Ep 381: My 3 Favorite Email Marketing Tips | Nathan Barry Episode Recap
RV (00:08):
Let’s talk about Email Strategy. You know, it’s funny, after all of These Years, email is still kind of the king when it comes to monetizing an audience. And, and I actually Just got off a call With our internal marketing team talking about the irony of how our email list we’re. This is very rare. I Think this is incredibly rare. Our email list
RV (00:33):
Is about twice the size of Our social media following, Like Most people, like almost all of our clients, it’s the Opposite. Where They’re social media following is like, you know, much larger, and then there’s some fraction of those people on their email list. Ours is the opposite. Our email list is, Is Like pretty massive, definitely massive compared to the Size of Our social media following. Most people
RV (00:57):
That have the size of our email list Are probably the people Who would have millions of social media followers. And so
RV (01:03):
Part of why that is, is it’s just where you place your focus, right? It’s like, what do you focus
RV (01:08):
On? And so I’m excited to share With you Three of my favorite email marketing strategies Of just Kind of like how we think about email in terms of the Way that we use it. And these are like my, my three favorite email marketing tips,
RV (01:26):
My three Favorite email marketing strategies. Of course,
RV (01:28):
This was inspired a little bit by my recent interview with Nathan Berry on our, on our recent podcast Episode. And So I just wanted to kind of share with you some of my philosophies and our Philosophies at, At brand Builders group About how we approach this
RV (01:41):
Subject and treats this subject Because frankly, like we do this pretty Good. I mean, I, I didn’t really, I don’t really Think of us necessarily of like, oh, we’ve got the World’s biggest email list, But it, it Did hit me and go,
RV (01:56):
Wow, That’s amazing. Like so many people are focused on growing their social media following and then trying to like convert that to a, to an email list Where The email list is really where the money is, right? Like the, the, that, that’s where The real long-term relationship happens. And that’s where a lot of the Trust takes place is, Is, you know, somebody’s email. So Let’s Dive into my three favorite email marketing strategies.
RV (02:21):
So the first strategy Is actually understanding something that we call the Four Types of email marketing. And this is actually something that we teach formally inside of one of our lessons inside of one of our courses.
RV (02:34):
So Our building your revenue engine course, Which is where we Teach our entire content marketing machine and how we convert it and nurture leads and automate trust.
RV (02:45):
There’s A section, a very specific section on email, and this is one of the things that we talk about. So this is a little bit of a, a preview for you if you Haven’t ever been through that. If you’re not one of our customers, and if you are one of our members, it’s A good refresh for you. So
RV (02:58):
Four types of email. The first type of email is the one that we all think of. These are broadcast emails, okay? So what is a broadcast email? It’s where you take your entire list or something that we would not recommend doing. We would never say, send it to your whole list. Take a segment of your list, you’ll have much more success with that. And you send everybody in that group the same message at the same moment. So whether somebody signed up for your email list today or 10 years ago, they’re all getting the same message at the same moment. And we used, we used broadcast messages to speak about things that are either timely or they’re big announcements. Those are like the two biggest reasons we use those. So timely, meaning it’s something happening in the news cycle, or it is something happening in the like like a holiday or something, right?
RV (03:53):
And we go, Hey, we wanna just like send out love about this, or it’s, it’s a big announcement. So, you know, we’ve done this recently a couple times in recent years where I can remember we’ve sent out big announcements when our clients have had huge wins, right? So we’ve had 13 clients that have hit the New York Times with a Wall Street Journal bestseller list. So whenever that happens, we’ve sent out some pretty big announcements. We’ve had now five clients go viral with TED Talks. I, we, we, we have another one that’s coming up the ranks that also could be taken off. And, you know, we, we celebrate client wins a lot of times and say, you know, cheer on everyone, Hey, check this out. So that’s broadcast email. It’s also used in launches would be another time that you would use that where you’re specifically saying, Hey, everyone show up for this free training or this, you know, webinar, or, Hey, we have a new whatever, a new podcaster, something like that.
RV (04:48):
So you’re, you’re launching something. So that’s broadcast email. The second type of email is something that people often think of, which I’m gonna call it long-term nurture, long-term nurture sequences. So this one is, you know, if you ever heard the term drip marketing or drip emails or funnels or automated emails, that’s kind of like this is going, you’re pre-scheduling out a series of emails where if you sign up today, you’re not gonna see the same, you’re not gonna get the same email today as someone who signed up 10 years ago, but you’re gonna get the same email that that person got on their first day, like hypothetically. So you’re the, and the, the number one way we use this is for long-term nurture, and specifically we use it for, we call it Evergreen magazine or easing, right? That’s kind of where that term easing originated from is to go, we’re gonna take your best of content of like what’s been on your blog post or what, what you’ve posted on your blog, and we’re gonna convert that.
RV (05:58):
We’re gonna turn that in to a greatest hits series. And so, the way this happens, right? If you think about a blog, every time you post something on a blog, whether it’s a podcast feed that you’re posting, like on brand builders group.com is where we post all our podcast episodes, but on rory vaden blog.com is where we post all of my blogs that I do every week. And so both of those, in both of those cases, they both get pushed down. And so some of the best content is from a long time ago, especially if you’re following one of our B B G mantras, one of our BBB G mantras is save the best for first, save the best for first. Always put out your next best piece of content as free content. Because what you, you don’t need to be worried about people consuming everything you have and then not buying from you.
RV (06:43):
You have to be worried about your content not being good enough that no one ever comes back, no one ever shows up again. So you’re always pushing yourself to get better and better and better and push your best stuff forward. So some of our best posts, a great example of this for me is you know I built my keynote speaking career on this story called Be the Buffalo, and it’s about buffalo’s versus cows. And you know, I, I published this intake the stairs in 2012. A lot of people use this, you know, use this. But I’m the original author of this story, and I was, I was telling this 10 years before it even showed up in my book, which was now 10 years ago. And that’s like a very popular story. People love it. And you know, it’s, it’s, it’s like one of my most highly trafficked pages.
RV (07:29):
Well, if you sign up for my email list today, you’re not gonna see that blog post, that blog post was five years ago. So it’s pushed way down. But I know that’s gonna be one of, that’s something that everybody loves. So I’m gonna take it and I’m gonna force it to you, and I’m gonna save the best for first. So just like we save the best for first with our kind of like blog strategy or podcast strategy going, what’s the next best thing I can put out fresh today? We’re also going to convert that into an a long-term nurture sequence of a greatest, basically, it’s your greatest hits. And we’re going, okay, I’m gonna take my my best blog post ever and I’m gonna make sure that everyone signs up, whether they sign up today or that was, you know, they sign up in six months, or they sign up in two years from now, they’re all gonna see this piece of content that I know everybody loves.
RV (08:14):
It performs really well. And I go, great. I wanna push my best stuff forward even to people who are showing up brand new. And so that’s how we use the, the long-term easing strategy. And so a lot of times, or not a lot of times, this is what we do, is we push our greatest hits into this email nurture sequence so that if you sign up for our list today, like you are gonna see all of our best stuff in addition to seeing some of our fresh stuff, which I’ll talk about in a second. Every month you’re gonna get one email, which is the greatest hits, and that’s the frequency that we do that is once a month. The other part that this does is this, make sure I’m talking to my entire email list at least once a month. So, and, and every time they get something from me, it’s, it’s not new content that I’m sort of like testing out and I’m hoping it works and that everybody likes it.
RV (09:04):
It’s like it’s proven, it’s time tested, we know. And so that’s automating trust, which is what we’re trying to do with our email list. We’re trying to automate trust. We’re trying to add so much value that people trust us and they go, you know what? These guys aren’t just trying to make money off me. These guys aren’t just trying to pitch me their next thing. Like, they actually give a crap about helping me succeed and they actually know what they’re talking about and they can help me. And so as I make money, I’m going to invest with them and, and hopefully they’re helping me make money, and then I’m investing, and then they make, help me make more money and then I invest more with them, right? Like, that’s the relationship we want to have with people, is we’re giving them free content to help them make money.
RV (09:42):
Hopefully they’ll make some money, they’ll invest it with us, then we’ll help ’em make more money, they’ll invest it more with us, right? And we’re trying to like, grow, grow with people. So anyways, that, that means that we have an email going out on autopilot so I can sleep at night just knowing my entire email list is gonna get one awesome email from me every month without adding any additional time to my calendar. Zero. So that’s the second type of email. The third type of email is one that you don’t hear very often and people don’t think about. And this kind of boggles my mind, and this is RSS email rss. What the heck does that stand for? RSS is a technical term, it stands for a real simple syndication. What it means in common sense language is every time I post a new article to my blog, automatically send an email to my list.
RV (10:33):
And this is amazing. First of all, it’s automating something for you. So you go, if you’re we have a whole nother process we teach called the content diamond, which you can go, you can go [email protected], I did a whole free training on this, on the content diamond. Well, if you’re doing the hard work of creating a content diamond every single week, then you want to tell people it’s out there. So we create this RSS so that automatically emails you. And, and by the way, if you can sign up for ours, right? If you go to, you can sign up for my [email protected], and we give you other, we give you a free training as an incentive for you to sign up for it. And then you get, you get free training every week, right? So we’re sending you this free video for me once a week, every single week.
RV (11:20):
And they’re like these little five or seven minute videos that I do and their articles, we convert ’em into articles. And so now that’s on autopilot. We also do [email protected] slash podcast because Brand Builders Group doesn’t have a blog, but it has our podcast. And so we post all of our podcasts there every week so people automatically can sign up to be alerted. And so RSS is this technical, you know, piece of code that you put on your website behind this form that people can say, Hey, I wanna automatically get notified every time you post something new and boom. And so this is cool because it’s automated, but unlike the long-term nurture, which is your old stuff of your greatest hits, it’s all your newest stuff, your freshest stuff, your like most hyper-relevant thing that you’re talking about today, and they’re automatically getting that.
RV (12:10):
So that’s also how we sort of balance the, like staying relevant and super current with our email list along with making sure they’re seeing our greatest hits of all time. That’s like the timeless, you know, principles and stuff like that. So that’s the third type of of email and it’s easy, I mean, easy to set up. So we do that, that’s standard protocol in both internally and also what we teach in building your revenue engine, which is where we teach all of this in social media and getting on podcasts and speaking engagements, et cetera. So, and then the fourth type of email, the fourth type of email is short term nurture sequences. This one actually is more commonly associated with the term funnel. So short-term nurture sequences mean that only a targeted set of your email list is going to get a series of pre-written emails that are hyper-relevant to a behavior they’re engaging in now.
RV (13:05):
So again, out of revenue engine one of the lessons we talk about is building funnels and, and how do we, we actually dissect and show people behind the scenes of our actual funnels that we use to run our entire business. And we talk about the different one. You know, we’ve done summit funnels and we’ve got video funnels, and we’ve got webinar funnels, and we’ve got, you know, just a pdf like download free, free download and free call funnels. We have all these different funnels that we use and we show behind the scenes of each one and how we, how we, how we build them, right? So, but if you, if you, let’s say you sign up for one of our webinar funnels what would happen is you sign up for a free training and then it’s going to say, Hey, thanks for signing up.
RV (13:48):
Here’s a link to the free training you requested. And then what it’s gonna do is we use marketing automation to that can tell us, did you ever actually click the link in that email and watch that free training? If you didn’t, it’s gonna automatically send you another email, like 24 hours saying, Hey, by the way, little reminder, thanks for signing up for our free training. Don’t want you to miss out, you know, here it is as promised, you know, when you have a minute, check it out. Boom, right? And then we’ll send a couple reminders to, to watch the free training. Now, as soon as you click that link and you watch the first couple minutes of the training, again, we’re using Mark marketing automation here, which is what we, we teach people do, and we also actually build templates to help you that we actually can do this for you, right?
RV (14:32):
So we’re building all these templates right now to actually do the programming and coding for you. So what would happen is it’s then gonna shut down that, that we call that the the training sequence, or sorry, we call it the the watch sequence, which is, you know, emails that are designed to get you to watch, watch the free training that you signed up for. So let’s say that you watch five minutes of it. Well, as soon as you watch five minutes of it, we’re using marking automation to shut off that sequence that’s reminding you to watch it. Cuz now we know you already started watching it, but then it starts a new sequence, which would be invisible to the untrained eye that says, let’s say you watch seven minutes, but then you abandon the video, it’s gonna start a new sequence called the finish sequence and it’s gonna say, Hey, we noticed you started watching the video, cuz we can tell, but don’t forget to finish because here’s some of the great things that come at the end.
RV (15:24):
And so then we’ll send ’em a few reminders to try to get them to finish watching. And then if they finish watching, but then they don’t like take the action, whatever the action is, we’ll say, Hey, you know, here’s a couple reminders of like whatever the action was that we’re trying to get them to take. And so you’re using these short term you’re using these short term sequences to move them along, and that’s the fourth type of email. So everybody is, everybody in that group is seeing the same emails similar, it’s like, it’s like kind of a, it’s kind of like a cross of all of these because it is a nurture sequence, but you only get put into that nurture sequence in a very specific moment in your journey where you have clicked on a video or requested a free call, or you’ve watched something or downloaded something very, very specific.
RV (16:14):
And so, you know, like one of them again if you go to, if you go to rory vain.com, there’s a free training section and there’s a, you can download our trends and personal branding national research study. So if you download that, that’s a lead magnet. It’s a free lead magnet. It’s incredible. It’s like this 60 page study, this of all this data that we paid tens of thousands of dollars to get, we give it away for free and then it, it starts a nurture sequence. Right? So everybody who, the only people who ever see that are the people who downloaded that specific thing. So it’s amazing. So anyways, those are the four types of email. I know that’s a lot, but, and that’s, that’s, you know, advanced, but that’s the kind of stuff we’re teaching and that’s like super, it’s advanced, but it’s simple, right?
RV (16:57):
But you go, you gotta build out all these different types. So it’s not just, you can’t just think of, oh, I send emails and that, or I send an email once a week. It’s all of these, it’s at least four major types of email that make up your overall email strategy. So you gotta like understand what’s the mix of these, and also the technology and also the timing of how they intersect, right? So that’s one of the templates that we provide to people is the actual marketing automation campaign that goes, Hey, make sure you’re not emailing people too much. And, you know, give them a chance to opt in and outta stuff and, and, you know, make sure they’re not getting, you know, a bunch of emails all at the same time. Which leads to number two, okay? So this is the number two thing that I wanted to talk to you about.
RV (17:40):
So my second favorite email strategy, which is really important is control the email opt-outs yourself, not the platform. So what do I mean by this? It means that every email marketing tool doesn’t matter which one you use, right? And, and we use all of ’em with clients and we like all of ’em, like we’re kind of like, you know, there’s certain ones we like more than others and whatever, but, but to us, the strategy is what matters more than the technology. The strategy matters more than the technology. And for example, all of the email marketing tools have an opt-out function. They have to, by law, this, this law is called gdpr, right? GDPR compliant. There’s, there’s all of this, this compliance now with how emails needs to be sent and permission-based marketing and all this sort of stuff. So they have to, when an email goes out, there has to be an option to unsubscribe.
RV (18:32):
Well, if you send an email to your list, let’s say you send a broadcast email, and let’s say you send it to 10,000 people on your list every time you send a broadcast email, by the way, people unsubscribe every single time. They always do. So don’t be offended or upset by that. And that’s not a bad thing, it’s not a bad thing when people unsubscribe, it’s a good thing. You only wanna be emailing people who wanna hear from you. But if people just hit that unsubscribe button, it starts to affect sort of like your ranking with the email service providers. And so what we like to do is, is we like to just, we give an opt-out function. But what the, the, the, the, we make a, we actually make a more noticeable link for people to opt out somewhere above the default one that is built in and tied into the tool where we say, if you don’t wanna hear from us anymore, click here.
RV (19:24):
But we also con control the languaging, which a lot of times you can’t with the default setting or not as much. And we’ll, so we’ll say something like this, if you say, Hey, if you want to hear from us less often or more often, click here to control your preferences or unsubscribe altogether, something like that. And then they click on it and then it takes them to a, a form where they can now manage. And we usually give them like four options in our standard suite it. And, and option number one says, you know, I’m a super fan, email me every time you have something new for me. And when they select that, it’s gonna apply all the appropriate, appropriate tags for them to get the broadcast emails, which we send once in a while, the evergreen monthly easing, which is on autopilot once a month, and the r s s feed.
RV (20:10):
So that means they’re gonna get at least one r s s feed every week and one email once a month. So that’s five. And then broadcast emails whenever we send them, which might be once every other month or something like that. So they could get maybe six emails in a month plus any other short-term nurture sequences that they are in. If they get into one of our, you know, free trainings or something like that, then the, the next button down would say something like this. They would say it would say something like I only wanna hear from you once a week. So we go, okay, no problem. We’re going to remove them out of our Evergreen magazine and we’re just gonna add them to the rss. So they’re just gonna get the most recent stuff once a week. And it’s like, download our most recent podcast, watch our most recent video or, or read our most recent blog posts, which are all kind of the same thing.
RV (20:58):
If you’re running the content diamond in and it’s just gonna push ’em to our blog feed and you go, great, once a week, the next person says, ah, I really only want to hear from you once a month. Okay? So that’s option number three, just once a month. So now they’re going to only get our oh, and by, and by the way, on that second one I wanna hear from you once a week we would say RSS plus broadcast, which we send once in a while. And if they say, oh, I really wanna hear from you once a month, we go, okay, great, once a month, let’s unsubscribe you from our RSS feed so you’re not hearing from us every week, that’s too much for you. And we go, but you do wanna hear from us? So we go, great, let’s, let’s put you on the evergreen nurture.
