’s this other piece. But then the other way, the other way to look at it then, of course is to say, okay, but then what’s the average value of a subscriber? Cause if you can look at a campaign like what I just described, and if you can do the math on how many subscribers and what’s the total value, and if you can come up with a dollar value per, like your average quality email subscriber, what they’re worth to you in your business, well then all of it makes it lot easier to decide where to invest deal marketing money. I will say all of that is true, everything I just said, and even though I know how to do all that stuff, I really try not to get distracted by most of that.
JM (23:55):
And I try to keep it super simple for my clients and myself, which is that of those three core products, my gateway product, every dollar that I generate from my gateway product is my sales and marketing budget. And so my goal is not actually to make money from my gateway product, it’s basically to say whether it’s a book or a course or a workshop, when the goal of that gateway product is to create customers not cash. And so when that money comes in, great, that’s what I can use now to either partner with other affiliates and pay commission or to sponsor a newsletter to get featured. I don’t do a lot of paper click ads, but that’s something else you could do with that strategy. And then my, my flagship program is primarily how I fund my lifestyle. And the goal of the membership then is that funds sort of the core infrastructure of your business, your ability to hire, to scale things like that. And so that’s like super simple and any accountants or bookkeepers listen this are, are just like, oh my gosh, how do you put that on a p and l? That’s way too simple and Yep. Skipping all the complicated stuff. Yeah. But I, it really helps. I find when you’re selling these products to think about, especially when you’re starting from scratch, to think about how
RV (24:55):
Do you calculate the value of the email subscriber?
JM (24:59):
Well, I mean, candidly, I don’t, I don’t do that a lot. I mean, technically, yeah, I’ve done this for clients, I’ve done this in the past when I was a, like a full-time fractional chief marketing officer. And so the way you would calculate that essentially is, is look at, look at a period of time. I mean, typically it’s a long period of time. Look at your total revenue and divided by number of subscribers. And you know that the reality is that 80 to 90% of your email subscribers, they never bought anything from you. So they’re obviously gonna throw that math off. But even if you say, okay, wait a minute, a subscriber, a quality target subscriber to me is worth two or $3 when all of a sudden, or maybe $5, now all of a sudden it’s easier to make decisions about how you’re gonna get your leads.
RV (25:39):
Mm-Hmm. Interesting.
JM (25:41):
But I don’t wanna mislead you. I don’t, I don’t do that, all that tracking myself in my business.
RV (25:44):
Yeah, no. Well the, they and I know you’re kind of just in terms of running your own membership site, you’re newer to, newer to that, newer to that party. But it’s really interesting to see you doing that and to hear some of the data of how you’re kind of getting this up and running, which is cool. And so the, talk to me about free trials. So this is another real common thing that I think you, you see, right? Is either a free trial or try it for a dollar for 30 days or seven days. Have you seen those strategies work? Do they work well? Do they work not so well? Do they work only if you do it in a certain way? Like yeah. Tell me about the trial trial period.
JM (26:31):
Well, the reality is, is we’re talking about this right now. Subscription products have been on for a long time. And so the average modern consumer has subscription fatigue. You know, you’ve got Subscri, you’re subscribed to like Netflix and Amazon Prime, and I mean, you know, your utility company, of course that one’s been around for a long time, but you’ve got all these different things that you’re paying for on a regular basis that are the mean that once upon a time you could sell very differently. In the early days of membership sites, there was a lot of like leading with a 30 day trial, getting people in there, they forget about it, now they’re a customer. Well, if the goal of your membership website is to create raving super fans, your goal is not to get people to become a customer by accident, right?
JM (27:14):
So there is a way to use free trials, but I just wanna put that disclaimer in there, that sort of, the way that a lot of people used to do it doesn’t really work anymore, nor do I recommend it. But there’s a, one of my favorite newsletters, I can’t even pronounce it, I think it’s called ari, but it’s academic, it’s an acronym for academic research in your hands, A R I Y H. But he dove into like the, there’s actual studies on pre-trial link. And what they found was that the order trials actually had a higher a higher effect on sales and retention, specifically seven day trials. What they found was if it’s a longer trial, people are nervous that they’re gonna forget it. And so it actually hurts your sales. But also then even if they do forget it, and then it automatically when used, they’re more likely to either cancel asper refund, but a shooter trial gives someone to say, yeah, I’ll try this this week.
JM (28:04):
And so it is a great way to get customers. I what I do is typically I use, I use free trials as an opportunity to introduce urgency to get people from a gateway product to a membership product. So like for example, I don’t do any public free trials, but what I’ll do is say like, Hey, when once you buy a gateway product, like a course, then included in that is a complimentary 30 day membership in Thrive School Pro. And that is essentially a free trial. That’s one way to do it. One of the most profitable ways we grew PLA University was we did have paid ads going to a funnel for a $1 10 day trial. Now, there’s two reasons I love this. One is it’s a short trial, and so people know going into it like, yeah, that’s, that’s realistic. Like, I’m not gonna forget, forget about it. I’m gonna actually give this thing a shot, see if I like it, stick around
RV (28:50):
Or 10 days the second one, 10 day trial.
JM (28:52):
10, yeah, yeah, we did a 10 day. The second thing I like about that is that it’s a dollar. It’s not free. That means there’s actually some money changing hands, but it’s not much. But it also means we’re actually getting real life payment information cuz we’re free trials. People will often put in fake credit, like fake payment information, but the $1 trial, it’s like we actually charge ’em, they have 10 days and then it turns into a regular membership. And that was very effective.
