Ep 308: How to Grow a Personal Brand and Build a Real Estate Empire with Vinney Chopra
RV (00:07):
Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand buildersgroup.com/podcall. We hope to talk to you soon.
AJV (00:53):
Hey everybody. And welcome to another episode on the influential personal brand. This is one of your co-hosts AJ Vaden. Here I am here today with a, a friend we recently got reunited. We randomly were at the same mastermind event together. And I don’t think until here recently, I had seen Vinney in probably 15 years, been a really long time and was such an honor to get to run into him. He’s the happiest, most joyful human on planet earth. You all have a taste in just a moment, but first before we kind jump into a conversation, I might give a couple of high level things that you need to know about Vinney Chopra and why you need to stick around. This is, it’s kind of gonna be one of those interviews where we talk about personal branding. We talk about business, we talk about entrepreneurship, but we’re also gonna talk about scaling through investing.
AJV (01:52):
And Vinney is just a fascinating human being. And some of the most fascinating things that I think you need to know about him is that when VI, he moved to the United States almost 40 years ago, he moved here with $7. That’s right. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, $7 in his pocket. That’s it. And today he’s got more than 650 million under assets. He’s the author of two amazing books. He’s a podcast host, he’s a crypto investor. He is a man of many talents. And y’all, I’m just so excited to learn from him like selfishly, I’m having Vinney on the podcast today, cuz I want to ask him all these questions and learn for myself. And I know that if I can gain something, I know that you’re gonna gain something about.
New Speaker (02:46):
Real estate syndication of being an author, using that, to help your personal brand, but growing your business and your reputation, which are all things that Vinney has done exceptionally well and going from $7 when he moved here to over 650 million in assets 40 years later is nothing shy of incredible. I’m so excited to have you on the show. Vinney. Welcome.
VC (03:12):
Thank you, AJ. Thank you. I’m humbled. I’m privileged to be with you. I appreciate that. When I met you and Rory few months back, maybe last month we were there, you know, in Sarasota it’s it was fabulous to meet you all. And I saw you in presentation here, dynamic. I mean the company you have built is super, you know, just so great. And I’m so fortunate to be with you today.
AJV (03:40):
Oh, I’m the pleasure is all mine. He’s like even in Vinney’s text, y’all he just emos joy. It’s like even his text messaging, he’s just like the happiest guy and I’m so excited to get, to spend an hour with you. So all Vinney. So I kind of gave you a little bit of advanced notice and I clearly shared a tiny, tiny little microcosm of all of the things that you’ve accomplished, but here’s what I wanna do first is I wanna help our audience get to know you. And so here’s, I’m just gonna lay it out there. You can tell us as much or as little as you want, but how did you go from moving to the United States with $7 to being a multi-time international bestselling author podcast, host and most impressively, this incredible real real estate investment empire. How did this all happen?
VC (04:31):
Thank you. Thank you, AJ. Actually, I came with a very humble beginning. We are six siblings four sisters and two brothers, including me. We lived in one bedroom apartment. I think it was 300 scare freak total, literally like one bedroom, one living room and a hallway, never had a television, never had like a telephone or a refrigerator when I was growing up all the way till 11th grade. I think we only had a bicycle and you know, the two legs cycle, right?
VC (05:39):
So that really gave us very good in, you know, power to learn and be aggressive. And to really top in the class, if I may post a little bit, you know, in the junior high, I kind of topped in the high school I taught there also in studies, I got a free scholarship, five year scholarship from the Indian government to, I always wanted to become an engineer. So I’m a mechanical engineer. I took my five years to get the degree that I worked with Larson turbo, which is reliance group, one of the biggest company in India. But then I came here. I always wanted to do MBA masters in business administration. I thought, you know, marketing and engineering, I can make a good living in USA or in India. So I came here with $7. Now I could only bring $7. My grandpa actually paid for my ticket to come here.
VC (06:39):
My parents didn’t want me to come here.
AJV (07:44):
This is amazing. Like it’s like, I mean, it’s like one of those stories of when we think about overcoming the odds as someone who lives in America, it’s a really different story when you compare it to really no access to ed education and like no vehicle, 300 square foot with eight people living in it. Like that’s a, that’s a different level of humble beginnings than what we hear most often specifically on this podcast. And so I know that after college, right, you took clearly a job. So what was your first job? Like? Did you go into engineering or did you say the sales and marketing?
VC (08:24):
It just so happened. I worked like 80 hours a week. I know Ru also worked, I think, you know, in the similar profession, but that was like selling through summer months while I was going for George Washington university and we’ll sell books and encyclopedias 13 hours a day knocking on doors. And that really made me tougher. It made me being very, you know, accepting rejection and making sure that I could really down deep in myself, you know, figure out ways how could to overcome and be happy. I guess, you know, I was not always smiling like this, but I just always felt like, okay. And they gave us great many books by the way, Mandino in the greatest salesmen in the world, Charlie, tremendous Jones, you know, Dale Carnegie’s book how to influence people and, you know win France then think and grow rich, you know, Napoleon Hills. I remember those seven books really got me going mind wise and thinking, oh, I forgot magic of thinking big by WJ Schwartz. You know, all, these are very, very great books. So that’s when after about three summers, I said, you know what, I’m enjoying it so much. Let me just put the engineering in a box literally for some time and let me try out other revenues. So I became promotional consultant, fundraising consultant. I ranked, you know, raised my bar high. So I never went back to engineering. Can you play it?
AJV (10:02):
I, I mean, it’s kinda one of those things where, you know, I think people forget the power of learning, how to be a great salesperson. Yeah. Right. It does not matter what business you’re in. Right. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, having the skills of knowing how to make a sale and have influence like, like even as a parent, right. It’s like I’m selling every day and my kids are the best negotiators on the planet. Right. It’s like, there is just so much power in knowing how to make a sale that makes you a great business person. So I know that you went on and you were in fundraising for 40 years.
VC (10:41):
Yeah.
AJV (10:46):
For a really long time,
VC (10:47):
He retired in 2015.
AJV (10:50):
So I want everyone to pay attention to that. Let me call that out. So Vinney retired after a 37 year career with the same company, right. But 37 years. And you retired in 2017. It’s 2022 y’all. So your real estate investing really started five years ago,
VC (11:10):
Two eight. When I really took big, big strides, we start, we’ve been married 42 years just to say everybody, and I’ll be 17 this year. I’ll be, you know, after 50, I say, every birthday we go backward. So actually I’m only 30 mind of 17. Maybe
AJV (11:32):
I love it. I love it. But it’s like, I think it’s really important that I think just so often we feel like we look up at some point in our life and we just feel like we’re, I just thought I would be in a different place by now, or I thought I would have more or do more or something by now. And what I love about your story so much is that so much of the monumental success that you’ve had in books and everything has happened post retirement, right? Retirement is not retirement for you. Retirement. Truly
VC (12:05):
Seven years have been spectacular growth years. For me, I’m making more and doing more and being happier more. I was happy all these 40 years also. And we’ve been married 42 years, but what I have really scaled up has been in seven years.
AJV (12:23):
This is incredible. So, okay. So what click, what changed? What’s different? Like what did you start doing seven years ago? Because really what happened is you left kind of the quote unquote corporate America. You left your, you know, quote unquote nine to five, even though I know you’re working more than nine to five, but you left that and you said, all right, this is my, you know, next era, right? This is the next thing I get to do in life. Why real estate? Why investing? Like, what was it like, what was that next step that you took when you quote unquote retired?
VC (12:55):
Surely, you know, actually when we got married, it all depends. You know, when the opportunity knocks, you gotta open the door. I always say that and you should embrace it. That’s what is the other thing, you know, and being consistent in, you know, in the things we do. So when we got married, I was in Ohio, Finlay, Ohio, and we moved to bay area. My peer group started talking about real estate, hold on, I’m a promotional consultant, but I’m meeting over the weekend and all, and they’re saying rental homes and investing over here and there. So when Neil and Monica were born, our two children, we started, we said, okay, let’s dabble into it. Right? So we started investing into single family homes and we were getting cash flows. Okay. Cash flows. Then we went to Arizona, we bought two homes in one day, then another home, another rental later on, on the internet, went to Georgia, bought over there, went to Texas.
VC (13:56):
So we kept on buying these single family homes 2005 while being working full time. Also, you know, we have a lot of free time. What we do with the free time is our own choice. So I became a broker and I declared it to the company. I’m a broker, but I’m not going into that profession. So that helped me a lot to really start building my side hustle. Let’s say, you know, in real estate. So when I retired in 2015, I started a company in 2014, December, November, actually. And that is monil investment group, our kids name, Monica and Neil kind of put together. But before that, I had another company with a big major partner. I was not major partner. And then we sold all the assets in that one, you know, later on. But this Moni investment group has seven companies now in the last seven years. And it’s got monil senior living, monil management, monil you name it academy multi-family academy, then hospitality, Mon hospitality, and all these different, you know, crypto. And now we are going into Bitcoin mining, Mon mining just got built last 10 days. What
AJV (15:17):
VC (16:22):
You know, my main passion is really to make 1 million millionaires. What, I mean, that’s a pretty big goal, but if you look at 8 billion people on the planet, you know, and I think how many I was told out of eight, 4 billion have internet. I really believe that you could pass the information through the internet online education, and that can be spread all over the globe. So that has been my passion. I’ve recorded maybe 1,300 lectures right now, which can really manually teach everything that I do even better. And again, with all the tools and things, and we have dropped it down to 330, 6 of them into a course where people can really learn everything and everything. But writing book also makes the author really dig deeper into themselves. And they even, I say teaching is twice learning. I always say that because you try to perfect the art because you are going out in the open to tell other people about it in simpler ways.
VC (17:32):
I just have to say that I, you know, in Scottsdale, we finished the trip, right. You know, last week. So mark ter Hanson and crystal Hanson invited me for dinner. And as you know, mark ter Hanson wrote that book chicken. So for the soul, they sold 500 million copies, the number one writer, author in the world. So they want to write a book on me. I said, what they said, Winnie, we wanna write a book on you, fictional character, but your life and that book, fictional book is getting more coverage and people are learning about the principles much better. Anyway, I thought I might, it’s been on my mind. And I told them yesterday that yes, I gave permission. And we’ll be now doing interviews and all, and then hopeful. Yeah.
AJV (18:25):
I mean, I think that is just a, it’s a Testament too, of what a personal brand is all about. Right. It’s becoming known for something that you wanna be known for. And it’s like, I love what you said. It’s like teaching is just choice learning. Yes. Right. And I think there’s so much power in what you said of like writing a book or even creating a course or creating content in general really is more self-reflection of what do I have to say? Yeah. And how do I wanna say it? And it’s an R to fine tuning your message in a way that it reaches this very specific audience, but then two was like, you’ve got this enormous goal of helping a million people become millionaires. Right. And a part of that is it’s information, right. It’s education. And so one of the things that I wanna share with the audience today, anyone who’s listening is Vinney has made one of his books available.
AJV (19:19):
And e-copy so if you go to Vinny chopra.com Ford slash freebook. Right. So Vinney, V I N N E Y Chopra, C H O P R a.com Ford slash freebook. I’ll make sure to put that in the show notes, but you can go and grab an E version of one of his books. And I just, I love so much that you’re, you’re leveraging all of your success to help other people have success. And I think that’s really incredible. And I think that’s a power of a personal brand and creating valuable information is that you’re helping other people succeed, but simultaneously you’re becoming more successful every single time someone else hits their goals. And I think that’s a beautiful part of this whole puzzle. And so I, I’m super curious. And then I wanna actually talk about, you know, investing your business through, you know, real estate and scaling, but I’m curious, it’s like, there’s a lot of things that you could do. So why a book? Why a course, like why, why those specific things for you?
VC (20:24):
I would say definitely no, that is passing down the knowledge so that in simpler terms and having people to really act on, right. A lot of people just read and read and read. I like to also hold them accountable. So I do group coaching, every Wednesdays in my masterminds. Then I have personal coaching, only four students. I take a year that way, but that’s just one part of my thing just to give back forward, give giving. Then other side of my business is really getting into the deals and the structures and raising money. That’s what I’m good at. I just waste 4.5 million in three hours on vacation, literally. And you know, and I’ve got four interviews this week with my half a million dollar investors who are very already seen the package, cuz I’m buying $65 million multi-family right now. And then also crypto Bitcoin mining is very big in my mind.
VC (21:25):
And we, even though the stock, I mean, crypto Bitcoin went to 31,000 or whatever, 32, we can mine it at 12,000. So still there is a huge, huge profit. And that’s what I’m very, very excited about right now. Then hotels that’s the other one and senior living is my other one. So I mean every angle it’s kind of like, I give some time to this pocket this time, this, this, this. So I always have believed in, you know, AJ that you never should say, I can only do this or this or this or this, but always replace the R with an a and D and just your subconscious and your brain will just, you know, become so infer. I say, when you say I can do this and this and this and this and this, that has been the real success principle for me to really send it out in the Cosmo with the law of attraction.
VC (22:31):
Like the book was the secret, right from Rhonda burns, which is kind of going for the last, you know, a hundred years, what we think, what we conceive and we send strong signals all around us in the Cosmo. You don’t even know how it’s gonna happen. I don’t even know what, how these things are under unraveling right now.
AJV (23:56):
You know, it’s interesting. It’s like, although you’re doing a whole bunch of different things, there is a common through line. And you know, we talk a lot about that at brand builders group, but it’s, you really have the common through line, the common thing in every component of what you’re working on is investment. Yes. It doesn’t matter if it’s personal investment in learning or it’s real estate or Bitcoin or mining, or, you know, you know, senior living or hotels. It’s all about investments. Good, true. Right. It’s like, that’s that through line. So, you know, we talk about this a lot in brand builders groups. So for anyone who’s listening, who’s been around for a minute, you know, that we really much believe that you break through the noise by becoming known for one thing mm-hmm
AJV (24:45):
Right. And it’s like, now you’re doing a little of this and a little of that, but you’re doing all those little of this and a little of that, but it’s all through the lens of investment wealth building. Right. And I think that’s really important for everyone who’s listening of going, oh my gosh, well I’ll never be at that level. It’s like, no, you are. When you find that common, when you find that common thing that you’re passionate about, that you’re really good at doing, which I do wanna talk about how do you raise several million dollars in on vacation? So we’ll talk about that in a second. But it’s like, once you find that thing that you’re naturally good at you’re superpower, it’s like, then you’re, I really do believe that your mind activates and it goes, and it’s like, it could come in this form and then this form, it’s just like, it’s the same thing with information.
AJV (25:27):
You could read it, you could hear it on a podcast. You could be in a coaching program, a Masterman program, a course, but it’s all the same information, but it’s how it’s delivered in a variety of mediums. That makes it unique. And I hear you saying invest investing is very similar, right? It’s like plenty of people invest in a 401k or in a Roth IRA. And it’s like, but there’s also real estate investing. And then even in real estate, you’ve got senior living, you have hotels, you have multi-family units, you have single family homes. It’s like, there’s all these different ways to expand it. As long as you know, what your focus is. And what I hear you’re saying your focus is really investment. Even when it comes to education, it’s personal investment,
VC (26:07):
You are so right about it. A is you are so right. Two streams just too very focused, you know, attack is of course on the passive investors who are rich
AJV (27:15):
VC (27:53):
I love it to give credit to Monica Chopra, our daughter, she’s our partner else in the business. You met her in Sarasota. She’s wonderful. She’s been with us seven years. Of course. And the good part is that we have in mail Chi designed these beautiful emails that we have used for previous undertakings, where we use raise money. We just clone it. What? Just clone it and put new information in it. Yeah. So we were able to, she was able to design it. She sent it test market while I was there sipping, you know, pina colada or something. And then she said, dad, should we send it out? And we did. We sent out to 1,330 investors we have in our database and we never talk to anybody. But in our bullets we share all the good information and then give them soft commitment forms, clickable links.
VC (28:54):
So as soon as they like the whole system and the brochure and everything, they click on it, then it goes into a survey automatically. And then when they fill out the survey, it goes into Google sheet in real time, in real stamping, we find out if they wanna put 200,300, 500 and so on, and then how will they believe will be investing? We have a whole questionnaire that way. So that’s how we raise that money. Then in the mail chip, it says, oh, so many people clicked and opened and how many did not open? So we resend it again. Mm-Hmm
AJV (29:50):
Know? Oh, let me tell you what y’all I don’t know. Who’s been saying email marketing is dead, but they’re dead wrong. Oh, raising millions of dollars and email marketing right here with Vinney Chopra.
VC (30:23):
In our, in our CRM. In our, I know you mentioned it. I think I saw that in Sarasota. You said your next customer is in your Rolodex, in your right school, literally, which is so true. I love texting also huge, huge fan of texting. So I copy the same message
AJV (31:02):
Great. I think that’s such a great reminder of the power of your email list. And if you’re not building your email list right now, like if, if this was not clear enough, raising millions of dollars yeah. In an email blast, like let’s tune into what are you doing to build your email list, but not just build it, but nurture it right. Provide value to it. That’s huge. Like that’s a really big deal to raise millions of dollars off of, you know, 1300 investors is a really big deal. You know, we, some of us have email lists of 10, 20, 30, 5000 thousand people and couldn’t raise that much money with a launch. So I think there’s one thing in building a great email list in terms of numbers, but there’s a difference in having a quality email list versus just a quantity of an email list. I’m
VC (31:49):
So glad you said it, AJ. Now this was mail Chimp. I used the word that’s very sacred for us. That’s 1,330 investors, but my active campaign list is 14,000 mm-hmm
AJV (32:13):
VC (32:40):
Sense urgency. I should definitely mention that. I get sold out very quickly because I tell them it’s first come first served. Even if you have 5 million with me before I will not put you above the line, you got to make that commitment. It’s time stamped and everything. Mm-Hmm
AJV (33:23):
I mean that, I think again, that’s good old fashioned sales, right? How to create that limit, that sense of urgency. Yes. Something that moves people to action. That’s that’s 40 years of amazing sales that work right there, Vinney
VC (33:38):
Work. And you know, I collect almost 98 to 99% of my commitments, which is unheard of in the syndication world. It’s very unheard of. Even my coach told me, Vinney, you gotta get twice as many commitments to get half of it, money collected to buy anything. But somehow in the other, I always felt that if I can educate my investors nicely, not selling them, nobody wants to be sold at all. But as a consultant and show them all the different avenues, what can go wrong or whatever, and then make them understand right about the investment they will endear to you. And the more open you are, more trustworthy, you are, they will bring money more and more and tell more people about it and everything
AJV (34:31):
True.
VC (34:31):
So we collect almost 99% of soft commitments into hard commitments.
AJV (34:37):
Yeah. That’s awesome. You know, I heard this the other day and I’m paraphrasing it, but it’s, it’s really simple provide value, build trust. Yeah. Right. The more value that you provide, the more trust that you build. Right. that’s so good. So, okay. You kinda mentioned something that’s gonna kind of transfer us into the second part of our conversation. So we’ve got, you know, 15, 17 minutes left here. So we wanna talk about investing, right? So your personal brand is all around investments. It comes in a variety of formats. But you you’ve chosen a very distinctive, you know, path post your corporate retirement into this world of investing. And a lot of people don’t know what real estate syndication is. And so fill in like, what is that?
VC (35:24):
It’s very simple syndication. If you do the word, you know, in the Wikipedia or dictionary, it’s pooling of money together of likeminded people for profits. And you could, you know, syndicate to raise money, to buy a plane and put the plane to use. And that is where the profits will be generated. You could buy apartment building, which I’m in quite a bit and hotels, you could buy office building mobile home park. You could build a company, you know, a VC company mm-hmm
VC (36:34):
When you buy in Mar in stock market, Google stock, you have to pay a hundred percent of it cash or do margins or do options and all that more risky. But in real estate, guess what? You come up with 25% of the money. The bank comes along, they look at the property. They say, yeah, we feel comfortable. We’ll give you 75% of the money. What you bring only 25. They give you three times more and you give the whole hundred to the seller. Now you own the property. What the bank says, just pay us the interest only loan for five years or three years, or give us interest and principle, you know, principle, payback, Orlu payment. We call it right Uhhuh. But now you made that property increasing value. The bank says, you keep all the profits, you keep all the equity. You’re not gonna take any equity out. You. I mean, this is the craziest thing.
VC (37:48):
First of all, you put a hundred thousand, you are buying $400,000 worth. And when the 400,000 increases to 40 million now 40,000, all that gain is yours to keep, oh my gosh. And the tax laws say, depreciation, what is that? Depreciation is that your building is going to be worth zero. If you buy it for 1 million. After 27 and a half years, taxation code says it’ll be worth zero. And you can deduct the losses every year.
