Ep 403: How to Set Your Fees | Mitch Matthews Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
All right, guys. We are going to talk about how to set your fees. In other words, how to be well paid as a speaker, coach, consultant, author, who also does speaking, coaching, and consulting. But this is a conversation specifically designed for what we call the expert community. That person who is trading their content, right via coaching, consulting, speaking, writing, content, creating for money. And ultimately, this is to help you make more money so that your, your message gets more out into the world. At the end of the day, I believe that most of you who are listening to this are driven by mission and purpose, and you want to make money as a bri, as a byproduct of doing really good work. But at the same time, if you do really good work, then you should be paid like you do really good work.
AJV (00:56):
And for many of us there, a reason you’re not getting paid like you should is because you don’t have the confidence or the conviction to charge what you should. And that’s what this conversation is about today. So at Brand Builders Group we believe that there are four categories, sorry, five categories missed. One, there are five categories that really will help you decipher how do you set your fees? So we could talk about things philosophically or in theory, we could share best practices. That’s not what this is about today. What this is about today or what are the five categories that you need to evaluate yourself in to know how to set your fees. All right? And each one of these, I just want you to rank yourself on a scale of one to 10, one being not existent, 10 being crushing it out of this world, killing it.
AJV (01:53):
That’s what we’re talking about. So high level here are the five categories that we’re gonna go through. Credibility, content, delivery, right? Your presentation style, right? Stage presence, we could call it that. Marketing materials and reach, right? So I’ll say ’em again. Credibility, content, delivery, marketing materials, and reach high level. That’s what we’re going after here. So I’m also trying to keep this 10 minutes or less. So we gotta crush, we gotta roll. First one, credibility. Again, rate yourself on each of these on a scale of one to 10. One being I don’t have any in the market. 10 being I’m a household name, right? So this is what we’re talking about. A 10 is like a PhD or a global thought leader. These are people who have viral TED Talks, New York Times, bestselling books, people who are regularly on some of the biggest media and podcasts, your mainstream, right?
AJV (02:47):
That’s a 10. One being is you’ve got no specific expertise or track record in the public. Now, you may have a lot of hidden credibility. In other words, only a few people know about what you’ve done. But man, for those who know about it, they know it really well, and you’ve done an excellent job for them. But that’s a one, right? So this is credibility in the known marketplace. One to 10, one is going to be a lower fee. A 10 is going to mean a higher fee, right? And we’re gonna do this five times. So I want you to take an average at the very end, right? So as you jot down these numbers, so let’s just say you give yourself a five in credibility. I want you to take your average of each of these. And at the end of the, you know, episode, I want you to go, Hey, what’d you average, right?
AJV (03:37):
Did you average a five? Did you average a seven? Did you average a three? That’s what I want you to do. So that’s credibility. Content is the next one. Rate yourself on a scale of one to 10. 10 is someone who’s got award-winning ideas, original research. You are regularly referenced in the media or in the mainstream, but people come to you for this piece of content. You are known for this thing, right? You have a truly original thought leadership in this area, okay? That also means that you’ve got well-documented frameworks and IP that could be in the form of books, courses, speeches, TED talks, all the things. But it’s documented as yours, referenced as yours. That’s a 10 a one. As someone who has loosely constructed ideas, but no specific frameworks, f frameworks or organization. There’s no unique methodology or processes. And if you were just honest with yourself, these are somewhat largely repackaged ideas that already exist somewhere else.
AJV (04:44):
In other words, nothing original, truly yours yet, yet, okay? So give yourself a ranking of scale of one to 10, one being got none, 10 being I own this. Okay? That’s content. So you’ve got two. Now. Now, let’s go into number three, delivery. This is, again, I kind of said this earlier, stage presence, right? What is that? You know personality or charisma that comes across on camera, on stage in front of people one-on-one, right? 10 being you are
AJV (05:37):
But it’s like people are constantly commenting on the delivery of your presentation, of your content, right? One would be, you don’t get that
AJV (06:33):
That’s with websites, demo videos, slides, workbooks, resource guides your social media, right? It does not mean you’ve got to have the fanciest, most expensive stuff, but it looks good, right? It looks well presented. I just came off of seeing Taylor Swift in the ERAS tour. Now, she spent millions and millions and millions and dollars. I’m not saying that’s what it is, but man, it looks well thought out. It is well planned. It is important how things look and come together. You can tell that. So is that yours or are things mismatched together and you’re just scraping by? And that’s okay. You don’t have to be at a 10 here, right? But this is, this is just helping you go, man. It’s like, you know, people always say, don’t judge a book by their cover. Well, unfortunately, sometimes they do. They go, man, that looks so good.
AJV (07:21):
It must be as good as it looks. So gotta take some of that in. I’m not saying I agree with all of that. I’m just talking about where, where, where we are here in the world. And number one is that, I mean, you’re just, you’re first starting out and it’s version 1.0 of everything. You’ve got things in word docs and PowerPoints, and you’re using your own stuff on Canada. That doesn’t mean it looks bad, it just means things are kind of compiled together and mismatched, right? That will affect your fees and pricing. It just will. So let’s just call it what it is. Where do you fall on a scale of one to 10? Always knowing that we get to improve at every level, right? We get to do better then reach. So reach is how many people do you reach?
AJV (08:04):
How many people do you have access to? How many people follow you on social media? E email list, subscribe to your podcast, how many people you are in front of on a consistent basis, right? So a 10 would be you’re someone who reaches millions on the regular, right? This is in some sort of controlled medium as well, not just on social media, but you’ve got a large email list. You’ve got a huge amount of subscribers and downloads to your podcast. And you’ve got social media, right? So when you think about this, you probably have hundreds of thousands of people on an email list, hundreds of thousands of people on social media. You have access to reach through main media other top known, well-known podcasts TV shows, radio shows et cetera. But that would be a 10, right? A one would be you’ve
AJV (08:55):
Got no email list. You don’t even know how to make an email list.
AJV (09:39):
I only have like 9,500 people that follow me on Instagram, maybe 15,000 all in on social media. So this is not all about having a huge social media file. I don’t care to have that. But we have a fairly large email list, which I do care a lot about. I have access to lots of large audiences through other people’s podcasts and stages, but I would not rate myself anywhere near a 10. I would say I’m, in terms of reach, I’m somewhere like a six or a seven, right? And I do this for a living, right? But is, is being honest with myself to go through each of these. It will help, you know, one where you are today and in what of these categories can you quickly improve on. Like, I could improve on reach if I so desired, right? I’ve spent a ton of time and money and resources over the last year to upgrade my personal marketing materials.
AJV (10:26):
That was an area I was focusing on. My content, I feel like is world class, right? I do believe you should believe in yourself, and I believe in myself. Credibility. I have good credibility, right? Can always be more, we have original research, we’ve spent the money to get original data, like we’ve done that work, but it’s like where you score also lets, you know, where could you do more? Where could you get help? Where could you get coaching? Where, where do you need to put some attention is also really helpful. So here’s how I would base across, if you averaged ones across the board, I would just say a starting point would be, you are probably charging for, this is for a speaker fee or coaching fees. I’m just calling it for an hour, right? But if you’re charging, or sorry, if you’re averaging a one, you’re probably charging in the hundreds, not the thousands in the hundreds, right? And then just for the sake of time, just to kind of give you some averages here, if you average a five, right? So if you’re averaging fives across the board, you’re probably charging somewhere between thirty five hundred and fifty, five hundred, right? That’s a five. So at one would be you’re charging hundreds of dollars, right? And then the twos, threes and fours are those low thousands. And then as you average out of five, you’re probably charging somewhere between, and this, I’m looking at an hour here. This is kind of like for a speaker fee,
AJV (11:52):
Right? For $3,000, right? So if you were gonna do that for coaching, that might 3000 might be your first coaching package, right? Then again, trying to give you some baselines here. If you’re, try, if you’re averaging in the eights then you’re probably at a keynote fee. If you have eights across the board, you’re probably charging somewhere between 25,000 and $30,000 as a coach or a consultant. That means your package is probably somewhere between 25,000 and $30,000 if you’re averaging the eights. Now, if you were averaging tens across the board and you’re just like, you know, pit bull, pit bull is to worldwide himself, right? Like a speaker fee for you would be like a hundred thousand dollars of speech, right? You’re talking about like presidential rates here. You’re talking about Brene brown rates and Mel Robbins rates, Tony Robb rates who are more, right?
AJV (12:45):
Those are even more than this in some cases. But if you’re a coach or a consultant, right? Those are your packages, right? You could be upwards of the a hundred thousand dollars packages of your tens across the board. So this is how I want you to think about this. It helps, you know, one, what’s your baseline, where you are today in these categories, credibility, content delivery, marketing materials, and reach. And then I’m just giving you some averages. If you averages one across the board, then you’re in the hundreds. If you’re five, you’re in, you know, averaging five, somewhere between the three and 5,500 range. And then eights, you’re up there, you’re getting up there. It’s like that’s that 25 to 30 range. And if you’re, tens are across the board at six figures and up per speech or per package. So how to set your fees back to this, it’s like there are five categories that we believe are really important for you to consider to have some unbiased internal look at.
AJV (13:38):
What’s my content, right? How original is it? How forward thinking of it is it what’s my delivery style, right? How, how much have I invested into making sure that I know how to deliver it? Well, marketing materials, your reach. And there’s so many different things to be looking at here. And I hope this is kind of gives you a baseline. It’ll help you know where to start, where to improve. And also as those numbers, those averages increase. So do your fees. So how do you set your fees? You ask yourself, how credible am I? How good is my content? How good is my delivery? How good is my marketing material? And then how, how much reach do I have? And those are the five categories to help you set your fee. So go set your fees, go raise your fees, and go get well paid. We’ll see you next time.
Ep 401: What You Need to Know About Becoming a Bestselling Author | Nena Madonia Oshman Episode Recap
RV (00:02):
Book deals, publishing bestseller lists. These are some of my favorite, favorite things to talk about. I mean, legitimately, this has become one of my, you know, passion projects to understand as an author. And you may not know this we, we say this sometimes, but a lot of times on this podcast, we don’t talk about book launches specifically. But as at the time of this recording, we have helped 14 of our clients become New York Times or Wall Street Journal bestselling authors. So 14 times we’ve done that. We’re actually in the middle of another launch this week. So who is a candidate for probably a Wall Street Journal. And so we, we might be increasing that number. And we know a lot about this, and we know a lot about selling books because when we go after bestseller lists we’re, we don’t let people buy their own books that, you know, some people would do that and just to try to hit a bestseller list.
RV (00:58):
We don’t do that. We, we teach people how to sell books. And so what I wanna talk about here is a couple key things to know about how to get the book deal specifically. And then also understanding a little bit about book launches. So the very first thing, and th this is a what has become a famous story around brand builders group. And I heard this story, third person, so I don’t actually know how true this story is, but I think it is true. And even if it’s not, the lesson is totally accurate. And as the way the story goes, Robert Kiyosaki, who is the bestselling author of several books, but became really famous for his book, rich Dad, poor Dad, apparently, was at, at an event one time, and this journalist came up to him and, you know, they were in a conversation and apparently at some point, she mentioned in the conversation, she said, you know, I don’t, I don’t personally think your book is that well written.