RV (21:33):
Now you’re hearing from us once a month but we are, we’re also gonna keep you on our broadcast e e email, not not, yeah. So our long-term nurture, which is our, our monthly easing and the broadcast e email, which sends, you know, sporadically once in a while. So those are the top three. And then the fourth one will say, ah, you know, it’ll say something like this I only wanna hear from you once in a while, you know, once in a great while or whenever you have something big to share. And so we go, great, unsubscribe ’em from rss, unsubscribe them from long-term nurture, easing, unsubscribe them from oh, but keep them subscribe to the broadcast tool, right? So we’ll keep them on the, the broadcast tag. And then the last one would say, I never wanna hear from you ever again.
RV (22:18):
Please stop emailing. So I guess there would be five options counting that, right? So boom, boom, boom, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So now what’s happening is, first of all, we’re controlling their preference because a lot of times people don’t wanna unsubscribe completely. It just might be like, they’re like, bro, you’re overwhelming me, ro like, it’d be like, Rory, I love you, but dude, I don’t wanna hear from you twice a week. Like, that’s too much Rory in my life, which I can, I can appreciate. Well, I’m not offended by that, right? Some people are like, gimme all the Rory, you can give me like I need, I need, I want motivation, I need inspiration as much as I can get it every day I am like, yeah, you know, great my people, but it’s whatever your threshold is, right? And you have some people like to hear from you for different things or it’s just, what do they have going on in their life?
RV (23:02):
What do they have capacity for? They re they might be in a season of like, man, I’m not trying to gum up my whole inbox. And you know, you just, a lot of it doesn’t have to do with you, it has to do with them. And they’re just going, I wanna be able to read what you send me and maybe I don’t have the time, or your topic isn’t so hyper relevant at this moment that I’m gonna make time to read everything you’re sending me and now you’re annoying me and so I’m just gonna unsubscribe, right? So you’re, you’re wanting to give them a chance to sort of choose their own adventure here. And that’s what we’re, and that’s what we’re doing. So control the opt outs yourself, l and and then the other thing is if they hit never talk to me ever again, we add an unsubscribed tag that anytime we send an email to, we filter against that tag.
RV (23:42):
So we literally opt them out and we will never, we will never send to them again. But it’s not hurting our rankings with our email service provider. And so that’s part of why we do that. And you know, anyways, so that’s that. And then the, my third favorite email tip is super short. It’s super clean, it’s simple, but if you’re not doing this, make sure you’re doing this every single time you send a broadcast email, which is send to the unopens, send to the un unopens. So what does that mean? Well, okay, we’re talking about broadcast email, remember, with four types of email broadcast, long-term nurture, RSS and short-term. So we’re talking about the first type here, which is broadcast email. By the way, I hope you’re not listening to this on two x speed, cuz if you are, this is going really, really fast,
RV (24:25):
So anyways, when you send a broadcast email, which is to a wide swath of your list all at the same time, boom, everyone gets a launch email or a a, a timely email or something like that. One of the ways to like literally double your opens is you send it to all these people, however many it is, a whole bunch of the people aren’t gonna open like some, usually something like 80%. So if you send an email to 10,000 people, okay, typically like 20% are gonna open and 3% are gonna click through roughly, right? Something like that. So that means if I send it to 10,000 people, 8,000 of ’em aren’t even opening the email, right? So 20% are opening the email and then 17% are opening it, but not clicking Well for that 20%, you know, they saw your email. So we go, let’s not annoy them, right?
RV (25:19):
They, they, they already have it. We know they’ve seen it, but most of the good email service providers will tell you this, 80% or these 8,000 people never even opened your me email. So what does that mean? That means it’s like they never got the email, they never even saw it. So you’re not ano you’re not annoying anybody to send an email to people who never opened it the first time because for them it doesn’t e it’s, it’s not like, Hey, you’re bugging me, you keep sending me the same email. They’re going, no, they, they never saw it, right? Like, you sent the email, they never saw it, they never opened it, they don’t even know that you sent an email. So you send just to the unopened. So you would just send to that segmented list, you could send the exact same message. We, we do, we we literally go send, send a broadcast three days later, take everyone who has not opened the email and send it again.
RV (26:11):
Because if they haven’t opened it within the first three days, they probably not gonna open it, right? So we send it to 8,000 people, the exact same email, and guess what the number of opens in total, it’s gonna be like 20% of 8,000. And, and sometimes it’s higher, sometimes you get a higher percentage on, you often get a higher open rate percentage on a smaller list. That’s almost always true. So you might get another 2000 opens off of your send to 8,000. Well, the net effect there is instead of 2000 opens from your email of 10,000, you got those 2000 plus you got another 2000 from your email to 8,000. And you could actually keep doing this saying, okay, well now there’s, you know, roughly 6,000 people who didn’t open that email I could send to them. So you could keep doing it. We usually just do it twice.
RV (26:57):
Sometimes we’ll do it three times, but if they’ve never opened the email, they, they never saw it. Like, you’re not annoying anybody. So at least do it once. Always, always with broadcast emails and it’s so simple, right? Then these are things where you just go, man, of course like that makes so much sense, but you don’t know until you know, right? And you know, if you don’t have a strategist like us, you know, our team walking you through it, you just literally leaving money on the table, that one thing could literally double the income of your entire next launch or promotion or thing by such a simple tactic, right? Imagine adding up all of those tactics over and over and over again and y’all, this is, this is what we do. So at any point if you want to talk to our team, I would encourage you to do it like we have so much to share and teach you.
RV (27:46):
And so you just go to free brand call.com/podcast to request that call. If you’re not ready to do that yet, I would encourage you, as I said, go to brand builders group.com/podcast and subscribe there and or go to rory vaden blog.com and you could subscribe there and we’ll send you lots of free stuff so that you can be growing your business and building your income and, and increasing your mindset and your motivation and your productivity and all the things that we teach and talk about to help you make more impact in the world. And then hopefully you start making some money from that and you go, all right, I’m ready to level up. So when you’re ready to level up, request a free call free brand call.com/podcast. In the meantime, share this episode with someone who you think would l benefit from it and listening to it. And just thanks for being here, right? We’re, we’re, we’re trying to add more and more value to your life constantly, whether you’re paying us or you’re not, our whole goal is to just add value to everybody as much as we can. And the fact that you’re listening gives us the opportunity to do that. So we appreciate you being here. We’ll catch you next time on the Influential Personal Brand podcast.
Ep 379: How To Keep The Money You Make | Shannon Weinstein Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
All right, y’all, let’s talk about how to keep more of the money you earn, right? You’re making money now. Let’s talk about some key ways to help you keep some more of that moolah that you’ve been working for. Had a great conversation with a friend and a client, a brand builders group, and I thought I would just take some of these highlights of this awesome conversation around money and taxes and financial literacy and bring them to you. And a couple of like key points. So I’m so excited for this because I personally learned so much from this conversation, so I know that you are too. So here’s a couple of things. Financial literacy is a skillset that you must learn as a business owner and entrepreneur. That does not mean you have to do all of it. That does not mean you need to know everything, but it, it does mean that you have responsibility to know enough that you can make good decisions for your business without just going, Nope, I’m gonna hand that over to the professionals.
AJV (01:05):
Hope they do a great job, and none of it’s my responsibility. That’s not true. It is your responsibility. In fact, the number one reason that small businesses fail is a lack of funding. They run outta money. And that means that they did not have a good, healthy stance on when the money was coming in and when the money was going out, right? That’s cash flow, right? And so there’s a few things that you can do to better understand your financials and manage your cash flow to make sure that you stay in business and you keep more of that money. So here’s a couple of things that we talked about is one is just account dispersion, right? In light of all the things happening with like the S V B banking situation and the F D I C insurance and interest rates and all kinds of market volatility there are some things that you can really do to that makes a difference.
AJV (01:57):
One you need to have account dispersion. You need to have account that’s for everyday operating expenses. Then you have an account that is really your reserve. Used to people would say, keep four to six months of your operating expenses in a reserve account for emergency purposes. I e like covid the pandemic, right? If you didn’t have that am that amount of money in reserve, you likely did not end the pandemic still in business today. However, people are suggesting six to eight months, that’s a lot of money. That’s not a part of your everyday operating cash flow. But that’s a good necessary thing of going. You need that as that backup reserve, right? That emergency fund and the na or in the terms of Dave Ramsey, then actually have a tax account, have a tax savings account where every single month you take 20, 25, 30%, whatever you think you’re gonna end up in terms of your tax bracket, pull that out of your earnings every single month and stick it at a tax account.
AJV (02:57):
So you’re not surprised with a six figure plus bill at the end of a really successful year. And now you’re going, whoa, we can’t afford to pay that right plan for in advance. Now, this is not my money. This now belongs to America and put it in your Little America tax fund and keep it separate so you have a good accurate standing of the cash flow, not only of today, but where it’s gonna be in 3, 6, 9, 12 months from now. Then also have a fourth account that is your true like savings and fundraising for the business. So what are the things that you want to do in the business that you need to start setting money aside for? Maybe you want to buy a commercial building. Maybe you want to do a new website. Maybe you want to do this education or this course, or this mastermind, whatever it is.
AJV (03:44):
You have your reserve fund, which is for the operating functions of the business, but then you have a savings or fundraising fund to go. And these are things that we wanna do. So if we can’t afford them right now, we’re going to start putting money aside so that we can’t afford to them one day without impacting everyday cash flow, account dispersion. Simple, not easy, super important, right? Next is like mindset, right? Know the goal for your money, but you actually need to know like, what are the financial goals that I have for me and the company? Somewhat simple, but often we don’t take the time to go, what is the goal of what I’m doing, what I’m working for? Like what, what am I actually trying to do with this? Then you have to know where your money is going, right? I love this little saying of, I don’t even, I can’t even give credit where credit is due.
AJV (04:30):
It’s been so long, but before you expect you must inspect. So you have to know when your money is going out and when the money is coming in. Simple but not easy, right? You’ve gotta know like when every month or every week of every month, do typically expenses go out and when does revenue come in? That’s cash flow, right? But you’ve gotta do some inspecting before you can create any level of expectation of what’s going to help healthily grow the business. Then you gotta understand like the, the cadence and the sequence of that flow. Is there regularity to it or well, or do you work in seasons where there’s a launch and then there’s a long pause and a launch and a long pause? Are you in a recurring business model where there’s that natural cadence where I can expect that, you know, between the 15th and the 28th, most of all of my recurring payments come in during this time period.
AJV (05:23):
I make payroll on these dates and that’s when the money is going out on these periods. So some of it is just knowing the cadence and the flow of when the money comes and when the money goes based on the type of business that you have. Is it a recurring model? Is it a, you know, buy one at a time kind of model? Is it a launch season model? What does that look like? And then last but not least, it’s knowing how to save and reduce your tax liability. Okay? So that’s the last thing I’m gonna talk about some, some somewhat quickly here. Here are four quick things that you should go and research. I am not a tax professional, I’m not a financial professional, I’m an entrepreneur. So these are just things that you should go and research on your own.
AJV (06:05):
Talk to your CPA financial planner, a professional who’s accredited, who has a license in this. These are just ideas to bring to them, okay? Number one, if you’re an L L C, make sure you’ve got the s corp election. If you qualify for that that allows you to avoid much of the self-employment taxes. Also allows you to qualify for the 1 91 99 a deduction. Okay? So that’s the first thing. Just take that to your professional, right? Look it up, take it to them. Second is the Augusta election, right? So can you rent out your home that is not currently used in use for any sort of everyday business expenses for business events? So client gatherings, company gatherings weekly meetings, monthly meetings, annual meetings. But the Augusta election allows you to run out your home tax free for 14 days. It does require documentation comparison.
AJV (06:59):
There’s a lot of work that goes into it, but that would be worthy of going, do I qualify for that? Could be a really good strategy. Number three, home office deductions, right? The percentage of the square footage of your home that is solely dedicated that you can prove to actual business expenses. You can take that same percentage of your square footage and apply that to all of the household expenses that you have. Your internets electric utilities all the things, right? Maintenance. so do the work, have it documented and talk to your professional
AJV (07:58):
So you cannot the example my friend Shannon gave is, you cannot hire your two-year old to be your co your core here, right? Your driver that is not gonna work out. But do you have positions in your business? And I will just give this a quick example for me. I am a, I have a personal brand, right? I have a lifestyle personal brand about motherhood and entrepreneurship. I speak about it, I blog about it, I podcast about it. And so I hire my kids as child models so that I’m not renting children that aren’t my kids to be the child model. So why not pay my kids for that? So for photo shoots and all that, I looked up, if I had to hire an agency to hire child models, what would I pay per hour? You gotta do all the math. I created a contract, I did all the things. Then they could be legitimate employees even at younger ages. But you gotta have a legitimate reason with legitimate proof in order
AJV (08:54):
For these things to work for you, right? So that is super high level that is not even scratching the surface of all the things that you can be doing, should be doing to have a better grip on how do you keep more of the money that you earn. But those are some high level things from a recent conversation, and I know if it was that impactful for me, you’ve got to be able to take something from it too. So, hope you enjoyed it. Hope at least one of those gives you some ideas of how to keep more money that you earn.
Ep 377: 3 Sources of Inspiration to Help You Outlast Difficulty | Dr. Mariel Buqué Episode Recap
RV (00:02):
Well, I’m breaking down the interview with one of my newer friends, Dr. Mariel Buque who is brilliant and genius, and I actually love her work. And it was so fun to get to hear the behind the scenes story of, you know, how she goes from being this, this doctor, right? This clinician, this, this woman who’s teaching at Columbia University Medical center or working at, and, and is a professor to becoming one of the most powerful, or one of the most prestigious online influencers in that community in the world. And what I wanna break down for you is there was just, there was one specific line that she said that really got me thinking, which is what I want to, I want to talk about. And she said look,
RV (00:47):
For seven years, I had a steady flow of information. We were just putting information out for seven Years.
RV (00:58):
And I think it’s easy to look at somebody like her and go, oh my gosh, like she got lucky. She has a hot topic. She’s whatever the For some reason, the world fell in love with her The, you know,
RV (01:14):
She’s a doctor. She has, she must have connections with all of this and to overlook the truth, which is that for seven years she put out a steady flow of information. Seven years. Let me ask you, how many years has it been since you have steadily, consistently been putting out information? Not sporadically, not once in a while. For how many years have you consistently been putting out information that helps the world at large that helps your audience? Because if it’s not at least five, you got nothing to complain about, right? I don’t wanna hear about the algorithm, I don’t wanna hear about the topic. I don’t wanna hear about shadow banning. I don’t want to hear about too much noise. I don’t want to hear about only this type of political agenda or that type of political agenda, or only cute puppy dogs or hilarious comedians or, or, you know, silly entertainment stuff.
RV (02:18):
I don’t wanna hear about any of that stuff. Like, if you haven’t been putting out content consistently, it’s on you, right? You can’t blame anyone else. It’s on you. The tools of the day exist. They’re more accessible than ever before. It’s cheaper than ever before. It’s faster, it’s easier. And so the question is, are you showing up? Are you showing up? Are you doing your part? Are you adding value? And, and this part frustrates me a little bit because it’s easy to say, oh, I’m not that smart. I’m not a doctor, I don’t have famous connections. I’m not rich, I don’t have private jets, right? I don’t have a huge podcast. I don’t have friends that have huge podcasts, right? It’s so easy to point to all these things. And you go, yeah, those things can help, but are you doing your part? Like, are you doing the thing that’s in your control?
RV (03:13):
What’s in your control is adding value to people’s lives day in and day out, over and over, consistently, constantly never ending. And so I think a big part of, of what we undervalue, and it’s, it’s because it’s because of virality. And we sort of assume, oh, these people with all these followers that must have gone viral and like they blew up. And it’s like, no, it’s consistency. And so I think a lot of this comes down to just being able to outlast, outlast your competition, right? And when I say competition, I don’t really mean like other people. I mean, can you outlast your fear? Can you outlast your self-doubt? Can you outlast your insecurities? Can you outlast the inconvenience of having to figure out technology? Can you, can you outlast the pain it is and the challenges and the difficulties that come along with getting your message out to the world?
RV (04:12):
If you are a mission-driven messenger, you gotta outlast all those things. It’s not, and, and, and, and if you’re not seeing the success that you want, don’t look back and say, oh, the algorithm, or, oh, I don’t have the right topic, or, oh, nobody cares about this. Or, you know, I, I don’t look this way or that way, or I don’t have this, don’t you? Like, all of those are excuses. And here’s the thing. If you set out on this journey, you said you wanted to change lives, well, you can change lives at any given moment. No one is stopping you from changing lives, right? Making money is a different thing. You may or may not make money. It may, may take, may take time, but if you wanna change lives, you can push a button and publish. You can push a button and record.
RV (04:54):
You, you, you are one button away from literally broadcasting to the entire world. Like, are you doing your part? And if you’re not, at some point, you just gotta reconcile the reality. Like, you gotta go look snowflake. It’s, it’s not that you’re unlucky, it’s not that you’re not knowledgeable. It, it’s that you’re not showing up, you’re not outlasting, you’re not doing the work. And so I’m gonna give you three strategies, three tips, three techniques, three sources of inspiration that I think will help you outlast the competition. And by competition, again, I’m not so much saying other people who do what you do, although you could, you could think of it that way. I just think it’s, it’s outlasting your own fear, your own self-doubt, your own inconvenience, your own insecurity, outlasting, all of the excuses that will come up on this journey, cuz they will, I’m living them.