VC (39:01):
We call it three DS, but the property management companies took care of it. Right? But then when we started buying apartments, we were having 20 homes in one place, kind of because 20 units, you collect rent from all 20 and they’re paying the mortgage down. That’s the other part. I didn’t talk about that deposition and all that. And bank is separate. Now comes to residence. Mm-Hmm
AJV (40:34):
Up. That’s amazing. So, but
VC (40:36):
It’s the only reason AJ, because I’m able to get money from my family, friends, people I know. And they gave me money. That’s the power of syndication.
AJV (40:47):
That’s amazing. I mean, it’s, it’s a pulling of funds. Yeah. Where everyone wins.
VC (40:52):
Yeah. Everybody wins.
AJV (40:53):
Everybody, everyone wins.
VC (40:55):
70, 30 splits means our investors get 70% of 30 returns and the cash flow, I get only 30, which is great, but they, you know, get benefit and we get benefits to
AJV (41:09):
You. Oh, so much of the win-win I love this. And I think the, that, there’s a couple of things that you said that I wanna kind of go back to, and I’m just curious for everyone who’s listening. Who’s going, I’m at a place where I know I need to be investing specifically in real estate, cuz right now, if you’re not investing, your dollar is losing money, right? Yes. You just have dollars in the bank. You are losing money at the rate
VC (41:30):
7% each year.
AJV (41:31):
It’s insane. So it’s, we’re not really at a time of like, you know, should I invest? It’s like, no, what are you going to invest in? Cause otherwise your money is literally losing its values sitting where it’s sitting. So you went residential versus commercial. Why?
VC (41:48):
The reason is because of economies of scale, because instead of having single family or duplexes all over in different cities and different because you don’t wanna buy everything in one place, mm-hmm
AJV (43:13):
That’s a love it. Well, I think too, especially in this world that we’re living in where how much of a virtual environment are we gonna stay in? Yeah. It’s like, regardless of people ever return to offices, they’re always gonna need places to live. Sure. Right. and so that kind of leads me to my second question. And I don’t know, what’s, you know, it’s like this doesn’t have to be academic, but I’m just curious on your perception with millennials. Yes. Younger millennials specifically. And then the rise of gen Z, right. Which, you know, Monica is, you know, in the verge of this millennial gen Z era, I’m curious, like, what are your thoughts on the importance of how you invest in money in terms of, you know, multi, multi, how like multi-family housing units versus single family homes. Because I’m just so curious, like how many of these people are going to want to buy? I have so many people that I know that are in this younger millennial generation where it’s like, they don’t want to, yes. It’s a decided choice that they’re choosing to rent because they want the freedom and flexibility.
VC (44:16):
You know, you hit the nail in the head. I talk about three tsunamis flowing through the world and USA one is the millennial and Zen Z, just like you said, they like portability. They don’t wanna move lawn. They want to be moving into remote areas and working from laptop, enjoy the beaches and this condominiums renting. So portability is number one on their mind. They don’t wanna be tied down. Some of them saw their parents lose their homes in the last recession or something. Right. So that is a huge, we are investing. It’s a rental rental nation. We call it, we are a rental nation, you know, rent. Yeah. Rental nation, renters nation. Second one is our tsunami, which is a silver tsunami. 10,000 baby boomers are turning 65. So seniors are growing more and more and more 10,000 every single day. So there’s a simple tsunami going through. The third tsunami I talk about is the immigration, the immigrants coming, our population growth is very low. 2.4%, you know, and with the death rate and all. So we do need influx of other nationalities and different people coming through. So three tsunamis are all making USA, a renter nation again. So we have been renter nation. We have so much shortage. 20 billion units are shortage in America right now, 20 million. Even if I built so many apartments still, we will not be able to capture it.
AJV (45:57):
That’s insane. And I love this. And I heard you talk about this just as a tiny bit in Sarasota around these three tsunamis. So I just wanna repeat this for everyone. We’ve got this generational tsunami with gen Z and millennials who don’t necessarily wanna settle down and buy a home. They wanna be flexible and move from city to city or place to place in this, you know, laptop living world, which I think is fascinating. And only growing with the natural, you know, distant work environment that we’re experiencing with virtual work. Second is the silver tsunami. Right? And I wanna kinda go back to one of the steps. You said, you said 10,000,
VC (46:39):
Every night turned into 65 years of age. So there are so many, I’m 70, I’ll be 70 this year, right? August. But up to 2031, what almost nine more years, all these people who are in the sixties, you know, on 61, 62, 63, 64, all the way, the last person will turn 65.
AJV (47:58):
That. That’s not your typical senior living in bar city. But I think that’s amazing because that’s true. It’s like people are living longer and they want better quality of life. No one wants to go to what you think about now, when you think about a retirement home, it’s very yucky and scary. And quite honestly like what kid wants to put their parents in that, right. That’s not ideal, but you’re, so I think this is amazing because it’s like, we’re saying 10,000 a day, you’re entering into this and all these people are living longer. It’s like, where are they gonna go? Right. When they are not able to stay into their home, they’re not able to upkeep it or they don’t want to. And so you’re, you’re doing a ton in this senior living environment. Like, like what do you think is the potential for this particular a real
VC (48:44):
I’m setting my goal at 2 billion, with a B billion in this decade, rest of the decade, I’m doing five projects right now in Florida and Virginia Williamsburg, Virginia should be opening up end of October. Beautiful, beautiful place. If anybody would like to, you know, watch and see and meet me there. That’s Hampton Manor is our brand Hampton, a M PTO N manor.ceo is the website, but Williamsburg, Virginia, Chesapeake, Virginia, we are building. Then in Punta go, we just opened up. We are not even open yet. We are 60% occupied already. We are not even open yet. So people have already given us deposit. And as soon as we open the door, they’re going to all seniors will be coming in. And even the corner of Florida is coming. I just found out yesterday to our facility. There’ll be a big, big write up on our communities because what we are building. So that’s gonna be great. Cape coral. We built it. Palm bay, Sebastian vane Jacksonville, Mari island. So building in all these locations then St. Louis, then Texas, we are coming Nashville. We are coming Nashville. I know we all over
AJV (50:04):
USA. I’m harassing VI like, come on. When are you coming to Nashville? You have two investors waiting on you. This is the it’s incredible. Like I think this is amazing. And then the immigrants tsunami. Yes. Right? Which again, renters I think this is really interesting in hearing this perspective of one syndication where you don’t hold all the responsibility. You don’t hold all the liability. Yes. But you’re pulling it together to do something larger. Right. but then it’s this, I love this multifamily housing component. Especially when you get into like 5,000 units, plus it’s really exciting. And then what I’m most interested is you senior living? Like, I think that is fascinating mainly because it’s so needed. It’s so needed to reimagine what senior living looks like for this, you know, next 10 to 20.
VC (50:54):
No, that’s so true. What you said, AJ, our goal, our motto is let’s spoil the seniors. Yeah.
AJV (51:01):
Love that.
VC (51:02):
You know? I mean, we want them dignified life, respectful life, cuz that’s their golden years. I love that. And we start at like 3,300, I think is the amount which includes all the meals, rents, all the ADLs activities are daily, living, caregiving, linen, laundry, everything included, transportation, all that. And then the care of service. If they need us, it might go to 4,000 or 4,500 and seniors don’t have to pay a penny because there are certain livings where you have to buy a condo or something. Hours are rental units. They are five to seven acres of land. One story, no two story, no elevators and courtyards are built with the waterfall functions, but in greens and swing pools and other things so that, and they can put vegetable garden outside. Just enjoy the life. Yeah.
AJV (52:05):
Oh, I love that. I, I mean, I think too, it’s like, my dad is 70. He turned 71 this year. Yes. And I, you know, I’ve heard him tell me if it comes down to putting me in a home or killing me, just kill me. And I think a lot of that comes down to this mentality around there’s a, a horrible association with, there’s gonna be no quality of life. Right. I don’t wanna be in this stale hospital-like place. And I’m like, well, dad, we’re not killing you. No. So we need other options. And I love this because I think this is so needed and it’s so necessary. It’s not going away. It’s only growing and that’s the power of investing and specifically in this way. And I love this concept of syndication. I think it’s so cool. I could just like sit here and talk to, we didn’t even, we haven’t even scratched surface of Vinney’s knowledge and
VC (52:57):
Exactly. If other people who are asking, listening to us, if you say to AJ, you know, bring Winnie back, I’ll be here whenever you need me.
AJV (53:06):
VC (53:11):
So my gosh, I didn’t talk about the cyber security. My company is doing really well with the venture capital fund that we have also started with my partner, our, our, you know, I’m thinking about bit mining, maybe going to NASDAQ, you know, up there. And also the re small re that I have in the back of my mind. So we are just, you know, mind is a good thing. Right. You know?
AJV (53:34):
Absolutely. and I think this too, it’s like, I know most of you probably aren’t watching our video, you’re listening, but Vinney couldn’t look further away from 70. If he tried it’s, there is power in keeping your mind active and keeping business and keeping just full of life and busy of doing things that you enjoy. That keeps you young. Like the joy, all of this is just, it’s amazing.
VC (54:03):
ADI, you said it. You know, my grandpa, he passed away at 94. He was driving our Indian friends. They might know the traffic in new Delhi. It’s pretty bad. He was driving at the age of 91. What at 91, able to see and manure the car and everything. That’s the thing I will, I’ll be 70 in August. I wanna be like him.
AJV (54:50):
Oh, I bet. That’s how it feels when you’re doing what you love. Right. It’s how it feels.
VC (54:55):
Never a work. No, not at all. I,
AJV (54:58):
Oh, I love it. I love all of this. Y’all I think this is just so fascinating. Not only do I think it’s awesome that you should check out Vinney and follow him. Because he’s got this awesome personal brand that’s growing out of really just a desire to help other people succeed. And it’s like a Ziglar used to say, if you help enough people get what they want, then you can also get what you want me too. And you’re so living back. And so Vinney, when it comes to social media, do you have a preferred platform? Like where should people go to stay in touch with you?
VC (55:29):
Oh my gosh, you just go Google Vinney Chopra. You’ll come with 1000 pages. I, somebody told you, and then you could go on Instagram, smiley, Winnie I’m smile a lot. You know, you could go on Amazon, Winnie smile, Chopra, Winnie Chopra. You could go to Facebook. Youtube channel is growing big time. Tiktok is also getting bigger now Pinterest. They started and of course, iTunes and bus bar. I mean, all my, you know podcast that I’m doing and my live show is every Friday live at nine 30 wi and Bo show my partner and I do it together. No, it’s been fun. It’s been fun. I’m writing a book by the way, Uhuh, my third book is gonna be this one. Oh,
AJV (56:20):
You’re
VC (56:20):
Living, investing made easy look
AJV (56:22):
At, I love.
VC (56:23):
So it’s almost half done. And then of course I’m gonna be coming up with my big book with mark Victor Hanson and his company is going to be, you know, he just personalized it last week. You know, when we met, oh, I don’t know if
AJV (56:39):
Cool, love this
VC (56:40):
With a great book ask. And they’re gonna write a fictional story on me, which I’m very excited about
AJV (56:47):
You. Oh my goodness. So we’ll put all of these different links in the show notes so that you guys can connect with Vinney. And then don’t forget, go to Vinney chopra.com/freebook. Yes. Grab a copy of his book. Follow him on social, subscribe to his podcast. If you wanna learn about growing your personal brand through watching someone else do it, which is what he’s doing. And also learn about the power of real estate investing check him out stay tuned after our recap episode that I’ll do after this Vinney. Think this, thank you so much for being on the show.
VC (57:22):
Thank you, AJ. Thanks to you and R you guys are doing amazing. God bless you.
AJV (57:28):
And thanks everyone. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal.
Ep 293: How to Read People with Vanessa Van Edwards | Recap Episode
RV (00:02):
Vanessa van Edwards. One of the
RV (00:05):
Coolest
RV (00:06):
Sharpest, smartest personal brands that I think is in the marketplace and we’ve become pretty good friends over the last few years ever since sharing the stage together at global leadership summit a few years ago. And she is really, really impressive. And just the science of people is what her brand is all about. And it’s, it’s literally all, all of this about reading people and their nonverbals. And I just, I think it’s fascinating and I think it’s so cool how she’s taken such a specific tri like a specific skill set, you know, all the way down with a very specific type of communication and turned it into such a magnificent personal brand, built it on science and research and data and just, just a really great example and an awesome, awesome person. So this is a recap, obviously of my interview with Vanessa van Edwards, her new book cues is what we talked about.
RV (01:03):
And I mean, just that idea alone of the, the title of the book that are, that there are social signals that we subconsciously send to one another is really powerful. And that’s of course what the whole interview, what her book, her whole book is about. And so I’m gonna, I’m gonna share with you a couple of my highlights and in this case, you know, there’s two big highlights, and then I’m gonna, I’m gonna teach you something that is a part of our curriculum at brand builders group, which I haven’t, I don’t think we’ve ever covered on this podcast. And it’s, it is game changer. Like this technique is the single, maybe the single most powerful technique that we have that we invented. This is our proprietary technique that will make you a master communicator. And I’ll, I’ll tell you what it is. That’s gonna be my third takeaway. But my first takeaway, which is just good to hear, and it’s edifying for what we do and what we teach and you go, how has she built nearly a million subscribers on YouTube, this great social media following she’s consistently selling all these books and built a, a tremendous speaking career. And she said two words aggressively helpful,
RV (02:21):
Aggressively helpful. If
RV (02:24):
You want to get people to pay attention
RV (02:26):
To you, you need to be aggressively helpful. You have to be
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Relentless. You have to be intentional. You have to
RV (02:34):
Be committed. You have to be dedicated. You have to be ruthless about the idea that your
RV (02:40):
Brand, your media company, your platforms, your podcast,
RV (02:43):
Your social, your YouTube, like your books, your, your, your blogs,
RV (02:48):
Whatever you’re putting out into the world, your keynotes,
RV (02:50):
Your, your
RV (02:51):
Podcast interviews, like when you’re a guest in someone else’s show your webinars, your lead magnets,
RV (02:56):
They have to be aggressively helpful.
RV (02:58):
They to be useful, right? Albert Einstein says you don’t try. Don’t try to be a person of, of influence. Try to be a, a person of, of utility, like be valuable to other people. And that’s the secret. Like that’s the secret don’t hold back. As we say, around here all the time, save the best for first, save the best for first, give away your best stuff. And, and that’s what keeps people coming back. And so it’s just powerful. And again, edifying to have so many like guests on this show who have built huge personal brands that then come and tell us, Hey, this is, this is how to do it. And that’s why we do it is, is because we’ve learned from a lot of them over the years. And we continue to learn from them and, and we can, and we teach you those things, right?
RV (03:49):
So how can you be aggressively helpful? How can you put out content that will dramatically change people’s lives, save the best for first, give it away, make a difference and watch how people show up and come back and share and invite friends. The second thing, which the second, my second takeaway is probably what I would say is my biggest takeaway from this interview. And it is not really what the topic of the conversation was about in terms of how to read people. This though was something I’ve never heard anybody say, at least not so clearly as Vanessa said it. And I almost didn’t ask her this question. And I said, but I, you know, I we’re watching the data of all these book launches, right? So we just, we just helped Tom and Lisa BIU with their book launch launch. We’re helping Eric ed Mylet with his huge book launch right now.
RV (04:44):
We’ve, we’ve, we’ve, pre-sold tens of thousands of units. And so we’re watching all these book launches and, you know, I’m seeing Vanessa clock through every week with several hundred units. And it’s really impressive. It’s very, very hard to do, to sell consistently several hundred units. And so I asked her, I said, Hey, what’s your secret? Like, how do you do the long tail, right? Because we have all this, you know, we have a, a great strategy for how to do a book launch and all the presales and everything leading up to it in like the first eight weeks and, you know, keeping it going. I mean, we’ve got now, in my opinion, perhaps one of the best, if not the best book, launching strategy that there is in the marketplace. And, you know, we got a lot of the results to back that up and prove it with several best selling authors that we have helped.
RV (05:28):
But this long tail long, you know, this long tail is something that I’ve always been super interested in and going man, like what you really want is not, you know, not just the big launch, you want the big launch, you want the big book launch because it lights the spark, right? Like it sets things into motion, but the true perennial bestsellers are these, you know, books that sell several hundred or even a few thousand units every single week for years. And, you know, other than writing a great book and, and hopefully having it propagate, there’s not that much that I’ve seen or heard or learned, or been able to reverse engineer about how to make that happen. And Vanessa shared this great secret, and this was like a light bulb for me. And she said basically that she sells books by SEO, SEO search engine optimization.
RV (06:24):
If you’re not familiar with that term, now we teach SEO. That is a part of our, our curriculum and our, our high traffic strategies training, which is one of our, our phase two trainings. For those of you that aren’t members, we have 12 different topics that are 12 different training, you know, kind of like modules that are they’re each two days. You know, so our entire education takes 24 days just to like go through the full education. It’s, it’s a lot, it usually takes people three or four years to get through it all. But like, so we teach search engine op search engine optimization, but never in connection with selling books. And it’s so simple, right. But it’s so brilliant because you go, how do you create this steady, consistent, long tail sell through of a book? And you go, well, what, what force is there in the world that is steady and consistent and long term?
RV (07:20):
And the answer is search people’s search behavior, they’re search habits. People are searching for terms on a very consistent basis. And if you can figure out what are the terms that people are searching for. And of course, you know, there’s lots of different tools for this, but one of the ones that we, the one that we use internally, which is also the one that sounds like Vanessa uses is called a refs, a refs. And it’s a tool that will tell you, you know, you could type in any term and it’ll tell you, this is how many times this term is searched every, every month on Google. And then you can also go to pages and see which, you know, how, which, how, which, which terms pages are scoring for et cetera, and, and what the average cost per click is. If you want to go out and buy one and what she said, which first of all, this was a tactical tip, which I did not know is that a HFS has a secret tab for YouTube, which is huge, cuz because YouTube is also a search engine.
RV (08:20):
So that means that you can use this tool, which you might already have. And you know, MOS is another one Uber suggests is another one. Like they all, they all, you know, do a decent job of, of what you need to do. But AHS specifically since that’s what we use, I don’t know about the other ones, cuz she didn’t talk about it. But has this a tool that will tell you about YouTube search? So how often are people searching specific terms on YouTube? And then all she did was she made a list of all those terms. And then she created videos that were specific to those questions, which happen every single month, right? People are, are continuously like repetitively searching those terms. And every single month new people are on YouTube searching. And so she creates, she said for like every single book, she creates 20 videos that specifically address these common questions and those specific term search terms that people are looking for. And she creates videos for those where the primary focus of the video, first of all, is to add value, right. To be aggressively helpful. But the secondary vehicle is to promote her book specifically. Right. And all it doesn’t have to be overt. It doesn’t have to be a huge pitch. She’s just adding valuable content. She’s optimizing her presence in the PLA in the marketplace for terms and then suggestively and gently sort of referencing that what she’s teaching is coming out of her book.
RV (09:56):
So genius, so simple, so actionable. So duplicatable, so something that we are going to do. I mean, what, I mean, that’s a huge, that’s a career altering that one idea like could be a career altering idea of just going, because if you, if you write a book that sells several hundred copies every week, like within a few years, that’s a lot of people that have read the book, that’s gonna change the trajectory of your entire career. Like this was a really big tip and not something that I have heard anywhere else. Like out of all the stuff we’ve read that we’ve looked at the courses we’ve been through the, the hundreds of authors that I’ve interviewed, no one has ever given me that tip. So that was a huge, huge tip and one that we are definitely getting into action mode on. So really, really brilliant and smart and simple.
RV (10:53):
So I hope you pick that up and you know, if you’re not selling books apply this to anything, right. You’re selling mouse traps or you’re selling cars or you’re selling battleships, figure out what are the search terms that people are searching for, create VI videos specific to, to those queries optimize the video so that they come up for those, do an awesome video and then make a suggestive call to action to whatever your product of service is like. So we even teach that with content marketing, but just have never thought about it or applied it to a book like it’s, it’s so simple. And it’s like, how did I miss this? How have I never thought about this? Well, UN you don’t UN until, you know, you don’t know until, you know, right. But you go man, one little tip like that, SuperDuper powerful.
RV (11:38):
The third takeaway was something that I’ve heard before. And so I wanted to share with you one of our favorite techniques, and this is something that I personally invented. You know, our team has polished over the years and, and is a formal part of our world class presentation, craft trainings. So the one of our phase three, or excuse me, the third training in our phase in our phase one curriculum is called world class presentation craft. And it applies very much to what Vanessa’s talking about here. And, you know, she said nonverbal communication is 69% of, of communication. And she was talking about how, it’s not the words that you say, it’s your facial expressions. It is your eyes. It’s the, your gestures, your body language, even the clothes you wear, the colors that are around you are all things that communicate in a very clear way.