RV (02:01):
I, and she was just kind of saying like, it, it’s you, you know, obviously you sell a lot of books, but it, it actually feels like it could be written better. And Robert’s response apparently was, he said, well, that’s okay, because you have to remember, it’s not called New York Times Best Writing Author, it’s New York Times Best Selling Author,
RV (03:04):
And your writing had to have personally influenced in a deep way, other people who were in the group. But this was this amazing group that we came to. I posted about it on Instagram, you can go check it out if you wanna read a little bit about it and see some of the, the highlights. But anyways, we were there and, you know, talking about the, the importance of this, right? And, and that you have to sell books because writers write, editors edit publishers, publish distributors, distribute retailers, retail, but nobody actually sells the book. Like nobody has the job of saying, I’m gonna sell this book. I’m gonna make sure a lot of people buy this book. And it is really ironic that no one has that job. And so who does that job fall back on? That job falls back on you, the author, the messenger as, as we refer to you as Mission Driven Messenger.
RV (03:57):
So that falls back on you. And so that is one of the 14 classes that we teach at Brand Builders Group, right? We’ve got these 14 classes in our, that make up our curriculum. One of ’em is called Bestseller Launch Plan, and we’ve taken a lot of people through that class. And we’ve had 14 clients become bestselling authors Louis Howes and Amy Porterfield, and Ed Mylet and Eric Thomas, et the hiphop preacher Tom and Lisa Bilyeu. You know, these are some of the, some of our more well-known names. But then we’ve had other clients hit the list that are, you know, more like up and commerce. But regardless, the, the big epiphany, the big realization that you have to have if, if you wanna become a bestselling author, is that you have to sell well, and I would say there’s, there’s actually two things here.
RV (04:44):
The first is realizing that becoming a bestselling author is about sales. Okay? It’s not it, it is also about writing, or it can be about writing that sometimes books take off and hit the bestseller list because they’re really well written and people share them around. But one of the data points that I shared with the group this mastermind group, I’ll, I’ll share it, I’ll share it with you here. Because our, our team analyzed this piece of data was that of all the books that have hit the New York Times bestseller list on the advice how to list specifically, it’s a weekly list. 2023 year to date at the time of this recording, that 98% of those books hit the list in the first week, which means and actually I think that was for the previous 24 months is what we looked at.
RV (05:36):
So the, the no, actually it was year to date. It was 2023 year to date. So what that means is people aren’t even reading the book, right? Like when it hits the bestseller list, it’s not, cuz people have read the book, the book isn’t even out yet. So those are the instant New York Times bestsellers, they, they happen in the first week. That’s because of all the pre-sales that happen. And that’s one of the big strategies that we help authors with is legitimate ethical incentive based strategies to help get people excited about your book. And so you generate all the pre-sales and all the pre-sales count on week one. And so that’s why most books that hit the bestseller list hit the first week. But it sort of dispels the myth that it’s about, you know, writing a great book. Now, you should still write a great book cuz that’s what you’re doing.
RV (06:21):
And that’s if you want to change lives you should write a great book. And also because over the long tail, which is really the game to play, is not just hitting a bestseller list for a week or two, but really having a perennial bestseller that sells hundreds of thousands or millions of copies that’s entirely about writing a, a a, a great written book. So, couple couple ideas there. The, the, the second thing that I wanna talk about on this topic related to getting, getting big book deals and doing book launches is that in our world, social media, what we have learned is that social media and PR are not the answer to selling lots of books. They’re not typically that is the only strategy that authors have. And a lot of publishers, and we’re starting to talk to a lot of publishers, a lot of publishers are actually starting to refer people to us.
RV (07:16):
Just cuz our track record is getting out there, right? I mean, we had two books last year that pre-sold over a hundred thousand units. Two of our clients did that. And you know, we’ve, we’ve got a lot of, a lot of clients that are doing these really great launches and they’re following a system, right? They’re not buying their own books, it’s, they’re not faking things. They’re, they’re just following our, our proven system and methodology to do that. And it’s working. And part of why our system works is because we know that social media and PR is not the way to sell a lot of books. I’m not, now don’t hear what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t use social media. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do pr. What I’m saying is that that ranks very, very low on the list of things that actually sells and moves books.
RV (08:01):
So we all tend to think, oh, you know, somebody has, you gotta have millions of followers to become a bestselling author. You don’t. I’m case in point, I’ve never had millions of followers, I’ve never had millions of followers. I’ve never been one of the top social media presence, you know, one of the, you know, people on social media. So it’s really more about your offline relationships. It’s really what it’s about is your offline relationships. It’s very difficult to get people online to just buy anything. And the same is true for pr, right? I’ve been on national TV multiple times. It’s a great thing. You should do it, you should try to do it, it should be a part of your strategy. But if you think that getting on national TV is gonna make you a bestselling author, let me just save you the, the, the heartbreak.
RV (08:46):
It’s not like there, there are times where, you know, crazy things happen and phenomenons take off. Or if you’re able to be on national TV every day for like a few weeks or something like that you know, or if you’re a celebrity and you get on every major TV show, great. But, you know, I’ve been on, I’ve been on Fox and Friends example, we’ve had clients be on the Today Show. Good Morning America. Very often we’ll see that these huge national appearances, these huge appearances will, I mean often if the a thousand books would be a lot like moving a thousand books on a national TV segment would be a good number. But that’s nowhere near what it takes to, to become a New York Times bestselling author. At least not according to our data, which is part of what our team is doing, is we’re trying to understand how many units does it take to hit the New York Times?
RV (09:36):
And it, it takes a ton, a ton more than that. So you know, social media can be good, PR can be good. But we, the, the number we use just to share it with you, is 0.001%. That’s what we estimate is the percentage of somebody’s audience on social media that will convert to be book buyers. Which means for every million followers you have, you’ll sell a thousand books. You say that again, for every million followers you have, we estimate that that’ll move about a thousand books. The reason is because when you post on social, not a million people see it, right? The biggest problem is that it’s not a million people who see it. If you have a million people, you might only have, you know, a hundred thousand people see that. Of the a hundred thousand that see that a very small fraction will actually consume the entire piece of content, then a fraction of that would actually go to a page and then a fraction of that would actually buy.
RV (10:30):
And so it gets whittled down very, very quickly. Now we do use social media like our clients our private clients, we give them a 75 day like social media posting template because you have to do it. You still have to, to, to sell books in every way possible, but social media and PR are not gonna be the things that move the needle to becoming massive bestselling authors. You gotta use offline mechanisms and offline relationships and, and live events and all of these various things that we, we, we do. So that’s the second thing I want you to know about this. And then the last thing, and, and this has become a A B B G mantra, there’s a few things that we have around here that we call B B G mantras because we say them so often. And if you’ve been following me or AJ or our company for any amount of time, you’ll hear us say things like your most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were, right?
RV (11:22):
That is one of our B B G mantras. That’s an original quote that we have shared that has become a part of our culture. We also say, if you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. That’s a B B G mantra. One of our BBG mantras is we say build relationships before you need them. Build relationships before you need them. So we have all of these mantras that we just are, it’s cuz it’s, we’re repeating ’em over and over and over for people to get well. We have an important B bg mantra as it relates to selling a lot of books. And as it relates specifically to bestseller launch plan. And I wanna share it with you here, and I want you to get a pen and write this down. Whether, and, and whether you’re a first time author or an experienced author, whether this is you know, your your first book, your second book or your hundredth book, whether you’re traditionally published and you have a literary agent and you know, a big, a big publishing company or if you’re self-published or if you’re using a hybrid publisher. And we, we have done all three. We use, we are, we have clients that do all three. There’s advantages and disadvantages to all three of them, but regardless of what topic you write about, what the format of your book is, the length, your experience, level of an author, this is something that you really need to know right up front and it, and it matters tremendously. Bestseller lists don’t change lives.
RV (12:50):
Bestseller lists don’t change lives, but books do. Bestseller lists don’t change lives, but books do. We love aiming for the bestseller list. It’s important. It, it, it matters in some arenas, which I’ll talk about in a a second, but the ultimate measure of the success of a book is not how much money was made, how many units were even sold, right? It is the, the impact that it made in the world, the impact that it made on other people’s lives. Ultimately, the end goal of a book should be that, right? And it’s not about the author and it’s not about the publisher and it’s not about a bestseller list, it’s about the readers. That’s what writing books is all about. It’s about the readers and it’s about creating a transformation in their life. And that is the ambitious, aspirational, worthwhile goal and pursuit that I think you should have as an author.
RV (13:47):
And as I said, we’ve, we’ve done this several times, 14 times, we’ve helped clients count counting myself become a New York Times bestselling author or Wall Street Journal bestselling author. It’s a great goal to have, but it doesn’t, it doesn’t change lives, right? It might change your life, and I’ll talk about that here in a moment. But it doesn’t change anyone else’s lives. In fact, we did a study called the Trends in Personal Branding, national Research Study. And you can actually go download this for free. We spent tens of thousands of dollars to do this. If you go to rory vaden dot com and then you click on free trainings and then you scroll down, you’ll see trends in personal branding, national research study. So you can download this study. And this was a very intensive study. So this was a PhD led academic research study.
RV (14:33):
It’s empirically validated, it’s weighted to the US census. So it’s a, it’s a study of the us general population, right? And you, you know so one of the questions we asked in that study is we said of how much do each of the following factors influence your purchasing decisions, right? So this is a question we’re asking to consumers, the general American population. So for our international listeners, it may not be the same in your country, but in the US and, and we asked about all these criteria. We said if they have a YouTube channel, if they have a large social media following, if they have a podcast, if they speak for a living if they have a nice website, we listed all of these things. And there was one entire section just related to books. And it said one of the options was a, somebody has a self-published book.
RV (15:26):
Another option was someone has a traditionally published book. Another option was they are a Wall Street Journal bestselling author. And another option was they are a New York Times bestselling author. Here’s what’s fascinating, a to the average American citizen, there was zero delineation between a self-published book, a traditionally published book, a Wall Street Journal bestselling book, or a New York Times bestselling book. In other words, people on the street don’t care because they don’t know the difference. They don’t know the difference between an Amazon bestseller and a New York Times bestseller. And there’s a stark difference, but they don’t know it cuz they’re not authors and they don’t live in this world. So your customers don’t really care. What they care about is themselves. They care about can you help them. Now that said, what does matter? It does matter to be a bestselling author in among the industry, right?
RV (16:28):
Bestselling authors get higher speaking fees. They’re more likely to get booked on national tv. They’re more likely to get into to on big podcasts and to get invited to private masterminds. But they’re not more likely to, if people are not more likely to buy the that book just because that person’s a bestselling author unless they know the author, right? But that’s not because they’re bestselling author, that’s because they’ve heard of the author before. And so it is important, it’s still worthwhile as a personal brand. It’s, it’s worth a lot of money to be able to get on these big shows and get invited to these exclusive groups and speak on these big stages. That’s, that’s worth a lot, but not to your customer, right? They don’t know any difference. It just gives you more ability to get in front of more customers. So that matters.