RV (05:52):
I face them every day, right? Like, I still carry this chip on my shoulder of going, man, I would be so much further ahead if I didn’t have to start over five years ago. Like, I was so much further down the road, I had to start completely over, right? So I know what that feels like, and here’s three things that I want to remind you of and e equip you with that I think will help. So these are three sources of inspiration to help you outlast the inconvenience. Number one is vision. Vision. This comes right outta my first book. Take the Stairs, which still to this day is selling like hotcakes. If you’ve not ever read it, it’s a life-changing book. Like, if you haven’t read, take the Stairs. I don’t know how you’re surviving. Like, it, it’s, it is a, it, it is a quick read.
RV (06:41):
It has got so many powerful fundamental truths about success in general, and it shows up here and it applies to personal brands. Why? Because one of the things that we talk about in there is that the amount of our endurance is directly proportionate to the clarity of our vision. The amount of your endurance is directly proportionate to the clarity of your vision. When you can see something clearly that you want, when you can see it, when you think about it, when you can taste it, when it’s visceral, when you, you dream about it and you focus on it and, and you go, this is something I want in my life, for my life, for my career. When you can see it, then that creates a naturally strong connection to how the sacrifices you’re asking yourself to make today forward you towards that pursuit. It creates a context for action to take place.
RV (07:35):
And so your discipline engages automatically. You become motivated, you become inspired, you become alive, you become activated, right? But discipline becomes dormant in the absence of a dream. Discipline becomes dormant in the absence of a dream. If you’re not dreaming or you don’t have a dream, or you don’t dream that often, or you don’t dream that clearly, or you’re not spending time thinking about it, then there is no reason to make the sacrifice. There is no reason to bear the inconvenience. There’s no reason to endure the pain, to navigate the difficulties, right? To to to survive the setbacks, to conquer the challenges. If there is no vision, there’s no reason. That’s why the Bible says if without vision, people perish because it literally dies you, there’s no reason to put in that effort, that energy, that work because there’s no payoff at the end. But that payoff is something that exists in your mind.
RV (08:30):
The powerful part is not achieving it in real life. The powerful part is having it exist in your mind, which is something you can create and access today and it will use, and in your mind will use that to activate your discipline. So what is your vision and do you spend time thinking about it? And, and when you, when we talk about vision, we mean think of a picture, a moment in your life that you wanna live in the future, right? I i, I tell the story often of like walking through the airport and seeing my book on the bookshelf in the airport with the New York Times bestseller logo, like burst on the cover, right? Or, or being on stage at, in, in front of a huge arena or our house that we live in, right? It was years that I was visualizing this house that I, I wanted to have and, and, and, and not so much because I manifested it, right?
RV (09:19):
It’s because I saw it and I worked my butt off and we worked our butts off to where it became real. But I held it out there. So that, I mean, yes, I’d like to believe that it’s moving towards me, but I was moving towards it, right? And maybe you meet somewhere in the middle, I don’t know, maybe you did manifest it, but I’ve never manifested anything without working my freaking butt off. Like I have never thought about something and had it just like something huge, something significant and just had it show up. Other than one time I did manifest 1 million followers because I went to bed thinking I’m gonna get a million followers, I’m gonna get a million followers. And the next day someone dropped off at my house, a book called 1 million Followers
RV (10:10):
It was a book called 1 million Followers by Brendan Kane, which is actually a really good book. I really, I really like it. We’ve had Brendan Kane on the podcast and so, but you gotta have a vision, right? You gotta have something you can see that you’re moving towards. The second thing is you gotta have some good old fashioned commitment, good old fashioned commitment get this also is in take the stairs, we call it the buy-in principle of commitment. And it says the more you have invested into something, the less likely you are to let it fail.
RV (10:50):
The more you have invested into something, the less likely you are to let it fail. That means you should increase your investment, increase your expenditure of time, money, prayer, thoughts, resources, attention, like you should increase your investment. Because when it’s difficult, you’re gonna tend to run away. That’s the, that’s the natural default and design of the human brain to keep you safe. Which means to run away from pain, to run away from fear, to do what everyone else does, which is to avoid the inconvenient and chase the convenient chase the easy escalator, right? And what you gotta do is you gotta be a take the stairs person. You gotta be someone that says, no, I’m, I’m not gonna be like everybody, I’m not gonna run away from the pain. I’m not gonna run away from the fear. I’m not gonna run away from the inconvenience.
RV (11:39):
I’m gonna run towards it. I’m gonna run into it, I’m going to conquer it. I’m gonna be the buffalo. If you’ve ever heard me tell this my Buffalo story, which now is like, you know, going all over the internet which we’ve been talking about for my entire career, being the buffalo charging the storm. That is what it takes is straight up commitment. Because the more money you invest into your dream, the less likely you are just to walk away, right? The more time you’ve got into it, you’re like, I can’t just walk away from this. Like, I’m not just gonna leave this here. I poured my life into this thing. Like I poured my life into pursuing it. And that’s what it takes is to set a goal that matters to you so much that when you go all in, the reason it works is not so much because like you get lucky cuz you went all in or or cuz you figure it out just cuz you went all in.
RV (12:26):
It’s because you, there wasn’t any other option. And so you do it until you find a way. And there’s always a way, a lot of times it takes a long time to find the way, but eventually you find the way, if you stay committed and you stay committed by increasing the investment, right? You do more, you spend more time. One of my mentors early on in my career was a guy named Randy Gage and he said this, and I’ve always loved this, he said, you should always be the number one investor in your own dream. You should be the number one investor in your own dream. You should be investing. Not your boss, not your investors, not the bank, not your rich uncle. You, it’s your dream. If you want it bad enough, you put your money on the table, you put your time on the table, you come to the playing field and you put your heart on the field and you say, this is what I want. This is what I’m after and I’m all in.
RV (13:24):
And if you don’t do that, then don’t be surprised when it doesn’t work out. Like, don’t be shocked when you fail. Don’t be surprised that you, you end give up or you get distracted. And what most people do is they don’t get, they don’t quit, they get distracted and then they quit inadvertently, right? Accidentally. And it’s some good old-fashioned commitment. And that leads me to number three. So the number three, the number three force here that you can use, the number three source of inspiration to help you outlast the challenges is service. Service. To me, service is the greatest and most powerful inspiring force there is.
RV (14:07):
It is getting outside of ourself and what we want and saying, regardless of what I want, regardless of what I care about, regardless of what I like, regardless of what is convenient for me, I’m going to do whatever I have to do to be of value to somebody else, to enhance their life, to improve their life, to, to help their situation. My inconvenience is irrelevant. The fact that it is difficult is not a, not something that factors into the consideration. It’s not a characteristic of the equation. Because what matters is helping other people and making a difference and making an impact. And so honestly, my wellbeing in that is sort of ancillary. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s irrelevant. It’s, it’s not a part of what matters. When you are living in service and there is no fear, once the mission to serve becomes clear, there is no fear, there is no self-doubt.
RV (15:05):
You’re not worried about it cuz you’re not thinking about yourself. You’re thinking about the person out there who needs you. That is what I want you to do. That is how you a last your competition. You’re focused on others and you’re going, yeah, this is difficult. Yeah, I don’t feel like doing this today. Yeah, I don’t like it. Yeah, I don’t like the technology. Yeah, this annoys me. Yeah, it’s hard. Yeah. I’m spending, investing more money into my business. Yeah, but it matters because it matters to someone else. And your message matters. Your message matters to someone else.
RV (15:44):
Your work matters to someone else. Your life matters to someone else. When you get fully present to that. And then you won’t abandon ship, you won’t change course, you won’t alter the destination. You’ll stay focused, you’ll stay on target, you’ll stay committed, you’ll stay disciplined, you’ll stay activated and you will outlast all the fears and inconveniences that show up and you will conquer it and you will do something great. Share this episode with someone who needs to hear it and keep coming back every single week on the Influential Personal Brand podcast. Thanks for being here.
Ep 375: What Is Imposter Syndrome and Do I Have It | Michelle Chalfant Episode Recap
AJV (00:03):
Hey, allI don’t even know if I can talk, I just had one of the most insightful and enlightening conversations about what it means to be an emotionally healthy adult. And I need that. Like, I need that. And it was like such a really great conversation about as adults, do we make time and space to feel the feelings that we have? And then to actually sit down and talk about where did those feelings come from? Are they true, are they not true? And what do we do about these? And how are these feelings causing success or problems in our lives? Or, you know, and, and some of these, it’s like, how are they affecting our relationships or how are they causing havoc in our relationships because we don’t even realize what they are? And so as a part of this conversation the question came up, what is imposter syndrome and how do you know if you have it right?
AJV (01:09):
So I thought this was really good because a part of being around tons of people who are creating content and building businesses and doing things that are exceptionally important to their lives, and they believe in them deeply, that also comes with some insecurity, right? Because the more willing that you are to put yourself out there, the more, the more vulnerable you have to be and the more vulnerable you are to negative commentary which can cause problems on your mental wellbeing your state of emotional health it, it just doesn’t feel good to go, Hey, that sucks. You suck. I don’t like that. Though nobody likes that. So what, what do we do about it? And so I, I love this conversation. They said that imposter syndrome, I simply believing that you are a fraud. That you are ill-equipped to do the job or task at hand, although, right, and this isn’t a part of any formal definition, although you have the necessary expertise, experience, credentials to do exactly what you’re doing.
AJV (02:24):
You, you are capable of doing it, but you have feelings of like, I’m not good enough. I’m not smart enough, I don’t know enough, I don’t have enough experience. I don’t have enough time. I I, whatever it is, it’s you allow yourself to believe that you are fraud even when you’re not. And so we talked about, well, where does that come from? Where do these feelings come from? And then how do we overcome them? And a huge part of it is just recognizing your own limiting beliefs of what are the things that I actually believe to be true that are not true? They are not true. And so I’m just gonna pause for a second introspection moment here and go, what do you tell yourself? What do you allow yourself to believe about yourself? That is blatantly not true.
AJV (03:28):
Just gonna sit in this awkward silence for just a minute. What lie do you believe about yourself that maybe you’re not even aware of? That’s a limiting belief. And through this conversation I shared that over the last several weeks that I have really been struggling with like, am I capable of doing the job at hand that I have as c e o and co-founder of Brand Builders Group? Am I capable of doing that and being a great mom to two toddlers and being a good wife to my husband and being a good friend and dedicating enough time to the Lord as I walk in my Christian faith? And do I, does that leave any time for me? It’s like, can I do the job and not work 80 hours a week? And where does that leave me? Because the truth is I’ve been struggling with that.
AJV (04:22):
I had a recent emergency surgery and I have not been able to get back to my normal workplace, which has caused my, caused my workload to grow and grow and grow. And my time is less and less and it makes me feel like I’m not equipped to do the job. It makes me feel like I’m incapable of, somehow I’m different than I was six weeks ago. Or something has changed in me that doesn’t have have it in me anymore. And I had not really paused and taken the time to go where this is coming from. And what lies am I saying? What lies am I believing? And I think a part of this conversation really comes down to it’s like, do you even recognize the lies that you believe? Do you even recognize that you have limiting beliefs that you say to yourself and you literally speak out into the world without even realizing?
AJV (05:15):
It is a limiting belief. It is a lie that you have allowed yourself to believe and it is holding you back. And I think awareness, consciousness of this is the first step of, of overcoming these limiting beliefs, which ultimately can result in imposter syndrome, right? It’s like I’m sitting here as the c e o of Brand builders group. I’m going like, can I imposter? Like, am I equipped for this? Like, can I do this? Deep down knowing I was built for this, I’ve been training and working my whole life for this. Like everything leading up to this is, is God preparing me to do the work that he has for me? And also knowing that I’m not doing this alone God is working through this and I have an amazing husband and a partner and a staff and a team and coaches and mentors.
AJV (06:02):
I am not doing this on my own. So where is this nonsense coming from? And here’s what I can just tell you in my own journey through this conversation, and not just one conversation. But it’s, I have literally said out loud, I don’t know a hundred times over the last six weeks, I just don’t have enough time. I don’t have enough time. That is my limiting belief. And until I took a moment to have a conversation about what was going on, I did not even realize that I was literally suffering from imposter syndrome, allowing myself to believe I’m a fraud. That I’m incapable of doing something that I’m fully capable of doing while simultaneously allowing and even repeating it out loud, a limiting belief, speaking it into the world, letting it control my life and my thoughts and feeling more ill-equipped every single time I say it.
AJV (06:57):
I don’t have enough time. That’s not true.
AJV (07:54):
And we just can’t work ourself into that because you already are right? There’s nothing that you can do to make yourself more valuable than you already are. I am just as worthy and just as valuable. If I work 80 hours a week or eight hours a week or zero
AJV (08:45):
And so maybe this podcast interview that I did with Michelle Shon was really just for me. And the interesting thing, and I didn’t tell her this, but I’ll tell everyone else who’s listening. I almost canceled it today because I have a, a sick baby at home and I’m so behind and I’m like, I just need to postpone it. I just need to reschedule. I don’t have time for this. But I didn’t, I don’t know why, but I didn’t. Mainly cuz I’m looking at my calendar going, what am I, where am I gonna move this to? And I I’m so glad,
AJV (09:26):
To feel the feelings that you have to recognize what is true and what is not. And then to speak truth to the lie, which is what I got to do on my own podcast interview with Michelle
AJV (10:34):
There was 24 hours, then there’s 24 hours. Now that’s not new and different. I have the same team, the same staff. Everything else is the same, but my feeling about it has changed. And that’s what I can control. That’s what I can own. That’s what I can write down. I can think about it, I can speak truth to it. I can write down the evidence to it. I can make a plan and I can move forward. We can all do that. But it takes time and it takes space and it takes desire and intention. What it doesn’t take is you vegging out and going, I don’t wanna talk about it. I’m just so tired. I’m gonna go, go get a glass of wine and I’m gonna pop on the TV and I’m gonna watch a show. How about instead of doing that, we take these five minutes and we go, what is true? What is a lie? And what is factual evidence of truth in my life when it comes to this certain thing? So I hope right now you’ll just give yourself five minutes. Anything that is calling your attention will be there in five minutes. But give yourself five minutes right now to go, what is a limiting belief in my life that I’m allowing to wreak havoc on my belief in myself and my relationships and everything around me? And start making a change about it right now?
AJV (11:53):
Cuz it really could only be five minutes. Awareness is the first step. So take five minutes and see where it gets you. We’ll see you next time.
Ep 373: 3 Hidden Traits of Successful People | Carey Nieuwhof Episode Recap
RV (00:02):
Well, I absolutely adored my conversation with Carrie Nieuwhof, and as often happens, he inspired me. Some of the things that he was talking about, I guess, you know, set me on a path of thinking about things that are important for, for my life. And, you know, even though we were sort of talking about how pastors can build their personal brand, it really, it was him sharing a lot about how his speaking career got started. And so if you’re interested in, in hearing that story about, you know, how did he build his speaking career? And, and, and how did he, how did he start from scratch? I think that’s super powerful. And so I was thinking this was related to that. And then the more I kept processing on it, I realized no, what it reminded me of are three hidden traits of successful people. And so I’m gonna walk you through, through these because I think these, these are, when I say they’re hidden traits, I mean, these are three things that make successful people successful that I don’t know that we hear enough about, or that we maybe we take for granted, or we’re not sure that they, they are really there.
RV (01:11):
And so as I was listening to Carrie’s story and also thinking back on my own life, and then thinking about so many of our successful clients and where also where we’re going, these, these three things really jumped out to me to go, you know, if you want to be a successful person, these are three things that I think you really need to commit to. And you need to ask yourself on the front end, am I willing to commit to these things? Because if you’re not, no matter how skilled you are, no matter how talented you are, no how much, no matter how much head knowledge you have, I think these are the things that are, are more invisible, they’re more hidden, that really hold people back from success. And so the first one is to crush it where you are at. And this is one we definitely don’t hear enough about when it comes to success.
RV (02:04):
Everybody talks about like, Hey, start the side hustle. Hey, do the next thing. Hey, you, you know, figure out what your vision is. And all of those things are good. And I think too many times we overlook the importance of being successful, not just successful, but being very successful at the thing that is right in front of us. Meaning the best way to set yourself up for success in the next thing is to be successful doing the thing that you’re doing right now. Let me say that again. The best way to set yourself up for being successful at the next thing is to be successful at doing the thing that you’re doing right now. And I think that many of us embrace this lie. We live in this fantasy land
RV (02:59):
That once I’m doing the thing I want to do, then I will suddenly make the sacrifices it takes to be successful. Once it’s my business, then I would, then I would pay the price, then I would put in the work. Or once, once we get past, you know, once I get this certification or that certification or, or once I got a new boss, or once I got promoted, or once I made this much money or, or once I had kids, or once I didn’t have kids, you know, like once they were growing and out of the house, like we are so often convince ourselves that we will really turn it on. We’ll really pay the price, we’ll really put in the work. Like we’ll really show up and do what it takes to be successful when the external circumstances change. And that is a lie.