RV (12:35):
Although, you know, somewhat subconsciously to the people around us. And then she was talking about how our, our vocal pace and cadence is a huge component of that. And so I wanna go ahead and share with you one of our favorite techniques of all time and this, we call this the vocal variety matrix, the vocal variety matrix. And it’s very, very simple, but it’s extremely powerful. So if you were to create a graph where the Y the Y axis was energy, so high, you know, at the top would be high energy at the bottom would be low energy. Okay. and then the Y axis would be like speed, where you know, let’s, let’s say all the way to the right is fast. And all the way to the left is slow. What happens is you have this natural separation of these four distinct quadrants and each quadrant represents a different utility of your voice. And when you master this VO, the, you know, this vocal variety matrix, we sometimes call it the emotions matrix because each different quadrant communicates a different emotion. And it doesn’t matter the words that you say, right? So let me, let me, let me talk this out for you. Right? So for example, quadrant number one is somebody who talks like with high energy, which is often also the volume is very loud and very fast, right? And so you talk like this, and when you
RV (14:00):
Talk really loud and really fast, what you’re doing
RV (14:02):
Is you’re adding a
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Tremendous amount of energy and emotion and enthusiasm. It doesn’t matter what the words you’re gonna do. Like what the words are that you’re saying, don’t even matter. You’re creating this physiological change in the audience by just talking loud and fast with high energy and high speed that suddenly create excitement and enthusiasm
RV (14:18):
And energy. Similarly,
RV (14:21):
If I talk loud
RV (14:24):
And slow,
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This
RV (14:27):
Has high energy, loud volume,
RV (14:30):
But slow pace, regardless of the words that come
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Out of my mouth,
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You talk like this
RV (14:41):
To create the emotion of respect, you’re commanding authority. You’re, you’re, you’re demonstrating your control, your credibility, your power. And then if I talk low and slow, low energy, low volume, and low speed, it creates a completely different emotional experience, a different energy, one of authenticity, vulnerability, honesty, transparency, connection, and trust. And then if I keep my energy low and I keep my volume low, but then I pick up my pace. All of a sudden I start adding suspense because just by adding, just by talking faster again, regardless of the words that I say, this, isn’t a matter of the words that we’re saying, we’re just talking about delivery here and here. This is what, this is probably the, the most underutilized quadrant of all the four quadrants. But this is somebody who just talks very low, but very fast, but it’s a mental game, right?
RV (16:20):
It’s, it’s mental exercise that forces you to concentrate, to lean in, to create suspense, to be, to be sort of curious, to be preoccupied with like, what’s he gonna say? And like trying to keep up with everything that’s going on and, and notice that no one quadrant is better than any of the others, the magic here, first of all, is that it doesn’t matter what you say, it’s using the vocal variety matrix to determine how you say, because all of a sudden, no matter what I’m saying, this is loud and it’s exciting and it’s fast pace. And then all of a sudden I drop it way down.
RV (16:55):
And I share the lesson that I learned from that story. And what this means for your life personally, is that you have to take this advice and you must go out and execute this behavior, this action. And then I can move on into the next story and set up the next story with back, you know, backstory on the characters and, and saving some time in my presentation by just sort of speeding along, keeping you mentally engaged and forcing you to have to listen, sit on the edge of your seat because of this suspense. And because of the, the way your mind has to be preoccupied with what I’m saying in order to keep up with how fast that I’m talking, but I’m moving through a lot of kind of insignificant details and trivial things just so I can set up the next story, baby. Cuz here we come, it’s getting exciting again.
RV (17:50):
Bam, isn’t that amazing? This is one of the secrets that has shaped my career. I mean, it is one of the biggest things that we coach speakers on when we work with them in world class presentation craft, this is part of, you know, how I created a viral Ted talk and got inducted in the professional speaking hall of fame and you know, became a two time world champion of public speaking finalist, helping people with the art of speaking is one of the things that we do most frequently at brand builders group, both their message, but also the, the mechanics of their delivery. And that technique is called the vocal variety matrix. We’re sharing it here for you for free on this podcast episode. Usually those kind of things, you have to be a paying member to get access to, but I wanted to share that one just as a special bonus giveaway in honor of my friend, Vanessa van Edwards, because of how much content she shared and how much I love what she’s about and just applying one of the techniques that we teach very much to what she is talking about here in the science of people.
RV (18:55):
So I hope you enjoyed that interview. Hey, share this recap edition with someone who needs to hear it. Somebody who you know, is, is trying to build their personal brand and, and the interview as always tell your friends. And if you can leave a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to the podcast that helps us tremendously, you know, we’ll share another ad for that here in just a second, but we really, really need that help. And that’s why we’re here every single week, bringing you the best of the best that we can from our friends and community, and also drop dropping in with our tips and recaps and highlights. So thanks for being here. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand podcast.
Ep 292: How to Read People with Vanessa Van Edwards
RV (00:02):
Vanessa van Edwards. I met her, we shared the stage together at GLS global leadership summit. She was awesome. She got amazing feedback, you know, from close friends and clients, people that I love and trust. I started following her, checking out what she’s into and the more I get to meet her, the more I think she’s just awesome. She’s got great content. We’re gonna talk about, we’re gonna talk about that a little bit today. So she has a new book out called cues. So her first book was called captivate. The science of succeeding with people it’s translated into 16 languages. She’s had more than 50 million people watch her videos on YouTube and her Ted talk. She has a massive YouTube channel, hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Mm-Hmm
VVE (01:08):
Thank you so much for having me. It’s so great to be back with you and talk about everything. You know, I love a cue. You send good cues, worry. I love your
RV (01:16):
Cues. You do. Oh, what is okay. Tell us. Okay. So tell us cues, tell us about the, so this is the new book and yes. And everything you do is basically science backed communication skills ish, right?
VVE (01:29):
Oh man. That’s it. That’s it. So, yes. So I’m a recovering awkward person. So I learn social skills and communication with black and white formulas blueprints. I like to lay it out. And so this journey for this book, so a queue is a social signal, human sent to each other. I never thought I would write this book. I never thought I would write it. This was a, a secret science that I was embarrassed about. Like it started off for my own use. And I’ll tell you the moment it started. So 17 years ago, I was in my, the peak of my awkward stage and I was watching Lance Armstrong on Larry King live. And Larry King asked Lance Armstrong, have you ever DOD? Now spoiler alert. Lance was doping. But in this interview he told a flat out outline. He said, Nope, I’ve never DOD.
VVE (02:16):
And then right after he said it, he did a lip purse. He pressed his lips into a firm line. Hmm. He pressed his lips down together. And I remember watching that interview and thinking, what was that? Like? My spy sense knew something was off, but that specific cue, I didn’t even know it was called the queue back then says, what was that? So I began to look in the research. What is that body language gesture. It turns out that is a universal sign of withholding. When humans wanna hold something back or keep it together or keep it in liars often do it. They press their lips together. We press their lip together to say, don’t say it don’t get yourself in
RV (02:49):
Trouble. Interesting. Interesting. I
VVE (02:51):
Was like, what? And so I started to see this lip purse on people, in shame, people in people who were lying. And I wondered, okay, what if we could study humans? Like we study foreign languages where we break down behavior into specific cues, into our trust cues, our power cues, our danger zone cues, our trust, our, our charisma cues. And that’s exactly what this book was. I was spent the last 17 years cataloging all these queues, seeing if we could learn to speak them.
RV (03:25):
So
VVE (03:33):
Yes.
RV (03:33):
Are they all physical? I mean, are, is that like, like, will you, cause when you say study it like a language, you know, when I hear like science back communication, a lot of times it’s like your voice and your, you know, you’re you’re but are these like more like gestures conscious or subconscious gestures?
VVE (03:49):
That’s a great question. So in the beginning it started off as all gestures. I was like, okay, nonverbal, right? Facial expression, gestures, posture, movement, eyebrow raises. Right. But then I realize, and the research actually backs us up as well is there’s actually different ways that we sh broadcast our cues. There’s four of them. So the first one is non-verbal and that’s actually the biggest 60 to 90% of our communication is non-verbal. And when I say that, people are always shocked. But think about, if someone were to say that they were fine, I’m fine. And hold like a really angry face. You would know they were not fine. In other words, we give more weight it’s nonverbal. So that’s the biggest one. The second one is vocal. So how we deliver our birds words, our pace, our cadence, our volume, our pitch. So how we say our words is just important as what we say, the third one is verbal.
VVE (04:35):
So the actual words we we use, of course, that’s how we communicate lots of cues and the hidden signals in our words. And I have a whole chapter on sort of the secret things you can find out about someone’s charisma, simply based on the words they use in emails. And the last one, the one that’s forgotten is imagery. The colors we wear the props in our background, what we’re carrying in our profile photo even personality, even fonts have personality. The props that we use and jewelry wear. So imagery is the last small one.
RV (05:04):
Mm-Hmm
VVE (05:14):
Right now you’re you just got
RV (05:16):
Nervous, not fixing my hair. You
VVE (05:17):
Just got nervous. I saw
RV (05:19):
It cause you’re reading me
VVE (05:21):
Well a little bit. I can’t help it once. So this is a blessing and a curse. I will warn you. I should actually, I thought about having a warning at the beginning of the book and my publisher said no, which was that these cues, once you see them, you cannot unsee them.
RV (06:23):
A second. Don’t me break me down. Break me down sister.
VVE (06:26):
Okay. Let’s do it. So the reason why highly charismatic people are so charismatic is because they are purposefully sending off very positive cues of two traits. And this is exactly what the researchers found. Highly charismatic people have the perfect blend of warmth and competence that when we’re interacting
RV (06:44):
With competence with a
VVE (06:45):
P competence with a P not confidence, that’s, that’s, that’s a,
RV (06:49):
Yeah, that’s a big distinction. That’s an important distinction. It’s
VVE (06:51):
A really important thing. It’s not confidence. It’s competence. In other words, really highly charismatic. People are at the very same time, warm, open, collaborative, trustworthy, likable, but at the same time, they’re also competent, powerful, efficient, impressive, and productive. And the reason for that is because we like people who answer the two questions. Can I trust you? And can I rely on you? And so when I first met you, you were broadcasting. I think you might do it subconsciously. Cause since you haven’t read, I haven’t cues just came out. So I don’t think you read that one yet, is that you naturally are picking these cues that are both trustworthy and very competent, which makes me want to talk to you, engage with you, makes me wanna level up with you. And that’s because when we’re around care about people, we wanna catch that charisma. We like to, we feel like it rubs off on us too.
RV (07:43):
So what are some of the cues let’s talk about? Buying signals. Okay. Yeah. So if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a personal brand. You may be a CPA or financial advisor, real estate mortgage, or maybe you’re a coach and you’re, you know, trying to go like, is this person ready to buy? Like those are classic cues. And that’s, you know, the world we came from was, is sales. And that’s part of it probably where I developed this, these learning queues is I knocked on, I knocked on over 20,000 doors. Like I did five years of knocking on doors. Right? So you, you pick up some of these things. What, what can I look for that tells me that somebody’s ready to buy, they’re ready to book me for the interview. They’re ready to buy my, my keynote or buy my book or buy my service or what, what am I looking for?
VVE (08:31):
Okay. So before we even get to that, I’m gonna make a really big statement, which is starts with a corny metaphor, which is that very, very brilliant people have, are it’s impossible for them to share their ideas if they have bad cues. And the way that I think about this as a metaphor is that if your ideas are a car, cues are a gas and this is the problem with really smart entrepreneurs, really smart business people is they have great ideas, a great product, a great service, and they cannot get it to move. They literally cannot get the gas for that car. And that is because really smart people rely too much on their ideas. I think. Well, my idea is great. I don’t have to worry about how I talk about it, cuz the idea is so good that it will just speak for itself.
VVE (09:11):
That does not work. Our ideas have to have cues deal to communicate. And so the very first thing that we think about before you even look for buying signals, which we can talk about is you need to make sure your website, your LinkedIn profile, your social media profile pictures, all are signaling or broadcasting, warmth and competence, your digital first impression when someone Googles you or they look at your LinkedIn profile, they look at your website. I actually count on our website, how many warmth and competence queues we have. I’ll give you a really basic example of how this works. Warmth are things that create the warm and fuzzies for us. Their stories they’re relatable, they’re likable. Competence are data, research, numbers, proof recommendations. So Casper mattress is one case study that I like to use. Cause it’s very, very easy way to think about this.
VVE (10:00):
Cause the reason I think that Casper blew up, I mean literally just destroyed the mattress market is not only because they have a great mattress. There’s been a lot of great matches in the past. But remember that’s like having a really good idea, not knowing how to share it. If you look at Casper’s website, they have the perfect balance of warmth sales cues and competent sales queues. Their tagline is obsessively engineered at outrageous comfort. Those are two. So talking about words, right words can also be warm and competent, competent words make us wanna do things. They make us wanna achieve things. Warm words make us feel good. So obsessively engineered are two competent cues. We like things that have a lot of research done, balanced with outrageous comfort and that makes us feel good. So their tagline is the perfect balance of warm and competent.
VVE (10:50):
If you go down their website, you’ll see pictures of kids jumping on beds, warm proof of our Casper labs with guys in lab coats, competent quote from Vogue about how your bed is your new desk. Funny, warm research, five stars, right from consumer reports, competent, warm clouds and pictures of people sleeping, warm comp like right? So you literally all the way down the website, you see this perfect balance that is tingling something deep inside of us as humans of I can trust this brand and I can rely on this brand. Does that make sense? That kind of breakdown.
RV (11:31):
Totally. Yeah. I mean that, that, that’s fascinating, right? I mean, if you’re gonna hire somebody, I mean, even if you think about how am I gonna, if I’m gonna hire someone to do a job, it’s like, can they do the job and am I gonna like working with them? Like it’s pretty much, what else is there? Are they gonna do a great job? And am I, are they not gonna annoy me? And like, you know, are they gonna, are they gonna be reliable and dependable and, and yes. And show up? I think that’s, I think that’s really fascinating. So, you know, cause that would translate to hiring. And so, you know, the way I process what you just said in the, in, in the reverse of, of sales is to go, what can I do to make myself more attractive in what I’m selling is, is go. So if I’m talking, then that means I’m using customer testimonials and stories and our purpose and our why. And then the competence is like how many clients we’ve worked with and the results we’ve achieved. And the testimonials
VVE (12:25):
Got five star test, five star testimonials all the media outlets, right? Like, so even my bio, right? You read that at the very start that if you count the number of warm and competent queues, you’ll find a perfect balance. So like science to people, my company’s name is very competent. I did that on purpose because I know women tend to default to higher and warmth. That’s just a, a, a basic gender difference. And so I knew that I had to use, I have to use a little more data, a little more research, a little more science to sort of balance out that natural aspect of who I am. So science of people, then the media logos, the media mentions, those are competent helping people that’s warm. Right. So exactly. As you mentioned, you’re balancing that out on the queues side for your buyers. So there’s two sides of queues, decoding and encoding. We’ve been talking about encoding, the signals you’ve sent to others. What’s just as important though, is decoding making sure you’re spotting the right queues in your, in your folks. Here’s my favorite sales queue where I would say customer report queue. If we don’t even say sales, which is the lower lid flex, I know this is a really weird one, but the lower lid flexes, we harden our lower lids as if we’re like swinging to see something better. Just your lower lids. There you go.
RV (13:33):
Your lower eyelids,
VVE (13:34):
Lower eyelid. Yeah. So if you, so if you try to see something across the room, you’ll harden, your lower lids. This is a natural biological response. And what research has found, the reason all humans do this across genders and cultures and races is because when we’re trying to see more detail, our lids close to block out the light, to see more detail, they found that when people are listening and their brain just went from listening to doubting or listening to scrutinizing are lower. Lids will flex as if our body’s going. I don’t know about that. This is the single biggest missed queue in sales. If you were on video call or you were in person, you’re going through your pitch, you’re sharing your great idea and you see that lower lid, flex pause, stop and ask questions. Does that make sense? Does that all good? You know, let me explain something else here. How’s that sound to you? You are going to get right in that moment. Any doubt, the biggest problem for sales folks are entrepreneurs is they don’t realize why they didn’t get the job. You know, they, they think it went well, they leave. And they’re like, why didn’t I get the job? Why didn’t they say yes, it’s probably because you missed that little lower lid flex. It’s signaled literally a, a, a Twitch in their brain that went, I dunno about that.
RV (14:47):
So you’re saying that that is a sign of skepticism.
VVE (14:51):
Yes. It’s a sign of,
RV (14:52):
So like when you focus, it’s like, you know, it’s like a side eye,
VVE (14:57):
It’s a side eye. It’s like, so yes. And it’s also it’s right before skepticism. So the nice thing about it is it just means intensity intense focus. So if you stop and you address it, you can actually prevent a future. No. Or skepticism from coming. We in our lab, we analyzed, you know, the show
RV (15:14):
Shows, I love that. That’s really, that’s really huge and important.
VVE (15:18):
It’s so powerful. It’s so powerful. And you see it now, you’ll see it all the time. You can see it on video too, which is amazing.
RV (15:22):
It’s like I critical, but I’m not yet skeptical. But if I catch you, if I catch you while you’re critical, I can win you back.
VVE (15:31):
There you go. Exactly. Right. So we saw this on we an I love the show shark tank, which is a show obviously where me
RV (15:37):
Too.
VVE (15:38):
I love, love that show. So we analyzed 495 shark tank pitches. It was thousands and thousands of hours of data looking for patterns. Was there things that successful entrepreneurs did in the tank that were more likely to get them a deal? And we noticed, and again, we’re, we’re looking at the show and you see a lot of cut footage, but on shark tank, the successful entrepreneurs would spot a shark, hardening their lower lids and then address their concern. Right? Kevin, you know, I see that you’re skeptical. Let me bring up some more data for you or Laurie. You know, I know this is a surprise for you, but here’s what we’re planning. We really wanna work with you. They were a dynamic on their feet, the worst pictures. And I, I talk about this a lot in the book. I break down Jamie Simoff shark tank pitch who pitched ring in the tank.
VVE (16:23):
So ring is a billion dollar company. He pitched ring in the shark tank and it completely bombed. This is what’s critically important is Jamie. Simoff had a billion dollar idea, right? Amazon acquired it for a billion dollars. Richard Branson invested Shaq invested, but he went on shark tank with this brilliant billion dollar idea. And it totally bombed that is because our ideas cannot stand by themselves. He delivered it so poorly without competence and warmth cues that everyone was out. And a couple years later, he came back into this shark tank as a, as an investor. So what happened in that pitch is he actually gave away all of his competence and warmth. He wanted his idea to speak for itself. But even though this company had amazing numbers and amazing growth, they could not buy into the idea because his cues were so bad.
RV (17:10):
What are some of the other common cues let’s go back to end coding. So what are the other common mistakes that people send? Like you might be on a first date, you might be trying to make a sales call. You might be trying to, you know, get a job.
VVE (17:24):
Let’s talk about what Jamie’s seminar should have done. Right? So like this is his pitch is so demonstrative. So end coding on the end coding side, the very first few words out of your mouth. So that could be hello. That could be, my name is Rory. That could be so good to see you. Okay. So the first 10 words out of your mouth are incredibly important for your vocal. First impression we are listening for confidence cues. I do say confidence with an F confidence. That is because when we hear someone who’s anxious, we don’t wanna catch it. And so we’re in the first 10 seconds, we’re listening for any vocal anxiety. The biggest way we give away our vocal anxiety is we use the question inflection on a statement. So Jamie’s seminar. He way he did this is he entered the tank where he knocked on the door.
VVE (18:08):
So he closed the doors to the tank and he knocked on the door cause he was trying to show like a doorbell. So he knocked on the door and his first line was this it’s Jamie here to pitch. So the question inflections, we go up at the end of our sentence, as if we’re asking a question, the problem is, is research has found this when people hear the question, inflection mistakenly used on a statement. My name is Vanessa. It’s Jamie here to pitch our brain goes from listening to scrutinizing. In other words, we know, wait a minute, something wasn’t right about that. So the most important thing you can do is in the first 10 seconds in person on the phone in video is go down at the end of your sentence. So it’s so good to see you. My name is Vanessa, and I’m really excited to pitch you this idea today, that’s downward, right? I’m keeping my words down. It actually signals high confidence. If I said, my name is Vanessa, I’m here to pitch. So happy to be here today. No, like you would know, I don’t want you don’t your brain doesn’t know why, but you know, you don’t like it.