RV (17:12):
And, and that’s what I want you to just remember, right? At the end of the day, this isn’t about bestseller lists. Best seller lists, don’t change lives. What books do. And so regardless of if you think you could be a bestselling author or whatever that number looks like to you, all authors should want to have as many people as possible read their book. That’s why you did the work of writing the book in the first place. And so I also would encourage you not to be so heartbroken or caught up or mixed up in whether or not you hit a bestseller list. If that’s a goal of yours, you should definitely talk to us, right? You should go to free brand call.com/podcast
RV (17:49):
And you should request a call with us because we know a lot about that. But whether you hit it or not is not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal for a mission-driven messenger is and should be to change lives, to help people, to serve your readers. Not to just hit bestseller list, but to actually make a difference. So I hope this helps you in your journey. If you really are interested in becoming a bestselling author, request a call or share this episode with somebody you know who is an author or wants to be an author. I think they’ll get a lot out of it. And so I hope you consider sharing it with them and we’ll catch you, catch you right back here next time on the Influential Personal Brand Podcast.
Ep 399: How To Find Your People | Phil Treadwell Episode Recap
AJV (00:03):
So I just had a pretty enlightening conversation with Phil Treadwell, who I happened to be interviewing for the influential personal brand podcast. And we got on this little bit of a side tangent talking about, you know, real estate and mortgage professionals and what they can do in today’s, you know, somewhat tumultuous unique market. And we got on this side conversation about social media that led to another side conversation, which has now led me to this conversation, but I thought it was worthy enough to make an entirely separate video about, because I think this is something we really forget. And this is a little bit about social media, but also just human interactions. So it doesn’t matter if you’re online or offline, I think this conversation is really important. I will start with the online piece because that is a continuation from this conversation that I had with Phil Chadwell on our podcast.
AJV (01:04):
But here, here’s kind of where it stemmed from is that as you’re thinking about how to use social media for your business, right? And we talked a lot about how social media is a tool, and like any tool, it can be used for a variety of reasons, good reasons, healthy reasons, bad reasons, unhealthy reasons. But it’s a tool, right? And we have to treat it like a tool. And in this particular instance, it’s a business tool. And here’s kind of where this all started, is that social media, it’s a tool. But like with any tool, you have to ask yourself first, why am I using this tool and how can this tool be used? So I’ll say that again. Why am I using this tool? And then how can this tool be used? So through the lens of social media, what we talked about is, you know, if you just ask yourself for a second, for the audience that you’re trying to reach, why do they get on social media?
AJV (02:11):
Do they get on for education, entertainment to stay in touch with friends and family? Do they get on to see what’s happening in, in the world and media? Or is it to shop and look up pretty things? Why do they get on, right? And I thought it was a really good example that Phil shared in our interview, and he goes, most people, as they’re sitting in line at the D M V, this is the exact example he got where he gave, we’re, we’re trying to, you know, you know, kill 15 minutes and you decided to pop on social media. Were probably not sitting there trying to go, yes, real estate professional that you are defined for me the terms and definition of amortization, right? That’s probably not what we’re doing. Now, some of you maybe it is, but in general, I think it
AJV (02:58):
Just begs the question, what is your audience doing online? And is what you are doing online appealing to them, right? So that’s the first is why is your audience getting on social media? And then the second is, how are they using it both in their personal and professional life? So why are they using it? And then how are they using it, right? And I think those are two very distinctively different questions with some similarities. And at the end of the day here’s what resonated with me is that so often as we think about social media as a business tool, we think about it as an educational tool. We think about it as a marketing tool, a branding tool a selling tool. But we forget that the heart of why most of us human beings get on social media is for human connection. Truly, yes, we find vendors, we check people out, we listen to music, we learn about, you know, media, entertainment, political things, news, whatever is happening.
AJV (04:08):
Yes, we do all of those things. We learn, we get information, and most of what we’re doing most of the time is actually checking in with people.
AJV (05:13):
And Jenny Allen is single-handedly my most favorite author of all time. And I explained this book, find Your People as a Adult Version of How To Make Friends
AJV (05:57):
This is also something that I don’t just wrestle with in my professional life or using social media or as a, you know, thinking about business. I struggle with this in my personal life as in almost 40 this year, almost 40 year old. I find that it’s really challenging to find people that I can do life with who’s in a similar life stage. Who we go through similar challenges, right? So for me, a mom of two young boys who also runs a business who’s in business with her husband, who works out of their home, where we both travel a lot, right? That’s kind of unique. And I have found it’s really hard for me. So I picked up this book cuz I was like, I need you to teach me how to make friends Jenny Allen, help me. And what I learned is that this was is this so much more than about making friends.
AJV (06:43):
This is about the human condition of we are built, we are truly built, and this is this, I’m gonna bring this all together in just a second. I promise. We are truly built to connect with people who are in proximity. And I think a little bit of that is true online and offline. And I think one of the reasons that so many of us default to online is because we have immediate proximity. It’s this thing right here that’s in our pocket all the time. And we default to that versus, you know, taking it the offline part cuz that’s harder, that’s more awkward, that’s more uncomfortable and it’s definitely more time consuming, right? But one of the things that I learned is like I was trying to do life and build friendships with, not that they’re not still my friends, but with people who don’t even live in my city.
AJV (07:30):
Some of my closest friends do not even live within a drive away from me. I have to get on an airplane for hours to see some of my closest friends, which is why as a human being sitting here in Nashville, I’m going, I don’t feel like I don’t have friends when I have tons of friends, but I need friends that I can walk to their house, that we run into each other at the grocery store. I need friends that I’m gonna naturally see at church or at different functions across town. I need, I need friends that there is natural crossover. In other words, it needs to be easy, it needs to be convenient, there needs to be things that we have in common. We need to be in proximity of each other if we’re gonna have that natural opportunity to do life together, to build real community.
AJV (08:16):
And so much of that has to do with proximity, convenience. But mo most importantly, it’s what we have in common. Do we go to the same grocery store, the same coffee shop? Do we go to the same church? Do our kids go to the same school? Do we live in the same neighborhood? Do we work out at the same, you know, for me, bar three class, right? It’s like, what are the things that we have in common? Because that’s where there’s natural connection. And then it hit me, the exact same thing happens online on social modi, on somo, on social media, both professionally and personally. And here’s how I’m gonna wrap this all up. My encouragement to you is that before you start talking
AJV (08:54):
About the what that you do, right, interest rates, how many sales you’ve made, how many people love you, how many flights have you been on, how many stages were you on? Like, that’s cool, that’s fine. But that does not build connection. And that’s what we’re trying to do on social media, right? Social media is the networking tool of the 21st century. It’s not meant to only be online, but it’s a starting point. But in order to build connection, it’s like, I need to get to know you. I need to know who you are where w you know, where do you live? Not like your address, but you know, like, do you live near a beach? Like for me, I live like in this, you know, foresty tree area. It’s like, I want to know the little things about you that’s a part of the human condition, the human connection that makes me wanna follow you.
AJV (09:40):
I wanna see what you’re gonna dress up for as Halloween or what you thought about the Arrows tour with the Taylor Swift concert. It’s like those are the things that are equally as important, and they may seem counterintuitive, but the who part of this, the human connection part is equal to the what part? At least 50% if not more. So as you’re thinking about social media and how do I use this as a tool and how do I use this to help separate myself and differentiate myself? The number one way that you can differentiate yourself is to actually let people go get to know you. You’re the only you there is, there’s lots of loan officers, there’s lots of attorneys, there’s lots of dentists, there’s just only one you, so who are you, right? Like, what do you like to do and what are your thoughts?
AJV (10:27):
And you know, find your own balance in there. I’m not gonna get into the weeds on that. My point is, is we wanna get to know the who. That it’s that human connection that I wanna know that there’s other people like me out there doing things I like and struggling with, things that I struggle with. And we follow people. We’re drawn to people that we have things in common with offline and online. So as you’re thinking about the, why is my audience getting on social media and how are they using it? Just don’t forget the who part of that. It’s not just about the what and the education and information that’s part of it, but it’s about the who, who are you, who are they and what do you have in common? If you like this, then go check out the full conversation that I had with Phil Treadwell and I’ll catch you next time. See you later.
Ep 397: 2 Customer Service Secrets that Will Grow Your Sales | Brittany Hodak Episode Recap
RV (00:07):
Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview. As always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions, and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to, to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do [email protected] slash pod call brand builders group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon.
RV (00:52):
The customer experience, customer secrets, customer service secrets so much to be said about that. And I have to tell, tell you that one of my favorite people ever on this topic is Brittany Hodak. And it’s not just cuz she’s a friend, and it’s not just because she’s a B B G client. I genuinely love her book and I love her experience and I love her take on customer experience and creating super fans. And she’s just awesome and so smart. And like I said, I read her book cover to cover and I fully endorse it. I did endorse it. And I, it’s, it’s, it’s phenomenal. So I hope you got a chance to go back and listen to the interview that I just did with Brittany and that you got some takeaways from that. Separate from that, it inspired me to share a couple of my favorite customer service secrets.
RV (01:47):
You know, this is, this isn’t something that I necessarily would con, I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on this. You know, I consider my expertise on the psychology of influence though, and moving people to action. And so what I wanna share with you in this lesson is two customer service secrets that will grow your sales. Two customer service secrets that will grow your sales. So customer experience, customer service, whatever you wanna call it. But specifically in the context of if you do these two things, it will help you actually grow your revenue which is definitely right inside of my wheelhouse. So number one is the concept of secret service. And I have to blatantly and boldly attribute this to John De Julius. John de Julius would be probably the number one person that I’ve learned the most from in terms of customer experience, customer service.
RV (02:46):
We love John’s philosophy of Secret Service in their whole company. We’ve, you know, I, I originally met John, I spoke at his event and then we became super fans of him and his work, and we’ve tried to incorporate that into our culture at Brand Builders Group and, and all the businesses that we’ve been a part of. And, and so here’s the difference between Secret Service and, and good customer service. Okay? Good customer service is doing is basically like being nice to people, doing things that are nice for them. But Secret Service is about doing things that are tailored for them. So it, it, secret Service requires that you learn and pay attention to the hyper-specific interest of each individual prospect or customer that you are interfacing with. All right? So a good example of this is, you know, giving out a rose to every woman who comes into your store or, you know, on Mother’s Day or to, on Valentine’s Day, let’s say it could be good customer service.
RV (03:51):
That’s a good thing. There’s definitely nothing wrong with that, that’s a great thing to do, but you’re doing the same activity for everybody, right? I mean, if, if someone comes and you say, Hey, how can I be of service today? That might be considered good customer service, but you’re doing the same thing for everyone. What’s next level though, from that is Secret Service and Secret Service is not doing good things for people. It’s doing tailored things for people and we we try to pay attention to what is going on in the lives of the people that we care about, right? So for example, one of our clients is Kiir Weimer and Kiir, if you know anything, he’s incredible. A incredible guy has an amazing story. But Kiir got into a boating accident when he was in his twenties. He ended up going to prison for it.