RV (03:49):
I mean, if you can’t turn it on now, if you can’t pay the price, if you can’t make a sacrifice, if you can’t endure some short-term pain to be successful at the thing you’re doing now, why do you suddenly think you would be willing to in a different situation? And I guess there’s times where maybe that is true, right? Where you go, man, I hate my job, I hate my boss. I’m not given this company one lick of more effort. You know, I’m gonna work just hard enough not to get fired. And maybe that is true, that if it was your own thing, maybe, maybe you would. But I think we overestimate how easy that is. The reality is that, like Vince Lombardi said, winning is a habit. Being a winner is something in your character, right? People who are winners win at everything. Like they win at all the things they pursue, not just winning on the scoreboard, are not just beating other people, but, but creating excellence, doing excellent work, showing up powerfully, serving people, making a difference, making an impact, right?
RV (04:53):
Making contributions to the teams they are a part of. That’s not something you do once in a while. That is not something you do when the conditions are perfect. That is a character trait that you have to decide and commit to embracing that I am a winner because I’m always a winner and I’m gonna succeed because I, I, that’s what I do. I succeed. We’re gonna be excellent cuz that’s what we do around here. We, we make excellent things and yeah, it’s hard at times. Yeah, it’s inconvenient. Yeah, it’s painful. But that is the price of admission to being excellent. That is the price of admission for being great. That’s the price of admission for doing anything that matters. And so if you wanna be successful at your next thing, don’t wait to start developing the success habits until you’re doing those things. Start developing them now.
RV (05:47):
And in my life, you know, there, there’s been a couple times where my life direction has abruptly changed very and, and, and, and a couple times very unexpectedly. And I think the reason why we were able to pivot so quickly to the next thing was because we had done everything in our power to make the current thing succeed. And it’s sort of like, you know, it’s like jumping from the top of one mountain to the top of another mountain versus having like to be on the, if you’re on the, if you’re, if you’re halfway up a mountain or you’re on the bottom of a mountain, you have to like go down that mountain and then go up the bottom of the next mountain. But if you’re on the top of a mountain, you just jump from the top of one mountain to the top of the next, to the top of the next, you know, maybe not from top to top, but you know, near the top.
RV (06:31):
And then you climb back up to the top. And this is what successful people do, right? They’re successful in everything. So don’t convince yourself, don’t lie to yourself that, oh, I would really be successful, you know, if I had a different this or that or whatever. Maybe that’s true. But, but the reality is that most of success comes down to you making that decision to be successful regardless of your circumstances. So do that now. Crush it where you are at. And that is concept right out of take the stairs, you know, from years and years ago. Hasn’t changed. Second thing, second thing that I don’t think people talk enough about when it comes to being successful, specifically at generating revenue, right? So when specifically at, you know, building your personal brand or selling your course or selling your keynote or getting a promotion or, you know, let’s, let’s just say sales in general, generating revenue.
RV (07:30):
I think what we don’t hear enough about is that when somebody succeeds at something, a lot of times, like most of the time it’s because they have banked up all of this trust first, right? So when, and I’ll, I’ll I’ll use this. I think this is a great example. You know, we, we were fortunate to, to be a, a very significant part of Ed Millet’s book launch in 2022. And we made a major contribution. We did a lot, we worked very closely with Ed, and we brought the best that we had to offer in terms of strategy and relationships and you know, we did what we did. But, you know, and we helped Ed pre-sell 117,000 copies of his book. You know, and just recently we, we, we helped Louis House and Amy Porterfield both and, and they both became New York Times bestsellers.
RV (08:24):
All in all, we’ve now helped 13 different clients become New York Times, wall Street Journal, U s USA Today bestsellers. But with Ed, you know, he pre-sold 117,000 copies of his book. Did we have a lot to do with it? Sure, we had a lot, we had something to do with it, right? We, we helped Ed, we helped Ed. The reality is we get far more credit than we deserve. The reality is Ed had banked up so much trust with his audience, so much reputation, right? Did some of our stuff help? I, I hope so. I like to think so. Ed is very gracious in saying that it did. But the reality is that we taught Ed the same thing. We teach all of our clients, right? It wasn’t like we gave him some secret that we didn’t give anybody else the difference in his results, right?
RV (09:11):
The difference in what Ed, ed Mylet experience was not because we did a better job with him or because we taught him something, we don’t teach everybody else. It’s, it’s case in point that what happened was it was his trust that was banked with his audience before he asked them to buy. Trust must always take place before there’s a transaction. Trust must take place before there’s a transaction. When Ed did his book launch, he had years and years of trust banked up. Now we showed up, we were lucky enough to get introduced to him. We were one part of a team of people that were all working together to support him. And we might have helped him maybe, you know, optimize efficiently the, the, the quote unquote extraction of that trust in the form of book sales. But he was the one that banked the trust.
RV (09:58):
And so when we get extraordinary results with clients, you know, I don’t think we could take, like, we cannot take all the credit for it by any means. Even when they follow our formulas, even when they use our ex exact stuff. And similarly, when clients don’t succeed, it’s not because of us, it’s because of them, right? We know our formulas work. They’ve worked for us. They’re working for lots of other clients, the biggest personal brands in the world, all the way down to intermediate and novice people who are just starting out getting extraordinary results. We know what we do works. The difference is you, the difference is how much are you willing? How hard are you willing to work? And how much trust have you banked with your audience? Trust must take place before there’s a transaction. And too many people want to come out and just sell right away.
RV (10:45):
Too many people want to come out and just like, oh, I’m gonna launch something and go, I just wanna sell to a bunch of random strangers on the internet. Well, it’s not bad to do that. It’s not necessarily wrong to do that. But I think the reason that people struggle to succeed right away is because they think, oh, there’s some technique that I need to develop. There is, there’s some strategy. And if it didn’t work, it’s cuz oh, I got bad advice from, you know, this person or that person, or brand builders group, or this course didn’t teach me. And the reality is, it’s because you didn’t have enough trust banked up with your audience. You have to build trust before people are willing to buy. You have to build trust with people. You have to add value, you have to give first. You have to help them.
RV (11:27):
You have to pour into them. And so if your launch failed, it doesn’t mean you failed. It doesn’t mean you got horrible advice. It doesn’t mean that the thing that you’re doing is bad. It doesn’t mean that people won’t ever buy it. It probably means more often. It means that you’re just too early, meaning you are trying to extract revenue before you have deposited trust. So I don’t, don’t think we hear enough about that. And I think, you know, I think people like us, you know, wanna take credit because we do. We, we wanna, we wanna have a part of people’s success. We work really, really hard for it. And you know, sometimes you’re hard on yourself when you don’t succeed or you’re hard on the people around you. And the, the fact of the matter is, a lot of success has to do with trust.
RV (12:13):
And trust comes from adding value to people in your life that they see you, they learn from you, they know you. You’re giving to them, you’re teaching them. And that’s why our entire content marketing strategy, right? Everything we teach, which, you know, can get very sophisticated, but it all boils down to like our entire content marketing strategy is this simple, teach everything you know, for free, but in small bite size chunks and all random miscellaneous order. That’s how we do our whole, our whole content strategy for podcasting, for YouTube, for social media, right? Like, I mean, we’re teaching everything we know for free, but in small bite size chunks, in all random order because we, there’s two things we believe. First of all, we believe that people don’t pay for information. People pay for application. People don’t pay for information, they pay for organization and they pay for application.
RV (13:06):
So even if you teach everything, you know, what they’re gonna hire you to do is they’re not gonna hire you for the knowledge. They’re gonna help, they’re gonna hire you to help them apply the knowledge to their own life and their own business and their own situation. But the second reason why we do that is because we’re automating trust. What are we doing here on this podcast? We’re automating trust. That’s what we’re trying to do. What are we doing on my blog? We’re, you know, you rory vaden blog.com. I’ve, I mean, I feel like I’ve given away a master’s degree in free content on my blog, like for free. Like if you actually sat and went and read all the hundreds of articles, it’s like equivalent to a master’s degree, like probably better in some ways in terms of the ability to help you generate more income for your life immediately.
RV (13:52):
And it’s all there for free because we’re automating trust. We want, we want to add value to people before we need something, right? We we’re, you know, we don’t particularly need anything. Now, what we do hope you do at some point is you, as you go to free brand call.com/podcast and you say, you know what, I like these guys. I like what they’re about. I like their style, I like their guests, I like their information, I like their knowledge, and I think they could help me take my small business to the next level. I think they could help me grow my reach, grow my revenue, increase my sales build my personal brand, build my audience, build my impact, and I wanna talk to them, right? So that’s why we do the podcast for free. That’s why we work so hard at it. We’re automating trust.
RV (14:35):
That’s what we’re trying to do. You can do the same thing. That’s what we’re doing on social automating trust. Teach everything you know, for free, but in one small bite size chunk in an all random miscellaneous order, all right? That accounts for a lot of your success, like more than you realize. So if your last launch failed, give yourself a break, right? Like, if your revenue’s not climbing as fast as you want it, welcome to the club, right? If your audience isn’t taken off and you’re not getting the kind of reach that you want, welcome to the club, right? That doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong, it means you’re just early on the journey. That’s it. And that leads me to the third thing. The third thing that I don’t think we hear enough about when it comes to success. I mean, you do hear about this some, but I don’t think that we index it enough.
RV (15:28):
I don’t think we appropriately wait this enough. And that is simply that you have to make a decision to stick with it most of succeeding in the personal brand space. Okay? So if you wanna become a, a bestselling author, a world renowned speaker, if you wanna become a world renowned coach, a high paid consultant, if you wanna just make it in this space, in this business, a huge part. Like most of it, probably 80% of it is just sticking around
RV (16:22):
And so they give up, or you know, sometimes they have to, right? Something changes and they’re, they run out of, you know, money or somebody gets hurt in their life, they gotta take care of ’em or you know, whatever, whatever. Like, there’s life situation, but they, but they of ultimately, they just, they, they quit. They, they, because either they choose to or they have to, they stop pursuing the dream. And I think 80% of achieving a dream is just not giving up on it. Like 80% of you achieving your wildest dream is just not giving up on it. It’s just pursuing it is sticking with it. And, and the reason why I think this matters, especially for small business owners, especially for entrepreneurs and especially for personal brands, but I think this, I would round this out and say that this applies to all small business owners, right?
RV (17:05):
Because this is, here’s what it means to be an entrepreneur. Like, ultimately people think what are, what’s the criteria that it takes to be a successful entrepreneur? We think, oh, we gotta have a great product, or we gotta be good at sales, or we gotta have the gift of gab. We gotta be good with people, or we gotta have, you know, good time management, or we have to have, you know, good systems or good at marketing, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. None of that. I mean, all of those things help. None of them are the predominant criteria for a success. Successful entrepreneur. You wanna know what the number one most predominant criteria for a successful entrepreneur is. I’ll tell you, I’m a hundred percent convicted that this is the number one most important criteria for being a successful entrepreneur.
RV (17:50):
You have to be willing to get kicked in the face over and over and over every day and keep coming back for more. That’s it. Like, you have to get punched, you have to get kicked, you have to get hit, you have to get beat down and be willing to come back for more. If you wanna be a successful entrepreneur. That’s the job. That’s the job. It’s not secret strategies, it’s not mentorship, it’s not this personal development book, that coaching program, the perfect product, customer experience sales. It is that it is going, what is your appetite? What is, what is your threshold for getting kicked in the face? Forgetting, beat down for having problem after problem, rejection after rejection, set back after setback in your personal life, your professional life, people quitting on you, losing clients, thought you had the gig and you didn’t getting zing with a, a tax bill from the government.
RV (18:46):
You weren’t expecting the product breaking down that you thought was perfect. The marketing thing busted. Having people run off with your money. Like it’s, it’s, and then it’s, it’s managing all that, right? While in your personal life, you have chaos going on. This is the story of our life, like in the last few weeks, right? We’ve had unexpected surgeries, we have kids throwing up in the middle of the night, someone drove into our fence, right? On accident, we, we knocked over our fence. We’ve had people bump into the car. We have had gas leaks in our house where we had to tear open the walls. We have so many things, kids riding on the walls with markers like the, the kids’ teachers getting sick and now the kids are home. Like all of that is normal. That’s the job, right? So you go, can you manage all of that simultaneously while getting kicked in the face simultaneously, while trying to like, make an impact in the world? That is what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur. What is your threshold for getting beat up? What is your threshold for, for getting hit? How hard can you get hit and keep coming back for more? How many times can you be told no? How many times can someone let you down? How many times can you be taken advantage of? H how many times do you have to fail? But w and but you’re willing to iterate and keep coming back. That is what it takes.
RV (20:16):
That’s what it takes. So if you’re going, if you’re having a hard day, if you’re having a hard day, don’t, I, I feel for you, right? I don’t mean to be too hard on you. I know it’s freaking hard. It’s hard. And if you have kids, you have young kids, it’s freaking hard. And if you have a team and you’re managing people and you’re dealing with the gossip and the relationships and their personal life and their, you know, traveling in this and what, and they let somebody down and they didn’t show up, right? I, it’s hard. And I know you don’t have the, you don’t have as much money to hire the vendors and you hire and then you hire a vendor and they let you down or they don’t do a good job or they ghost on you. We had a vendor ghost on us recently.
RV (21:02):
$6,000. We paid them. They disappeared. $6,000 gone disappeared. I know it’s hard, but that’s the job. Like, that’s the price of admission for success in this business, in this game of entrepreneurship, of being a small business owner, of being a world changer. Do you think things were easy for Martin Luther King Jr? Do you think things were easy for Mother Teresa? Like, do you think things are easy for the people who change the world? Like if you wanna change the world, that’s the job. You wanna own your own business, that’s the job you wanna make. Unlimited income, that’s the job you want freedom. That’s the job. You wanna be well-known. That’s the job. You wanna make more money than anyone in your family has ever made. That is the job. What is your appetite for getting kicked in the face?
RV (22:00):
I’m not saying I like it, I’m just saying that’s the job. So if today’s a hard day, welcome to the club. You’re on the right track, right? These are the things we don’t hear enough about, but they are the truth. In order for you to succeed at launching your next thing, you need to crush it. Where you crush it with the thing you’re doing now, crush it where you’re at. In order to succeed and make money and generate sales, you have to bank trust first. Trust must take place before a transaction. And if you’re gonna succeed as an entrepreneur, as a small business owner, as a personal brand, or as anything else, you just gotta increase your threshold for getting kicked in the face and keep coming back for more because that’s what it takes. But if you’re here listening now, if you’re still listening by this point, if you found your way here to us and you found your way to this episode and you’ve found your way to this moment and you’re still here, here’s what I believe.
RV (23:17):
I believe you have what it takes. I believe you have what it takes. I believe that there’s a calling on your life to do something so big in the world that that calling will outweigh the, the, the pain that you have to go through. That, that long-term calling that purpose for your life is to make such a positive impact for other people that you will be willing to endure the pain. So you’re on the right track. It’s okay to have hard days. Just realize that’s the job. Keep going and keep coming back for more. We’ll catch you next time on the Influential Personal Brand podcast.
Ep 371: 5 Things You Need to Know to Hit A Bestseller List | Esther Fedorkevich Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
Have you ever wondered what makes a New York Times bestselling book? A bestselling book,
AJV (00:58):
And so I thought I would share some of those tidbits with you because they were really important to me with the disclaimer. At the end of the day for anyone who is a writer, an author, a content creator, a thought leader, it’s like, I just think this should go without saying that. I do believe solely wholehearted wholeheartedly that knowing the amount of work that it takes to write a book and then edit it, and then rewrite it and then edit again, and then rewrite it again, like that’s no small feat. So I know that at the heart, most authors, most people who have a message on their hearts are not doing this just to hit the list, right? Because the real benefit is a life changed, a life transformed, sometimes a life saved because books have the power to do that. Words have the power to do that.
AJV (01:45):
And at the same time, we know that when you do hit a list, it creates a credibility factor, a shareability factor, a just a, a component to it that helps you share it more, get it into the hands of more people, thus impact change, transform save more lives. So I don’t want this to just be about, oh, like the only reason you write a book is if it’s only good if it hits the list. That’s clearly not the case, cuz lots of not so good books hit the list.
AJV (02:59):
AJV (03:44):
Number two is you gotta have a platform. You’ve got to have people that are already coming alongside with you on this journey. And that’s a really important part of this because although not every author is in the business of hitting the bestseller book or selling millions of books, publishers are
AJV (04:37):
If you don’t want to hit a list and make this some sort of big part of your business, then self-publishing is an amazing route. And self-publishing today is extraordinarily amazing. Like, truly like it’s not the self-publishing that it was 12 years ago. Like you can’t even tell some of these self-publishing houses. You couldn’t even tell that this was done self-published. They’re really great. And so you’ve gotta think about the intent of that, of knowing that if you’re going after a traditional publisher, the intent is that you’re gonna hit the list and you’re gonna sell lots of copies. And in order to do that, you need a platform, right? You, you gotta have a platform of, of fans, followers customers that already know who you are and subscribe to the content that you’re teaching. Then I love this and I loved what Esther said, and she was like, you actually have to have a unique idea, right?
AJV (05:27):
Having great content is one thing, but it needs to be unique. It needs to be a creative idea or concept. What we would say is it’s got to forward thought leadership. It doesn’t have to be a brand new idea, but it’s got to be presented in a brand new way. So those are the three things fundamentally that are kind of like at the base, the foundation of if you’re going after a bestseller list to get this in the hands of lots of, or get this book in the hands of lots of people, those are like the prerequisites. Then there was a few other things that I thought was really important, and she was like, you just, the bestseller list, just hitting the bestseller list on Amazon alone is its own algorithm and its own beast of just knowing what category listings, not listing listings to be in.