RV (19:10):
Mm-Hmm
RV (20:02):
It’s like, they’re an expert on something and they get lost in, oh, it has to be beautiful and perfect. Where do I get a graphic designer and a video editor? And it’s like, you’re such a great example of like deliver the goods, add values to people’s lives, do it consistently a few basic things. So I love that. How do you do book launches? I’m curious about this because your books have done really, really well. And, and we do a lot of big launches, right. And we’ve done for our own books, big launches, but the thing that really makes the career, I mean, it helps to hit the New York times for sure. But what really makes the career is when you can have that book, you know, or books that sell 500 units every week, a thousand units. I mean, if, if you’re, if you’re, you know, if you’re lucky, you’ll, you’ll write, you know, John Gordon’s energy bus or Patrick, you know, Len’s five dysfunctions of a team and he’ll sell 2000 units, 5,000 units every week. But you know, like Ryan holiday is another person who’s done a great job of this. Like he, he does good launches, but it’s like, it’s not really about the launch. He sells 800 book, 800 units every week of all of his titles and you know, there’s spikes of course. And you’re you do that? And I love that. How do you do that?
VVE (21:19):
Yes. So yeah. Thank you. Thank you for, by way, for the kind words. So captivate came out in 2017. We had a nice, really big launch. I think we remember four on the wall street journalist. And since then, even, you know, five, six years later, we sell about 300, 600 copies a week and that, you know, amazing doesn’t include our spikes, right? Like sometimes we have spikes from events. Queues is doing extremely well, even better than captivate. We’re seven weeks out from that, but it’s still selling extremely well, probably a thousand or more a week. So the way that I like think about this is very weird. I have a very weird approach to this, which is YouTube is a search engine. And what I mean by that is people put YouTube in a social media category. It is not social media. It is a search engine, meaning people are not only going into YouTube and searching their needs.
VVE (22:07):
Google is also serving up YouTube as an answer to their needs. So for this reason, we think about, okay, who is our ideal person? Our ideal person is an incredibly brilliant professional entrepreneur, entrepreneur, both male and female. We literally have almost exactly split usually around 30 to 55. Okay. So I know my person, they’re really smart. They’re trying to level up their career. They’ve often been held back by some communication or soft skill. Okay. I know that person is what we do is we do specific keyword research and a reps. That’s the service we use. It’s like a software you can use. I think there’s a couple different ones out there.
RV (22:41):
Yeah. MOS or yeah, there’s a whole bunch of them. Yeah. Suggests et cetera. But AHS is, I think, I think that’s what our team uses too.
VVE (22:49):
A has a secret tab. It’s not so secret. Cause I’m about to tell you about it, which is most people use a for Google, we use a for YouTube. So I will go in the YouTube tab and I will search at first, first I think about what are the 50 to 20 keywords or search phrases. I think people are gonna use to get to a book. So for cues, I, you know, we, I started writing cues over two years ago. The very first thing I did is, okay, cues are about reading people, breaking down behavior, communication, charisma, right. I made a whole list of all those terms short and long. And then I had my writing team begin to pump out articles and especially video scripts for me on those specific keywords so that I can already come up for what I know my people are searching for and then serve them really helpful content, like really helpful, like free content, but then also the book. So before queues even came out, we were ranking one, two or three in those big spots for our YouTube videos, the articles are actually less important than the YouTube videos so that when someone is in YouTube and they search charismatic conversation or how to make small talk,
RV (23:57):
How, yeah. How to be more charismatic, like
VVE (23:59):
Ex exactly our videos come up and on the back end of the video, I’m selling the book and the bottom of the video, I’m selling the book. And so I think that every single entrepreneur, it doesn’t matter what you do. You should have a YouTube presence. And by the way, I don’t work for YouTube. I don’t teach YouTube courses. I don’t teach you how to sell on YouTube. So I had no reason to recommend this because I, I actually, it hurts me the more people who come on YouTube, but I feel so passionate about it because whatever your product service book is, if YouTube is a search engine, you have to have a presence on there for your top 50 keywords, because that’s a way that you’re gonna be able to drive people to your product or service. That is exactly how we sell books.
RV (24:38):
I mean, that is so brilliant. And, and, and, and simple, like simple because cuz I, we understand search engine optimization. We understand, you know, even like YouTube optimization, but just the idea of putting your book on there. And you said you put your book at the, at the back of the video and on the bottom. I, and I, I think you’re, you’re saying literally there’s like a, a, an ads, a buy button. Yeah,
VVE (25:04):
We literally, so at the, so first of all, just to get really into tactics is typically our videos will our videos around 10, 20 minutes an average, but you should have, you should mention your book organically or your service organically, ideally in the first third or half of the video. So while I’m teaching, while I’m getting highly valuable, really engaging tips, I never want someone to click on a video and feel like it was a waste of their time. Some point in the first third or half of the video, I will say, and all this research comes from queues. Be sure to check out on an Amazon or an audible. And then I keep delivering, keep delivering in the description of the video. I have not only a link to the Amazon on the audible, but I also, we use a plugin in YouTube. It has a little by mech shelf.
VVE (25:44):
So on our little by mech shelf below every video, actually, we don’t do it for every video. We only do it for videos that directly sell our books. I have cap date. I have queues. I have people school, our big master course. So it’s right below the video. And at the very end, I put a little promo to our book where I’m like, Hey, if you like these tips, check out cues, check out captivate, give this video a light, give a subscribe. I’ll be putting out free content every Wednesday. So that way there’s a couple of mentions. And what I found is I either get a subscribe because I’m delivering good content or they literally go go by the book.
RV (26:16):
You said there’s a, you’re using a plugin in the description.
VVE (26:20):
I am. Yes. It’s a special plugin. It’s QA. Y a I dunno how to say ITA, Chaya, Kaya. I don’t know QA. Y a but it’s a, it’s a plugin that we literally enabled for YouTube that adds a merch shelf, which is like another, that a lot of people, a merch shelf. Yeah. You can sell anything on there. So like if we have a course launch, like we have a lie detection course I can SW swap that into my me shelf on my LA detection related videos.
RV (26:47):
Oh. So basically like you, you can just make a change and it’ll roll through all those videos at once.
VVE (26:52):
It’s manual it’s manual
RV (26:54):
VVE (27:44):
And it’s going after your specific key terms, right. It’s not book promo for my new book. It’s not what it’s called. It’s called. How do you more charismatic how to read people, how to have conversations with anyone like it’s, it’s specific keywords. And so thinking really carefully about that is extremely helpful. And I think you, you don’t have to have videos forever. Like that’s optimistic it also people make cuz they’re like, oh, once I start a YouTube channel, I can never stop. I’m like, no, it’s a search engine. Create 20 incredible videos. My incredible, I don’t mean fancy. I mean just really high value and
RV (28:15):
Your like useful, those are useful.
VVE (28:17):
Those are your 20, like 98% of our ad revenue on YouTube. So we also run ads on YouTube. 98% of our ad revenue on YouTube is from my back catalog. So it doesn’t have to be that you’re posting new videos every week. No, most of my money and our views are from videos I posted eight years ago.
RV (28:35):
Mm-Hmm
VVE (28:43):
Yeah. I enable YouTube ads behind the video. Yeah.
RV (28:47):
Do, do you, do you run paid ads on YouTube?
VVE (28:52):
Like I do not run. Nope. I don’t. You
RV (28:54):
Don’t run ads for your stuff. That’s a completely organic strategy, a complete, like a search strategy.
VVE (29:01):
We, we, we, all of our traffic, 100% is organic and we have millions of visitors every month. Except for during launch. So during launches, we do do pay ads,
RV (29:11):
But y’all like Vanessa is the, the, the, the perfect example of how we just talk about it. If you just add value and you just add value. One of our philosophies at brand builders group is we say, save the best for first. We, we tell people save the best for first. Like just put it out there. Eight years later you’re still ringing and you’re still ringing the, the register.
VVE (29:35):
Yes. And, and maybe this is a good place to sort of end on, which is our same. This is what I teach. All my writers is we are aggressively helpful, relentlessly helpful. Like if I feel that something in a video is boring or not helpful, cut it. I don’t care about the fancy graphics. I have one camera in a room. It’s like a closet I’m in here right now. And that’s it. But it is not relentlessly aggressively helpful. Cut it. That is more important than any fancy graphic, any video equipment that you can get. And so that’s, I think what you have to think about is like, how can you just be aggressively helpful?
RV (30:11):
Love it. So brilliant. So the book is called cues. That’s the new book. Where would you want, where do you wanna point people to go, Vanessa, if they wanna, obviously we talked about your YouTube channel, where would you direct people?
VVE (30:23):
Yes. So it’s on Amazon. It’s available. Wherever books are sold. I read the audible book. If you like my my unique vocal power, I do some fun. There’s a whole vocal section. So I do some really fun ones in there. And also I just wanna thank worry so much, you know, you, I don’t know if your, your listeners know that you are relentlessly helpful. Like literally I have to tell you to stop helping me. You’re such a giver. You’re so kind you always give, give, give, and there’s no feeling of like, oh, I, I need it in return. It’s literally just your relentlessly helpful. And so for people who are listening, like worry is the real deal. And I’m so grateful.
RV (30:56):
Oh, well, thank you so much, buddy. I mean, it’s it’s what works. I mean you know, I was, I, I was mentored by Zig Zeigler and he has that famous quote. If you help enough other people get what they want, you get what you want. It’s like, you can go all in on it. Like you can just, just test it. Like just, it feels
VVE (31:12):
So good.
RV (31:13):
It feels so good. Like you don’t have to, you don’t have to sell or do anything. Like all you’re doing is helping people all day long and then just like, it just, it just comes back. And I love seeing that as a content marketing strategy. I need to, I may, maybe I need to do that. Maybe I’m being too stingy with my YouTube videos. Maybe that’s why my way, maybe that’s why my channel’s not growing. Like I’m not being, I’m not being helpful enough there. So anyways, Vanessa van Edwards, brilliant, sharp, intelligent, useful, helpful. We are so excited and, and to, to know you and to promote you and to be associated. So keep kicking butt girl, you we believe in you. Thanks for being here. Woo.
VVE (31:47):
Thanks you so much for having me.
Ep 289: Personal Brand Strategies for Network Marketing and Direct Sales with Ray Higdon | Recap Episode
RV (00:07):
Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon.
RV (00:54):
This episode brought together three of my favorite things, sales, personal branding, network marketing, and and four, I would say leadership, all kind of coming together in this interview that I did with Ray Higdon and welcome to this special recap edition. I love this. I, I love this conversation. I’ve been, I, I love having this conversation specifically about how does personal branding apply to direct sales people, you know, all types of direct sales and then also network marketing specifically, which is really what rays expertise and, and, and special niche is. And so I just, I just thought this was fascinating. And if you know anything about the world of network marketing there’s just a really interesting kind of almost like dynamic happening right now, where companies are trying to really figure out how much flexibility and freedom should people have with their personal brand versus, you know, leveraging the company’s brand.
RV (02:01):
And I think a lot of companies are struggling with that, but it, it it’s really prevalent in direct sales, cuz they’re like, you know, right on the front lines out there selling face to face and, and doing business with friends. So fascinating conversation. I, if and we talked about some of those things with Ray, but the three highlights I wanna share for you apply outside of network marketing. And, and beyond direct sales, I think these are three ubiquitous concepts and takeaways that are really important for all of us and for you, no matter what type of business that you are in. And they they’re super duper powerful and they were great reminders for me. And as I was going back and reviewing the show, I was like, yeah, this there’s some really, really big moments in here. So the first one is when, when Ray said this, he, this is such an important phrase.
RV (02:55):
He said, I want to be duplicatable. I want to be duplicatable. That is a really important concept. And it, it makes sense like that is one of the best things. That’s one of the best lessons you can learn from network marketing, right? Is they just, they teach you how, how, how to sell something. And then if you can teach someone else how to sell something, you just duplicate that process over and over, it’ll change your entire life. But even with your personal brand everything you need to sort of think in terms of being duplicatable, repeatable processes and, and how do you scale things. So whether it’s just scaling your own content marketing strategy, right? Like we call it the content diamond. For those of you that are brand builders members. You know, we teach this, this system of what happens every single week, this, this giant checklist that you have to run, that’s being duplicatable, right?
RV (03:52):
It’s, it’s being able to have many people step in it’s interchangeable parts of your system. We also talk about an eight figure entrepreneur, which is one of our phase, one of our phase four programs that, you know, the same thing about like redundancy and scale. And we, one of the flagship points from, from scale your sales, or excuse me from eight figure entrepreneur, is that we talk about how custom fails, right? Standard scales, custom fails standard scales, custom fails standard scales. Anything that you can do repeatedly over and over and over again. And in this episode, when Ray was talking about, you know, why is McDonald’s the most like successful franchise it’s because it’s designed to be run by the person with the lowest level of skill, right? It’s created for the least common denominator. It’s it is, it is the most spelled out.
RV (04:55):
It is the most explicit. It’s the most specific it’s like, if you follow this playbook and this process, it will duplicate. And that is how things scale. Think, think about manufacturing lines. We, we talk about this, of going a manufacturing line works because it’s cranking out the same thing over and over again. That is how you scale. So you want to think in, in, in terms of being duplicatable, even if you’re gonna choose not to be duplicatable, right? Like you might say, no, no, no, I don’t wanna be the, I don’t wanna be the Honda accord. I want to be the rolls Royce. And I want every single thing to be custom and handcrafted, even if you’re gonna make that choice, that’s something you should do deliberately. And, and intentionally by way of considering to go, what’s the, the alternative of like, how do I scale?
RV (05:47):
But if you wanna be one of those two things, right, you don’t want to get stuck in the middle, which is where a lot of people do. And, and honestly, being duplicatable is gonna be really important, even Rolls-Royce as, you know, great processes and streamlines and, you know, checklists like you can’t build a great brand without being duplicatable. You have to be able to do things systematically, repeatedly on autopilot, over and over and over. And it, it reminds me almost of my in my Ted talk. And so my, how to multiply your time, Ted talk, my second book procrastinating on purpose. One of the, one of the flagship sayings in there is we say automation is to your time. Exactly what compounding interest is to your money. Automation is to your time, what compounding interest is to your money. That’s being duplicatable.
RV (06:36):
It is investing in creating a system or a process that can be stamped out on, on repeat. You should be thinking that way, always as an entrepreneur, like that’s how you free yourself up. As you, you replace yourself with a process. You, you, you, you know, people become interchangeable to some extent the, the, the better your processes are. The second takeaway for me in parallel, I wanted to highlight for you was when Ray said, look, if I had big goals, I would have a prospecting number. And then I would have a marketing metric of something that I focused on. And I love this. You know what, like for example, he said, I’m gonna do one reel every day or three reels a day, I think is what he said. He’s like, if I had big goals, I would be doing three reels a day.
RV (07:28):
And there’s a couple things I, I love about this. The, the high level concept here though, is focusing on what you can control, reminding yourself that your job is to do the things you can do. And you have to focus on doing the things you can do, stop worrying about the things you can do and start focusing on the things that you can do. You have to focus on the controllables, you do the things that are a hundred percent in your power. And so I always, you know, I believe in that concept a lot, we, we write about it in, in take the stairs. And in my first book, we say, put your self-esteem in your work habits, not in your results, put your self esteem in your work habits, not in your results. You let the results shake out. You let the results be a byproduct of the work.
RV (08:19):
So I’m a huge believer in that concept. It’s always great to be reminded of it. The thing that I loved about this and, and the, the little kind of nuance flip that switched for me was that applies to marketing too. Like, it definitely applies to sales. It’s a survival mechanism in sales. We, we would say, you know, don’t don’t focus on how many people say yes, like just focus on how many people you’re gonna talk to. Like your goal is to work a certain number of hours and talk to a certain number of people or make a certain number of dials. One of my old friends, Andrea Wal wrote, she wrote this book on called go for no. And that was sort of, the mentality was like, you know, just worry about like, instead of going, Ooh, I hope I get one yesterday, aim for 20 no’s.
RV (09:06):
And by aiming for 20 no’s, you’ll end up with more yeses than if you were just focused on the yeses. Right? So it’s that kind of idea, which I love it. And, and, and you hear it for that applies very much for sales. The part that was really cool here is the same applies for marketing. The same applies for marketing for personal branding specifically for social media, right? Is if all you’re focused on is how many views did I get? How many followers did I get? How many comments did I get? How many likes did I get? How many shares did I get? If, if that’s all you’re thinking about, none of that is in your control, right? Like none of that is in your control. You can influence those things by the quality of the content that you put out. But the better thing to focus on is, is the quantity, right?
RV (09:52):
Quantity leads to quality. Quantity typically is where things are controllable. So when Ray was saying, I would focus on making three reels a day, that’s a great metric to focus on. That’s a great way to think about it is to go H what is the volume of output you are going to do every day? Not, and, and let the results shake out, knowing that if you put in the work, if you pay the price, if you, if you constantly make good choices, if you continue to, to, to do the, like, have great work ethic and great character and integrity, and you do the right things over and over and over and over again, consistently over the course of time, it’s going to shake out it’s, it’s the compound effect that book by Darren Hardy and which is, you know, that good choices compound. And over time, it all plays out.
RV (10:41):
Like you have to remind yourself of that, even with your marketing is just like, I’m just focusing on, you know, like I’m gonna do a hundred podcasts, or like, I’m gonna do three reels a day, or I’m just gonna write every single week or whatever it is, focus on the activity, not the results. So what is that for you right in your business, in your life, like right now, where are you focused on the results? Where are you allowing your self-esteem to be tied to a result? And you need to break that you need to chop that you need to separate, that you need to sever that relationship, and you need to instead connect your self-esteem to activity, to controllables, to your work ethic, to to like the volume of what you’re doing and allow, and, and then just allowing the results to shake out, knowing that they will be there.
RV (11:34):
They will be there sooner or later, but it’s almost, it’s never, when we want it, it’s always slower than we than we want, but that’s really, really a big deal. And then finally, my, my third takeaway, this is actually more of something that, you know, Ray said that reminded me of a really important concept, which I don’t know that we’ve hit it hard enough on, on, on this podcast, right? And on this show, and even with our, our members with our brand builders members, like, but this is really important to understand. Marketing is long term sales is short term. Generally speaking, marketing is long term sales is short term. Marketing is good. Sales is good, but marketing is, you know, typically it’s like, you’re reaching the masses and you’re building trust with the masses. You’re building an audience that takes time. The good news, right?
RV (12:33):
The downside of marketing is that it takes time. It, it, it takes time to build the systems, create the content, you know, put it out there, grow a following, stay in touch, like earn trust with people. That’s the, that’s the bad news. The good news though, is that it’s extremely scalable. Once you hit the tipping point where you’ve been doing this, now people just start flooding to you and it just gets better and better and better, but it’s hardest early on. And it’s slowest early on like marketing. Isn’t the fastest way to results. Sales is marketing is long term sales is short. Term sales happens right away, right? Sales is human to human conversation. I can pick up the phone. I can talk to somebody today. I can make a sale, right? I have to just convince one person, you know, Mani, mano, or wo mano to wo mano
RV (13:25):
And you’re just going to talk directly to somebody and listen and ask questions, and you can make a sale. That’s the beauty of sales, the, the downfall, you know, or the hard, you know, that’s the good news of sales. The bad news of sales is that while sales is fast, it’s not super scalable. I, I mean, it, it’s, it’s quite scalable to a point, but you know, you, if you always have to do the selling, that’s gonna make it harder to scale, cuz it’s pulling your time. Now, the way you get around that is, is you go through what we teach in phase four, which is scale your sales, which is how to recruit and hire and train and manage and motivate a sales team. So sales is quite scalable has been for decades, but like the, as a solopreneur, it doesn’t, it doesn’t scale super well, cuz it’s taking your time and your time is pulled from all of these other, these other things.
RV (14:15):
The other part is that a lot of people are uncomfortable selling. They don’t know how to prospect. They don’t know how to ask for referrals. They’re not comfortable asking for the sale. They don’t know how to do it. They don’t know what to say when, when people, you know, give you objections. And by the way, if that’s you who you need to request a call with brand builders group and you need to go through our pressure free persuasion course, that is where we teach all that stuff. The tactics of how to ask for referrals exactly. You know, step by step what to say when they give you, when you run, when you get an objection, when you get you know, when you’re unsure of what to do or how to respond like that is, that is sales, but, but sales is fast.
RV (14:58):
Marketing is slow. Marketing is long term sales is short term. But then, you know, long term marketing catches up and it becomes this super powerful thing and, and marketing can also shorten the sales cycle. Because if somebody comes in to you already, you know with a, with like persuaded to use Robert child Dini’s persuasion kind of idea, like if they come to you already sort of pre-sold, that’s gonna accelerate things. And so part of the magic of brand builders group, like what we do internally is, is we do both, right. We do marketing and sales. Like we use marketing to sort of like warm up the leads and bring them in. And then we use sales and then we work through referrals. And so that’s why we’ve been able to build very successful businesses, very fast and, and businesses that are, are, are much larger than most people with millions of followers frankly because we understand how to do both.