RV (04:44):
And then, you know, he has this, this massive turnaround story for how he transformed his life and became this very wealthy, successful real estate agent. But he couldn’t never, he, he couldn’t get accepted back into a university for years. He came outta prison. You know, he had, now he had a criminal record. He couldn’t get a job, he couldn’t get, you know, schools to accept, and he ended up getting in real estate and becoming very, very successful. And very wealthy. But like, he didn’t actually you know, he struggled to get kind of the formal things, and one of ’em was a formal education and, and finishing college and graduate school. And so it was a really more of a personal thing for him. Kira eventually got accepted into N Y U and he’s going, you know, went back to school years later and he got his degree and we sent, we saw him post about it, we heard about it, and so we sent him an N Y U sweatshirt, right?
RV (05:36):
And I mean, you would’ve thought that he won the lottery. He was so touched and so moved by that. That is Secret Service, okay? That is Secret Service. We also try to pay attention to when, when people have deaths in their family, right? We try to often do something that’s honoring to their loved one, whoever that is. Or, you know, sometimes it’s a pet, sometimes it’s a grandparent it could be a friend and just trying to be there for people. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s a little bit weird to even call this customer’s service. And it’s, and it, and its definitely weird to think of this as like, oh, this is what will, you know, you do this to grow sales. You don’t do this to grow sales, and you don’t do this to have great customer service. You do this because you care about people and you wanna make them, you wanna let them know that they’re important to you.
RV (06:30):
And so when someone’s important to you, you wanna go out of your way to make them feel special, to make them feel important, right? If they’re important to you, you wanna do things that help them feel important, that, that help make them feel important. That’s a, a part of what creates relationships and bonds, right? And, and if you know anything about Brand Builders Group, like our vision is what we call a thousand messengers. It has been since day one. We’re not trying to have, we’re not trying to be a company that sells for hundreds of millions and billions of dollars, right? Like Brand Builders Group is not a profit maximization endeavor. It’s not. We are in impact maximization endeavor, and we said we want a thousand clients. That’s what we want a thousand clients who choose to be in our monthly program that we can work with, that we can know in, in, in an intimate way that we can serve in a, in a, in a, on a deep level and that who we can be a part of their life.
RV (07:24):
And we feel like we could build a team of maybe 50 people or so that feels manageable, where we could know our team and we know them well, and we all know the clients and we recognize them, and they’re not all, you know, just strangers in a crowd, but that we’re doing life with our clients and we’re helping them succeed. And that their wins are our wins, right? We’re not going, oh, just bigger is better. That that’s just not our game. And so our clients matter, and so we wanna celebrate their wins, right? When they have a win, we wanna celebrate them. I, I, when Amy Porterfield we worked with Amy Porterfield, and I remember when she hit the New York Times bestseller list, she post, she made this awesome post about, she showed her calling her mom, telling her mom on the phone that she was a New York Times bestselling author.
RV (08:10):
And it was like such a moving moment. It was so inspiring, and it was such a great win for her. But it was a great win for us to feel like, hey, we had a part in somebody’s journey, you know, building their brand to where they, they become a New York Times bestselling author, you know, a a small part of it, but a part of it. And to go that win, her win is our win. And that moment of her sharing that with her mom is our win. And so we sent her a, a balloon of this giant, a giant balloon that was like a Congratulations, New York Times bestselling author. And then she posted that we’re not trying to get her to post on social, we’re not trying to get more money out of her. She was the past client at that point, right? Like, we already had her money.
RV (08:52):
Like it, it was, it, it’s about caring for people and, and caring for them in a hyper-specific way, in a tailored way, in a unique way. Not that you shouldn’t do good things. Not that you shouldn’t be responsive and you shouldn’t be positive and you shouldn’t smile like you shouldn do all those things. Those are good customer service, but good customer service is markedly different from good Secret service or what John de Julius calls secret service. This secret service is this idea of going be listening. First of all, it’s listening, it’s caring, it’s watching, it’s paying attention. And then just looking for these natural moments where you can intersect into people’s lives and go, man, it sure feels like something big just happened for this person. And, you know, everyone gets birthday pre, everyone gets presents on their birthday, right? Everyone gets phone calls on their birthday, everyone gets presents at Christmas time.
RV (09:48):
It’s not that you shouldn’t send gifts to someone at Christmas or at their birthday. You, you know, you should, if you can, you should. But the part that is really special is, is when you’re, when you do something, when no one else does, when it shows that you’re watching when maybe no one else is, when, when you’re going, man, I see you going through a tough time, or I see you having a huge win that, that you wanna celebrate. And, and maybe honestly, you don’t wanna celebrate it on social media because you don’t wanna look like you’re bragging or whatever, and going, but we see this, we wanna celebrate with you. It’s caring about people, right? The the best form of marketing, the best marketing strategy in the world is to care about the success of the people in your company and the success of your clients and the success of your prospects.
RV (10:36):
We’ve done things when we, we happen to be talking to a prospect who’s not even a customer, and we hear that their house gets hit by a tornado, or they lose a loved one or something. And you go, what can we do to just show them a little love? And I don’t know what the ROI is on it financially. We don’t measure that. We don’t track it, but we don’t have to because the, there’s, there’s, there’s always an r o i on service. There’s always an r o i on making, making people feel special. There’s always an ROI on making people feel seen and, and, and helping people feel heard and helping people feel important. There’s always an ROI on that. And it doesn’t have to be financial. It’s even if it’s the, the satisfaction and the meaning and the purpose that you get from your business and what you do and the way that you’re using your money.
RV (11:26):
Like, that’s really special. And, and do we do it a hundred percent of the time? No, we don’t. Like, we miss a lot of ’em. And sometimes we’re going too fast to pay attention, and, and sometimes we maybe just, maybe money is really tight and we can’t do it, or we can’t do it for everybody, right? But you, you try to choose the moments for the people that you go, man, this is someone who’s important to me, or I I want to be important to them, or I want them to be important to us. And I wanna build a relationship to go, this is beyond money, this is beyond transactions. It’s about, it’s about caring, and it’s about service. And, and the, the only part that’s secret of it is that you’re secretly watching, you’re secretly paying attention. You’re secretly going out of your way, pausing our own natural self-centeredness, just for a moment to open our eyes and be alert and awake to what are the big things going on in other people’s lives, and how can we mourn with them?
RV (12:21):
How can we celebrate with them? How can we cheer them on? How can we encourage them? How can we recognize them and just make them feel special and important? So it’s, it’s this hyper-specific response, this hyper tailored experience, and that has been life-changing for me. The, the relationships that we have furthered and developed and deepened from that, and just the meaning and the significance and the joy that the genuine authentic joy that you get from being able to do something for somebody. And this all could, could, you know, from a tactical standpoint, this all could be summarized from a line from Sean Connery and the movie Finding Forrester and Finding Forrester was not necessarily a great movie, but this is a great line. So even if it wasn’t a great movie, this is a great line. And Sean Connery is this older writer and he’s mentoring this young writer and he starts mentoring, kind of like in more than just writing.
RV (13:24):
And, and this guy’s like trying to catch the attention of a girl or, you know, to make her like him or whatever. He’s trying to like, you know, get her to like him or show, show her that she’s important to him. And Sean Connery says, the secret to a woman’s heart is an unexpected gift at an unexpected time. An unexpected gift at an unexpected time. That is what secret Service is all about. Not just to a woman’s heart, not just for earning romantic love, but for earning and developing and building all types of love, love with your employees, with your customers, with your spouse, with your kids. Unexpected gift at an unexpected time tailored to them, right? And the, the key is tailored to them, right? We have these wonderful, beautiful brand builders, group pens, these brand builders, group pens. They have our logo on ’em, sending these out or giving these to everyone who comes.
RV (14:17):
That’s good customer service. Like, okay, hey, thanks for the pen, man. It’s a cool pen, but it’s, it’s marketing, right? If it has my logo on it or our logo on it, if it has our company logo, it is, it’s marketing. That’s not service, that’s marketing. But if I send them something with their logo on it, or a picture of their family, or celebrating their win, or memorializing their achievement or something like that, that that’s not marketing. That’s, that’s friendship. That’s relationship. And so it’s, it’s simple, but it’s so powerful and profound, and most people don’t do it because we’re too busy and we feel like we don’t have the money or we can’t justify the roi. And I’m telling you, just do it. Just, just do it. And also, it doesn’t have to be big, right? You don’t have to send them to Disneyland, right?
RV (15:05):
That’s not even secret service. Like, it, it’s, it’s just doing something that’s really relevant to them is going, oh, you know what? They really love yoga. I’m gonna send them some yoga socks, right? And, and it’s like, they get it and they go, this is so different than what it’s, it’s like you’re listening. It’s like you’re paying attention because you are, it means that you care. So show that you, you care and, and pay attention. That secret service the, my second customer service secret, that will grow your sales. And again, you know, I don’t mean to hype hyperbolize too much, the revenue part of this but it does, it does grow your revenue because it grows your reputation and reputation always pre precedes revenue. So how do we track this exactly? We don’t, nor do we want to, nor do we care about this, you know, tracking these things.
RV (15:51):
But if unexpected gift at unexpected time in a tailored way would be the first lesson. The second lesson is to anticipate the need you wanna provide, great customer service, anticipate the need. That is what great customer service is all about. Right? Good customer service is meeting the need, meeting the expectations, right? I check into the hotel and I expect to have a clean room. I expect it to be ready. I I expect it, you know, to have, you know, cool air and, you know, some, some number of amenities based on the price that I’m paying and the brand of the hotel chain, right? Those are expectations. Anticipating the need. Anticipating the need is somebody arrives late and you know that they’re, they probably missed their flight. And so maybe they don’t have their luggage, or they tell you, it’s been a rough day, I lost my luggage.
RV (16:42):
And you go, oh, you know what? Let me send you up some, let me send you up a toothbrush and some shaving cream and, and whatever. And you know, that’s anticipating the need. What you wanna learn to do with your prospects, with your customers, with your employees, your team members, with your spouse, with your kids, with anyone you’re trying to build a relationship with, is anticipate their need. By the way, this is everything we do at Brand Builders Group. Everything we do is about trying to anticipate the needs of our clients. So we’re going, okay, what do they need first? First of all, they, they need, they need education. They need to understand that, you know, there’s a, there is a framework and a structure for how to, how to build a sales page that converts the 15 piece of copywriting, right? So we gotta teach ’em that, but then we go, well, now what are they gonna need?
RV (17:29):
They’re gonna need help doing it. So we either need to introduce them to a vendor who can help get it done, or we gotta create a template for ’em. And so we go, let’s create templates that people can use, right? And then, and it’s like, okay, well now they have a template. Now what? Now they’re gonna need help building it into a page. So how, how do we, how do we create a template to actually convert the copy into, into an actual landing page? Boom, right? And so our whole company is in a constant evolution of going, anticipate the need, anticipate the need. What do they need next? How can we help our clients succeed faster? How can we help ’em succeed for less money? How, how can we help ’em create more impact? Like, what would shorten the learning curve? What would shorten the implementation cycle?