AJV (06:15):
And I’m gonna tell you, go listen to my podcast interview with Esther. This is just like one of the most insightful interviews. So just go listen to it in terms of if you’re in that world of writing and publishing a book right now and your launch season or pre-launch season go listen to the interview with Esther. But this whole concept of Amazon listings, it’s like, think about it like this way, when you go look for a book in a retail bookstore yes, there are a few of those left
AJV (07:07):
And I think it’s like, it’s like that but different when it comes to Amazon because you’re just typing in book names or categories. You’re not saying, Hey, I want to research kids books about turtles. Most likely you’re saying, Hey, I want to go kids books for five to seven year olds, boys, right? And it’s like, the thing is though, the category listings are really important and Esther told us awesome story about one of her clients who is a 17 year old who wrote a kid’s book about turtles and it hit number one on the Amazon bestseller list under the category of turtles. Turtles, right? It’s a kiss moment, it hit it under turtles. So it’s like being strategic with the marketing intent is a really important part of, you can’t just have a great book and assume you can just throw it on Amazon or anywhere.
AJV (07:55):
It’s like no, that there needs to be some strategy and marketing intent in order to get it to some of those credibility components like a bestseller’s list that’s then going to help it spread and help the message populate throughout, you know, your intended audience. So category listings actually do make a difference. I think that was really unique and very insightful. The other thing that I thought was really interesting is she shared with me that audiobooks audio sales are up 347%. Now, book sales are also up, but audiobook sales are up 347%. And what she said is that most people even though they listen to it on audio, they will also buy a physical copy because after they listen to it, they wanna go back and have something to underline or highlight or go back over. And so many people are doing both.
AJV (08:49):
But audio that’s huge. And then she goes, I make my author. So Esther is an agent, right? She is the owner and founder of the Fed Agency, but she goes, I say, if you’re gonna write a book, you must do an audio book. It’s a prerequisite, right? You’re doing it. And I would say I would throw that in there as the unsolicited feedback from a consumer books. If you’re gonna do an audio book, make sure you read it. You need to read your own book. Don’t hire someone else to read your book. You read your book. It makes it so much better for the consumer to listen to if you’re listening to the actual author. So just a couple of quick things about audio and the importance of not just having your book and words on pages, but having the audio version will actually help your book sales, audio sales help book sales.
AJV (09:35):
So make sure you have it on audio. Then we talked about a couple of other things that I thought were just really important. And some of them are just high level and, but worthwhile, worthwhile is that if you’re gonna launch a book you need to treat it like you’re launching a business because that’s what it is. And you need to be prepared to put in the time, resources, money as if you were launching a business. And because that’s what it takes. It’s gonna take a lot of sweat equity, a lot of actual equity, bro, dollars and cents like things cost money to prize. But a lot of time, and I thought this was really again, an important thing to remember. It’s like people talk about launch season. If you’re an author or an aspiring author, you know what I’m talking about.
AJV (10:20):
There’s a launch season. But nobody really explains like how long is a launch season. And what Esther said is she was like, A launch season is about a year, a year, not six weeks not three months, not six months, 12 months, let’s say year. And she goes, most of my authors begin their pre-sales and their kind of pre-launch season, six months before the pub date of their book, six months. And now that’s after they already have a plan in place. So think about how much
AJV (11:53):
Organically, or at least 10 years. Now that doesn’t mean you won’t write other books and talk about other things, but you gotta love it so much that for the next 10 years I would dedicate every conversation to this or for my life. Like, I could be talking about this until the day that, you know, I go to heaven, I God brings me home. It’s like I could talk about it forever. That is what needs to be in your book, is the things that people are like, man, like you always talk about that. You should write a book about that. And so just think about that. It’s like, this is not, I’m gonna write it and then for a couple of weeks we’re gonna market it and then it’s gonna spread. And no, it’s the, it’s not build it and they will come. It is you build it and then you go talk about it and talk about it some more and talk about some more and then some more and then a little bit more.
AJV (12:37):
And so it’s just treating it like a business that it’s like, it’s not something you write and it just sits on a shelf. It’s just like a business. It takes a continual process over the course of time before, during, and after to really make it successful. And then the last thing that I would just say I would just share is there is not one sales aha. In order to sell a lot of books, there’s a lot of sales aha movements and a lot of sales strategies. And there’s not one thing that’s a lot of things happening simultaneously that work today and that’s new and that’s different and that can’t feel overwhelming, which is why you need a good strategy and you need a plan that you can do over six months. So some of those things are making sure you’ve got a good social media plan.
AJV (13:22):
And some of the things that Esther and I talked about on our conversation I thought was so good is do fun things that create engagement. Like do a do a book cover reveal with your social media followings. Do a challenge from content in the book. Do different fun things like do a book launch party do giveaways, but create engagement with your social media months and months before it releases. You know, give tiny little sample excerpts outs, share stories, but create engagement all around the content that’s happening in the book. Other things were make sure you do a podcast tour, right? Make sure that it’s like you’re hitting every single media outlet in media venue. You can speaking, right? Speak for free, speak for money, go on podcasts. If you can get big media outlets to interview you, that’s great too.
AJV (14:12):
But it’s making sure that you’re just exhausting all of your resources. It’s not just sending an email to your list or just focusing on your followers. It’s how do I access anyone who I think could benefit from the message that are on the pages of this book? And that takes time and it takes a plan. And it’s not one thing. It’s lots of things happening simultaneously, which means you gotta have a sales and marketing plan. And I think that’s like the big overarching takeaway is that launching a book is like launching a business. And as the author, a huge part of your role is the salesperson. You, like, you are the sales team of the book. And if you are not a great salesperson, then you’ve got got to surround yourself with great salespeople who can go out and market and sell the book on your behalf.
AJV (14:57):
But again, like this is a really important thing just to walk away with, is we say this all the time that Brand Builders Group is, there is no such thing as a New York Times best writing author. There’s only New York Times best selling author. Highlight, bold, underline, whatever you need to do, which means that’s who is selling it, right? That’s who is selling the most. That’s who’s buying the most of that book. There’s not a lot of the best writing. That’s the, you know, that’s just what’s required. That’s the prerequisite, is it’s great writing, it’s great content that should be right. But then there’s gotta be the sales and marketing plan to get it in the hands of the people that you can help. So I hope this helps. You’re so insightful for me. Great reminders, new stuff. So hope this was helpful. Go check out the full conversation on our podcast, the influential Personal brand. I’ll catch you later.
Ep 369: How to Build Recurring Revenue | John Meese Episode Recap
RV (00:02):
How do you build massive recurring revenue? That is the theme of today’s show. And recap, this is sort of based off the interview that I did with John Meese talking about how to build massive membership sites, and we’re gonna talk about some of those highlights. But really, I wanna zero in on some of what our, what we believe our keys are to building massive recurring revenue and, and even just understanding what recurring revenue is and why does, why does recurring revenue even matter? And I wanna just kind of start with a little bit of a track record here. So you know, this is something that we know something about. Brand Builders is a recurring revenue model. I mean, our core business is a one-on-one coaching or, and training product that people pay a subscription for. And that’s our, our flagship program includes you know, coming to two days of training every month, and also one-on-one coaching every single month as well.
RV (01:04):
And then there’s a, there’s a, a, a, a do it yourself, like a self-study version of it, which is you get access to all the online training, and that’s a lower, a lower version. But we are a membership site, or not a membership site. We’re a recurring revenue business. And the business that we sold in 2018, a huge component of that business was also recurring revenue. So this is something we know a lot about and have a lot of experience in. And I first wanna talk to you about why would you even consider recurring revenue and, and, and, and what are some of the, some of the strengths and some of the reasons to have recurring revenue. One of the great things about recurring revenue, so this is some of the, you know, selling subscriptions, is because every month you don’t start on zero, right?
RV (01:48):
Like every month you’re not automatically on zero every month, you automatically come into the month with revenue contracted. Now, not always does a hundred percent of that come in, but you always have a, a, a, a large number, a large proportion of revenue contracted. And so that’s really, really valuable. And y you know, just in terms of taking the pressure off, because what recurring revenue does is it allows you to kind of predict for the future. It’s, it’s, it’s more predictable. And so because it’s more predictable, we can say, okay, well if, if we can grow our revenues, you know, we’re always factoring for churn. So some percentage of people are gonna leave, and hopefully we’re gonna seal that back door with retention, which we’ll talk about. But the the other thing that we will we’ll try to do is we’re always bringing people in the front door and, and then the snowball is growing.
RV (02:44):
And so it’s a snowball that gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So the revenue is steady, it’s consistent, and then you can plan for growth. You can say, gosh, you know, hiring this person would be a little scary right now, I don’t know that we could afford them, but assuming some basic metrics. And, you know, if we can look back and say, Hey, statistically our, our revenues grow at this rate, we can sort of forecast more predictably and more comfortably in the future to say, yeah, there’s probably some investments we could make, whether it’s technology or personnel or you know, equipment or whatever you know, software tools you need or services you need done to go, I think we, we can, we can swing it based on, you know, our growth trajectory. The other reason why recurring revenue is so valuable is it’s, it’s literally more valued in terms of business valuation.
RV (03:35):
So when you look at the financial valuations of a business, this is a super deep dive by the way that in our, one of our phase four courses is called eight Figure Entrepreneur. And we really teach the real mechanics of, of, you know, the, just the, the basic foundations of finance and acumen, cash flow and things like that that most entrepreneurs don’t get, not even in business school. You know, I have an M B A and I would say I, there was so much practical information I I never got. But when you look at how businesses are valued, businesses are valued based on an estimated stream of future cash flows. So in other words, they’re saying, what’s the likelihood, the way I describe it is pretend that you, here’s how you, here’s how you value a business. Think of it as a money machine.
RV (04:22):
And if, if I had a money machine that printed dollar bills and I said, Hey, I have a machine here that prints a $1 bill every year. How much is, how much would, would I sell this machine to you? And what would you be willing to buy this machine? And we go, well, we know it’s, it’s probably worth at least a dollar cuz it prints a dollar every year. And you know, if you don’t do anything to improve the machine, if it’s a reliable machine, there’s probably gonna be a dollar next year. So that would be $2, you know, in, in three years from now, it’s gonna be at least $3. Now the machine could break down. So that’s part of what as the buyer is assessing as what’s the likelihood that machine’s gonna break down or the strategic, A strategic buyer is somebody who says, Hmm, I know how to take $1 machines and I can turn them into machines that print a dollar every month.
RV (05:09):
I have some expertise or some skill or some people on my team who can take that machine and make it per print more, either $1 bills faster or can print dollar bills that are not a dollar, but $5 or $10 or $50. And so that’s what, how businesses are valued. It’s like, what’s the, what’s the reliability of the revenue coming in the future and saying, I’m willing to, when someone values a business and buys a business, they’re saying, I’m gonna, I’m gonna basically buy three years of your future cash flow now and assuming going, I’m gonna take the risk of going this machine. I’m buying from you. I’m going to, it’s gonna take me three years to earn my money back, but then after that, I’ll make more money. Or because I believe that I can pay, pay you three years worth of earnings for your machine now.
RV (05:59):
And I think I can, I can increase the productivity of that machine. And that’s effectively right there is how businesses are valued, which they really overcomplicate in a lot of, you know, academic institutions and schools and just people don’t understand it in general. Well, so then why is recurring revenue valuable? Because recurring revenue is predictable, and as predictability goes up, the valuation of the business goes up because the likelihood of those cash flows being there, every single month goes up when it’s already contracted versus when I have to go out and sell a whole new bunch of customers. So recurring revenue companies have higher values, they’re literally worth more because they’re more consistent and more the revenue’s more consistent and more predictable. You know, and if you look at SaaS companies, software companies, a lot of times those companies are valued based on a multiple of their revenue.
RV (06:51):
Whereas most companies are valued on a multiple of their profits. And so it becomes highly valuable when you have recurring revenue because it, it’s enticing to a potential buyer. So the demand for that money machine i e a business is, is higher. So those are some of the reasons to do recurring revenue. The, one of the other reasons why we love recurring revenue, and, and here’s a good way so in our, our phase one course one which is called finding your brand, d n a, one of the things we help people do is, is figure out what their primary business model should be. Your primary business model. Is that the revenue stream to which all others are subservient to that one. And we talk about when you should choose a course versus when you should choose a membership site. And there’s all these factors.
RV (07:39):
Well, one of the factors is to say, if you are good at constantly finding new customers and you’re good at it and you, you, your talents lend themselves to it and you want to do it, you go, a course is a really good option because once the course is built, you don’t have to change much. You can focus your time on just finding new people to buy the existing thing. But if you struggle with marketing and sales and you go, man, I struggle to find new customers, I’m not as, as talented at as that, then we go, well, sometimes membership sites are better because what you can do is you can spend less time acquiring new customers and spend more time creating content to service your existing customers. And so that’s kind of what we do. I mean, we like to think we’re good at both marketing and sales especially is like kind of our expertise.
RV (08:30):
And, but, but we don’t love having to sell every single month just to like hit the budget, right? So we love having the recurring revenue and going, you know, at least for me, I think one of my superpowers is creating content. So it’s easier for me, even though I love marketing and sales, and we’re good at marketing and sales, and that’s what we teach people how to do. I, I, my superpower I think is even more so in creating content. So it’s easier for me to go, yeah, let me, let me find a few customers who will be in a continuity with us and let’s serve them in a deeper way. Now, at Brand Builders Group, we currently have over 600 active clients that are in our, our our monthly training, you know, and coaching program which are our flagship programs. And there’s like a self, you know, there’s a do-it-yourself version, and then there’s a one-on-one version, which also includes our live training events.
RV (09:25):
And then we have, we have like 300 private clients on top of that who just hire us for private projects and private, you know topics at at at less consistent. Those are more like, those are more like sales. They’re not recurring revenue, they’re bigger hits of revenue. When someone just says, ah, I really wanna like, focus on my podcast, just hire us to help you with that. Or writing their book or launching their book or their keynote or building out their funnels or, and it’s more of just they’re hiring us for, in a more expedient way to focus on a burst. But those are ones like, you have to be selling new ones every month versus the recurring revenues going, Hey, when you’re on a recurring membership, we give you all of those things, we give you access to all of ’em, and we’ll step you through ’em as you need to.
RV (10:06):
So that’s a little bit about why recurring revenue matters and understanding how it affects business valuation. Again, if, if you look at the difference between a company valued on revenue versus a company valued on profit most companies are valued on, on, on profit or ebitda earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, which basically just means profit, which is, you know, to use my money machine analogy which by the way is an analogy I came up with of, of just thinking about a business just as a simple m money printing machine to go, okay, a dollar, if my money, my money machine prints a dollar every year, that’s the profit of, that’s the final output. But and most companies, you know, depending on a whole number of factors, but let’s say you were getting a just a five multiple meanings, if someone were to pay you a five multiple, that means a buyer’s gonna basically come in and say, I’m gonna pay you five years worth of profits, five years worth of future profits today to buy your money machine.
RV (11:08):
So I’m gonna, if, if you have a dollar in profit, I’m gonna pay you $5. I’m a multiple of five, I’m gonna give you $5 today knowing or feeling confidently, like I will at least get my $5 back over the next five years and hopefully faster if I can do some things to improve the efficiency of the operation or if I have other strategic reasons to make that acquisition. That’s how most business deals are done. It’s a multiple of profits or multiple of ebitda, but recurring revenue, like SaaS companies often are valued on revenue. So if, if you get a, a value of let’s say you get a, a multiple of five, but instead of on your profits, it’s a, it is on your revenue. So, for example, to use this same example, a company that produces a dollar in profit every year, let’s say their revenue is $10, so that would be a company operating at a 10% profit margin.
RV (12:03):
So they generate $10 in revenue, they gotta pay all their expenses, their salespeople, their marketing, their overhead, you know, the product acquisition, their taxes, their insurance, their, you know, everything. And then at the end of the day, maybe they have a 10% profit. Like, and you go, okay, I generated $10 in revenue, a dollar in profit. Normally it’s a a five multiple would say, oh I’m getting, I’m gonna get $5 for that business, five times, $1. But when you’re valued on revenue, it’s a game changer to go, I’m, if I got a, if I got a a, a multiple of five on revenue, it’s not five times $1, it’s five times $10. So that company is to buy that company is not $5, but $50, five times 10, the multiple of five times the revenue of $10. So that’s five years worth of revenues.
RV (12:55):
I’m valuing, valuing that company based on revenues that that company is worth $50 instead of $5 because it’s five years of future revenues versus five years of future profits, right? One of the dynamics that makes companies more have a higher enterprise value is, oh, and be more likely to be valued on revenue, is the consistency of the revenue, which is, you know, happens with recurring revenue. So that’s probably more than most of you wanted to know, but I, I mean, I literally went through MBA school and never understood that basic core concept. It wasn’t until years later as an entrepreneur that I, I, I had a mentor finally explained it to me, sort of in, in simpler English. And it’s important to understand that. And, and that is, even if you plan on never selling your business, I mean, this is again, another principle.