RV (16:00):
And so they both work. They’re both good, but they both serve different purposes and you gotta sort of work work, you know, realize which one is your strength, which one is your weakness and how do you incorporate both of them in together? Because marketing is slow and sales is fast. Marketing is long term sales is short term, but, but marketing is scalable. And, and sales is more of a grind. So like it’s all it is. It’s all a balance. But if you’re gonna build a great business and a great personal brand, you want to be friends with both. Like you want to be really good at both marketing and sales and the better you are at those two things, the easier everything else becomes. So maybe you need to request a call at free brandand call.com/podcast request a free call with our team.
RV (16:51):
If you want to, you know, work with us, we do the first call for free. We’ll help you create a customized marketing. And you know, we’ll show you our journey for creating a marketing plan and a sales plan for your business. But that is those are the big take takeaways from today. Be duplicatable, put your self esteem in your work habits, not your results. And, you know, remember that marketing is long term and sales is short term, learn how to do both and you will have a great business and a great brand. Hey, leave us a review. If you wouldn’t mind at iTunes or wherever you listen to the show and share this episode with anyone who you think it might be helpful for. We’re so glad you’re here. We’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand podcast.
Ep 288: Personal Brand Strategies for Network Marketing and Direct Sales with Ray Higdon
RV (00:00):
So a few months back, I made some friends, Ray and Jessica Higden, who I have really grown to love. I mean, if you know anything about my story, you know, I was raised by a single mom who sold Mary Kay. I was in direct sales when I was in college. I went door to door for five years and, you know, just for really believe in direct sales and the power of direct sales and have been so warmly welcomed by network marketing companies and had the privilege of speaking at a lot of their events. And now at brand builders group, we see a, a growing number of you who are somehow involved with network marketing at, as either a side hustle or a portion of your business, or you’re, you know, maybe you’re a, you’re a fitness influencer, and you’re just recommending, you know, shakes or workout programs or whatever.
RV (00:51):
And so it made sense that we had to get Ray to come on the show. He is one of the world’s leading experts. I would say on network marketing and, and driving business for that. So he has a community called rank makers. He has about a half a million people, 500, almost 500,000 followers on social media. I met him and Jessica. They had a book that came out last year and the, the book came out from hay house. It’s called time, money, freedom. And the book is, and a bestseller and these guys have helped over 300,000 people generate more business, right. They grow their recruits, grow their business. And so anyways, we’re gonna talk about using your personal brand specifically to grow a network marketing direct sales business. So Ray, welcome to the show.
RH (01:45):
Yeah. Hey, thanks for having me man. Excited to be out here.
RV (01:48):
Did I say all that accurately? I mean,
RH (01:51):
Did I I’ll clear, I’ll clarify the last point. So
RV (01:53):
Clarify
RH (01:54):
In the last four years, we’ve helped network marketers bring in over 300,000 new customers, 71,000 new reps and achieve 14,000 rank advances. We actually track production of our, of our group. And so that that’s, that’s just the everything else was perfect, man.
RV (02:11):
Got it. So it’s that’s so it’s, it’s, it’s not 300,000 people you’ve helped your clients generate 300,000 customers recruit 71,000 team members. And then and then how many know the, how much show the rank advance
RH (02:27):
14,000 over 14,000 rank advances. And we have you know, a little bit over 11,000 people in our group. So, you know, you can kind of look at that and in those numbers, but you know, we’re very proud of our rank makers. We give them a action step every single day and they show it big.
RV (02:45):
Yeah. So, you know, there’s kind of two parts of this because on the one hand I’m really curious. And how do you think personal branding drives a network marketing, you know, direct sales business, but also, you know, most of the people we have on this show, it’s, they’re telling us the story of how they built their personal brand. And so you’ve done that as well. So like in the means of helping all of these people use their personal brand to grow their business, you guys have built a pretty monster empire here in a very, you know, a niche vertical, which, you know, regardless if somebody’s in direct sales or not almost everybody listening, I mean, this is gonna be our advice to them is, is to find their uniqueness and really dominate a vertical. And like, you guys have done that as, as, as good as anybody. Hmm.
RH (03:39):
Thank, thank you. Yeah. You know, before we were, you know, coaching and training you know, we were the number one incomers of a network marketing company. So I know, I know what it’s like to be in the field. I know what it’s like to, you know, to grind it out. I also know what it’s like to fail, cuz I, I failed in my first quite a few attempts at network marketing, cuz there were, there were a few of things I just didn’t get about network marketing cuz it is, especially when it comes to branding, it is very different than almost everything else. You know, if you’re like here’s, here’s a brand you would like. So in Cape coral we used to my wife when she was pregnant, we took her to this very specific chiropractor that was chiropractic for pregnant. Women.
RV (04:26):
Love it, like
RH (04:27):
Very specific. And that guy was booked. I mean he was booked. And I said to him, one day, I’m like, that’s a, that’s a pretty good niche. He goes, yeah know man
RV (04:44):
Right.
RH (04:44):
The reason I, I bring that up is, you know, the realtor isn’t typically teaching everyone how to also be a realtor they’re selling houses, but a network marketer kind of revolves around, you know, that world of, of what you do. You want to also be able to share that other or people can do. So I’m, I’m very hardcore when it comes to being, you know, being duplicatable, but there’s also nuances there’s nuances and, and pieces of that, that, that I don’t think a lot of people know that the distinctions of, but we’ve been able to, you know, to navigate that.
RV (05:19):
Yeah. And I, so I wanna talk about this specific, like, so you mentioned that you guys were a top income or number one income earn at, at, at one of these network marketing companies. I feel like the whole issue of personal branding is a conflict. Like it’s, it’s, it’s like a big question mark for how does a network marketing company deal with? Because I, on the one hand you go, yes, as, as one of our dealers distributors, team members, whatever you want to call ambassadors, whatever you call ’em builds this hugely successful personal brand, it, you know, helps them sell more and recruit more. On the other hand, I feel like there’s a lot of conflicts of like, well then they’re doing their own thing. They’re not really doing the company thing. And also it gets a little weird when people start selling products like their own information products that they make to their downline, right.
RV (06:19):
Because you’re in a, your downline or organization, you have a lot of influence and you’re already incentivized to help those people succeed. You make money off of their success typically. So like how do you, how do you recommend people like direct sales companies navigate that or manage that? Or like, what are some of the philosophies either that you’re employing or companies you go, yeah, I think they’re kind of doing this well, cuz I, I honestly see both sides of it. Like I see going, Hey, the company has a brand to protect, we’ve dumped a bunch of money into creating this product and this reputation back in infrastructure. And then also being like, well yeah, well, you know, if you’re growing your social media following, like that’s your asset. So yeah. You know, not to start with the, not to start with the hard questions, but let’s start with the hard, hard ones.
RH (07:04):
Yeah. Yeah. It’s interesting. So I remember, so that company that, that we were the, the top income earns of in 2013, it merged into a larger company and that larger company, you know, like I, I had a lot of internet marketers. I mean, I, I had like, you know, in our space I had,
RH (07:57):
And they’re, they’re big thing was we just don’t want you using our logo or our name. And I’m like done, done deal. And, and I think that that is I think that that’s a smart approach, right? That’s a smart approach to say, don’t use the company name, don’t use, you know, the logo. And I mean, at the time I, I don’t know what it’s like now at the time, I mean, I was getting more traffic than, than their site
RH (08:45):
No, you’re gonna be like, yay. We got Brian Tracy, right? If you brought in you know, some guru, of course they’re gonna continue to sell their stuff. And so if you can allow that, then how can you not allow, you know, this over here? And so there’s, you know, for, for me personally, when I started selling courses, I didn’t market ’em to my team. If someone came to me when we started offering coaching, if someone in team came to me and said, you know, Hey, I wanna hire you as a coach. If they wanted to learn prospecting team, building leadership, duplication closing, you know, the standard kind of stuff of, of network marketing. I’m not gonna charge ’em I, I’m not gonna, you know, hit ’em with some big coaching fee. But if they’re wanting to learn blogging, podcasting, brand, all these things, to me that falls outside the realm of what a network marketing leader should be teaching.
RH (09:41):
And, and so that was a little bit different story. I had a, you know, a few people on my team that, that hired us as, as coaches, but it’s cuz they wanted something that you wouldn’t typically get in network marketing leadership. I think one of the, if, if you look at, at what companies are red hot, I mean red hot these are the companies that are the most flexible they just are. And you know, there’s a lot of you know, we’re not in the eighties where there’s, you can just put hedges up big enough. So no one can, you know, see outside of the company opportunities at every, you know, every second of the day you’re presented with a new opportunity. So the influencer has a lot of options. And, and so I, I think it’s a mistake. If, if companies are saying don’t you dare build a personal brand, but I also think it’s a mistake.
RH (10:28):
If an influencer says you must build a personal brand. So, you know, for example, there’s a lot of, and, and I know I, I go crazy on over here. For example, we, a lot of influencers they’ll bash cold, cold market messaging, right? And so, you know, we teach people how to send, you know, simple messages to people that they don’t know and, and actually get results because some people don’t wanna build a brand. Some people don’t wanna, you know, do all the attraction marketing stuff, they just wanna and get in and get out. Well, one of our students, Christina, Danielle, she’s the number one recruiter in her company. It’s for a pet supplies company which she doesn’t even have a pet. And she does it a hundred percent through cold messaging. That’s someone she doesn’t care to have a brand doesn’t want a brand doesn’t wanna build a traction marketing. She’s the one to get in. She’s the, the number one recruiter in that company. And so there’s a, there’s a lot of things that, that work in network marketing. I think the mistake is saying, this is the only way don’t you dare build a personal brand or you have to build a personal brand.
RV (11:29):
Hmm. Yeah. Well, it’s interesting too, because like back in 2013 you know, that would, that, that makes sense to me to go yeah. Blogging, podcasting, you know, funnel, social media, definitely not part of the mainstream of what you would teach for network marketing, but today it probably is right. Like to go man, like social media, like a lot of these companies thrive or maybe I, I mean, I don’t know, like I’m not as much into it. I mean, I keynote at some of the events, but like, you know, it sure seems like leveraging social media. I mean, you tell me like leveraging social media to grow your business is a, is a, is one way to do it. Like I very, I hear you’re saying you can do it cold, which I believe in, I mean, I was knocking on doors in 2006. Yeah. When people had the internet and people are going, no one is gonna buy books. People have the internet. And yet I made more money than I, than I had any of the previous summers. Like people will always buy from cold calling. It’s not the easiest most glamor, but it totally works. So
RH (12:38):
Here here’s, here’s the difference like you know, for example, way back when, when I first started social media was bashed by every guru and network marketing. So 2009, every guru that is now all for it was like, oh, that doesn’t duplicate, that’s too complicated. I remember going to a conference and you know, a leader, one of the leaders in the company came up to me and said, Hey you’re the guy that recruits a lot of people on Facebook. Right. And I’m like, oh yeah, you know. Yeah, sure. And he said, well, I prefer duplication. And then I’m like, okay, like I, I love that kind of stuff. And so, you know, five months later when I was the number one incomer in the company, I kind of, you know, waved home a little bit. And so like, I I’ve been through all of that.
RH (13:23):
Right now you, of course, should be teaching your team social media for sure. To me, there’s a distinction between teaching how to properly use Instagram, Facebook. How, how do you do reels even TikTok? Like all of those are free platforms. It’s when, to me, it’s when you start to get one level above that, an email list podcast blogging that requires specific knowledge and, and tools. I think you, you should be teaching social media to your team, you know, period that should, that should be part of, of the deal. So even now, if I was running a team, which we retired from building a team in 2016, if I was running a team right now and someone wanted to learn social media from me, I, I would teach ’em I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t charge ’em for that if they were in my organization.
RV (14:08):
Yeah. Let’s talk about that for a second. So like, what are, what are some of the things that you should be doing, you know, and, and for those of you listening, like I just wanna highlight and go network marketing is really just marketing. Like direct sales is really just sales. Like whether you happen to be, you know, selling a supplement and there’s some type of override or whatever, or you’re, you’re running a local donut shop. Like there’s not a lot of the, to a lot of the principles apply. They don’t always, but, so just kind of keep that in mind, but like talking specifically about network marketing, Ray, like if somebody was just starting out today and they just signed with, you know, whatever, pick, pick your, pick your marketing company, what, what should they be doing on social media slash with their personal brand to immediately drive like revenue for their business, new customers?
RH (15:05):
Yeah. And for first, just regarding like, you know, Hey, sales is sales, marketing is marketing the it’s, it’s smarter to think like a franchise, you know, there there’s a line in Michael Gerber’s E MIF book that says the reason McDonald’s franchises rarely fail is because they were designed to be ran by the person with the lowest level of skill. And so that’s how we think about all, all of our training. Can the person with no skill, no influence, no business or sales background, can they do this thing that we’re teaching? And if it requires those things, then that’s not good network. To me, that’s not good network marketing teaching. And so as far as social media, there’s, you know, there’s a few, there’s a few factors. I mean, there’s, there’s, there’s are factors to, will you succeed in network marketing or not pipeline, which is number of people you reach out to follow up with set appointments, with send samples to if that’s what your company does position understanding the position of the prospect when you’re in a conversation, right?
RH (16:08):
So if they havet express any interest, you have no knowledge. Then you have to see if they’re open first, not try to close. ’em See if they’re open three posture, are you easily affected by the opinions of others? Are you to believe in what you have regardless of external acceptance or approval and number four perspective, which is your, your mindset. So how does that translate to social media? Well, you have two categories, prospecting market, right? And so marketing the top of the marketing food chain right now, without question, there is no doubt is the short video we’re in the short video phenomenon, it’s unlike anything any marketer has ever seen. You know, like I was, you know, the last hot trend and marketing in my opinion was way back in, you know, late two thousands, which was Google AdWords and that’s, you know, advertising, but that was red hot.
RH (17:01):
You know, I was taught by a guy that was dropping $30,000 a day, but he was making profit $30,000 a day. And, you know, and it’s, that was crazy. There’s so many people making money on that. The difference now is you now have, have a way to reach more people that don’t know you than ever before and for free. And so, you know, we have students, we, we have one student, she’s got a video, it’s got 15 million views and she didn’t spend a dime on it. And that’s more than who watched the Olympics.
RH (17:53):
So if I was starting right now and I had, let’s just assume big goals, I would have a a prospecting number and I would have a marketing metric of at least three reels a day. So I’d be doing three reels a day. And this is, you know, just adjust if your goals are smaller. But if you, you have big goals, you wanna hit six, seven figures. I would be doing three reels a day and I would have a prospecting goal. And that, that is whatever you have the time for. You know, like when I, when I was serious about becoming the number one income earn, I set a goal of 20 nos a day. So I had to hear 20 nos that day, every day
RH (18:36):
So have a number of how many human beings am I asking if they’re open to my product service or opportunity per day. And that is the key question. Not how many comments am I dropping? Not how many friend requests am I sending? Not how many, you know, anything else, how are you today? Right? None of those I’m I’m saying how many people are you asking? Are you open to my product service or opportunity per day? You combine that with, you know, two, three reels a day optimal, you’re going to build a business and you know, it’s, it’s simple, not easy. And, and I found the no number, one reason that, that people aren’t consistent has nothing to do with tactical or nothing to do with routines or, or anything like that. And we can, we can talk about that if you would like, or if you have more questions.
RV (19:21):
Well, yeah, like I, I think that’s a good, that is good to talk about. I mean, when I, like when I was in college and I was knocking on doors, that was the whole thing was, was you have to do 30 demos in a day. Like you gotta just, you just gotta show this to 30 people who meet the basic criteria qualifications. And it was, you know, it was always, it’s not the theory of averages. It’s the law of averages. And if you show this to 30 people, one to two will buy it. Like no matter how bad you are, right. One to two people are gonna buy it just because they, they need it. And it’s, you know, hopefully it’s a good, it’s a good product. So like I, I do want to hear about the mental side of it. That one thing that I wanna highlight though, that you said that I really love is like, when most people teach marketing that are gonna teach likes followers, comments, shares, engagement, et cetera.
RV (20:15):
But when you said the focus is do three reels a day, which is totally in your control. Yes. And, and focusing on, or like the thing you can control. And it’s like, I don’t know how many views that’ll be. I don’t know how many followers I’ll get. I don’t know how many comments will show up, but like I’m gonna commit to three reels. Every single day is a hugely powerful shift. Just, you know, tactically mentally, even spiritually to go focus, focus on that. So I would like to hear more about why aren’t people consistent, cuz my guess is it has more to do with that perspective as you say that like mindset component. Yeah.
RH (20:58):
You know, I’ve cuz I I’m, I’m a, I’m a consistent guy. I mean I did, you know, I did a video a day every day for 12 years straight because I’m, I’m a lunatic and, and so people have asked me over the years, Hey, what’s your daily routine or how are you so consistent? And so I was, I was a little slow at learning this admittedly looking back, but for the first like five or six years, I would just teach years. My routine and people are like, oh man, that’s awesome. Thank you so much. Then they wouldn’t do it. And so like I’m, I’m like pulling my students. I’m like, Hey, who is anyone doing this? Nobody was doing it. And so I’m, I’m teaching. I’m like, okay, I gotta up my game. I gotta be a better teacher. And so I started asking myself, okay, why do I do it?
RH (21:40):
I’m like, okay. A vision, a vision of who I want to become. So I started teaching that probably five to 8% of people started doing it. And I’m like, okay, there’s gotta be another answer. And what I realized is that there’s two categories of people. There’s, there’s the people that are borderline workaholics. Like I was that are hustling, grinding and to talk about consistency is like that. They’re confused. Right? Why do people, why do do you mean cuz they’re, we’re just, we’re we’re just designed for this stuff and for me, and a lot of, of people that I’ve now coached that’s actually a coping mechanism. It’s actually a coping mechanism with not wanting to spend time with yourself or actually having low self-esteem, which, you know, I grew up in a very abusive home and I didn’t think that that was of affecting me anymore, but it was, it was due to some of those issues of why I struggled to be present with people, why I struggled to have great relationships, but I was always consistent at working the other 95% of people that aren’t consistent.
RH (22:45):
I have found 100% of the time. It is they’ve drawn the wrong conclusion to success based on an observation they made as a kid. Hmm. A hundred percent of the time. So if you had a a parent who was really, really successful and then lost it, all a program was most likely created in you that made you really scared of being ridiculed and never wanting to have a big fall. So if you are afraid of climbing the, of falling off the mountain, just don’t ever climb it. And so what’ll happen is people will get to this, this certain level. And then they’ll just find themselves either distracted, they’ll join a different company or they’ll just not be motivated anymore because past the level is danger. And so the program is there not to hurt you, but to prevent you from feeling a way that really scares you or becoming someone you don’t wanna become, if your parents were really successful and they ignored you, you very likely drew the conclusion that successful parent means ignore a kid.
RH (23:50):
And I don’t want my kids to feel that way. So I don’t know why I can’t get past this level. And you know, I remember I, I coached a lady Tara this was on clubhouse and she like so many people that I’ve I’ve, you know, coached sense. She would go into a company and just rock it up to the top, just crush it, just make it rain break records. And then she would find something wrong and, and leave. And everyone’s like, wait, she left.
RH (24:37):
No drama, no trauma, no abuse, nothing. And you know, they’re awesome. They’re perfect. I’m like, Hmm. Okay. And I know that at programs, often block memories. And so I said, Hey, it’s okay if we don’t, if we don’t, you know, figure it out today. And she’s like, and she remembers catching her mom cheating on her dad. Now five minutes before she said they were perfect. And I know, I know what’s going on, but she’s like, well, what does I have to do with my career? Everything as a kid, she was out of control. She had this perfect scenario was feeling really good about life. And then something happened outside of her control and her reality was crashed. So every time she starts feeling really good about something, she knows that she was about to. So she makes the choice with awareness of that program. She no longer has that program. So now she’s been able to rocket in her, the current company that she’s with. But that’s one example of, of hundreds of different examples. I’ve seen where something happened in the past. Like if we have time, I’ll give one, you know, one more example, you know, when people struggle with motivation,
RV (25:51):
I wanna hear this. I just wanna make sure I’m, I’m, I’m hearing you correctly. That basically you’re saying the reason that people don’t perform is because there is some underlying program that was written perhaps and likely subconsciously yes. From the time they were young yes. That they carry with them. It operates in the background and it basically sabotages them because they there’s this kind of underlying program that’s running in the background.