RV (18:09):
Anticipate the need. If you wanna earn the respect, the admiration of your boss, you wanna raise, anticipate the need, right? Look on their calendar, look on their cal. This is the easiest thing to do. If you have access to someone’s calendar, you go, what do they have coming up next week? And they’re not even thinking about it, right? Cuz their, their, their hair’s on fire, they’re thinking about today. And Oh my gosh, what am I doing right now? So you look at what do they have on their calendar next week? And then you go, what are all the things I could do for them to help set them up for success? Wh how much of the work could I do for them so that when they get there in an, and they find out in an unexpected fashion that so much of this is already done, anticipate.
RV (18:52):
That’s how you get promoted. I mean, straight up, that’s how you get promoted. That’s how you get raises. That’s how you become more valuable, right? You help other people succeed. That’s what value is. Value is derived from helping others succeed. So one of the easiest ways is to go, you know, you might not even have to learn anything. You might not even have to do anything different. You might just have to do it sooner. And in a more app, appropriate timing, right? A lot of this is about timing. And you go, okay, what do they have coming up? And how can I help them succeed even before they get there? Or so that when they get there, I’m delivering this information, this tool, this training, this knowledge, this resource, this, this relationship. So that it’s like, oh my gosh, you’ve already thought of this. You’ve already taken care of this.
RV (19:39):
I mean, hallelujah, thank you. Anticipate their needs. So you gotta be asking that of yourself, of all of your employees, right? And your team members and, and, and your customers and your prospects. Like what do they need next? What, what is the thing that they most need in order to take the next step? And like one of the things that we’re rolling out, if you’re a member, you know this or you’re gonna know this, we have spent the last few years building something called Instant Automation Toolkit. And Instant Automation Toolkit was about taking all of the strategy, right? We have 14 different two-day courses that make up the curriculum of Brand Builders Group, right? Like when someone, someone joins up for our entry level monthly membership, it’s like a couple hundred bucks a month. Like they get access to all 14 courses right away.
RV (20:27):
I mean, we give away the farm for like very little money. So they get access to all the courses. But then we go, okay, well now how are they gonna implement? So we’ve been building these templates for years and years because we’re going, ah, what do they need next? They need help taking this strategy and applying it, and, and we can build tools. So the, the whole mantra is how much of the work can we do for them, right? That’s what we’re trying to do. How much of the work can we do for them? Now, ultimately, we’re a strategy firm and they, people gotta do their own work. And at some point, you know, you lead the horse to water, they gotta drink, they gotta do the behaviors. There’s certain things they have to do that we can’t do, but we’re going, how much of it can we do for them?
RV (21:08):
How far down the field can we advance the ball? How can we solve a bunch of the problems in advance for them that they don’t even know they’re gonna have yet? You know, for example, once they get clear on their uniqueness, then we help ’em create their content. And then they’re gonna go, oh, shoot, how do I get trademarks and how do I get copyrights? And we go, you know what? Let us introduce you to the legal firm that we use, that built templates so that you could get all of your copywriting, all of your templates, all of your contracts done for like a very low fee because we’ve already cur curated this relationship and we’ve created all these tools. And then they go work on their keynote and we go, Hey, now that you got your keynote, there’s a good chance you’re gonna need a slide deck for that.
RV (21:47):
Right? Here’s the template that we have that we put together based on what we use and your speaker kit, and we create all these tools and assets that they don’t even know they need yet until they get there. And by the time they get there, they go, oh my gosh, I, there’s so much I need and we wanna show up and go, here it is, boom, right here for you. Anticipate the need. It’s so simple, but it’s so profound. And if you do those two things right, unexpected gift, and well put that qualify in there, unexpected, customized gift at an unexpected time, unexpected gift at an unexpected time, and you anticipate the need, if you do those two things, you will be prov and you do it consistently. And especially if you can operationalize it through your organization and your practice, and your firm and your company and your life and your personal life, if you can find a way to operationalize those things, you will be delivering world-class service, world-class experience, you will be excelling, accelerating your reputation.
RV (22:51):
And you know, there’s, there’s, there’s there interviews at least three that come to the top of my mind that you should go back and listen to if you want more on this. So one is obviously the interview that I just did with Brittany Hodak creating super fans. The other is John de Julius. We’ve had him on the show and we’ve talked about this concept. The other, the other person who I would be remiss to not mention in this, in this conversation is John Ruland. He’s the author of a book called Giftology, another close friend, also a client of ours, somebody else that we’ve learned a lot from in this area. All three of those are podcasts that are available here. So share this episode with someone you know that wants to increase the customer, improve the customer experience inside of their company and then share, go, go back and listen to those other three and share those as well and keep coming back and let us know how we can make it better, right? Sometimes we can’t always anticipate the needs we’re trying to, but if you have ideas for how we can do that, please let us know always. And I hope we get a chance to talk to [email protected] slash podcast if you’re ready to get serious about implementing and operationalizing these principles along with all the other ones that we teach here on this show. So thanks for being here. We’ll catch you next time. Bye-Bye.
Ep 395: Simple Steps to Grow and Scale | Andy Bailey Episode Recap
AJV (00:00):
So you want to scale your coaching practice. This is a conversation that I have with so many individuals who are beginning on their coaching journey or who’ve been on it for a while, and they go, I’m ready to take it to the next level. So figured why not have this conversation in a recorded sense so that we can share it with the masses. So a couple of things that I think are really important to have this conversation. The first thing is asking yourself, why do you want to scale? Because you don’t have to. And I think the important thing to realize is that scaling takes a lot of work, a lot of time, a lot of resources, and it takes people, right? And I think what people also don’t realize is that often in order to scale, you will lose money before you make money.
AJV (00:58):
Not always, but often. And the truth is, is that our reasons for scaling are often out of line, are out of alignment, meant with what we really want, and we think, well, I need to scale because that’s what you do in business. And it’s like, not really. It’s your business. You get to decide what you do. And there is nothing wrong with just going deeper with the clients that you have and making purpose your bottom line, versus trying to scale revenues and actually lose on profit. And I think there’s just sometimes too, too often we focus too much on the money. Now, clearly we need to make money in business to pay our bills. Clearly we’re in business to make some sort of profit to like enjoy the fruits of our labor, but not at the cost of our happiness, our peace, our joy, our our time with our family.
AJV (01:58):
In other words, why are you doing it? And so I just would encourage that before you go, yeah, I’m ready to grow and ready to scale that you really actually answer the question, why? Why do you want to scale? Because you don’t have to. Now, if you choose to then let’s talk about that
AJV (02:49):
That’s what I’m talking about, right? And it’s like, okay, now I’ve got to duplicate processes, duplicate systems, duplicate myself with more human capital, and that, that will require your time and your money and your resources. So one, be prepared for work. Number two don’t expect it to happen overnight. Let this grow over time. Let it grow organically and let it grow by demand. That’s important. You do not have to bring on three people. It’s like you bring on one and then you bring on another, and then eventually you bring on another. It’s like let this happen by demand and let it happen organically so that you don’t find yourself upside down going backwards instead of actually growing forward, which is what you wanted in the first place, right? Number three, get super clear on your culture and your people acquisition process before you can start growing in terms of the people component.
AJV (03:43):
You’ve gotta be really clear about who you are, who your clients are, how you do what you do, why you do what you do, and what makes you unique in all of that. And you’ve got to align yourself with people who line up with that culturally and beliefs and values. Like that’s important before you start expanding your company, which is also your reputation. This is a reflection of your personal brand. You’ve gotta make sure that you have all of this work dialed in so that you can be a magnet to people who are like that. Or you can be the opposite, right? You can be repulsive, polarizing to the people who aren’t. And you wanna be a little bit polarizing in the fact that I would love your culture or not for me, you need to make it that clear so people can make an a easy yes or an easy no.
AJV (04:39):
And so that you can make an easy yes or an easy no. So get clear on your culture and your people acquisition process. So what do I mean with our people acquisition process? Where do we find people? How do we interview ’em? How do we make the offer and how do we onboard ’em? Right? So a couple of things here I think that are really important is one, where do people come from? In my personal opinion we’re kind of at a place in our life where you’re gonna need to come from someone I know, right? There are very few resumes that I put online when, and, and I’m talking specifically about a coaching business, right? But it’s like, I know you or I have a client who knows you or a friend who knows you, or another business owner who knows you.
AJV (05:23):
So network, why? Because this is going to be such a key part of the reflection of your reputation, but also it’s because if I’m going to entrust my clients to you, which is a really big important part of the relationship I have with my clients, then I need someone else who can vouch for you. And I don’t, I’m not talking about stranger references, like, I want to know you. So where do you find people? It’s like you network, right? You network through your friends and business acquaintances. That is what we do, right? Through our own employee base, our client base friends. I don’t put job ads up anymore because it’s a very lengthy process to filter through the masses to find a mi maybe might be one or two potentials, right? And so that’s not the answer for everyone. I’m not talking about scaling with dozens of people.
AJV (06:09):
I’m talking about the ones and the twos, and it’s like, I’m gonna network myself to finding that right person. That’s where we do slow down the interview process. You don’t have to make a decision in 24 hours or one week. It’s like meet the person in person. Even if that requires travel time to get together, it’s like you must meet in person. They need to do a shadow day, they need to get to know you, you need to get to know them. We always do the spouse test, which is are they married to crazy? Right? At the, one of the great lessons we learned from entree leadership at the Dave Ramsey organization, it’s like, man, you’re not just, it’s very much like a marriage. It’s like you’re not just hiring a person, you’re, you’re hiring who they’re attached to. So are they single?
AJV (06:53):
Are they married? Do they have kids? It’s like those aren’t deciding factors and whether or not you hire someone, but man, you do need to know those things about the people that you’re going to spend 60% of your time with every week. It’s like, I need to know where you’re coming from. So I know that if we’re how and if we’re aligned and then shadow days, right? It’s like they gotta see the job, not read it on a piece of paper. They gotta experience the job and you need to experience them experiencing the job. Those would be all things hire for experience. These are a couple of tips. Hire for attributes, not skills, hire for their values and their character traits, not just skills. Now with that, it’s like, yeah, you need to hire for experience. You need to hire someone who can do the job, but you also need to hire someone who shares the same cultural values and beliefs that are in alignment with you and your client base, especially if you have an existing client base.
AJV (07:49):
All right, next thing set pricing based on your people talent, right? So as you start scaling in people, this allows you to have different pricing tiers. It’s likely going to cost a different amount to coach or work with you than it does the people that you’re now bringing on. So that allows you to have new tiers, new levels of service. And I think this is really important for two different reasons. One, most of you are underpriced and you need to increase your prices. And most of you need to increase your prices for you. So this is a great opportunity for you now to have a tiered pricing schedule where the current pricing you have is now the pricing to work with my coaches that I’m bringing on board to help but to coach with me, and now I’m increasing that, right?