RV (13:45):
We teach an eight figure entrepreneur, is that a business worth selling? Looks a whole lot like a business worth keeping. You know, a business worth selling is a business that operates without you with consistency and produces loss of cash flow inevitably into the future. Well, a business that does that looks a lot like a business worth keeping. I mean, if you have a money machine that prints money every year and it doesn’t require a lot of your time, and there’s not a lot of risk in, in those, that money machine breaking down, you go, why didn’t I just keep it? So the money machine’s just printing money and I’m just keeping the money every year. That’s the way to think about it. Recurring revenue increases consistency, thereby reduces volatility or reduces risk, thereby increasing the valuation of that business, whether you sell it or you keep it.
RV (14:25):
So high level, that’s why recurring revenue is such a good idea. Now, how do you create great recurring revenue? Couple of the key things, if you’re wanting to create recurring revenue of your business, and John talked about this a little bit in the, in the interview, but if you really wanna create a quality recurring revenue product, the question that I would pose for you to answer is this, what is the problem that I can solve that never goes away? What is a problem that I can solve that never goes away? In other words, the need for it continues on month after month after month, which causes people to want to continue paying for us. Accountability is one of the, one of the core problems that we solve. Now, technically the problem we solve is obscurity. We help people who are struggling to be more well known to, to do that.
RV (15:24):
And we teach them a set of information and strategies for how to do that. And all the tactics that we have now used to launch, you know, we’ve had 12 clients that have become New York Times or Wall Street Journal bestsellers. We’ve had four clients create TED Talks that have gone viral with over a million views. We’ve had over we, we just had our, our fifth client generate more than seven figures growth in their annual revenue. So they’ve grown their revenue more than a million dollars a year since being a client of ours. So we have a set of knowledge that we teach people to do that. But what the need, the, the, the problems that never go away are accountability, community and access to great vendors and as well as inspiration, right? You, the inspiration is like never, it’s a, it’s something that never disappears.
RV (16:13):
So those are the, some of the problems we’re solving. So you gotta sort of think about it if you’re gonna create a membership site or if you have one and you’re going, how do I, how do I get the snowball rolling faster? Be thinking about what are the problems that my clients have that never go away? And how can I serve those needs better? All right? So that’s my first key for how to grow your recurring revenue. The second, the second key, and this one is directly from the, from the the mind of AJ Vaden. So AJ talks about this all the time with our team internally, is when you’re growing recurring revenue, it’s sort of a two-part game. You need new people coming in the front door. But the big thing that everybody misses, which is really the, like, the more critical one I think is you have to seal the back door.
RV (17:05):
You have to like, you have to be so sticky that people aren’t leaving. Otherwise, you literally have a treadmill or this revolving door where you got people coming in as fast as they’re going out, or if they’re leaving faster, then you’re bringing ’em in, then you’re going backwards, right? And that’s negative churn. So y you, the, the, the first real job is to go, man, even before we perfect bringing in new customers, it’s going, how do we close that back door? In other words, how do we keep people from canceling? And when I say key people from canceling, I don’t mean like locking them in to, to, to, to being forced to stay to something that they hate. It’s not like going, Hey, you gotta have, you know, these contract terms that are just relentless. And it’s not that, here’s the key, the key is retention or, or excuse me, here’s the, here is the key to growing your membership site.
RV (18:00):
Utilization equals retention. Utilization equals retention. This is what AJ is saying all the time. Utilization equals retention. Meaning the way to serve your current customers is you have to make sure they’re using whatever the thing is that you’ve given them. And this is a distinct mindset shift. A lot of people think that sales is done once the sale is made. And when you have that mindset of like, oh, I closed the sale, I’m onto the next, I’m onto the next, that doesn’t work. We don’t think that works, period. You know, in one of our phase three courses, it’s called pressure-free persuasion. We, we talk about how the sale is not done when the sale is made. The sale is finished. When the client experiences the result that you promised the sale isn’t made, or the sale, the sale isn’t finished. When the sale is made, the sale is finished.
RV (18:55):
When the client experiences the result that you know, you promised or that you were both working towards you probably didn’t promise it. I would recommend you don’t promise results. Just like you can’t, we cannot guarantee results even though we’ve had amazing results. And that’s why our client list continues to be amazing, right? I mean, we’re working with Ed Millet and Louis Howes and Amy Porterfield and, and you know, Eric Thomas et the hip hop preacher and Peter Diamandis and all these amazing people that are, are now clients of ours, cuz we are really getting amazing results. But utilization equals retention. So the sale that you have to make every month is not so much to a new customer like you might with more of a commoditized model, like a course offering, let’s say the sale you gotta make is to your current customers to use the thing they have.
RV (19:45):
So you always have to be selling, right? You still have to be selling, you gotta be selling them on making sure they’re using what you’ve given them. Utilization equals retention. If your people are using your program, if they’re using your service, if they’re using, if they’re accessing your portal, if they’re utilizing your tools, they’re gonna stay. If they’re not using your tools, they gonna leave, right? They’re not going to pay for something they’re not using. Even if what you’re providing is amazing world class best in class, even if your solution is the best there is, if your clients aren’t using it, they are bowing out, they’re gonna be leaving, right? So I’m not so focused, like if I were gonna buy a recurring, if as a, as a, as a business acquirer, if I were gonna go buy a company who had recurring revenue, I would be looking at their u the utilization.
RV (20:40):
Are people using the thing they’re paying for? If they’re using it, even if the product is crappy, I go, it’s, that’s great. I can make the product better. That’s not that hard. But if people aren’t using it, then I go, you just got a bunch of people paying for something here that are, you know, it’s a parking lot that no one is using and going, that’s not gonna long term, that’s not gonna work. We gotta get people using the thing. So utilization equals retention. And there’s a couple key things here for how to increase your utilization. So first of all, you gotta have a journey. You need to have a map, you need to have a visual that outlines what the process looks like. For those of you that are listening that are members in captivating content, which is our phase one course two program, that’s what we help you do.
RV (21:26):
We help you extrapolate your unique expertise and experience into a proprietary methodology, a body of work, a visual journey of, of illustrations and frameworks and flow charts and, and, and chart and tables that that show. This is the process. If you’re a member of ours, you know, we have the brand builder journey. It’s our four phase process that we walk you through from going you’re completely obs obscure and unknown to world famous and world recognized eight figure entrepreneur, best-selling author, hall of fame speaker you know, all the things that we have done and helped people do. We’ve got a four phase, a simple four-phase process that we push people through. And it works. Part of the reason why people stay is cuz they can see the whole journey. You gotta show them this, it’s this step and this step and this step. Don’t just assume that they’re gonna hang around blindly not knowing what, what it takes to actually get to where they’re trying to go.
RV (22:23):
So you wanna show that, talk about it, keep that in front of them so that they’re seeing like, oh, okay, you know, yes, it’s hard right now, but this is just a step and I’m gonna go to the next step and the next step and the next step, and that’s how I’m gonna ultimately get to where I want to go. So you gotta have a journey. The other thing is you gotta have data. You gotta have red flags going on, firing off in, in your, in your business. Meaning if somebody’s not using your stuff, you need to have dashboards and tools or reports or people who are monitoring that, who send up an alert to say, Hey, this is, and at, at at Brand Builders Group, I’ll just tell you transparently, we have something called an at-risk report where we’re looking at all of the people who haven’t been doing a certain number of activities.
RV (23:11):
So in our case, they haven’t logged into a portal in a certain number of days. They haven’t been to a course been to one of our live events in a certain number of days. They haven’t showed up for one on their one-on-one calls in a certain number of days. They haven’t, you know, been inside of our, our Facebook community, our private Facebook community in a certain number of days. And so we’re, because part of what we’re providing, part of what they’re paying for is frankly is accountability and inspiration. And this is how we track that, is go like, Hey, you’re not showing up, like you’re not doing the work. Like if you’re not coming, you’re not doing the work, which means you’re not getting the results, which means even though it’s not our fault that you’re not getting the result, the fact of the matter is you’re not getting the result, which means, means you’re not gonna keep paying.
RV (23:46):
So even if everything we do is perfect, if they’re not using it, it doesn’t matter, they’re gonna cancel. So we have to set up triggers and, you know, red flags and this at-risk report of all of these things. And we’re using automation tools to do this. And we’re using some of its manual reporting, some of it is customer surveys, some of it is manual outreach and check-ins, like to constantly go make sure people are using this. And, and here’s here’s another question that I would encourage you, you know, to, to ponder as it relate as it relates to this. Ask yourself this question, how can I serve my current audience in a deeper way? How can I serve my current audience in a deeper way? Because utilization equals retention. And if I’m serving them in a deeper way, then I’m, I’m speaking more powerfully to their immediate needs.
RV (24:40):
I’m providing the tools, the templates, the checklist for them to do it. Here’s a recent example for us. A lot of speakers struggle with how much should I charge? This has been, you know, gone on for decades, like what’s the right price to charge? And people throw out all these weird numbers. We created this, this speaker fee calculator. It’s, and it’s a simple set of questions you answer and it spits out not only what your speaking fee should be, but what your virtual fee should be and your half day fee and your two day fee and your international fee and your interview fee and all of it, it all spits out and it takes you like two and a half minutes to fill in this, this thing that is now a tool that solves a problem. We then also have a, a a a toolkit that is our speaker press kit and we go, you know, your speaker press Prescott needs to have a fee schedule.
RV (25:28):
Well, we just solved that problem, but then what about the rest of your speaker Prescott? What are all the things that need to be in there and how should it be structured and how should it be laid out? And we go, great. One of our incentives for people when they sign up I I think it’s, if I think if they sign up and pay for a year in advance, is we give them the template that we actually use for our own speaker press kits. And then you can like, model off of it and you can just build it, boom, up and running. So everything that we’ve been doing at Brand Builders Group for the last few years has been basically creating the education and all the educational resources. Now we’re moving much more aggressively and a assertively into how do we give people tools and templates and checklists to help them execute and implement what they’re learning faster.
RV (26:10):
And internally, our team is going, how are we monitoring utilization? Because utilization equals retention. Utilization equals retention. So that’s the second thing you really gotta do. Now the third thing is you gotta keep people coming in the front door. You gotta keep people always coming in the front door. And it’s just, you know, sales, sales solves all problems, right? Like if, if we, if we can figure out how to constantly generate new sales, then we’re gonna always have cash flow coming in that we can use to solve other problems or to hire people who can solve problems. The question is, do you have a consistent engine for driving new leads and new customers into your business?
RV (27:00):
Think about that. Just just think about that question to yourself for a second. Are you confident that you have an engine that consistently produces new leads and new customers for your business every month, every week, every day? Do you know exactly this is, this is how my machine works, we do this and then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens and that brings somebody who finds us here and then they do this, and then they do this, and then they become a customer and then they stay because they’re utilizing the program. And you, if you aren’t confident on that, like if you aren’t crystal clear on what is your process, what is your system, what is your method for perpetually continually, constantly never ending, always driving new leads and new customers into your business? If you’re not clear on that, go to free brand call.com slash podcast right now, free brand call.com/podcast because you need to talk to our team because this is one of the things that we specialize the most in, is helping you create a, a set of mechanisms and systems and processes in your business to keep people coming in the front door.
RV (28:13):
They’ve gotta be coming in the front door because they’re always gonna leave out the back no matter how good your program is. And no matter how much you focus on retention, which, you know, as I just said, utilization equals retention. So we wanna close that back door, but even if your program is the best in the world, people are always going to leave. So you just gotta make sure you’re bringing in new customers faster than the older one, than the old ones are leaving by. And so you’re adding value to them and you’re also constantly refining and perfecting your new customer acquisition strategy. If you don’t feel confident or you’re not clear on how you get new customers and new leads on a regular consistent basis, you need to talk to us. I mean, I’m, I’m serious. Just go to free ran call.com/podcast, fill out the form and talk, talk to someone on our team because this is what we specialize in and this is why we’re doing it, right?
RV (29:07):
And I, you know, i i I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a total jerk, but like we, we just launched another seven figure business inside a brand builders group in like the last year. So we, we now have five different seven figure, multi seven figures businesses that we’ve built and two eight figure businesses. And it’s by following the same principles. All of these principles are are very straightforward, they’re not easy, but they are simple and they do work if you follow the system. So that’s why we’re here. We’d love to talk to you. If you’re not ready for that, hey, share this episode with somebody who needs to hear it. Obviously anything you can do to, to leave reviews helps us tremendously, but also helps new listeners so you know, rate and review and help us that way. And no matter what, keep coming back every week so that we can be keep pouring into you and giving you as much as we can Right here for free on the Influential Personal Brand podcast. That’s all we got today for how to build massive recurring revenue. We’ll catch you next time. We love ya. Bye-Bye.
Ep 367: Tips For Being a Better Coach | Minal Mehta Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
So this note is specifically for the coaches out there. I had an awesome podcast interview actually earlier this week with a new friend of mine, Minal. And we got to talking about coaches and the coaching community and the coaching industry as a whole. And there were a few quick takeaways that I thought would be worth to pull out, put ’em in a little condensed version for you right now. But this is for you coaches out there who are out there serving your clients. So here was the question that was asked, what do you think coaches need to know to be better coaches? And I thought the answers were super helpful and pretty tactical, so I’m gonna share ’em with you right now. Number one, be niche, right? Get clear on who you wanna serve, how you wanna serve ’em, and what you’re going to actually do, right?
AJV (00:53):
Being a generalist is not in your best benefit. So niche down, niche down, both on the who, the how, and the what. Like what is it that you actually do coaching on? Who do you do it for and how do you uniquely do it? So it’s niche down in each of those three categories. So that’s the first thing you can actually do to be a better coach, is be more specific, less general, right? There’s a little saying in our house at the vaden household, the more specific, the more terrific, right? And this is a chance that you can be more specific and be more terrific. So niche down on the who, what, and the how of how you serve your clients. All right? That’s number one. Note, note and be honest with yourself, that being a great coach and building a coaching business are two very different things.
AJV (01:45):
The talent and the skills that it takes to be a great coach are often different than the skills that it takes to learn and master of running a great coaching business, right? Being a great coach means that you’ve got tactical experience and expertise that you can help someone with. You’re a great listener. You are a great asker of questions. You have great empathy, you have great accountability. There are so many amazing skills that it takes to be a great coach, but there are also some really important skills
AJV (02:58):
Uniquely different than the skills that it takes to run a coaching business, and definitely different than the ones it’s gonna take to grow and scale one if that’s of your desire. So it’s just to be aware consciously aware of the unique set of skillsets that you need in both areas, both of being a coach and running a coaching business. And if you’re not even sure what those are, then that’s what we at Brand Builders Group, that’s what we do. That’s what we help you with,
AJV (03:45):
E it works either way. I think the first step is just be consciously aware. Those are uniquely different skill sets, and you need ’em both. Okay? Yes. Number two number three is the importance, the importance of organized systems and how important that organization is to the client experience. And this is where there’s a combination of both technology and psychology that’s really important for your practice as a coach, is that there’s a, a component of me where it’s like, man, I, I want access to that recording that we just did on that session. I want access to the raw notes. You said you were gonna put a a list together. I have some action items. Where is it? You were gonna refer me a book, you were gonna send me this. Where is it? There’s a, a process to the organization that improves the experience that makes it easy for me as your client to have a great experience and make positive progress on every single call.
AJV (04:38):
And that’s where technology plays a great role. Automation and just different platforms. But there is a really important part of our role as coaches of staying organized to improve the customer experience so that they can make the progress they need to improve their lives and their businesses. So just the importance of organized systems will make you a better coach, right? Then that kind of lends itself to this question of technology, right? Which is, well, how does technology make the coaching experience better? And there are three simple things. One, it’s consolidation, right? Keeping all of your emails, chats, communication, documentation, recording content material in a a singular place is so helpful when I don’t have to go to a SharePoint drive and an email and a text thread and an L m s, I’m only saying those things because we have these same struggles, right? But the consolidation, if I go to one place to find all my stuff, then that’s so helpful to me. It allows me to be a better client by saying, organize so I don’t bug you the coach all the time. So it’s in your benefit too, as the coach. It’s like the more that you can consolidate, it’s like your life is gonna be more streamlined because your clients’ lives are more streamlined. So consolidation is a
AJV (05:56):
Major perk and benefit of technology. The second thing, it’s simplicity, right? Finding technology platforms that are simple they don’t have to be robust and complicated. They just need to work. So finding a technology platform that actually is easy to use, simple to use, right? Has basic trainings already available out there. So you’re not the person to conduct in inform, instruct and teach everyone how to use this, right? But the, just having something that is simple and easy to use, and there’s already a well known process, right? So easy user interface is a part of that. If I log in and can’t figure out how to do it, it’s not a good platform, right? So as you go through it of going, Hey, how long did it take you to learn it? And just double that or triple that for each of your clients, right?
AJV (06:44):
So pick technology that is simple. And then the third thing about technology and how we can use technology to create better experiences with our coaching community is community. It’s connection, right? So use technology to actually amplify the community component, which makes your clients have a better coaching experience. So how can you use technology to better create the connection within all of your different clients, or even if it’s just you and your client? That could be something as simple as having a Slack channel for all of your clients. That could be having a private group of some sort, a private community group somewhere. Maybe it’s hosting unique group calls that you just do over some sort of, you know, webinar or virtual meeting. I’m, I’m trying to stay technology agnostic right now and not mention any technologies because I think there’s pros and cons to all of them.