RH (26:27):
Yes, absolutely. And it’ll disguise it so off as overthinking perfectionism procrastination, or just lack of, of motivation like mine. The one that I discovered I’ve discovered, you know, several is when I was a kid in that house of abuse, some of the relatives knew that no one did anything about it. And so a program was created of, I’m not a priority that program you know, up until this last year, year and a half, I didn’t realize it. But I was that into every relationship I ever had, including the one with my wife. So I would locate and verify how I was in a priority. And that’s why I really struggled with relationships. And if you struggle with relationships, there’s, there’s gonna be a cap to how much impact you can possibly have. And, and so, you know, by me discovering my programs, I’ve been able, a lot of people discover theirs.
RV (27:26):
Yeah. And so you’re, and, and so that’s always there. I mean, all of us have something. I mean, there’s some, there’s something on the hard drive, right. So the you were gonna use one other, you were gonna tell one other example.
RH (27:39):
Yeah. so I was coaching a lady maybe a few months ago and she said, you know, I, I, I get to a certain level and then I’m just like, you know, I’m just not, I’m just not motivated. I know I could do more, but I’m just not motivated. And, and I asked her this very, you know, specific question I said, at what point in your childhood did you figure out that trying hard really didn’t matter. And she’s like, oh, you know, I remember this one day I used my easy bake oven to make these cookies for my dad. And I spent all day making ’em and I decorated ’em. I had ’em all perfect and everything. And when he came home, he yelled at me for using the, the kitchen materials. And man, I think that’s the last time I really tried hard in my life.
RH (28:28):
And so, you know, we’re that, that program is trying to prevent you from feeling that feeling again, it’s not is it’s, it’s trying to keep you safe. It thinks that it’s serving you and it doesn’t want you to figure it out. And so you, you have to do some pretty intense work to, to figure this kind of stuff out. And, but if you’re are not consistent, I guarantee you now, I can’t say that of everyone, but if you’re watching this, if you’re listening to this then, and you’re not consistent, it’s not because you’re lazy. It’s because you’ve drawn the wrong conclusion to getting higher than you currently are. Whatever that means, money impact following success, you know, whatever that means, but you’ve drawn a bad conclusion. There’s something wrong with you stepping it up. It’s something wrong with the next level for you?
RV (29:14):
How do you spot it?
RH (29:18):
The key is one not easy to do by yourself. The, the real key is patterns. Cause you, the decisions that you’ve made have been driven by have been driven by this, these programs, because before you’re aware, you’re on autopilot, right? You’re the puppet on a string. And, and so you’re just you knowing around the cliff, you’re going up and down and you’re making these decisions, thinking that you’re making the decisions, the program’s making the decisions, the program’s making, you see things in a certain light to keep you nice and safe. And so when you become aware, you can, you can become defiant to them. Right? So, you know, like the first time I really confronted my program of me not being a priority. It was a very tough time. My mind, I felt like I was under attack. I mean, my mind was going nuts.
RH (30:12):
And I just thought I was in a, you know, little argument with my wife and I, it came up. I, you’re not a priority, but it’s still a good relationship. That’s what my mind said. And I said, no, I don’t wanna feel that way anymore. I don’t wanna think that anymore. Cuz that’s not true. And
RV (30:44):
Mm-Hmm
RH (30:57):
I mean, that’s, that’s gonna vary based on, you know, based on your life, you know, that’s gonna vary on what, what you’re doing and, and what, you know, what it’s all about. Like, you know, for me, I can now once you become aware of it, you can kind of look backwards and, and, and, you know, like Steve jobs said connect the dots. Right. And and I can see that I’ve, I’ve, I’ve had that program my whole life I’ve had in every friendship, in every business relationship and every personal, I mean, in every relationship I was, I was seeking to prove that I was not a priority and I always verified it because we always verified what we’re seeking.
RV (31:36):
Mm-Hmm
RH (31:39):
So I know we kind of went from network mark. I mean, to deep, deep stuff, here
RV (31:43):
You go. We’re marketing to social media to sort of like limiting beliefs. But the, I mean, I, I think this applies a lot, right? Because a lot of people, I mean, people have the same programs about personal branding or social media, right? Social media is stupid. Social media is a waste of time, social media, whatever. And it’s like, well, there’s a reason why it’s not working for you. Right? Like that’s what you, that’s what you think about it. And it, it’s not the only it’s by, by no means the only way to succeed. But like those underlying programs I think are really, really, you know, they’re, they are really critical. And I think it, you know, tying back to my very first question about like, how do network marketing companies deal with how much flexibility or control they try to extend over the personal brands?
RV (32:30):
There is this old school thought of, I think that is for the most part, been pretty pervasive, which is control. Like we have to, we have to put a fence around our people and, and sort of like shelter them from the rest of the world. And that is really a conflict with like a whole world of decentralization where things are blowing up. Everyone has access to everything. We all see what’s going on in other people’s lives. We can talk to anyone around the world and it’s like, that’s a really big, you know, conflict that we’re, we’re, we’re wrestling with.
RH (33:06):
I, I just, I don’t, I, I just don’t see, you know, and we, I mean, we coach a lot of different leaders work with a lot of different students in different companies. I just don’t see the mega control growing nearly at the pace of some of the more freer companies. And, you know, we’re just, you know, it used to be like, okay, maybe you’re in, you know, whatever you’re in Alabama. And, and there’s only one company that you know of in your area right. Then, okay. You can kind of be controlling, but as soon as you start to ask your show, the question of what if I bring in a big doctor, what if I bring in an author? What if I bring in an influencer, as soon as you bring that up, it’s kind of like, well, well, we gotta accommodate them. Like, well, how can we, how can we say, okay, if you’re successful already, you can keep doing that stuff, but don’t, you dare try to, it just doesn’t make sense. Does
RV (33:58):
That happen? I mean, does that, I mean, I, I know that like oh,
RH (34:01):
All the time
RV (34:02):
Happen all the time,
RH (34:04):
All the time. I mean, so, I mean, I saw, I mean, we recruited one of the top I think like top 10 orthopedic surgeons in the country here in Naples, Florida, I recruited Ron LaGrand. You may know that name. I mean, he ran a, he still, I haven’t stayed in touch with him, but he runs a, a big real estate investment, you know, education company. I think they were doing 20 million a year. We brought in quite a few doctors actually brought in different authors, brought in different speakers for sure. And, and that’s something that a lot of these influencers, you know, they, they, they make money, but most of ’em don’t have residual income. So I, I, I think it’s actually very smart for an influencer if done, right. To have a network marketing thing on, on the background, on the back end, they don’t talk about it every, you know, real or every, you know, post, but to have one in the, in the background so that they can start to build more residual income, cuz most people don’t have that most business owners don’t have that.
RV (35:09):
No, but I think you, I think y’all one, one of the things I’ve been surprised is, you know, at brand builders group, we end up seeing a lot of clients that come to us. You have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of followers. And they’re going all wanna write a book or build my speaking career, whatever. And we come to find out that somewhere in their back end, they have a, they have a network marketing and that like that a lot of their money comes from the, the, the thing that’s really financing the growth of their personal brand in many cases is more of the network, the network marketing backend. It’s not so much that they’re making money from their personal brand, it’s that they’re using their personal brand and they’re driving people to something on the backend. Like I’ve been shocked at how common that is
RH (35:54):
Very, very common. I mean, you know, it’s, it’s kind of a natural thing of if you, if you gain success and you feel that limelight in a network marketing company, cuz network marketing companies are amazing at edification, making people feel good, feel appreciated. And so you, you, you know, you get a taste of that and you know, you, you may get a taste and you’re at a point where to get bigger taste is a really big leap or you’ve already tasted all the limelight you can, you know, possibly get and you still want to grow. You wanna stretch out. And so it goes from being the person, you know, signing autographs in your company to getting people outside of your company, to know you, which is actually beneficial for the company. And that’s, that’s where, you know, some companies I think misunderstand think that they’re going away, they’re actually, you know, going out into foreign lands and, and, you know, informing more people about that company, if they’re treated right. If they’re not treated right, then a lot of times that influencer’s gonna make a different decision.
RV (36:52):
Yeah. Well, and I, you know, the thing I’ve always,
RH (37:45):
That, that’s a, that’s a great point. So when a new person would come to me and say, Hey, I wanna do blogging. I wanna do podcasting or whatever, I’d say, okay. You know, I, you, you certainly can now just understand it’s more expense of, and it takes longer when, starting than if you just follow the system. And so, you know, and, and nine times outta 10, I would talk ’em outta that fame because they think that’s simple, fast and easy. And, and it’s not, you know, it’s not simple, fast and easy build a YouTube channel or, or a huge following or a blog or, or a podcast. And so like, you know, I would always give, you know, the freedom of choice. Hey, you can, might take you a little bit longer than if you do it this way. And if they’re looking for speed, that’s really good advice because you doing the, you doing the basics of, of prospecting and, and, you know, basic marketing, you’re gonna get faster results than building out, you know, infrastructures. And, and so, you know, it, it is a good point. What a lot of, of, of influencers do is not what they did to reach the top. You know, a lot of them, you know, did you know, did the work prospecting, marketing the basics, reach the top then became an influencer and most, but most people don’t understand that. So you, you do need to teach that.
RV (39:05):
Yeah, no, it’s, it’s really similar to like, you know, people we’re really big on find your uniqueness, figure out the one thing that you can do in the world better than anyone else. And that that’s really how you break through the wall. Not by trying to talk about lots of things and lots of places to lots of different people and people go, well, what about Gary Vaynerchuck? And we say, Gary’s actually the perfect example, because he does talk about everything now. But in the beginning he talked about wine on just YouTube. And that was how he broke through the wall, right? Like in the beginning, the rock was just a wrestler in the beginning, Ellen DeGeneres was just a comedian. Like it, they, they, they all break through on the one thing it’s really similar to, to this conversation. And people need to be taught. Don’t do what they’re doing now, do what they did to get there.
RH (39:53):
Right. And, and here’s the thing about dub, how you generate a lead is not what has to be duplicatable, because if that were true, then you couldn’t, you couldn’t recruit an influencer, an author, you couldn’t recruit a doctor. You
RV (40:09):
Say that again,
RH (40:10):
The way you generate a lead does not have to be duplicatable. What you do with the lead that’s what has to be duplicatable. So if you’re relying on your, so however you generate a lead that does not have to be duplicatable because I know people you don’t, and that doctor knows has clients, and I’m not gonna tell ’em don’t you dare talk to your clients, cuz not everyone has clients like that would make no sense. It’s what you do with the lead. So if the doctor has a pamphlet in their, in their you know, office and people say, Hey doc, you know, you know, here, let’s just say opportunity. Hey doc, it says right here, I can make some, you know, extra money you know, is this something I should do? If the doctor says, yes, I highly recommend it. That’s not duplicatable.
RH (40:56):
If the doctor says, you know what? We have a short video and this is the video that will tell you if it’s a fit for you or not. And by the way, if you ever wanna tell other people, you’d use this same video, watch this video, see if it’s a fit for you. That’s duplicatable now is how he generated the lead duplicatable. No, and it doesn’t need to be, it’s what you do with the lead. So when I would have people come to me after building a brand and say, Hey man, I wanna work with you. I don’t know what company you’re in, but I’m gonna give you my credit card. I would, I would have that happen. And I’d say, Hey, I really appreciate that. That is awesome. Thank you so very much. But you know what? Let’s make sure this thing’s a fit for you. I’m gonna send your short video, watch this video. And the cool thing is that’s the same video that you’ll use. Okay. That’s duplicatable. It says, oh, oh, I must watch a video before I join this thing to kind of get the gist of it. Got it. And it’s the same tool that I would use if I rely on personality, charisma or influence, that’s not duplicatable. And so it’s not how I generate the lead. It’s what I do with the lead. Once they’re in the conversation, once we’re having that communication,
RV (41:55):
Mm-Hmm
RH (42:12):
Yeah. You know, if you’re a, you know, like a lifelong learner, like, like me, I mean I do self development every single day and I have for forever
RV (42:50):
That’s that’s I mean, if you made a video every single day for what did you say? 12 years. 13
RH (42:56):
Years. Yeah. I, so from Ja July 15th, 2009 to July of 2021, I made a, at least one video a day. And the only reason I stopped is I was in a meditation retreat. I’m just like, eh, I’m not gonna do it.
RV (43:09):
Yeah, that’s funny. I,
RH (43:10):
But then I picked it back up the next week.
RV (43:14):
Yeah. Well, I, I think you know, this is interesting Ray and I, I think to me, there is, there is the world of network marketing and affiliate marketing and info marketing and digital marketing all seem to sort of like be colliding, like as, as the tools are available to everybody and the lifestyle is available to everybody and people are more interested in freedom and, you know, time what’s, what’s your book, time, time, freedom, money, right?
RH (43:48):
Yeah. time, time, money, freedom, time,
RV (43:51):
Money, freedom
RH (43:52):
By hay house. Yep. That’s my wife and I wrote this and it’s you know, this is not specific to network marketing. It’s you know, 10 simple rules to redefine what’s possible and radically reshape your life. It’s basically what what I, I did to get out of foreclosure and, and build a, you know, a business and it’s what Jess did to get away from the makeup counter. And and so, you know, it’s helped lot of people inside and outside network marketing.
RV (44:19):
Yeah. Well, super thought provoking, man. Always great to connect with you. Thank you so much for your time and keep helping, helping people make rank, man. You’re you’re you’re doing it.
RH (44:30):
My pleasure, man. Thanks for having me.
Ep 275: Spiritual Truths About Marketing Bestselling Books with Gabby Bernstein | Recap Episode
RV (00:07):
Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know the there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from Martin team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon.
RV (00:54):
So I knew when I was gonna sit down with Gabby Bernstein, that we were gonna talk about books and book launches and book writing. That was, that was part of like what we decided on the front end that we were gonna talk about. But I had no idea that we would get into such a conversation about spirituality and what the spiritual connection is to launching books. But I’m, I’m so glad that we did, because that was a conversation. If you haven’t listened to it, you have to go back and listen to this interview with Gabby Bernstein. I mean, she’s a number one New York times bestselling author. She’s written nine books. Several of them have hit the New York times list. And several of them sell very, very well. She’s built a huge social media following. You know, she’s a, and she’s a, she’s a spiritual teacher which, you know, like I don’t follow her super closely on that side of things cuz you know, I’m a hardcore Bible thumpin Jesus freak.
RV (01:54):
So I, I tend to follow more of like, you know, pastors and stuff like that. But I like, I like following Gabby, but I thought what was really the interesting, and I’ve always followed her as like a marketer to see what, what she’s doing and she’s just sweet and kind. And so, you know, I built a relationship with her just recently with some of the other stuff we were doing. And then she mentioned, Hey, she is doing a free training for authors on how to become a bestseller. And I said, well, Hey, that’s something we should talk about. Like our community would, would really care about that. And so by the way, if you go to brand buildersgroup.com/gabby, so brand builders, group.com/gabby, G A B B Y you can check out depending on when you hear this you can sign up for the free training that she’s doing.
RV (02:42):
And if you miss the free training, it’ll just point you directly to like whatever the course is. But she’s, she’s you know, doing this free training on it. And I said, Hey, well, we should talk about it on the podcast. And so anyways, we got into this wonderful conversation and, and I guess that that was enlightening for me was never really not so directly connecting the idea of just what a spiritual journey writing a book is. And so I just thought it was really a beautiful conversation. I’m gonna share with you kind of my three biggest ahas, my three biggest takeaway, my, you know, what, what was, what were the highlights for me? And the first one was about vulnerability. So here’s here’s, I’ll tell you, these are the three things I’m gonna talk about vulnerability, responsibility and clarity. These are the three things that came out of the conversation, vulnerability, responsibility and clarity.
RV (03:36):
And the first one is vulnerability, cuz this is something that I’ve always with, which is how vulnerable should I be? Meaning how much should I expose to the world? What is going on in my private life? And you know, just how intimate exactly should we, should we be? And so I’m always fascinated by people who have these really massive platforms, how they, you know, reconcile that issue and, and, and, and use it cuz you know, everyone talks about vulnerability and of course it, it builds a deep, deep, you know, that’s what intimacy is right. Is you’re, you’re sharing these, these intimate details about your life with somebody and, and that’s what makes people feel like, you know, you, but at the same time, people, you know, on the internet, there’s a lot of strangers on the internet who don’t really know you. And so it’s kind of a kind of weird thing.
RV (04:25):
And, and I thought the answer that she gave when I asked her that question, how, where do you draw the line of how much you share was really brilliant? Cause I kind of thought she was gonna say one of two things, which is what most people say is they say, Hey, you should share everything. And just like, you know, you, you know, this is, this is the modern way of the world. Just like, you know, share everything and that if you wanna build fans, you would share everything, which is like, I, I kind of thought maybe she might say that or she might say the other thing, which is you hear a lot, which is like, Hey, these your followers, these are not your personal friends. They don’t need to know everything going on in your marriage and you know, what’s going on with your kids and, and, and whatever.
RV (05:01):
But her answer was so eloquent and brilliant and she didn’t even have to think about it. And she said, share only what you feel safe in share what you feel safe in. And I thought that was just such a, a great thing to go share as much as you feel safe sharing. That’s a really beautiful way to answer that because it’s like, if I feel safe sharing it, then it, it means, you know, that God, the universe, you know, I, I call it God Gabby calls it the universe like, but I think you’re, you’re you have a sense of going it’s I feel good about this. I’m I’m I’m talking about something that I’ve processed enough to where I’m past it. I’m not in the middle of it. And that was another, another really key point that she said, which I thought was a real practical step is she said, make sure you’re able to tell the story safely without being triggered by it.
RV (05:58):
And I think that’s a, that’s a key delineation point is to go, okay, if what I’m sharing triggers me, then that means I’m probably still too close to it. Like I’m still, I’m still, I’m still living inside of it. And so that’s gonna be dangerous because I don’t yet really have the full perspective on what happened, which means some of my emotions might be taking more of center stage or front stage versus like, you know, rationale or logic of, of, of what really it went on. So I thought that just was, was, was really good. Like you know, and it doesn’t give you necessarily a hard and fast answer, which is kind of what I was looking for, but it kind of does it actually gives a, a better answer share only what you feel safe in. And so I think that’s just really, really good.
RV (06:44):
So that’s, that’s vulnerability. That was my, my first takeaway, my second takeaway, which I think is gonna be looking back on this, this, this is gonna actually be my biggest takeaway from this is about responsibility. And when she said launching a book is a spiritual practice like that really hit me. I mean, I, I know that at a distance because I connect everything like for everything I do, you know, I connect spiritually and for me and AJ, like I mean our work is our, is our ministry. I mean that, it, it it’s a, a part of what our ministry would be, but like the, the speak thinking. So specifically that of, of your, of writing a book and marketing a book is a, is a spiritual practice and there’s two parts. There, there are several parts of it. She said, it’s having the first of all, you have to have the bravery to reveal the truth.
RV (07:41):
And that’s really true, right? Is like you gotta have enough faith and enough comfort enough, a confidence security that like what you are sharing you know, is like, you have to be brave to let people see into your mind and see into your heart and see into the things that you’re thinking. And I, so anyways, I think that was really, really good. And then you, and then you also have to establish the worthiness in your own life. Like believing that what you have is worthwhile to say, and I think everybody, right, when they first start out the idea of being an author, every single author has this question of like, well, why would anyone in the world listen to me? Or like what gives, you know, like what gives me the right to, to share this? And I think that’s just the, that’s the wrong way of processing it.
RV (08:30):
You can’t ask yourself who am I to share this with the world? You have to ask yourself who in the world needs this. And if somebody in the world needs this, then that’s why you are experiencing that calling. I mean, this is why we say the calling that you feel to share your message with the world is the result of a signal that is being sent out from someone else. And that person needs you more than you need them. And it is your responsibility to share that message, not because of what it will do for you, but because of what it will do for them, that’s a spiritual practice that that’s powerful. That’s, that’s allowing your, your life to be used. It’s allowing your voice to be a vessel, right? It, it’s allowing your, your, your story to be a conduit to impact and better improve somebody else’s.
RV (09:28):
And, and that is a great responsibility. And so, you know, she said this so directly, which very much aligns with what we say. You have to make it less about you and make it more about the impact that you’re gonna have on other people. And specifically, again, I loved how it was like, you know, really kind of like spiritual and, and, and, you know, like up there, but then it was also so practical the way she brought it down. And, and she said, visualize your reader, like reading your book and visualize the moment of them having a breakthrough in their life. Right. That changes everything. Like, you’re not going, am I good enough? Am I smart enough? Are people gonna think I’m stupid? Like, is anyone even gonna read like this? Like, no, one’s gonna, you know, I don’t, who am I in the world, all these negative self doubts.