AJV (08:32):
It’s a simple supply and demand. You increase prices when there is more demand than supply. When you have more supply, i e a new person, then you can keep prices the same, right? And then over the course of time you have to hire another person. It just allows this opportunity for you to set pricing the way it should be, which is a little bit based on supply and demand of your time and availability, but as you bring on more people you don’t have to outprice yourself out of the market that you serve or love unless you want to. And that’s up to you. And then the last little quick tip, because I’m trying to keep these short is create recurring revenue lines, right? When you set your coaching pricing model, when you’re thinking about scaling, now this is specific to scale.
AJV (09:17):
It’s a, you have to have products that allow you to have some recurring revenue. If it is always, I’m gonna sell a, you know, three month, three month contract and I’m constantly trying to renew this quarterly thing, you’re gonna be in sales mode all the time, right? So what can you do to create some monthly recurring revenue models or annual recurring revenue models that make it a no-brainer for people to sign up for those? Now they may buy additional services that aren’t that project-based services, but this is a membership model, is what I’m talking about. This is it could be an annual mastermind model that renews and recurs over time, not a one and done. But this is a month to month or a monthly with a six month, 12 month whatever contract model. These could be online education platforms, memberships, the list goes on and on.
AJV (10:10):
But make sure that as you are selling, you don’t sell calls one at a time or you don’t sell just a quarterly contract where you’re always in renewal season, but find ways to create recurring pricing models that allow you to create a base foundation to give you some breaks to do the work. Because if you’re a solopreneur, a coach that is looking to scale, even if you have a couple of other coaches and you’re going, what’s that next tier? That next level the biggest thing, it’s like, it’s really hard to create both lots of new revenue and nurture and care for the existing client base that you have, right? And so some of the very first physicians that you may need before too long as a salesperson. So you’ve always got someone focused on bringing new business in while you or your coaches focus on keeping the business that you have.
AJV (10:58):
So first questions first. Why do you want to scale? And if you go through that process and still determine, yeah, I do, then you’ve got a quick checklist of things to go through. But just remember purpose comes before profit. Now that isn’t, I didn’t say revenue, right, that it’s like, make sure you’re doing what you’re doing and you’re going deep and wide and making an impact and loving what you do, and weigh all the pros and cons of how much of that will will temporarily go away in the scaling mode. Now I’m all about scale. I’ve scaled businesses. We are scaling our current business. I am not antis scaling. I am anti undoing it because somebody else is doing it. I am anti doing it for the wrong reasons. I am anti doing it because of our ego and our pride. I am pro doing it because there is demand that is requiring you to expand your reach and
AJV (11:52):
Impact, and you can do it right. And it’s like you have the desire to do it, is what I mean by can you have the desire and the ability to do it. And you don’t always have to. There are gonna be seasons where you’re like, I’m good. And maybe that’s just for a season. So just give yourself the permission to be happy where you are and love the work that you’re doing and the impact that you’re having, knowing that there’s always a season to grow and to scale. And sometimes there’s a, there’s a season to just go deep with what you’re doing and define that deep work and passion can easily be the thing that you look for versus the very next, you know, business move. So with all of that said there are reasons to scale. There are reasons to not, and I hope this quick conversation helps you vett those for yourself. We’ll see you next time.
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 391: How To Get Your Brand Protected | Heather Pearce Campbell Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
All right,
AJV (00:59):
And I think that’s really important. And I’m not really a litigious person. And sometimes, you know, I can be pretty old school and just wanna do like a, a good old handshake. But when it comes to your ip, when it comes to the things that make your brand, your brand, or make you know, your content, your content, there are just some things you really do need to protect. So simplicity does not always equal protection in a legal sense. So you may think that let’s just make it a, you know, everyday language, one pa one page agreement. But do you want ’em simple or do you wanna be protected? And I think that’s just really worth sitting on for a minute of going. There’s just some things that we need to, like cash up, you know, some time, effort, and money on, and make sure that you, you protect the right things in the business and you should know what those are.
AJV (01:52):
So let’s talk about what are those things in the business that you should actually, you know, spend some time protecting? All right. Here are, you know, kind of high level the areas that you wanna spend some time on. So number one is entity structure. I thought it was a staggering statistic to learn how many small businesses, how many entrepreneurs actually never get set up as a legal entity. If you have not done that, stop listening, get off your computer off of whatever you’re doing and go do that right now. And so what I mean up by that is like, are you set up as a sole proprietor? Are you a partnership an L L C? Like how are you set up legally? Now, the easiest, simplest thing for most people to do in the United States, cuz not all countries have a limited liability company infrastructure for legal entities. But in the US we do, and that’s probably one of the quickest, easiest, simplest entity structures that you can set up. When it comes to the S corp conversation that everyone
AJV (02:58):
That I know is constantly talking about, that’s not an entity that’s a tax election. So you have to be an L L C and then you can fill out a piece of paperwork, check a box, and then have the export tax election, which it has some pretty awesome tax benefits. But you’ve gotta qualify for it and fill out a little bit of paperwork. It’s not that big of a deal. But not to get on a tangent and digress. Make sure that you actually have a legal entity set up, right? You need an operating agreement. You actually need to have legal documents stating what your business is. You need to have a business tax license, right? You need an an f e I N number, like you need those things. Like that is important. Step one basics, right? Step two is make sure that you’ve got the right business contracts.
AJV (03:49):
Now, do you need to spend tons of money on a variety of contracts? Depends on what level your business is in. It’s one of the reasons that at Brand Builders Group, we partner with Legal Website Warrior and Heather Pierce because she is an attorney who has been working in the personal brain industry for a really long time and has created an incredible set of contractually binding agreements in a templated form. Now, that’s not gonna work for every single type of agreement, but for some of your basic ones, it’s a great template to then customize and, and versus spending $3,500 on getting an agreement, maybe you spend a couple of hundred dollars of having an attorney just to review what you’ve done with a template, right? So that’s an easy workaround. That’s what we’ve done for most of the path at Brand Builders Group to be honest.
AJV (04:41):
But the first thing you wanna make sure that you have in place is just your service agreement. So whatever is your primary service, make sure that you have a legally binding service agreement for your primary service. Second to that is make sure that you’ve got your website and any digital online protection, right? So this is your terms and condition for your website, your privacy policy. If you, if you have any sort of financial information that is shared in terms of earnings potential, make sure you have your earnings disclosure. You can go to brand builders group.com at the very bottom in the footer to go, oh, that’s what she’s talking about, right? You should have all of those don’t copy and paste, right? Cuz those are custom to Brand builders group. Don’t do that. But this is again, an awesome template, the website kit at Legal Website Warrior, but you can go and buy and it’s pretty much 95% static and really good to use.
AJV (05:32):
But those are things that are required, right? You could get in a whole bunch of trouble and have to pay a whole bunch of money by just not having some basic things on your website. And so go pause right now, if you have a website, go make sure you have terms and conditions, a privacy policy and an earnings disclosure if applicable, right? So that’s the next thing after that, if you have any sort of referral partner or affiliate relationships, that requires a separate agreement, right? So you have your service agreements, which are for your products and services. There are two different types of service agreements to consider. You’ve got one that is for a more high dollar ticket offer. That’s going to be your service agreement. But then the other option, if you have just like courses or an app or a low dollar ticket or a low dollar ticket offering of like a a low dollar membership that’s like, you know, 20 bucks a month or something like that, you may want to opt to not doing a full service agreement, but you could just do a terms of payment agreement where you, you know, it’s like if you are on iTunes and it just says like, you know, terms of payment payment terms you just click on that and that’s kind of it.
AJV (06:46):
And it’s like it gives you a whole bunch of stuff to read through, which you likely never read through. So it’s like a click of a button that says, ah, I agree to these terms of payment. That’s another way of doing it, that you don’t have to have a full service agreement where you have to put your name in, date it, sign it, you just put a button. So that’s another option as you’re looking at, are you doing this for volume, right? Right. So low dollar, high volume, or is this high dollar lower volume where you need a full service agreement? I think that all just depends on what you need in that agreement. Ip, IP protection payments, subscriptions deliverables, the list goes on and on, right? Which is why attorneys exist. But also why templates are really helpful and we’ll save you a ton of money, okay?
AJV (07:34):
So you need service agreement you definitely need your website, online protection, you know, set up. Then you would have some sort of an affiliate agreement or referral partners if that’s applicable to you, but that’s the next one. Outside of that, you would need employment agreements if you have employees or if you want to, you have to have an employment agreement. If you’re hiring an employee, let’s just call it, you’re gonna need that. And then contractor agreements, right? So if you have 10 90 nines that work for you or vendors, you need a 10 99 agreement. And those are all the different types of business agreements. Now, we could go for partnerships, agreements, partnership agreements, and you know, stock agreements and you know, we could go on and on. We’re not getting into that. We’re just talking about the basics, right?
AJV (08:17):
Do you need an employee, have an employment agreement, you have some contractors, you need a 10 99 agreement, right? So let’s just talk about the basics, but you need those things right after that, it’s ip, right? And these are in no sort of chronological order, just fyi or I importance order. But ip, right? So I love the way that my friend Heather Pierce the creator of legal website Warrior defined this. She said the IP conversation is really around copyright and trademarks, right? And you think about a trademark that is your very high level, right? Think about it. It’s like that’s your, your titles and your subtitles. It’s the high, high level stuff. Whereas copyrights is for the body of work, right? So trademarks are for your business name, your logos, your tag, your taglines, what I would call like your headline statements, right?
AJV (09:05):
And then copyrights are really for the body of work, the content, the curriculum. Trademarks take longer. Copyrights can be, you know, done pretty quickly. I think I applied for and sent in and got several copyrights back within like a six week period where trademarks take a few months. Now, should you file for every piece of content? No. you could, but you don’t. But you wanna have your business name and your logo and your tagline if you have one that’s important. And if you have a very unique niche set of content, then yeah, you’re gonna wanna copyright some of your proprietary thought leadership in IP that’s in a course or a book or something like that. So again, this is a high level conversation. Yeah, we did an entire podcast interview on this with Heather Pierce, who’s an attorney. So if this was just scratching the surface, which it is, I encourage you to go listen to this entire hour long conversation and check it out. And don’t just learn from us, but get legally educated, make sure you’re protected, and make sure that you keep growing in a way that you’re never going to pay the piper down the line for the foundation that you didn’t set in the beginning. So go check out the podcast and stick around. I’ll see you next time.
Ep 389: 3 Elements of Mental Toughness | Todd Durkin Episode Recap
RV (00:02):
Huh. I love the fire that Todd Durkin brings to the microphone and to the camera, man. I’m a, I’m a fan. This guy’s enthusiasm and, and positivity and his energy that he brings, it is contagious. And as a friend, as a client, as a colleague, I am I really have enjoyed my time around Todd Durkin and I, the interview that we did. If you didn’t get a chance to listen to it, go back and listen to it yourself. You’ll catch a bit of his energy and just his intensity, which I, I really, really loved. And you know, as always, what I’m, what I’m doing is I’m, I’m taking these interviews and sharing back with you things that I’m being reminded of, things that I’m learning myself, the ways that I’m internalizing or processing what has just happened during that interview. And today’s no different.