RV (29:17):
Yep. Yeah, that’s, that’s interesting. So I got one other question for you. I knew our time was gonna sort of fly by be before I do that you know, you’ve talked about some of the things, some of the things that you do and teach people in terms of membership site, like specific where should people, where should we send people and connect them if they wanna learn more about what you’re up to? John,
JM (29:40):
Thank you so much for asking Roy. I’m honored to be here and I wanted to share some of this. So I set up a special website just for you, Rory. Nice. It’s Rory loves memberships.com. Rory loves memberships.com. You do love memberships, right?
RV (29:53):
Rory? I do love, I do love memberships. We are okay. We’re, I mean, I think of us as our real, I would say our real expertise is like coaching. That was, you know, we have built an eight figure company before Phoebe Brand Builders group will be our second. But coaching and membership have a lot of similarities. Coaching is less scalable digitally you know, it’s, it’s much more people intensive, but Yes. Yeah, but
JM (30:17):
You’re still a subscription based coaching, which is very similar.
RV (30:20):
We are, yeah. A lot of the, a lot of the mechanics are very much the same. Yep.
JM (30:24):
Yeah, I love that. Yeah. So if you go to rory loves membership.com, you can download a free copy of a book I wrote could always be teaching that goes into this in more detail. But I’m also teaching at works, a live workshop there on turning your wisdom into wealth on how these different products play into each other that we talked about today. How does the Flasher product play to the gateway product play in the membership? Which do you do first? How do you scale them? And so that’s totally free Rory for anybody listening to this. So Rory loves memberships.com.
RV (30:53):
Cool. So we’ll link, we’ll link that up in the show notes and over on our website and everything. So one last question for you, John. One of the things that you guys did at Platform University, which is very, very rare is you sold or in this case Michael sold the membership site. That’s unusual. It’s unusual to see like, you know, people don’t often buy someone other creator’s video course because it’s very much connected to that person. So you guys were able to create an asset that was a brand that was sort of beyond just, just Michael. Obviously Michael was a big part of that, but you know, do you have any keys around scaling a membership beyond just like the original founder or the original brand? And like how do you go about, how do you go about doing that and setting that up? Because when you do that, it actually creates an asset that would be sellable so that, that has enterprise value, which is one of the big potential payoffs compared to Yeah. You know, a course that’s just tied directly to a course creator. How’d you do that?
JM (32:03):
Well, so now you’re tapping into my secret mission because when I was hired by Michael Hya Clocking University, I had a public mission, which is hello meet John Mes. He’s the brand director and dean of PLO University, and he now runs this thing and serves up our students whole time. I actually was a student originally, so it was a cool story of sort of like from Success student to the dean. That was my public title. My secret mission was I was hired to help separate platform university from being attached to Michael Hyatt’s brand to sell. That was explicit from the beginning. And so that was a huge part of, of my job behind the scenes for a long period of time. At this point, we’re talking about a multimillion dollar membership site with its own massive audience separate from Michael Hyatt’s audience. And so because of that, that means like we’re, this was, this was a slow process but it meant looking at the content strategy and finding out, okay, how much of this content is dependent on Michael itself and minimizing that as much as possible.
JM (33:01):
So we switched from having a hamster wheel of live content to creating a core curriculum and then recording all of that in a two day video shoot with guests that we flew in from all over to interview. And then Michael interviewed the guests for those interviews. And actually the, there was 13 interviews and the first and the 13th was actually me. It was sort of like we, Michael and I were in the book ends of like interviewing each other sort of Mm, which helped set me up in that role. But also every single one of those masterclass videos, we then created screening videos. They’d that when in detail on that subject that were, that Michael was never part of. And so we either had other people fly in, sometimes we had members of our team teach them. Sometimes I taught it, but we really just diversified the, the talent pool of who was teaching the content.
JM (33:45):
And then we took off the hamster wheel. Now all of a sudden it was all of our job to run the membership site was, was get new members in, serve the current members direct into the core curriculum and do regular weekly group live q and a coaching calls. And that was really a huge part of the process so that by the time we hired a broker and we were negotiating with different people to who were interested in buying the business, we’d already answered a lot of the questions that people were gonna ask about. Like, but what about Michael? And Michael was like, Michael could honestly say, he was like, I literally haven’t touched Pop University in more than two years and it’s still made over a million a year in revenue. Like that was, he was at that point where I was running the whole thing and he could, I mean, he knew of a financial and all that kinda stuff, but he was not involved in the day to day of that, which is really what convinced ultimately to have multiple people at the table who wanted to buy it. And then Pete Vargas was the one who ultimately struck a deal, bought Platform University and it became his
RV (34:38):
Yeah, wild. What an interesting what a really cool, really, really cool case study. And you know, that’s a, that’s a very unique potential feature of building membership sites. And just, and then giving life to people’s personal brands. Right now, here you are on your own teaching people how to do this, and that’s inside a brand builder’s group. We’ve, we’re, we’re raising up all many personalities. I mean, you were the primary one at Platform University, but like all of our strategists, you know, we’re constantly pushing forward and they genuinely get to know the content better than me because they spend more time in a more specific area and, and they just do it over and over, you know, like a specific area with clients and they, they actually really, really develop. It’s a really, really cool thing and gives life to other people. So I love that. Well, thank you for this, John. Thanks for sharing this, this. Oh,
JM (35:32):
It’s my
RV (35:32):
Pleasure. Really cool stuff, man. Congratulations on starting your Journey, your own membership site. So that’s, that’s fun. We’ll be, we’ll be cheering you on and watching you and wishing for the best my friend. So take care and, and keep going.
JM (35:47):
Thank you, Roy. Please keep up the good work.