RV (10:16):
And, and then when you visualize the idea of somebody, can, can you visualize, can you visualize the idea of one reader, one person looking at the work that you’ve done and saying, whoa, this is going to help me live a better life for the rest of my life. And if so, like, then you have to do it like that is a spiritual calling. And that is just a real powerful thought. It’s your, it’s your responsibility? It’s your privilege? It’s your privilege? It’s your, it’s your pleasure, hopefully, but it’s also your obligation. It’s your duty, it’s your responsibility. And that’s what we believe that that calling that you feel on your heart is the result of a signal being sent out by another person. And so that’s just a different way of, of thinking about it and, and going, gosh, you know, where she was, she was talking about being unapologetic, right?
RV (11:13):
You have to be unapologetic. She said, yes, I have unapologetically put my face on the cover and told the world about the works that I have created. Why not, not out of vanity for myself, not out of a, a, a desire to, to boost, you know, my own self-esteem, but out of a desire to serve and a desire to love and a desire to be useful and helpful to the world around me, which is like the H that’s the highest expression of my life. That what a great way to, to think about it and to overcome, and, and to really put in context what you’re doing when you are writing so that’s responsibility. And, and, and by the way, so just inside of her course, you know, she talks about this. So this is interesting. So I haven’t gone through her course yet.
RV (12:01):
You know, that one of the reasons that we’re, we’re, you know, at least promoting the free training, which again, if you go to brand builders, group.com/gabby Gabby and, and press me enough from a distance you know, I, I know that I have something to learn from her because I mean, the, the woman has sold a lot of books. She’s impacted a lot of lives and she’s got a huge platform and she is speaking to a lot of people, right. So on a practical side, I go, I, I have something to learn from this woman on a personal side, she’s just been totally endearing and just warm, just a complete doll, like and so, you know, and so she’s got this free training, so, but I haven’t, I’ve never gone through her course, but I planning on going through it. And, and I thought, what was interesting is this, this whole kind of module she has on this spirituality and like, you know, and she does meditations, things like that, you know, I would, I hall and prayers, whatever, but she’s, she’s got, she’s guiding people through meditations in terms of the mental component of this, of getting yourself to move past some of these limiting beliefs.
RV (13:03):
Cuz I think that’s really true. We really do struggle. Like most of our brand builders clients I’d say most of them have this issue of they’re worried about self-promotion, they’re worried about healing vein. They’re worried about not being humble. And so it holds them back from impacting people. And so I think this is a really, really big obstacle that we gotta make sense of. And, and, and I think, you know, the approach that she’s taking here is, you know, V very similar in terms of the, the posture, right? It might be a little bit different in of like the exact philosophy, but, but the posture of making it about other people and doing it for them and doing it out of service is exactly the same thing that we teach. It’s exactly the same thing that we believe. And so I’m really curious about that.
RV (13:49):
And, and, and what she’s doing there with those with, with those, you know, those thoughts. So I, I would call ’em prayers. She calls ’em meditations, you call ’em limiting beliefs, call it mindset whatever you call it. It’s, it’s a reality that the way, whatever you think in your own mind about marketing is either going to empower you to reach people, or it is going to disempower you to reach people. And so this is something we have to explore and I’m, I can’t wait to see it. So anyways, brand builders, group.com/gabby, if it sounds interesting, you could, you can, you can check it out. Of course, we have our best seller launch plan training too, and it’s great. And you, and, and you might go, well, why do you promote both of them? Cuz we have an abundance mindset around here and I wanna learn from Gabby and I go, Hey, you know, we do, we want you to learn from us?
RV (14:38):
Yeah, we do. Like we think we’re some of the best in the world at launching books. You know, we sent this, this big email out a couple weeks ago, we’re working with ed millet right now and his book launch. We we’ve helped him sell over 45,000 units. Like mostly he’s done it, but he’s following our system and we’re, you know, he’s a client and he’s following our plan. So like our system works too, but it’s, it’s not a, it’s like, I want more. Right. And there’s not that many people in the world that teach how to launch a book who have actually launched books at the level that Gabby has. So you know, I, I wanna learn. And so I go, Hey, if I wanna learn from her, then you know, some of you probably do too. It’s not a matter of either.
RV (15:17):
Or it’s, it’s a matter of both. So anyways, you could check that out brand builders, group.com/gabby. And then the third thing, which again, is also very aligned with us is clarity is clarity. You have to have this core message the through line. I mean, sh the things that we teach in finding your brand DNA about boiling your entire book down to one sentence, boil your whole speech, your entire personal brand down to one sentence. And I, you know, we talk about it all the time and then I think people come and they go, man, that’s a lot of work. And I don’t know, like I wanna talk about all these different things and it’s like, fine do your own thing. But listen to the, listen to the interviews. It’s not just me or AJ it’s, it’s the Gabby Bernstein. It’s the Donald Millers. It’s it’s the Michael hyats it’s it’s everybody we have on this show.
RV (16:03):
Who’s like making worldwide global impact is saying, you gotta have that core message. That central message it’s, it’s gotta be boiled down and the hardest work you’ll do. And nobody does it, except the biggest, the biggest, you know, brands, biggest personal brands in the world, the biggest influences, the biggest authors and the speakers, cuz they do that work and it’s, and is difficult. But you have to know it because it becomes the litmus test of what is allowed in the book and what isn’t in the book. And, and it clarifies who you’re marketing to and who you’re not marketing to. You know, not every book you write is gonna be a fit for everyone in your audience. Like there’s gonna be new people that your new book is a better fit for that. Aren’t yet in your audience. And there’s some people in your current audience that aren’t a great fit for your current thing.
RV (16:51):
So that’s why it’s like, you’re always evolving in your, and, and you have to have clarity about who you’re trying to serve too many, too many times. We go, well, what’s my purpose. And it, the faster way to get there is not to ask what’s my purpose is to ask, who can I help? Who can I serve? How can I be of value and, and narrowing down? Who is this for? Like, what is the core message and who is it for? And then the practical thing she said again, this was super, you know, the super practical. She said, this prevents you from, from writing five books in one. And that is so true. That’s what happens. Like the reason why the majority of books don’t transmit and sell and get passed on from person to person is because they say a little about a lot.
RV (17:38):
And as my mentor, Eric Chester taught me the very first day. I met with him when I first set out on this journey, like in my early twenties to say, I wanna be a speakers. He said, Rory, don’t say a little about a lot, say a lot about a little, right. And that’s what Gabby’s talking about here. Don’t, don’t try to combine five books into one, take one idea and deep dive on that. That is what makes a great, a great book. And I just, yeah, so I just, I think that, I think that is, is really genius and useful and Edon to all the things that we talk about. So I hope you enjoy this. The conversation is totally different than I expected, but Gabby was delightful and, and sweet, you know, and intelligent and brilliant as she is. You know, and to me, it’s just like, I’m curious to learn from people like that.
RV (18:24):
And, and even though, you know, if you, if you don’t know or you haven’t picked up, you know, we have different spiritual views on the world. I think Gabby’s just, you know, sort of prided herself on just being very like open, which is, which is great. You know, I happen to be clearly a Christian, but, but I still can learn so much from her. And we’re so aligned. It’s like, they’re not mutually exclusive. And, and I, so I’ve learned ton from her. I hope you’ve learned a ton from her. I love following her. She’s so uplifting and encouraging and what an honor to get to interview her. And you know, somebody that has, has impacted as many people as she had and, and for her to share. So generously some of these things that she has learned. So I hope you enjoyed it.
RV (19:10):
I hope you get a conversa. You got to listen in on a conversation between two people that you wouldn’t hear anybody else or you wouldn’t hear anywhere else. Excuse me. Like you would right here. So if you know somebody who is an author, aspiring author wants to be better marketing, send them this episode, send the, the interview of me and Gabby. And hopefully you’ll keep the coming back on and listening week in and week out to the influential personal brand podcast. Thanks for being here. We’ll catch you next time. Bye. Bye.
Ep 274: Spiritual Truths About Marketing Bestselling Books with Gabby Bernstein
RV (00:02):
Well, as sometimes happens, I tend to make a lot of friends whenever somebody is launching a book because we are involved with lots of book launches. And of course, right now, things have been pretty hot and heavy with ed my let’s book launch. And part of that led me to meet Gabby. Gabby Bernstein was in the middle of her launch. And so she’s a recent friend of mine. And I have to tell you, I adore her. She is so sweet and charming and kind. I followed her for years. Like she’s brilliant and intelligent and all those things, but if you, if you’re not familiar with her, she is the number one New York times bestselling author of nine books including the universe has your back super at attract and then be days, which is her newest Oprah’s SuperSoul Sunday called her the next a next generation thought leader. The New York times has referred to her as a new role model and she’s just extremely insightful and warm. And anyways, I somehow suckered her to coming onto our show to hear the, of how she built her writing career and share some of her secrets with us. And so with that Gabby, welcome to the show.
GB (01:11):
What’s up, man? Well, you’re welcoming me and my kitten, Jimmy blue. She everyone’s gonna probably hear her purring in the background because she’s very attached to her mommy and she wants to be in the room with me.
RV (01:22):
Jimmy blue.
GB (01:24):
Yes, girl. She says, hi. She says hi to every blue
RV (01:29):
So Gabby tell us, like, how do you get started as a writer? Like I know, I know you get this question all the time. So that’s part of why I want to ask you is you go somebody’s listening. Did, did you think you were gonna be a writer? Like, did you, when you were a kid, you’re like, yeah, I’m gonna grow up a and I’m gonna, I’m gonna write a bunch of books and, and podcast and like do social media lives and all that.
GB (01:50):
Well, I didn’t know that I was gonna be a writer growing up, but I did have the desire to be a spiritual teacher. And I, when I was in my early when I was about 14 years old, I was the president of a regional Jewish youth group from my temple. And we went all around and we would host these big weekends with hundreds of young Jewish kids. And I was the leader, right? So I was there kind of like this spiritual Sherpa for these high school students and fast forward a decade later, that’s what I started to do as my career. But I, and so I often think that the things that we do by choice is children can often reflect what we end up doing in our, in our career path. I was led to becoming a spiritual teacher, also through my own personal growth journey.
GB (02:39):
When I was in my early twenties, I ran a PR company and was a nightlife PR or firm. I worked really hard to be seen and heard, and ultimately got very addicted to drugs and alcohol, given the nature of the type of work I was doing, where I was doing it. And the age I was in New York city, but also because we become addicts when we’re running from something. So for me, I was running from something I wasn’t even aware of. I became addicted to drugs and alcohol and by the grace of God, I got sober at 25 on my own with, you know, finding a, finding a, a program and not going to treatment traditional treat, just recognizing I had a problem in getting myself clean and sober. But the reason I was able to also get to that level of understanding and awareness was my devotion to my spiritual practice, even when I was using.
GB (03:31):
And so I had, you know, all the stack of self help books next to my bed, my original mentors who are now my friends and, and sometimes deceased mentors, Wayne Dyer, and Louise hay. They were all my mentors even before they were my mentors sitting me sitting next to my bedside. And I, I would even be in after hours parties with people that I didn’t even know, and I’d be pointing to my books and I’d say, I’m gonna be a self-help book, author and motivational speaker. And at the time they’d be like, yeah, good luck with that. But I had the vision and upon getting sober, I got very spiritual. I reconnected to my spiritual roots and I started speaking about it publicly. And the more I started speaking about it, the more I started coaching people, it became very clear to me that I had many, many books in me.
GB (04:13):
And that was the plan and the path I was great at sales. I was, I knew how to sell myself. And I knew I had a very important message to share. And I sold my first book. But when I sold that book, I was really freaked out. It was like that, holy moment of uhoh. How am I gonna write this book?
RV (04:41):
I, I had, I had a very similar, so the very first I, I had a very similar experience. It took us four years to get our first book deal. And I was so focused on like, gotta get a deal, gotta get agent, gotta get a deal, gotta get deal. Like, and then it happened. And I like, when I sat down to write the first word, I had like a, a, a panic attack, I had not even realized the gravitas of what I had just committed myself to. You know, and that’s something I don’t think people always realize is that, you know, when you self-publish, there’s not as much of that, cuz it’s like, oh, if it works out great, you know, if not, it’s like, it’s kind of just you. But when you do, when you do a traditional book deal, there’s real money on the table and a lot of, a lot of lives and livelihoods at, at stake. So that’s interesting. I, I had similar experience.
GB (05:27):
Yeah. And thankfully I was 27. I’ve always had this. And so I was sort of like, I’ll figure it out. And I’ve, I’ve always had that mentality of, if I wanna do this, I’m gonna do it. I can do anything that I want to do. If I don’t wanna do it, I can’t do it. Like if it’s not something I’m excited about and it’s not something that’s passion driven for me. And so I was willing to do whatever it took to figure it out. And so at the time I hired a writing coach and she just taught me how to structure a book and how to structure the outline very quickly. I found my voice as a writer. My, my literary expertise ended in eighth grade. You know, my literary education ended in eighth grade. So I didn’t have any awareness of how to string a sentence together, but I was self-taught.
GB (06:12):
I, I, I wanted to get my message out. And that first book, when look back to the writing, my writing now is much more, much more effective, much more colorful, just a lot better grammar, but you can always have an editor fix those things for you. If you have a message and you wanna get that out to the world, there is a way to do that through a book. And so for me, I’ve written nine books now in 11 years, I think I I’m an excellent writer now, without any experience as a writer, I write very, very vulnerable, authentic stories. I write clear messages, and if anyone’s out there, like I wanna write a book or I have a message I wanna share, but I don’t know how to write or don’t know where to start. I hope my story’s really empowering to for people because I didn’t have anything going for me other than a really important message that I wanted to share and where there is a will, there is a way. And I think that’s the perfect example of that.
RV (07:09):
It is. I, and I, I think I, you know, I texted you a picture. We had a recent leadership retreat of brain builders group, you know, there’s like 10 of our leaders, our all together, and we’re sitting on the beach and two of them had Gabby Bernstein books, two different books of yours. And you know, that like, you know, your impact is, has been, has been really in incredible. Like I talk, talk to me about the vulnerable part. Okay. Like, because this is something that I think there has been a trend in recent years, I feel like more and more for authors to, I guess, share the very intimate details of their life. And to some extent, that’s been really, really healthy for people to see because they read and they, oh, this person’s not that much. You know, that person just like me, on the other hand, there’s been some backlash of life. Oh, well, this person isn’t like maybe who I thought they were or whatever what’s here. My question is, how do you establish the line of what you share and what you don’t. So like is there, and, and this could apply to social media too, but I’ll, I’ll say specifically for books since that’s kind of the thread of our conversation, is there no limit to what I should share with the audience? Nothing. Should I hold back? Or like, what’s your philosophy there,
GB (08:30):
There’s a big limit. I think that you can only share what you are safe in. So if you share about something that’s too vulnerable, still triggering for you, you haven’t fully processed it or moved through it, or you’re kind of good at it, but you’re not a full expert in it quite yet. If it’s something that, you know, if you don’t believe in your own ability, recovery, whatever that may be, that lack of confidence, safety belief is gonna come through in the book. And if you’re too vulnerable in a way that in a time when you’re not fully grounded and steady in your own recovery, that will trigger you and trigger your reader. My most recent book happy days is a great example of that. I wa I wanted to write this book in 2016, I was 36 years old. I just remembered a dissociated trauma. I knew I had to write a book about trauma, but I knew I could not do it until I was on the other side. So the book didn’t come out until, well, I was 42 years old and I had lived a lot of recovery and had done a tremendous amount of work to be safe enough grounded enough and enough of an expert in that experience to really tell that story safely and to take care of my reader at the same time.
RV (09:50):
Hmm. Yeah, that’s a really good, that’s a really great litmus text. So as long as were able to tell the story safely, not be triggered by it. Mm-Hmm,
GB (10:04):
But you don’t have to be like the expert in your field to write what you wanna write. For instance, every book I’ve written, I was an expert in what I knew then, and I look back to my first book and to the today’s book, and there’s a lot of depth. That’s still congruent, even though there’s so much more psychological mentions and, and, and references neuro biological met references my own personal training and therapeutic practices referenced this most recent book than there was 11 years ago. But the depth, the intention, the authentic vulnerability was matching where I was then as much as it is matching where I am now.
RV (10:50):
Mm-Hmm
GB (11:25):
Yes.
RV (11:26):
So why like how do you balance the frequency of writing a book and marketing a book and how do you know, like, do you think that the fact that you’ve written nine books in 11 years is why all your books have done so well, cuz you’re constantly marketing a new book or do you kind of look back and go, gosh, I think maybe some of the books would’ve done better if I would’ve spent more time marketing them before turning my focus to the next one. Like, I’m curious about that, like interval frequency of writing and marketing mm-hmm
GB (12:00):
Well, the number one reason that my books do so well is cuz they’re really good. They’re really good books. And I think that’s probably one of the things that’s overlooked often in the marketing space and when people are talking about like launching and like, you know, making sure you’re buying bulk books and you know, doing all the right events and promotions and keeping your launch going all right, cool. Like maybe you have a big platform. Maybe you can get on the number one New York times bestseller. Maybe you can, maybe you can, you know, sell a tremendous amount of books, but if the book isn’t good, then it’s just that launch. It just it’s it’ll flatline. And you know, I think about my book, the universe has your back. It still just sells tons, thousands and thousands of copies every week because it’s a very good book, you know, are all my books that caliber and some, some are not as great as others in the sense of like, they gonna have that wow power.
GB (12:54):
That’s gonna be so shareable, but they all are good. They all are healing. They all have had a major impact on people and you could meet 10 people and they may all say, yeah, I’ve read the universe has your back. And then one will say, but I also loved judgment detox and I was willing to go there with her or I loved may cause miracles cause of that 40 day practice, you know? So the content has to be really good.
RV (13:56):
Which is what ha, which is what most books do. I mean, there there’s a it’s everything is in the first few weeks and then it just kind of is a slow fade to zero.
GB (14:05):
Yeah, exactly. So you don’t wanna slow fade to zero, so that’s where you write a good book. But I, to answer your question about the cadence with which I’ve written these books and how so in some or early on I would have launched a book and that same week sold the next book and then on the flights of the book tour of the most recent book, I’d be writing that next book. Wow. I do not recommend that to people.
RV (14:33):
It’s insane. I mean, that sounds so crazy.
GB (14:35):
It was so crazy. And some of it was related, you know, some of the speed with which that was happening was related to the, my agent’s advice, you know, like let’s sell the next book, right? When you’re number one, New York times bestseller, it’s a very hot time to sell the next book. Like great. Okay. some of that advice was related. Some of that was related to the fact that I had a book that wanted to come out of me. And so I was ready to, for instance, my book universe has your back. There was a chapter about judgment. And when I was writing that chapter, I was like, oh, Gabby. Like this is a book, you know? And so I needed to get it out because I was like, I was just like sitting on it, you know? So some of it was, it had to come out some of it. And as I got a little bit further along in my literary journey and maybe I’d had about seven or six or seven books out, I actually started to put more space in between the books because give myself a year to write it. So it wasn’t like every year I was putting out a new book, it was almost like every year and a half suppose. And
RV (15:32):
Which is still super fast. I mean, it’s still super fast,
GB (15:36):
So fast, but you know, my most recent book came out two years, so my super tractor came out and that’s actually totally not true. Super tractor came out in the fall in 2020 and then, oh no. So target 2019 in the fall. And I had an audio book that I had come out in March of 2020, and then I hadn’t had a new book until now, 2022
RV (16:01):
Mm-Hmm
GB (16:03):
So, so yeah.
RV (16:04):
So you’re always, it seems like your path has always been like, you see the next one coming already and you go, okay. Like, oh
GB (16:10):
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I just sold my public. Sure. One of my publish, I, I have two publishers. I publish separately two separate types of platforms, but one of my publishers just like, you know, they’re like, what’s next. And I was like, this is what I wanna write about. And they’re like, great. So I kind of already sold the next one, but I’m not gonna start writing it until the fall. You know, I, I have, I wanna have time because the most recent book just wrote, I, it needs air, it needs breathing room. It needs space. It needs nurturing. You know, you’re like, oh, are you winding down? And I’m like, yeah, the launch is winding down, but the, the movement is revving up.
RV (16:46):
Right.
GB (16:47):
And that’s a important distinction.
RV (16:49):
Yeah. the other thing is your platform is always being built consistent. I mean, you have been someone who has just dominated on social media. And so it’s like, you’re, it feels like every book is like growing the audience grows, the, you know, grows the audience.