RV (00:58):
This is inspired, you know, by all this, this conversation with Todd. But I boiled this down to what I wanna share with you are three elements of mental toughness. These are three kind of pieces of your, these are three parts of your mindset that you have to get right, if you’re ever going to really be mentally tough. And I think these are three things that people don’t actually do very well. Like, these are three very rare things. These are three things that are unfortunately uncommon amongst most people in the world, but among the elite, among the top one percenters among what we would call the ultra performers. I refer to them and take the stairs in my first book as ultra performers, or in my second book procrastinate on purpose. We call ’em multipliers. You know, today, we might just call them like mega influencers.
RV (01:55):
But these ultra performers, there’s, the thing you gotta understand is that it is their mind. That is the, the magic is in the mind, right? It’s not their skills so much. And, and it’s, it’s that there’s mental conditioning. It’s like that story I shared about Navy Seal, Joe, the, the human body can take near anything. It’s the mind that needs conditioning. So here’s three elements of mental toughness. First one, something that you need to understand if you’re going to be successful in anything, is that the intensity of your discipline needs to match the magnitude of your dream. The intensity of your discipline needs to match the magnitude of your dream. This is one of the biggest problems we have in the world today, is there’s people, you, you see all these dreams and like people, all these fake flus online who are showing like, oh, these cars and these private
RV (02:58):
Jets in these homes. And so it’s like, oh, we all have these dreams and we have this huge dream, and yet we have this weak level of discipline that is a recipe for failure, right? That’s a recipe for disaster. Or it’s at least a recipe for a broken heart or unmet expectations. You can’t have a huge dream and very weak discipline. The intensity of your discipline needs to match the magnitude of your dream. Big goals are for people with big work habits, right? Right. I’m all about having big goals. I’m all about dreaming big. I’m all about, you know, achieving the impossible. I’m all about going for the thing that no one else says you can do, but you better show up and put in the work. Like you better show up and be ready to play. You better show up and say, I am willing to do what no one else is willing to do, so that I can have what no one else is going to have.
RV (03:51):
That’s the mindset of an ultra performer. I’m not saying you have to like it, I’m not saying it’s fun. I’m certainly not saying it’s easy. I’m saying that’s what it takes. That’s how it is, right? Also, I would say, and I’ve, I’ve said this several times before, discipline becomes dormant in the absence of a dream. Discipline becomes dormant in the absence of a dream. So part of increasing your discipline is increasing your dream. Because if you don’t have a clear dream, if you don’t have a clear picture, then there is no reason for you to make the sacrifice. And so the human brain left to its own default, to its own design, will naturally gravitate towards the path of lease resistance. This is escalator mentality thinking, which is where the title of the Take the Stairs book my first book even comes from, right? So you have to, if you wanna increase your discipline, one of the ways to increase your discipline is to increase the dream.
RV (04:50):
Because then you go, ah, now I have a reason to do it. Now I have a reason to make the sacrifice. But discipline goes dormant in the absence of a dream. So if you’re struggling with discipline, it might just be you don’t have a big enough dream. But so step one is like, have the dream, but then step two is make sure that the level of your discipline matches the magnitude of your dream. That is a connection that ultra performers understand. Most people do not. Most people will never get it. I mean, literally go to the mall, walk around, you can look at world or look, go to a stadium. Look at most of the people there are never going to make the connection that I am talking about that I just shared with you. But a 100%, 100% of the world’s wealthiest people, most successful people, highest performing people, top achievers, top athletes, top actors, top singers, 100% of those people will have made that connection.
RV (05:46):
So if you wanna be one of those people, I recommend you understand that and you make that connection. Number two, the power of community. I loved what Todd was saying when he said, hire an appointment with a trainer, right? Like, hire a trainer if for no other reason than to create the accountability in your life to show up and exercise, to show up and work out. If you don’t have the self-discipline to get up and exercise and do what you need to do, then hire a trainer for no other reason than to, to make sure you show up, right? Like there is power in accountability, there’s power in community. And if you’re not where you wanna be in your business, if you’re not where you wanna be in your personal brand, if you’re not, if, if you’re not achieving the things that you want to be achieving, one of the first things you have to do is look at who you’re spending your time with, right?
RV (06:47):
Who are the people around you? I can guarantee you that the people you’re spending time with are not people who have achieved those things. If you’re spending time with people who have achieved those things, you will become that person. You will. It, it happens by default because you, you absorb their mindsets, you absorb their tactics, their beliefs, their relationships, their, their, their, the things they focus on. You absorb those things. So you have to curate your own community. You have to curate your own community for your life. You have to hand select deliberately. Choose intentional in intentionally pick who you’re spending time with. And that’s another reason why. I mean, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, if you’re not yet a member of Brand Builders Group, I’m going, the amount of money you have to invest to become one of our members is so minuscule.
RV (07:44):
Not only compared to what you’ll learn, and, and not only compared to what you’ll earn as a result from what you’ll, but it’s so small just compared to the power of the network, of the people you would meet. Like, if you learned nothing from us, if you never implemented anything from us, the r o ROI you would receive just from being in the room with the people who are at our events, right? And who are on our virtual trainings and who are in our Facebook group, is so tremendously powerful. Like, it’s huge because it’s a community. It’s a community of mission driven messengers. It’s a group. This is something we never anticipated when we started. The company, never even thought about. It was like, wow, if we’re successful, what will happen as a byproduct is we will have hundreds of people who are world changers, all who coalesce, like, who all assemble in the same area.
RV (08:41):
And it is incredible. Our members are incredible. Like the people we see in our Facebook group and, and our community group and on, on our virtual trainings and at our live events and on our virtual events, I mean, mean, it blows my mind, the stories. I mean, our members are amazing. So you need to curate that community. And if you’re trying to build your personal brand and you’re trying to like, use your personal brand to grow your business, then I, I cannot recommend enough going to free brand call.com/podcast, request a call and find out how you can join our community, right? We have all different investment levels, right? Even we, we, we’ve designed this to be affordable for people who are even starting out in the very, very beginning. Cuz that, that was me one day. That was us one day, right? So we have a heart for that, for that early messenger.
RV (09:27):
But like, if you’re serious, like get serious and take that step. Request the call, show up for the call, find out what the investment is, figure out what the right level is for you, and get your butt to the community. Like, get plugged in. If it’s not with us, that’s fine. Whatever your goal is though, whatever your dream is, whatever your mission is, whatever, whatever is the thing you’re wanting to achieve or accomplish or do or become, you have to surround yourself with other people who are trying to achieve or do or become those same things. The power of community. And this last one, this last one is, I’m gonna name this concept. I’ve never named this concept before, but I came up with a name for this. I’ve, I’ve, I’ve thought about this a lot and I’ve talked about it some, but I’m gonna officially give it a name right now.
RV (10:24):
This is a, this is a, so officially a new concept that I’m introducing formally is the concept of something that I’m going to call standup speed. Standup speed. What is standup speed? Simple. Your standup speed is how fast do you stand up after you got knocked down? That’s it. That’s standup speed. How fast can you stand up after you get knocked down? How fast do you bounce back after you have failed? How fast do you make the next call after the last sales call rejected you? How fast do you post the next video after the last video flopped? How fast do you get on the next stage after your last stage bombed? Like, how fast do you publish the next episode after the previous episode? Nobody listened to like, that is standup speed. And those are practical, physical, external expressions of standup speed, right?
RV (11:31):
Those are behavioral things that you could, that you could notice and you could see and you could actually measure. But really where standup speed really starts is in your mind. It’s in your mind. It’s going, how long are you going to let something negative affect you before moving on from it? That’s your standup speed. Like, literally, think about this. You go, there are things that happen every day that, that suck, right? Or aren’t good. Like, or, or, or with some regularity. There are things that happen all the time, right? We, we have stuff right now. We have, we have this leak in the house. You know, we have a seven year old brand new house, like a very like pretty nice house, right? Custom-Built home. We have this huge leak that is like destroying a wall inside of the house that we are like, okay, now we have to get this repaired.
RV (12:27):
And you go, we did nothing to do that. Like, it, it, it was completely out of our control. Like, we did nothing to deserve that, I don’t think, right? Unless it’s God or the universe going, you know, some, some, some version of, you know, like what goes around comes around karma like coming back to us, but like we have this huge leak and you go, if you have a huge leak in your home, you know, we had a gas leak not too long ago and I go, oh, you have a gas leak. Oh you have we had a flat tire. I had a flat tire not that long ago. Had a flat tire, right? Or you lose a customer or you lose an important engagement or you lose a team member, which is, to me, one of the most devastating things is when I is, when when we lose team members, that’s like really devastating, right? You know, you go, okay, something negative happens.
RV (13:18):
What your standup speed is, what is the distance between, or the amount of time that passes between when the negative thing happens and you go, ah, this sucks. How much time passes between that and where you go, all right, I, all I can do is all I can do is control what I can control and move on to the next thing. Whatever that distance is there, that’s your standup speed, right? That whatever that time lapse is that that span between something bad happened and I’m immediately going into action mode about doing something about it. And not only going into action mode about doing something about it, but I’m letting go of the negative thoughts and the negative energy that surrounded that event. What is that distance? That is your standup speed. And most people’s standup speed is so slow. It’s so slow. We think the reason we’re not more successful in life is cuz like, we can’t go zero to 60.
RV (14:18):
Like, man, if that, the key to being successful in life is like, if I could start a business in 90 days, or I could make a million dollars in 90 days, that would make me successful. That’s not the speed that matters. You can crawl like a turtle, you know, in that race and eventually win. That’s all about consistency. The speed that matters. Where speed matters when it comes to success is your standup speed. It’s going, I got punched in the face. How fast did I punch back? Right? I got knocked down. How fast did I stand back up? I got rejected, I got doors, slammed my face. How fast did I knock on another door? How fast did I make another phone call? That’s the standup speed. And, and, and not just the behavior, but how quickly were you able to let go of, to release, to lose to, to shed the negative energy, the negative thoughts, the negative patterns, the whoa is me. Why did this happen to me? This is so terrible. This is so expensive. I’ll never break free of this. All of the victim mentality that shows up, which is not unwarranted, right? I’m not saying you’re weak for having those thoughts, you’re human for having those thoughts. Those are normal things. But where your strength comes from is realizing that those negative thoughts don’t serve you at all.
RV (15:40):
Having the thoughts helps you zero. In fact, it makes it worse. There is nothing about a negative thought. There’s nothing about negative energy, nothing about stewing, nothing about sulking, nothing about soaking inside of excuses or rationalizations or justifications or just things that, that you did nothing to deserve, but were bad. There is nothing about sitting in that place of negativity that does anything to serve you, that does anything to help you achieve your goals. That does anything to help anyone else. It doesn’t help you be successful. It doesn’t help you make more money. It doesn’t help you make more impact. It does nothing. All it does is keep you stuck and making you feel sorry for yourself. It’s a victimhood. It is a victim mindset in going, how long am I going to allow something that happened to me in the past? How many days am I gonna carry that forward?