AJV (07:41):
But it’s just finding ways to use technology to increase connection, not decrease connection, right? And that can happen too. Like one of the things that I’ll do to keep this completely technology agnostic is that I just make video messages. I make videos or even audio messages and send those to my client, right? Just seeing the face means a great deal. So instead of sending a text, make a quick video message or an audio message versus sending an email or sending a text, really simple increases that connection point in that community. And so there’s some things that you can do right now to increase the community experience, the coaching experience by using technology and at the same time making your life and your business easier and the process. So you coaches out there, you’re doing awesome. I so admire what you do. I, I, you are who I am meant to serve. Keep doing what you’re doing and let us help it make just a little bit easier for you. So keep on coming, we’ll see you next time.
Ep 365: How An App Helps You Build Community | Amanda Moriuchi Episode Recap
AJV (00:03):
So I’ve got a question for you. How good are you at building and nurturing your own community? And I think that’s a really relevant question to at least me. As you know, I sit as c e o, which is, you know, more like I just do all the things. Other people don’t have time for more than anything fancy. But as I sit as the c e o of Brand Builders Group this is just a question I ask myself all the time. It’s like our number one priority is to build and nurture deep, meaningful relationships with our community. And our team is always asking, how do we do that? And then how do we do it better? How do we do it more efficiently? How do we build community and nurture them faster in the way that they want? And that led to a, a conversation with a friend of mine, Amanda Moriuchi, who also happens to be a client at Brand Builders Group, which was even more helpful and insightful.
AJV (01:01):
And she happens to be the owner of this really cool custom app company. They build apps called app. And it led to this often conversation around how we use technology to deepen relationships and nurture relationships. And let me say, without going any further, I believe deeply in the importance of one-on-one human interaction on a phone call or in person over coffee. And I also know that there’s just so many minutes in the day. And so to be able to supplement some of that nurturing and some of that community building with technology is just, it’s where we are and there’s components that are really good and healthy and some that are kind of exhausting and overwhelming. So I’m gonna focus on the good and healthy ones. So I thought this was a really great question to go and how do we use technology to increase our relationships with our community as a company?
AJV (02:00):
And so there’s a couple of things I thought were just really noteworthy in this conversation that I would share in this little video with you. So number one is having an app is really what this conversation is about. It’s taking your relationship building off of social media and putting it into a platform that is yours. And in this particular conversation, we’re talking about an app that could also be in an email list. But I think the interactive nature of all the things that are happening in app make it really diverse and unique. Whereas an email list is, that’s an email list. But not to negate that, but this is specifically about how do we use apps to deepen relationships and sit, here’s some of the benefits that came out of this conversation of having an app. One is you own your audience, and that was, that is a number one priority for asset Brand Builders group is we can’t expect that the algorithm is always going to be on our, in our favor on other people’s
AJV (02:58):
Platforms. So, you know, regardless if it’s YouTube or Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn, it, it doesn’t matter. It’s, we don’t own those audiences. We don’t own that platform. We don’t own that content, even though it’s our content, it’s on their platform. And so to be at the mercy of that is a little
AJV (03:43):
Two is technology is really leveling the playing field. And right now it’s, if I have a small audience with not tons of engagement, I’m not favored on social media, but in my own community where it, although I may have fewer followers, they’re deeper loyal followers, I have more opportunity to even go deeper and broaden those relationships when it’s in my control. So there’s a lot of benefit of having all of your audience or ha giving them the opportunity to have more of you, and thus you get more of them in this technology, you know, component that we’re talking about with an app, right? So it, it levels the playing field and let the small guys, the small gals have more opportunity to have deeper engagement and more access to our community and vice versa. So I think that’s really important.
AJV (04:32):
It’s the difference. The next thing is the difference between community and connection on social media. And I’m not slamming our dog and social media right now. It seems like a, a comparison and a little, a little comparison, but I’m not dogging. I think social media is really important, don’t get me wrong here, but there’s a lot of connection on social media, but not a lot of deep community is being built on social media. And so again, whether it’s your email list, podcast, whatever, but for me, it’s this idea of an app that allows you to create real community where there’s back and forth chats and there’s notifications and there’s internal challenges that you’re not paying for. It’s like you’re getting unique content just for you. You’re getting correspondence. You’re, you’re getting videos, you’re getting all this different stuff all in one platform that is actually you’re subscribing to, you’re saying, give this to me.
AJV (05:23):
I want this. And it allows the person who is managing the community to tailor and augment and make it better for the people who are saying, I want more of this, and just creates more community. It creates a like-minded group of people who are going, this is what I want, more of this, less of this. And they’re asking for it, which is hence why they’re on the app, right? So there’s just a lot of opportunity to build more community versus connection which happens on social media. The next is talking about a, a simple way of taking all of your content as a content creator and having it on one place. So with an app, it’s like, I can have my podcast there, I can have virtual trainings there. I can have live events there. I can have community correspondence and interactions video engagement, eBooks, challenges, the list goes on and on and on.
AJV (06:16):
And I’m not having to send some people to this funnel, some people to my website, some over here to iTunes. It’s like, no, no, no, I’m gonna take everything that I’m doing and I’m gonna consolidate it, condense it into one awesome platform that allows you to have everything you want in one place at your fingertips that has just been a game changer of a conversation of how do we do all these things and do it effectively while also keeping in place the integrity of the relationship with the individual. And so as you’re kind of thinking through your strategies for the year and in the years to come, I would just encourage you to think about three things as you listen to this rant on the importance of building community, not just on social media would be one what are you doing to own your audience?
AJV (07:08):
What are you doing to take back control of the engagement, interaction and correspondence that you have with people who subscribe to you, right? In other words, they follow you, like you engage with you. That’s number one. What are you doing to own it? Versus having everything that you’ve built on somebody else’s platform, which is rented real estate. So how can you own those, that audience engagement? Second thing is, how can you consolidate? How can you put everything that you’re doing online and put it into a centralized place where people have a go-to place to get all the things right? Workbooks, downloads, video, content, engagements events, whatever it is you’re doing, webinars. But how can they just get everything into one place to create a better member community experience? So that’d be the second. First one is how do you own your engagement?
AJV (07:59):
Number two is how do you consolidate your engagement? And then the third one is, how do you actually create better deeper community, right? And that just means you’ve got more time with people a huge part of community and relationships. It just takes time. So how are you doing that? How are you creating, you know, better and deeper relationships within the community? And that doesn’t mean just you and one-on-one to your community, but creating them amongst your community and how are you gonna do that? And so the app is not the answer for everyone. The app is the obvious answer for us at Brain Builders Group and what we’re moving ahead with. But I would just pose those questions for you to go back and sit with and think about of how can I do more of this? How can I own it, consolidate it, and make it better and deeper for the people that subscribe to what I have to say and what I have to share. So with that, you have your homework assignments speed
Ep 363: 15 Legal Strategies for Entrepreneurs to Reduce Taxes | Henry Yoshida Episode Recap
RV (00:02):
Well, most of the strategies that we teach at Brand Builders Group are strategies to help you grow your income, right? Obviously most of the time on this show we’re interviewing guests. Most of the teaching that we do is in our paid membership. Of course, that’s our core businesses, helping mission driven messengers to build and monetize their brand and become more well known and make a bigger impact in the world. So most of what we talk about is how to grow your income. What’s interesting though is the interview that I just did with Henry Yoshida, which if you haven’t listened to it, go listen to it. The first part of the interview is all about understanding a vehicle called a self-directed i r a, which is, it’s not a new vehicle, but it’s one that you most people haven’t heard of that’s becoming more popular, especially because of like a tools being created like the one that Henry has created.
RV (00:52):
Which is very, very affordable way to sort of transfer your i r a into more self-directed or non-trad, non-traditional assets. And anyways, that’s what the whole interview is about. But towards the end of the interview we started talking about just general tax strategy. And you know, there were a few things that came up that inspired me to go, you know what? I’m gonna, I’m gonna put together a killer episode here for you all and this on tax strategy, because this is not something that you normally hear. And I would consider, like when most people think of Brand Builders group, right? They think of like, oh, you guys help people, you know, crush book launches, right? Like, we’ve had at the time of this recording, 11 clients that we’ve helped hit the New York Times or Wall Street Journal bestseller list.
RV (01:43):
We’ve had four clients that we’ve helped that we’ve, that we’ve worked with where their TED Talk has gone viral over a million views. We’ve had five clients grow their business more than seven figures in a year. Like it’s, it’s, we we’re known for like those kinds of things. But when you are with us for a while, like a lot of our clients stay with us for many years. Like as your business starts to grow, our training gets more and more advanced. And one of the things that we talk about, but rarely, it’s more like in smaller rooms like our private Highland Masterminds and like our most experienced people is tax strategy. And, and we talk about things like managing your financial statements and, and you know, forecasting and, and just, you know, legal stuff that you don’t hear a lot. So anyways, what I wanted to go ahead and put out there into the world and just make this available for free is 15 legal strategies to help you reduce your taxes if you’re an entrepreneur. Now obviously I’m, I’m not a cpa, I’m not a C F P. I did, I did go to school by undergrad. I studied much about accounting and I do have an mba. But you should always, always, always, you know, consult with your local tax advisor.
RV (02:58):
You know, know. So I don’t consider this professional like legal advice officially, but I’m telling you, you wanna check into these things. And I’m not gonna explain ’em all in detail cuz we don’t have time. But I’m gonna rattle these off of 15 legitimate legal ethical tax strategies that you can, you can explore if you’re an entrepreneur. And this is important. And, and I would actually say part of why I’m putting this together, and no offense to CPAs, there’s some great CPAs out there, but in our experience, we have worked with a number of CPAs who actually aren’t very well equipped to offer tax strategy advice. Most of them just do tax returns. They’re not very creative, they don’t ask very many questions. And when I mean creative, I don’t mean creative, like they’re bending the rules. I’m saying they don’t even know what questions to ask in order to take advantage of many of the kinds of things that I’m gonna share with you here.
RV (04:00):
Right? And so the, the place to learn tax strategy is not graduate school. It’s it’s not, you know, professional training. Where you really learn it is from other entrepreneurs. And, and honestly, they have to be very successful entrepreneurs. Otherwise, this conversation doesn’t come up very often and very, very few people know much about it. And so, anyways, that’s why I thought let’s go ahead and just put this out into the world. This’ll be, you know, hopefully you’ll see an example of some of what our high level business training looks like. Yes, we teach, you know, all the other things. Copywriting and funnels and podcasting in the business of speaking and book launches and how to train your sales team and sell high dollar offers and, you know, build your content and write your book and your positioning and messaging. But our phase four curriculum gets pretty ninja and it gets pretty advanced on, on just general being an entrepreneur.
RV (04:54):
So here’s just like one example of a micro lesson. I’m gonna put this out here into the world for free. You know, take it with a grain of salt, but this is, this is stuff that we’ve learned by experience. So here we go. I’m gonna rattle through these again, I’m not gonna spend a ton of time on each one, but these are, I’m gonna say these are hints for you to go investigate and look because they’re very legitimate. So, number one is what came up in the interview with Henry and that’s what kind of inspired me to put this together for you is a defined benefit plan or a pension plan. So you can listen more to the interview cuz we kind of talked a little bit in, in detail in the interview. But the bottom line with this is that as a, as a business owner, you can create a, a mechanism by which you provide a, a retirement benefit for your employees, okay?
RV (05:46):
Typically, like you think of 401k, right? And but when you are an employee of the company, there are certain plans that allow, allow you as the owner to maximize or create, create large contributions to your retirement account. So it doesn’t pad your money doesn’t pad your pocket with money in the short term. In fact, it, it takes money out of your pocket because you’re putting it into retirement instead of putting it either into your checking account or or into the government’s pocket. But what it does is it allows you to have to, to, to contribute much more than you would normally be allowed to include with something like the r you know, there’s Roth IRAs and they have income limits, and then there’s traditional IRAs and they have total contribution limits, and then there’s four oh [inaudible] limits.
RV (06:40):
So, you know, typically, you know, 25,000, 20 to $30,000 ish somewhere in there is about what you can do. But if you’re an entrepreneur and you have a successful business and you start to make real money and you go, okay, what are other things I can do? I can provide this awesome benefit to my employees and it gives me a vehicle to sock away more money for retirement later. So, you know, pension plans, defined benefit plan, go, you know, investigate that and listen to the interview with Henry, you can check that out. Second thing if you’re making a profit the, the, you know, the entity, the legal structure of your, of your business entity dramatically affects your, your tax liability and your tax implications. So there’s, there’s more that should be considered into this conversation. But in general, okay, a a great place to look if you are, you’ve been a, an entrepreneur and you’ve got a fairly successful business and you’re making profit, is to look at the structure in L L C filing as an S corp, right?
RV (07:43):
So a lot of times a business starts as like a sole proprietor, then at some point you maybe become an L L C. But look into L L C filing as an S corp for lots of of entrepreneurs that are sort of in this maturing phase, starting to make money. There is a great opportunity for tax advantages. Now there’s some, there’s some other things that get triggered. And, and what I’m sharing with you, I’m not sharing with you unethical or illegal strategies. These are legal ones. Part of what makes them legal is that they have counterbalancing forces, right? So in order to take advantage of some of these, there’s certain other things you can take advantage of. But I’m sharing with you sort of like my, some of my greatest hits here. There’s, there’s a few that are not on this list that are more advanced really for like scaling companies.
RV (08:31):
Really, really like, as as you start thinking about selling your company that would come up. And there’s one on here. The last one, by the way, I’m gonna show you how to become filthy rich and never ever pay taxes in a completely legal way. That’s gonna be number 15 on this list. So, so keep staying tuned for that. All right, so number three specifically, this is something for training companies. So if, if you are a training company which means you train people, you, you train, you have like you know, a lot of times it’s, it’s some type of information marketing type business where you do professional training. There is something called a 1 99 a exemption. Okay? Now this is set to sunset currently, I think in 2025. But if you just go to irs.gov and just look up 1 99 A, this is qualified business income deduction and look for the FAQs.
RV (09:30):
This creates a major tax advantages that, you know, could, can be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. If you have a company that you know, is like, let’s say multi seven figures, that is a true, legitimate training company. And there’s certain things you have to do to qualify as a legitimate training company. Brand builders group, we’re a training company. We have curriculum and, and we have workbooks, and we have courses in systematic training and processes that we put people through. So look at, look up the 1 99. A number four is the Augusta rule. So the Augusta Rule, this is something that says you can rent your home 14 days a year. I, I, I believe, again, don’t quote me on all this, this isn’t what I do full-time, but I, I, you know, I’m, the things I’m saying shouldn’t be grossly out of out inaccuracies.
RV (10:21):
They, they should be pretty accurate. Off the top of my head, I think the Augusta rule says you can rent your home 14 days a year tax free. It comes from the masters tournament and people who live in Augusta who rent their home out during the masters and they make a bunch of money. So what the Augusta rule allows you to do is to rent your own home to your business. So if your business has meetings and you have to rent boardrooms or meeting space and that’s a legitimate business operation and function that you have whatever the market rate is that you would pay to rent somewhere else, can be amount that you can you know, the equivalent market rate of, of renting a similar property or space somewhere else you can rent to yourself and use your home for those meetings.
RV (11:08):
And, and 14 days worth of that can be tax free. So this is this is one of the things you sometimes hear on the internet and you’re like, is that real? Actually is real? A few of these are gonna be like that where you’re like, man, I’ve, I’ve heard, you know, I’ve seen Instagram and TikTok videos like have gone viral. A lot of times they’re over sensationalizing things and they’re not, you know, telling you about like the restrictions behind them, but some of them are, you know, they’re actually legit and you just have to sort of investigate. The Augusta rule is one of those. Number five is a D A F, which is a donor advised fund. This is a charitable, this has to do with charitable givings. And basically, you know, when you make charitable contributions, the government allows you to, to deduct that from your taxable income.
RV (11:55):
Well, the thing is, is you might, let’s say you have a bunch of money come in at, at one year or something, you have a big launch or something, g great happens. You just have a good year and you’re sitting on a pile of money and you’re not sure who you wanna donate that money to. And, and you don’t wanna pay taxes on it. So you go, I’m gonna start a d a f a donor advised fund, which allows me to put my money aside in ear market for charitable givings, and I can take the tax deduction now so that I don’t get taxed this year, but then I have to give that money later. So again, it’s not like it’s some magic way of, of keeping money in your pocket, it’s just saying, rather than paying money to the government, I’m gonna pay money to causes that I care about and, and I’m gonna give, and so I’m reducing my tax liability.
RV (12:44):
And the government does that on purpose. It’s not like you’re sneaking one past them, right? What they’re doing is they’re incentivizing business owners and people of wealth to invest into and give money to things that make the world a better place. You know? And they have to be, you know, actual nonprofit organizations and they, they have to uphold certain standards to, to classify what, whatever it is, a 4 0 1 [inaudible] [inaudible] and i, I think is what it is. Yeah, I think, I think that’s it. A 4 0 3 [inaudible] maybe, maybe there’s both of ’em. But anyways, they have to be a nonprofit organization. But the point is, you can take the deduction immediately now and not have to give the money until later. Also, the money inside of your fund can grow and grow and grow and earn interest while you’re figuring out who you want to distribute that money to.
RV (13:33):
So that’s a, that’s a cool one. Number six is a keep bonus, and that’s Q E A A P. It is a rule that allows you to make up to $1,600, I believe, per employee as a gift and a deduction for any gift. So basically, instead of paying them $1,600 in income, of which you have to pay payroll taxes on and they have to pay in income taxes on, you can actually get money to your employees. So it’s a way of getting them more money where neither of you, like you get the tax deduction and they don’t pay the income tax on it. And you can do that up to $1,600 per a year per employee using something called the keep bonus. So that’s a really cool way. Again, it doesn’t put more money in your pocket, but it is, it prevents you from paying taxes.