RV (16:37):
How many times am I gonna take what was in the past and project it into my future? For how many minutes or, or moments? For how many moments or how many minutes or how many hours or how many days or how many years or how many decades are you going to carry that negative energy forward? Just answer the question, not to me, to yourself. How long are you going to allow that negative energy from that past situation claw at your future and pull you back? That’s your standup speed. Because what do ultra performers do? They fail and forget. Fail and forget. Fail and forget. Fail and forget tragedy and forget set back and forget somebody hurts them, forgive ’em and forget, forgive ’em and forget, forgive them and forget, fail and forget. Like their standup speed is like instantaneously, like instant. Their, their standup speed is instantaneous.
RV (17:38):
He go flat tire. That sucks. Call a tow truck, pick up the spare, get an Uber, buy a new car, whatever it is. But you immediately go into action mode. And, and I’m not saying that is the life isn’t hard. I’m not saying that things aren’t unfair. I’m saying life is hard. I’m saying life is unfair always for everyone. Is it more unfair for some people than others? Sure. Maybe. I, I, yeah, I mean, probably so. I would, I would buy into that. But is that what determines your success in life? No, I would, I would, I would rarely, on very rare occasion, I, I might, I might accept or acquiesce to that. But, but typically, no. I go, I know people who have, I know people who have overcome every setback. I know people who have been raped. I know people who have had family members murdered.
RV (18:26):
I know people who have been spit on. I know people who’ve been called racial slurs. I know people who have gone bankrupt. I know people who have been homeless. I know people who never had a formal education. I know people who have been burned, have been, who are quadriplegics, who grew up without a mom or a dad. Like I know people like from almost every horrible situation you could think of. I know personally these type of people who have overcome it and been successful anyways, who have overcome it and survived, not just survived, but they have thrived anyways. Not just thrive, but become world changers, multipliers, ultra performers. In spite of the fact of these setbacks, because they have extraordinary standup speed, they quickly engage with what is proactive, productive, and positive. So what is your standup speed?
RV (19:24):
How long are you gonna let the negative things of the past affect you? How many times are you gonna complain that you have too much work to do? How, I mean, how many years have to go by of you feeling busy before you stop telling people you’re busy? How many you know days do you have to live feeling overwhelmed, bef before you finally just go, I’m not overwhelmed. That just is what it is. And I’m gonna do, I’m gonna do my thing and I’m gonna go as fast as I can. Like, how long are you going to allow negative energy to hold you back? Standup speed. You need a faster standup speed. I need a faster standup speed. So much of my life, I can look back as going. It has been, my mental toughness has been about this conditioning. This one skill is what is my standup speed? How fast can I go from a negative thing happened into productive positive action And not just action. Action is huge, right? But also shedding myself of the resentment, of the worry of the fear of the heartbreak, of the sadness of the, of, of this thing and going it because it does nothing to serve me. Now, grief would be one exception. I think there is a time for grief that grief should happen when you experience loss and you go,
RV (20:46):
Yes, I’m gonna grieve. I think that’s a part of the healing process. But even that, at some point, you have to move on from, I mean, what are you gonna do? Spend the rest of your life grieving about something you lost or someone you lost? I don’t mean any disrespect to anyone who has lost someone. We’ve all lost people. But I think in many cases the way to honor that person is to move forward and do something significant, maybe in their memory, in their honor. But I do think there’s a, a, a, there is, you know, a psychological place and a necessity for grief, but not forever. Right? Now, how long? I don’t know you decide, but I go, how long is it really serving you? How long is it really serving you? I, I, that’s for you to figure out, right? I’m not telling you when or what’s the right amount of speed, but I’m telling you, when it comes to generally being successful in life, increasing your standup speed will radically transform the probability of you achieving the things that you want most in your life. This is not something in your d n a, this is something in your character. This is something you develop. This is something you code. This is something you drive with your own discipline. It’s a decision you make. I am no longer going to allow myself to be affected by negative energy and negative things that happened in the past. I’m not gonna allow myself to say I’m overwhelmed. I’m busy, I’m stressed, I’m frustrated, I’m tired. I, i like, it doesn’t serve you.
RV (22:21):
If it doesn’t serve you, don’t let it stay with you. If it doesn’t serve you, don’t let it stay with you. Stand up speed. Do it, my friend. That’s all we got for this episode of the Influential Personal Brand podcast. That was my rant. And I love you. And I’m talking to myself, right? I’m talking to myself going, Rory, you need to pick it up, Rory. You need to get, you need to get up faster. You need to bounce back faster. You need to quit complaining. You need to quit sulking. You need to quit soaking. You need to quit whining about this or that, or whatever. Just respond. Just re just respond to it, deal with it, and, and focus on the things that, that make a difference. So I’m on this journey with you and I’m grateful for that and I’m, I’m grateful for you being here. I hope you find it encouraging, encouraging enough to share this with somebody who needs it. Share this with someone who, a team of people who you know are going through something tough. And keep coming back, will ya? I appreciate it. Hey, leave us a review and a comment if you can at some point. We’d love to hear your thoughts and we’ll catch you next time on the Influential Personal Brand Podcast.
Ep 387: Redefining Success | Ryan Blair Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
All right, y’all. Today we’re gonna talk about redefining success and what does success look like to you? I just had this awesome conversation on our influential personal brand podcast with a gentleman named Ryan Blair. He’s a multi-time, multi, you know, time entrepreneur, billion dollar companies and just wise beyond his years and also humble extremely humble. And one of the things I loved about this conversation was this conversation of redefining what success looks like. And I think a lot of us are challenged today, specifically in 2023, with looking around and defining our success by what other people are doing. And I only know that’s true cause I know I suffer from it. And I can’t be the only one, right? I can’t be the only one who looks around going, man, is like having a really nice house. Does that mean success or free time?
AJV (01:01):
Does that, is that success or, or money? Is that success or fame? Is that success? And we, we kinda get caught up in it when we look around. And one of the things that I have found is that, for me at least, and I can only speak for me, but I know that there’s gotta be other people like me out there, is I need to put blinders on when it comes to success. I, I need one of those cones that like go around the heads of dogs after they’ve gone to the veterinarian. And I need to not be able to see what anyone else is doing. I need to be able to focus inward and upward of going what? Like, what God? Like what, what do you have for me? Not what does success look like? Like where does that word even come from?
AJV (01:42):
It’s what do you have for me? Because the, the truth is, is like I already know what God has for me. He has a promise for eternity. And that’s what I’m working towards. And my challenge for living in 2023 is that there’s so much things that distract, distract me from what I really should be doing, which is raising two awesome human beings, St. Jasper and Liam being an amazing wife to my husband helping, serving working. I believe in hard work. Those are things that I believe in. And that doesn’t always mean it’s gonna result in millions of dollars. It means it could, but it doesn’t mean that it will, that doesn’t mean I’m any less successful of the person next to me. And so I’ve spent a ton of time over the last few months really thinking about what, what is success to me? And here’s a couple of things that have come up with myself and my husband, Roy Vaden is, success today doesn’t look like more dollars than our banking account, which I’m not mad about it. I I’m not, I’m not saying I don’t wanna make more money. I think the more I make, the more I can give, the more I can do. But also I’ve realized it’s like, man, we, that was the only thing that we looked at in terms of success for a really long
AJV (02:58):
Time. And today, success looks like free space on the calendar. We’re buying back our time of going, I know success today looks like freedom with time to do what we feel like we’re being called to do. Not forcing ourselves to do the things that we think we should be doing because someone else told us that’s what we should do. Someone else could be our parents, our neighbors, our colleagues friends, right? But it’s like we’re defining success by the amount of hours that we have in our day to do the work that we want to do. Not freedom in terms of, Hey, I wanna, you know, go have a lunch every single day with a girlfriend, which I would love to do. But it’s like, no. It’s like, do I have the hours to do what I feel like God is calling me to do?
AJV (03:47):
That is success, right? The second thing is, success looks like having the confidence to say no, right? So the first thing is time. The second thing is the ability to walk away the wherewithal to know that’s not good for me, even though it seems like it today. I know six months from now, that’s not a good decision for me. That could be relationships, business deals, investments. There’s a lot of temptation to go, Hey, that’s going to be a great r o i. However, it’s gonna also simultaneously cause a lot of stress, right? It’s going to take away time and put pressure on versus give me time and take pressure off. And so it’s confidence to say no. It’s willingness to walk away. That is what success looks like. The next thing success looks like. How many lives impacted? How many people served versus again, dollars in the banking account.
AJV (04:43):
I believe that the dollars come when lives are changed. When people go, I want to pay you. Like you’re, you’re helping me so much. I desire to give you my money, versus I take your money and then hope I do a really good job. That is success. Success has shifted to, I want more time to do the work I’ve called to do. I want to feel convicted and saying yes when it’s a yes and feel powerful to say no when it’s a no. And man at the, and most of all, it’s, it’s helping. It’s serving, it’s feeling freed up to help someone in a way that someone else has helped me. It’s, you know, paying it forward, but it’s a, it’s a life impacted, it’s a life changed knowing that that will result in probably financial success. And even if it doesn’t, that is more successful, right? Not dollars, not social media followers, not even email list subscribers. It’s like I subscribe to all the things. I think social media is a powerful tool. I think AI is a powerful tool. I think owning your own context is a powerful tool. Those are tools, but that is not success. Those are tools that help you be
AJV (05:56):
Successful. Those are tools that help you on the journey, but those are not success money. That is a tool, not success businesses, right? Those are tools that does not define your success. Cuz the truth is, is no matter where you are, there are successes and failures, failure failures all day long, every day all through life. You are not a success or a failure. We all succeed and we all fail. And so what is success? Right? And I think that depends on the season that you’re in. And, and that should change. It most definitely will change and it should like success. What it looked like for me prior to having children versus what success looks like for me today is wildly different, right? The number one thing I think about more than anything else on this planet is how do I get my kids to know and love the Lord?
AJV (06:51):
If I achieve one thing, then call it a day, my life was successful, right? That is not probably what I would’ve said pre-children. I didn’t have context of what success looked like in the stage of life, right? And success will likely look different five years from now and then five years from then. But it’s like, it just take a moment to redefine what that is. Without worldly voices popping in, friends, voices popping in, siblings, parents, even your children popping in. It’s like, if we don’t define it, we won’t find it. And so you’ve gotta take the time to define it so then you can go after it. And I don’t know what it looks like for you. So I’m just sharing what it looks like for me today because it’s wildly different than it was at any other time in my life of going, I’m for the first time actually going, what would a successful day look like?
AJV (07:47):
A successful year? Knowing that I am not a success or a failure. I simply have successes and failures. But I’m just me who also has successes and failures at the same time. So just a, a word of encouragement. And also a prompt to spend some time on before you go after that next thing you’re after or even after. The thing that you’re after right now is just take a moment and define what does success and this thing look like for you in this season? And then make sure you continue to iterate on what thats, that success is in every season that you enter. So hope that was helpful for you, and I hope you stick around. I’ll see you next time.
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.