RV (14:29):
You, if you don’t do that, what’s gonna happen is you’re gonna get taxed on all that money, and the government’s gonna take a percentage of that. So it’s basically like instead of paying it to the government, you could pay it to your employees. And again, it’s the reason it’s not illegal. It’s not like the government is stupid or that they don’t know this. They’re, they’re doing it as going, Hey, there’s a vehicles and ways to increase the amount of money that you give to people. And this is why, by the way, this is why entrepreneurs get tax breaks, is because the government knows you’re stimulating the comp, the, the economy you are helping you, your, you’re helping stabilize the country. And b by the way, I should have said this earlier, these are all US based tax strategies. So I know we have a lot of you that are listeners that listen internationally.
RV (15:15):
This is completely US based. I apologize, but I’m not, I’m not well versed in international tax law, but what I would say is my experience has been many other countries have similar types of things, similar types of vehicles. They’re often called something differently. So still worth paying attention to this and then kind of investigating your local tax code or asking a C P A or asking a successful entrepreneur or investor about some of these things. But anyways, in the us you know, the, the government gives tax breaks to entrepreneurs cuz we’re creating jobs, which means we’re giving income to people, which means there’s a less dependency on the government for their, for their income and for their health and wellbeing and their family, and also for their retirement, right? And, and that takes pressure off of the government. And so that’s, that’s kind of why this works.
RV (16:03):
It’s not like we’re pulling a fast one over them, but it, it’s also, if no one tells you this, you’re not gonna know any of this stuff. And I went to graduate school, right? Like I went to graduate school and I don’t remember learning any of this.
RV (16:51):
So you don’t have to pay taxes, payroll taxes on that money, but you’re, you’re transferring money from the business to your employees without having a, and it’s lowering your tax burden. It’s lowering your, your tax impact. So that’s number seven. Number eight, okay? This is another classic internet viral video One is something called the section 1 79 deduction. This is sometimes referred to as the Hummer rule. And you go, people are going and buying hummers and taking a hundred percent of that as a deduction. Is that really real? And the answer is yes, it was for a while, and it kind of is still. So section 1 79 refers to that section of the, the tax code, which says that vehicles that weigh over 6,000 pounds are they were, they were a hundred percent deductible. I think that’s trailing off.
RV (17:50):
I think it trails down a little bit year over year. But this, this is something that we actually took advantage of because when you have these, it’s the catches, it has to be a, it, the vehicle has to have a gross vehicle weight rating, G V W R, gross vehicle weight rating of more than 6,000 pounds. And if that is the case and you buy a vehicle that weighs over 6,000 pounds, that’s considered to be like a commercial vehicle for your business, you could take a hundred percent of that amount as a deduction in the year that you made that purchase. Now this was like a year ago, I think this is already factoring out, but and, and, and, and may, it’s gonna disappear at some point unless the tax law changes. But anyways, investigate the details of a section 1 79 deduction.
RV (18:42):
Number nine is vacations, okay? Business trip slash vacations. It is true, you know, to my knowledge that you can take deductions for vacations if more than 50% of the time is for work, right? So you have to be doing work related activities more than 50% of the time. So there are details around this that matter and that, that, that are important. There’s details around all of these things, like I should have mentioned. Going back to the Augusta rule, which was number four on this list, one of the things you have to do if I remember, is you have to take meeting notes and you have to produce meeting notes that say I had, I actually had this meeting in my house on this date. This is what we talked about. And this is a meeting that we would’ve had somewhere else at a hotel.
RV (19:32):
And I would’ve, I would’ve or could have had to have paid that money to a hotel. And rather than doing that, I’m, I’m taking it as you know, a tax deduction for on my taxes, but I actually had a real meeting. You have to actually have a real meeting and have, have notes. Now you know exactly how long the meeting is and what exactly do you cover. Those things are, you know, a little more gray area and a little bit depends on your appetite for, you know, how much you follow the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law, et cetera, et cetera. But on business trip vacations, a good example of it is, Hey, I’m gonna go to Miami and I’m going to, you know, set up work meetings on Friday and on Monday, and then I’ll just stay there Saturday and Sunday.
RV (20:14):
All now of a sudden that becomes a business trip that I can write off you know, in full or large portions of, or certain components of, so again, there are, that is a legal, legal deduction. Number 10, this one is interesting. I almost didn’t put this one on the list cuz we’ve, we don’t, we’ve never done this, but I’m hearing of a lot of people doing this. So I would approach this one with extra caution, but if you have a company and you own a video production company, okay, so you have to start a business. You, you know, which means there has to be some legal documents, right? And you create an actual business that is a video production company that does video work. Then anything that you buy that shows up in your videos, it can be a deduction because it’s considered a part of the set design.
RV (21:10):
I’m sure it’s not anything you buy, it’s probably not cars and houses and, and helicopters and things although maybe, but you know, just like certain other things, like anything that would appear in one of your sets, which again, there’s probably limitations to this, but a lot of times it’s much more flexible than you realize if you actually go investigate the details. And this is where I talk about, you know, CPAs aren’t super creative, they don’t think of this kind of thing. And you go, well, if you shoot videos as a part of what you do and you go, can I start a little side business that does this legitimately? Like it’s gotta be a business. You gotta have some other clients beyond just you. But how many clients do you have to have for it to be considered legitimate? You know, is is kind of a flexible conversation.
RV (21:53):
So and then you go, man, I’m gonna, I’m gonna buy a prop you know, and I’m gonna buy a $200 set of bows headphones, because I’m gonna use that as a prop in a video and it’s part of my set design, right? So yeah, there’s an ethical gray area that comes into this, but there’s a, there’s a legal component that is, is perfectly legal if you are abiding by certain things. So pay attention to that. Alright, number 11, another internet one. This one is often becomes, you know, one of these viral videos is to hire your children. And this is true, this is a, is a, is a perfectly legal strategy. As long as your kids have an actual job, I think they have to have a job description and they have to have certain, certain form formalities and certain things that establish them as an employee of the company.
RV (22:46):
So in this case, you can pay your kids up to, at the time of this recording, I think it’s $12,500 a year, and the kids don’t have to pay taxes. Why? Because nobody has to pay taxes on the first $12,500 per year. So how does this save you money on taxes? Well, it’s basically a way that you can get money to your children with pre-tax dollars instead of after tax dollars, right? If, if I were gonna, you know, buy something for my kids, I’d have to buy that with after tax dollars. Like I draw income, I pay taxes, and then I have money to pay, put give to my kids. If my kids are an employee of the company now I can pay them $12,500 every year. They don’t have to pay taxes. And now they have actual money that is theirs that they have earned.
RV (23:38):
Now that money has to, will go to them. It cannot be money that you use otherwise that is like, you know, illegal. But if it is money that is going to them that they’re using for their things, paying for schooling, paying for sports, paying for whatever I don’t even think there’s restrictions on like toys and things. Like I think they can spend the money double check that, but, but it’s their money. It can’t be your money. You can’t pretend to pay that money and then take that money and go buy yourself a car with it. But it can be money that they have and they can, they can then start to invest that money and use that money to pay. I think they can even pay for like private school and things that are of personal direct benefit to them. And you go, the reason it’s an advantage is you’d be paying that money anyways, right?
RV (24:22):
Like if you didn’t pay it to him, you’d be paying that out of your pocket and you’d be paying that money with after tax dollars. So look into the specifics again of exactly you know, you can’t just say they’re an employee, you have to give them certain duties and things, but it’s, that’s reasonable, right? And you’re the business owner. So you’re, you are within your legal rights to determine what you pay people for and what you hire them to do and how much you pay people, right? The, as, as long as it’s above minimum wage, there’s no, there’s no government mandate on what tasks you choose to pay certain money for. And so, you know, there’s a limit here, there’s a threshold, but again, this is perfectly legal. Number 12, anything with your logo on it is considered a uniform or advertising expense, including clothing, right?
RV (25:12):
So brand builders group, you know, I, I’m for some of you are listening to this, you can’t see me, but I’m wearing my brand, a brand builders group sweatsuit that we got. It’s got our logo on it, this is a hundred percent write off, right? So I’ve got this little tiny logo on here, and now all of a sudden this piece of clothing is a hundred percent write off as advertising expense and I would say is very legitimate, right? Those of you that are watching this video, you see the logo right inside the video. So it’s like very, very legit now. So considering put your logo on things now there’s probably some limits here. Like putting a logo on your car doesn’t necessarily mean you can just write off the whole car, but there are some things like that where people wrap their cars and they do certain things.
RV (25:57):
You should look at that. Number 13, number 13 is an H s a A health savings account, okay? A health savings account. Think of it like an I r A, it’s just an account where you can put money in. You know, kind of like how we were talking with Henry about the, this, our whole conversation in this last interview was about SD IRAs, self-directed IRAs. It’s just a, it’s just a special type of account that has special tax treatment in the eyes of the government. And HSA is an account. When you put money into your hsa, that money you don’t get taxed on the money you put in there. Now, here’s the catch. All of that money has to be used for health expenses, right? So that’s why the government, again, you’re not pulling a fast one over the government, it’s legal.
RV (26:46):
They, they ins they create this tax incentive and the whole tax system, right, is not about penalizing people, it’s about incentivizing people to use their money in certain ways, in ways that benefit the economy, the overall health and stability of a country and, and, and you know, a government, et cetera. Well, this, if people have money saved for their own health expenses, that reduces the dependency again on the government. It keeps you healthy, et cetera, et cetera. There’s advantages to the government and to the overall, you know, country of keeping people healthy. So when you put money into your health savings account, now you have money that is earmarked. You can only use that money for health expenses except once you are over a certain age. So if you put money into an HSA year after year after year, and it’s growing, right? It’s an, it’s, it’s, you can have that invested that is growing.
RV (27:43):
You at a certain age, which is probably 59 and a half or 62 and a half or 65 or whatever the number is. Now, if you haven’t used that money for health expenses at that point, I believe you can then take it. And you can use that money. You, you can, you can use that money as retirement if not, even if you can’t do that or even if the legislation changes around that. The advantage is you have money growing and growing and growing. So even if you’re gonna use it for your, you know, your to, to be in a retirement home one day and and assisted living home, the advantage is you’ve had money growing and earning interest and, and, you know, you’re, you’re saving on taxes throughout your lifetime. It’s growing. You’re not paying taxes on that. And then when the time comes that you need it for large health expenses, the money is there, right?
RV (28:34):
So that’s a huge advantage. And I actually think that once you reach a certain age, I think you can access some of that money as retirement money. In, now again, in the interim, it doesn’t put more money in your pocket. It, it’s, it’s all of this is allowing you to invest. Notice the theme here. The government is incentivizing you. The government is using tax law to incentivize you to use your money in certain ways, providing jobs, taking care of your health, investing in things, and providing for your own retirement and for the retirement of your employees. That’s why these things are all legal. It’s, it’s, it’s because they want you to use it in a certain way. So what a lot of successful entrepreneurs do is they go, ah, let me put some money. You know, if you max out your I r a and you max out your 401k, and you start to make real money every year in profits, every year you go, well, let me put all my money, let me, let me max up my hsa my health savings account, which is I think at the time of this recording, around $3,600 a year, you can put $3,600 a year in there and now that account grows.
RV (29:38):
And then if you have the money or hopefully then you just, you pay your health expenses with after tax dollars so that you can have this big thing growing as a nest egg that gets bigger and bigger and bigger over the, over over time. So that’s a great, a great legal strategy. Now, these last two are huge strategies and they, they are gonna, they will sound crazy, but these are ways that you can actually legally avoid paying taxes at all. Like and you know, or certain parts of taxes. Okay? So here’s what number 14 is, and you may have heard of this. The, the more successful you become as an entrepreneur, the more you’ll start hanging around people who are having these kinds of conversations. And you will start to hear about Puerto Rico Act 22, Puerto Rico Act 22.
RV (30:32):
We have several friends now at this point who have moved to Puerto Rico. John Lee Dumas was our first friend that did this. And now I can, off the top of my head, think of like five other friends who all live in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico Act 22 allows you to play a, a flat tax rate of 4% again, at the time of this recording. But you have to live, you have to be a primary resident of Puerto Rico. So if you like Puerto Rico and you don’t mind living in Puerto Rico Puerto Rico is a US controlled territory, right? So you’re under the protection and the, and the rule of the United States. But you, you, there, there are some caveats here. So you have to live in Puerto Rico, you know, one day more than half a year. So whatever that is, 162 or 163 days a year, whatever the number is.
RV (31:23):
You have to live there. You also have to do certain things to establish Nexus. Like your banking account has to be there, your place of worship your your, your primary mailing address, your your driver’s license, things like that have to be legit. You have to become a legit Puerto Rican resident. But when you do that, you then do not have to pay federal income tax of the us. You only pay Puerto Rico taxes, which are 4%. Now one of the other things to be aware of is that you give up your right to vote, as I understand it, right? So you can no longer vote in elections, but and you gotta move your family to Puerto Rico. So there’s some trade-offs, right? But you’re also going, you might be going from a 40% tax bracket or 50% tax bracket if you live in California.
RV (32:09):
And if you can set up your business and operate legitimately in Puerto Rico, you’re gonna go to 4%. So you could like almost double your income just by moving. And you have to stay there a certain number of years. I think it’s like three years or something. And if you, if you come back before then you have, you know, there’s, you have to like do back taxes or whatever. But so anyways, look at this. It’s a real thing. Puerto Rico Act 22 and then number 15, this is the grand finale, the Grand PBA of how you can literally become a millionaire, a multimillionaire, a billionaire even, and never pay any taxes at all. How does this work? How could you possibly, how is this real? Yes, this is real. Okay? This is how wealthy, wealthy, wealthy people think. How do we know we happen to know a lot of wealthy people?
RV (33:06):
Because a lot of, I mean, we’ve had four clients at Brand Builders Group who are billionaires in like the last 18 months, billionaires with a B, right? So we’re starting to see and hang out with some like really wealthy people. So what is the best way to create wealth and never pay taxes? How is this possible that you can have billions of dollars and never pay taxes? So here’s, here’s how you do it. It’s not easy, but it is real. Is you start a company as an entrepreneur, you grow that business, and then you take that company public. Once you take that pump, that company public, now you have stock that is actually worth real money. It has a, a real market rate. And what a lot of these billionaire founders do, and I’m talking big companies, right? Big time people like celebrity entrepreneurs that you hear about.
RV (33:59):
So what they do is they take their company public, they have millions and millions and hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars in stock. And then what they do is they take a loan against that stock from a bank and you never pay taxes, right? So, so, so they’re using their stock as collateral to take a loan from a bank. So that’s how they turn it into money. If they were to sell the stock, that would be a liquidity event. So they would then realize that as income and they would have to pay taxes on it. But there are, there’s plenty of banks who will look at a public, publicly, publicly held stock as a, as a strong collateral against alone. And so they’ll take a loan from the bank, they hold up the stock as collateral, they technically own the stock. They never have to sell the stock.
RV (34:48):
And what’s happening is the bank is giving them a loan against it. And now they’re just paying, they’re paying interest, they’re paying interest on that loan to the bank. But it is, it pales in comparison to what you would pay in taxes to the government. I found this, bam. That is how you can 100% legitimately avoid paying taxes and become filthy, filthy rich if you wanna do it. So there you have it, no gimmicks nothing illegal. Definitely some things that have some stipulations and some criteria that you want to pay, pay attention to. But these are the kind of things that happen if you hang around brand builders group, right? These are the kind of people we hang out with. These are the kind of conversations we’re having in addition to how do we change the world and how do we help you change the world?
RV (35:35):
And how do you add your service to more people and, and make an impact and make the world a better place? And a big part of how you make the world a better place is how you use your money to do that. So we have no problems making money, right? We love money. Money’s just not the most important thing in our life, right? For us we’re, we’re Jesus followers, we’re Christians. Like for us, we’re a hardcore Bible thump and Jesus freaks. So we don’t serve money, money serves us. Money is a tool, but we, we care about money, we’re deliberate about money. We like to make money, and we want to help you make a lot of money, and then use your money to do good in the world for you and your family and your employees and for the people around you.
RV (36:17):
So there you have it. 15 legitimate legal ways to save money on taxes. Investigate these, check these out. Hey, share this, share this episode with someone who needs to hear it and request a call with our team. Will you go to brand builders group.com or sorry, wrong number, wrong number go to free brand call.com/podcast. Go to free brand call.com/podcast. Learn about us. Read a little bit about the people we work with you know, the clients that we serve. We, we serve major celebrity clients, ed Mylet and Lewis, how, and Eric Thomas and Amy Porterfield and Peter Diani, and John Gordon and Matthew West, right? Like, we have major celebrity clients, but our heart is also for the people who are just starting out and who are real entrepreneurs trying to find their way and figure this all out. And we’re gonna guide you. We’re gonna guide you on everything, marketing, sales, positioning and then scaling your company with leadership and financial strategy that is legal and ethical and that actually works to make the world a better place. So check out free brand call.com/podcast. Share this episode with an entrepreneur that you know who needs to save money on taxes. So I want you to think in your head right now, who do I know that is an entrepreneur that needs to save money on the taxes? Share this episode with them. You might just change their life and the lives of their employees and maybe the people around him and the investments that they make. And keep coming back here every single week listening and in to the influential Personal Brand podcast. Bye for now.