GB (17:07):
It is, it’s a big platform builder. Yeah. Books are a big platform builder, because think about it. You know, you take your ideas, you put them into writing. It’s such an easy way for someone to act access you. It’s a great beginning of the customer journey. They, they, they read this, they have an experience with you. They sleep next to you every single night on their bedside, you’re on their bedside and you have this intimate relationship with them. And so of course that really is a platform builder. It’s also a beautiful time when you just get a tremendous amount of, of publicity when you’re in that law launch mode and you give the, the media something to write about and you give the podcast or something to talk about. And it really, if you, if you are in that personal growth business, a book is a V a very important asset for you to have absolutely without a shadow of a doubt.
GB (17:55):
And in fact, look, you know, I, I, don’t always recommend that people put their face on the cover of their books. I started that from the get, from the get go, and it has benefited me, but with, but my vision for my, my writing was so that my books would be a, a huge part of the movement I was creating and the brand that I was building. And so all of my books to date have my cup face on the cover. I think this one smaller book I’m gonna print won’t because it’s, it’s the title is you are the guru it’s I it’s an audio, but I’m gonna print it in, in print. And so I think that you gotta take, you know, the teacher off of the cover when you’re saying you are the guru. So that will be one that won’t have my face on it, but the rest of them do, and for me, that has been a platform builder, for sure. You know, people recognize me from whatever they, other places they may have seen me. But a lot of times people like, oh, you’re that girl on that book cover that woman. I’m not a girl anymore.
RV (18:50):
So you’ve, but you’ve done that. You’ve done that deliberately and intentionally, and you’ve never had any, you’ve never had any worry about self-promotion or vanity or like, cuz cuz I’ll say this like a lot of we, we describe our, our audience as mission driven messengers. They’re exactly the people you’re talking about. They’re they’re not writers per se. They’re someone who goes, I have a message. And I would say that I feel like a strong number of our clients, Gabby. One of the biggest I’ll call it a limiting belief that they have is self-promotion they, they, they they’re stuck. They’re stuck. It’s like they’re trapped in these two prisons. One says you have to get this message out to the world. The other says that’s arrogant and vain and don’t be shallow. Like, you know, whate whoever like it’s and they just like, it’s a real pickle. It’s a connector
GB (19:44):
Beautiful point. Yeah. You know, I’ve had the privilege of, of training authors. I, and I have a training, the bestseller masterclass training. And in that training, I address this head on because I think that writing and publishing a book is a spiritual practice. The first step is having the bravery to reveal the truth, particularly for your audience that are just like me, they’re, they’re wanting to carry an empowering message. And then the next step is really establishing the worthiness. Like who am I to be the expert here? Who am I to tell this story? And in that training, I have a lot of meditations and spiritual practices for grounding yourself in the, who am I not to because we have, in order to show up with our highest purpose in this lifetime, we have to dissolve all boundaries to the expression of that truth. And that must come from a place of who am I not to do this.
GB (20:48):
And more importantly, really grounding yourself in the empowering message that you’re here to share and the impact that it can have. And the message mainly is making it less about you and more about the impact that it will have. And I do this whole me in the bestseller master class about visualizing your reader and really grounding yourself in that experience of the reader, taking in your content. And when you can see your reader in that way, and you can sort of have that, that visceral experience of feeling into that journey that you’re gonna take them on. It really takes your, in your feelings of inadequacy, your feelings of unworthiness out of the picture, it makes it bet something so much bigger. And so, you know, we gotta get our own ego out of it.
RV (21:39):
Yeah. But that that’s beautiful. I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s a beautiful thought and I, I I’ll tell you so, so by the way, Y also if you go to and builders group.com/gabby, we’re, we’re part of why we have Gabby here is because she’s someone who practices what she preaches. And we like to, we like to celebrate people who do that. And so we’re, we’re, we’re helping her promote this bestseller masterclass. And if you go to brand builders, group.com/gabby, you can, you can learn about it. Depending on when you get there, there’s a free training going on. So go, go Pronto ASAP. And when you and I were first talking about this Gabby and you were telling me one of the things that really hit me was what, like, to what you just said, that writing a book is a spiritual practice. It’s this and that really hit me both as a power concept that I think people think of it as like a tactical thing.
RV (22:33):
Oh, I’m just gonna like put some words on a page, but it’s actually a tremendously, you know, spiritual practice. It, it, it also really felt like a great example of you living in your uniqueness, that you apply your, your expertise to spiritual teacher, this topic of writing and marketing books. Mm-Hmm
GB (23:27):
Yeah. And I think that, that, you know, as much as I am writing this, creating this course from the lens of spiritual teacher, which there’s no way I couldn’t cause that’s who I am. I’m also a really great marketer. And I have been very unapologetic about carrying my message and putting my face on the cover and being the ex the very loud mouthpiece for my great work. And that is required of us if we wanna get our books out to the world. And I, and I believe that it is our, it is our responsibility to UN ally share our great work with the world. And so that comes through in all of the marketing techniques that comes through in all the spiritual practices that comes it through in all of the, you know, the practices on how to craft and write your outline and your core message.
GB (24:19):
Every single module of that course is infused with the spiritual foundation in the marketing, the, and the profound gift of, of marketing, because it’s, there’s so many people out there that have so much to give, but they have no idea how to give it. They have no, or they have no idea how to ma market it message it, and they have no confidence or they lack the value and the understanding and the awareness of the importance of how much it has to get out to the world. And so that’s what this training offers you. It does. It’s more than just, and I think that’s just in general, what I think my my literary journey has been, has been a journey of having this, this experience of allowing my books to heal so much that I’m, I can hold this book happiness right here. You know, I’m holding this book and I gotta tell you with my friend, you asked me like, is the launch over no way? Like this book has so much value in this world. This book will save lives. This book will transform people on a molecular level, and I will do everything that I can to make sure that every human that needs it finds it.
RV (25:36):
And when you say the term responsibility, that’s what you’re talking about. You’re talking
GB (25:40):
About a hundred percent. Yeah. I wrote a book called happy days, the guided path from trauma to profound freedom and inner peace is the most important book I’ve ever written. Yeah. Maybe it’s not as sexy as super attractive about manifesting, but it’s life changing and it is profound and it is healing. And it is giving a reader who, who may identify as having some kind of trauma with a big tier or small tea, giving them the guided path that I wish I had had when I went through that. And so I’m gonna do anything I can to get it out into the world.
RV (26:11):
Love that. I mean, that, that to me is, is such a huge part of this because, you know, like there’s, there’s tactics, right? Like, oh, you can, you know, dig it on, do PR and like do free events and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All that stuff is super helpful. But if you don’t believe that the world desperately your message, you will find a way to self sabotage, like, and you’ll blame it on the tactics. But the reality is it’s the beliefs that are holding you back. Mm-Hmm
GB (26:41):
RV (26:45):
Yeah. I love, I, I, I, I think that’s so good that said, okay, just a couple minutes. So do, do you have a few tactics? Cause like the tactics are helpful, right? Mm-Hmm
GB (27:28):
For you actually an interesting point. Yeah. See. So with regard to getting the book out, I, I created a six month marketing plan for in inside my bestseller masterclass. It’s actually, one of the modules is teaching it and then they can download the plan. Like they can really walk away with that plan it, if you follow those steps, you will be able to launch a bestselling book. And the thing that you’re saying, that’s so important in terms of tactical practical methods is giving yourself the space to prepare for birthing something so valuable into the world. And of all the products that I launch in the, you know, podcast and everything that I do in my life the most time, attention and energy goes into launching a book because for me, and I really go six months out. And, and now I’m thinking about that as it relates to, you know, pregnancy, right?
GB (28:22):
Like the first three months, you’re kind of like fun and then six months out, you start to plan. Right? And so that, that planning period, and I, I actually even start planning even for further back than that, but it’s really a six month journey of marketing this book out into the world. And then sort of what happens after the book the, the, the strategy and the, and the commitment and the planning is effective and necessary. In addition, there’s other tools I could give people right now, and I go deep into this, in that free training that you mentioned, and these are, and the free training, I actually share my four secrets to your best seller. And they’re, it’s a good sneak preview of what you get inside the bestseller masterclass, but to touch into some of that. Yeah,
RV (29:04):
So real quick. So just again, Y so if, if, if you’re hearing this podcast, right, when it comes out, you can, you can get the free training because it we’re gonna publish this right before it happens. If you go to brand builders, group.com/gabby, the free training will be happening. So hit, as soon as you hear this episode, go to that lake. And then if you it’s, It’s live
GB (29:25):
Right now.
RV (29:27):
Oh yeah. It’s a live free training. Yeah.
GB (29:28):
Live free training. Yeah.
RV (29:29):
If you miss it, if you miss it, we’ll have that link redirected to either, you know, something other free training she’s got or to, or just to the masterclass itself. Okay. Go ahead. So, so brand builders, group.com/gabby, don’t miss it. Okay. Continue on your four secrets.
GB (29:44):
And so I’m gonna share these secrets in the training. And what I’ll touch into right now is that the number one thing you have to know to write and market a best selling book is what your core message is. And your core message is the through line of your book, an example of a core message, happy days, the guided path from trauma to profound freedom and inner peace that is often the subtitle of the book is the core message, right? So the universe has your back transform fear into faith, the super methods for manifesting a life beyond your wildest dreams. Having that clear core message is so crucial to making sure that you don’t write five books in one, it’s so crucial to making sure that you’re sticking to the message rather than, you know, veering off into a thousand different directions. And it’s so crucial to the marketing process, because if you have written a book that has five different core messages, then you don’t know how to market what you’re marketing. You don’t know who you’re marketing to you. Don’t right. So it’s like the, the core message is so important. And I give a practice on how to establish core message inside that free training and a whole module on it inside the bestseller masterclass.
RV (31:06):
Yeah. that, it’s, it’s interesting, cuz we think of that, that message. It’s almost like a litmus test for what makes it in the book and what doesn’t get, make the cut. Exactly. And then, you know, less like the podcast that you, that you, you take on, you know, like which, which media appearances do you take, which speaking engagements do you take? Like who do you go? How
GB (31:25):
Do I pitch it? How do I even pitch it? Right. It’s like, if you don’t, if you’re trying to tell people how to manifest and how to overcome trauma, you don’t, what are you pitching? You know what I mean? Like it’s not the same book. And so you really need to have that clear core message before you start.
RV (31:39):
Well, Gabby, I, I think I will take you know, I will take away so much from this conversation and, and this idea that writing a book is a spiritual practice and marketing book is a spiritual practice. It is a responsibility that you owe to a reader who’s out there that needs you and they need the work that you’ve been called to be a conduit for. And so check out brand builders, group.com/gabby follow Gabby online. You probably already are. She’s got millions of people, but thank you so much for this time and your insight and your wisdom. And I just, I, you know, I’m honored to, to feel like I’m a little bit of a friend of yours and to, to know the true GE you’re on of all the people you’re gonna impact just in the years to come Gabby. So we wish you the best.
GB (32:30):
Thank you. Thank you. So to talk about this.
Ep 260: 3 Steps to Making Money From Social Media with Vanessa Lau
RV (00:07):
Vanessa Lau has become one of my favorite people to follow. You know, recently I mentioned that Jasmine star, when we had Jasmine on that, I’ve, you know, known her for years and we become friends and I love her. I love following Vanessa as well. I learn a lot from her, but I’ll tell you what impresses me the most about her is her transparency. If you hit her YouTube channel, which by the way, has a half a million subscribers, the very first thing that you will see is a video that auto plays, which shows her crying. It shows her in real life, the starting her dream, her journey as like corporate escapee just a few years ago, like three or four years ago. And now she is a seven figure CEO. And she specializes like in, in teaching online course creators and coaches, unlike how to build their influence, she’s got more than 200,000 followers on Instagram. And she just has a, a, a really powerful knack for teaching practical things in a very, very honest way. I had a chance to interview her for something I was doing with success magazine several months ago, Sean Cannel vouched for her and said she was awesome Hansen, Chang. And we just got to meet and I really, really like Vanessa Laos. So Vanessa, welcome to, to the show.
VL (01:23):
Thanks for having me, Rory excited to hang out with you and have amazing conversation.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
So tell us just a little bit of like, I mean, a lot of the people that we have on this show are people who’ve been around a minute, right? Like you’re you have like shot to the top of this space, just terms of the, the size of your following and your impact, like in a couple years. So what happened? How did that ha like, how did that happen? Why do you think that happened? Like, just tell us the story a bit.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
I mean, I started about four years ago in 2018. I started with my YouTube channel and I never like, even you explain that I’m having like pinch me moments, cuz even for me, I don’t realize how much I’ve grown and how far I’ve grown. But I honestly think what contributed to my success was just being candid and honest. I never thought that I was gonna monetize. I never thought that I would be building courses in the future or just even having a, a company. When I first started, I created my YouTube channel because I was just in so much pain in my corporate job when I was trying to figure out how to quit it. And during that journey, when I was trying to figure out, you know, if I should leave, if I shouldn’t leave, I really couldn’t find any resources that I could connect with to help me with that taboo decision.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
When you decide you wanna leave corporate, you wanna quit your job. You don’t go around your office asking your coworkers for advice. You don’t really have a lot of friends or family to really support you through that decision if they’re also in corporate as well. And at the time I found so many resources of people explaining them, leaving their jobs, but all of those jobs were more so like service level, minimum wage entry level jobs. I couldn’t find any resources that were really for that person who like went to college and has a really high paying job and trying to make that decision. And so I went through a lot of pain to like figure out what was right for me. Then eventually when I did quit, I made it my mission to create YouTube videos, to help that person and share my story of why I quit my nine to five, what was my thought process, the pros and cons, and really documenting my journey of doing that.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
And I think that was kind of the the thing that made me stand out the most was the pure honesty, but also the niche that I was in at the time, I didn’t even realize it was a niche, but looking back, it was like me addressing a pain point that was really specific to a very specific type of person. And I, so I think that’s kind of what really helped me make my mark in the beginning. One other thing that I was really good at when I was starting out was building and community. I think that there’s a difference between building an audience versus building a community. When you’re building an audience, it’s like building a following, getting more views, getting subscribers and all that stuff. But building a community is very different. Building a community to me means making as many of your audience members feel seen, heard, appreciated, respected, and feeling involved in your, and one thing looking back that I did really well was the moment I started building the audience.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
I would invite them to a Facebook group and inside I would do even more trainings. I would actually genuinely try to get to know people. At the time when I had the time, I would also do really generous things. Like, you know, if, if you had a question and book a call with me and let let’s talk about it, let’s hang out and let me, let me help you as best as I could. And I think that’s what really helped me grow a lot faster was because I focused on the community building aspect without me even realizing I was doing that. To be honest, when I first started, I was so naive. One thing that I liked to say is I was successful because I was stupid because I really didn’t know any other industry leaders. I didn’t know any business, best practices. I didn’t know what systems and processes were.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
I didn’t know what were the dos and don’t. And so I just did what felt right? I did what felt human. I did what felt good to me. And at the time I just genuinely wanted to connect with other people because I couldn’t find that connection in my real life. Now fast forward to today, this is why I love teaching people about social media specifically is because through my journey, I really learned that social media has just done so many great things for me. It really put me on a international platform and it helped me connect with so many people like without social media, I wouldn’t have connected with you Rory. And so now I realize like, wow, my mission today is I really wanna help people just like me who have this like story to share or, you know, who have tips and advice that they want to give to other people so that they can avoid the same mistakes they did, but giving them that international platform, whether that’s YouTube, Instagram, whatever is in trend right now, so that they can amplify their message and help more people. Because through my journey, I’ve experienced the beautiful thing where, because of my videos or because of my Instagram or because of whatever I’ve helped, one person get 1% better. And as a result of them getting better, they are now helping other people do the same with whatever they learned. And so that is kind of my mission today. But to answer your question of how I grew so fast, I really do think it’s because I UN unintentionally understood the difference to between community and audience.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Yeah. That’s a powerful distinction, you know, and I the, I think, you know, between com that component of community, and then also the transparency, you know, we were joking before we started the interview about how you wrote the world’s longest blog post at the end of 2020. And I read it, I read it because it was so honest about what you struggled with and you kind of hit, you know, you hit seven figures and you entered what we call the swamp. And we teach a lot of our clients is like, it’s really exciting to hit seven figures where the real work happens is, is truly between one to 3 million and, and getting to 4 million and beyond is a is a very much a case of what got you here. Won’t get you there. And most of us cuz you can’t do it alone, like you can get to 1 million by just being like a pretty bad mam Jamma, but like getting past three or 4 million is a totally different game and the team and you anyways, you were writing about some of those pains and I just you know, I loved it and it was really, really good.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
So on, on for the social media to talk about that for a second you know, Mo a lot of the people who have big social media followings had them because they amassed most of it before 2018. You know, this was even an I would, we would’ve even been in that category. So we sold all of our social media in 2018. You know, we kind of went, it went in the exit of our first business, but you started in 2018 and you also did courses. And I want to talk about the course business model because it was like, you know, 2018 was not early to the game. It was late to the game and yet you’ve grown really, really fast. And so when it comes to social media specifically, do you think it’s really cuz of that community aspect or, you know, are there other things to it you think that have played a big role?
Speaker 2 (08:39):
I think that one thing I, I like to say to my own followers because they always think that it’s too late to start something is just having the mindset of like, you know, it’s always going to be too late to be on a platform, but you know, today is better than none at all. And so that was the mindset that I had going in just as the FYI, because one thing I realized was like, wow, I’ve been putting start a YouTube channel, my new user resolutions for the last like five years, 10 years even. The best time really, if I were to be completely honest was probably when YouTube launched and a bunch of people discovered this whole influencing thing like that would’ve been the best time time to, to launch. So even in 2018, like I at the time didn’t feel like it was the best time because I missed so many opportunities.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
But even today I think that if someone’s listening to this episode, don’t think that even now is too late. I think that it’s it’s, you should just start. But in terms of other things other than building a community, I do think that it’s just, like I said earlier, like stupidity was my, my biggest advantage. Like I wasn’t, I didn’t even know who my competitors were at the time. And so I didn’t try to do the same things as everyone else did. I didn’t try to like watch someone else’s video and just basically copy and paste what they were saying. And so I think that especially if you’re trying to grow in a saturated market saturated, cuz that’s subjective. I think it’s important to almost shield yourself from some of that. So you can actually let your creativity break through. I think that you were just saying how, oh, I, that, that blog post that I wrote where literally outlined every single month, how much I made, even if I didn’t make a profit, all of my learning lessons, all of that, the reason why I did that was because I had noticed that everyone else during that period, during the new year period, everyone was talking about all their wins and all their successes and how awesome it was.
Speaker 2 (10:34):
And so I was like, you know what, let me just do something completely different to of that and talk about all of my failures and all the LS I took in 2021. And that, that, that blog post went viral. And so that’s an example of something that I still do today, which is doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing or having a more refreshing take on certain things. And I think that also helps you stand out in the crowd. I think even for me doing that and doing things different also attracted the attention of people who were even more successful than me. Like EV like even you RO you messaged me and you’re like, whoa, that blog post was amazing. It brought me back to back then when I was building my business and I was feeling a certain way. And you weren’t the only one I had people who had like doubled the following.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
I did message me about it because it, that blog post was circulating so much that it went up to them in their world. And so I know I’m talking about blog posts, but the same thing applies to videos and Instagram content and social media in general is when you actually have a different take on something, people tend to notice actually, people who are more successful than you, because it’s like, oh, this young person right here, or not even young, like this new will comer, holy. Like I didn’t even think about certain things like that. And so I think that from a even a personal brand standpoint is being different is your advantage. And if you are starting on social media, I think a big mistake that a lot of people make is like, oh, but I’m not successful. I don’t have a hundred million followers or I’m, I haven’t had X, X amount of years in business.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
I’m like, that is your advantage. What you think is not your advantage is actually your biggest advantage of being someone who’s starting out and being someone who’s new, not only from a con tent standpoint, because you might have a refreshing take on certain things that no one challenges or no one questions in your industry, but also it’s a lot easier to build community. You know, the reason why when I answered that question of yours earlier, I said, well, I used to, or back then I’m using a lot of past tense language is because back then I had the capacity to create eight community. And that was my biggest advantage that I took advantage of now with all these followers and all these subscribers, it’s a bit harder to do without a team. And so your secret sauce is what you actually think is your disadvantage, but I guarantee you that it is your secret sauce that you have to recognize within yourself.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Yeah. I that’s, I love the, even there where you mentioned the idea of a blog, right? I mean, you know, blogging is like, oh, it’s so old school. Now we talk about the blog is the central is the central home headquarters of our digital strategy. And it’s kind of what we teach everything else is just sort of filtering because of SEO and et cetera, et cetera. But you know, just starting with that and going now let’s talk, can we talk about your business model for a second? So we
Speaker 2 (13:23):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
You came out, it, it was the course. So your course is boss Graham academy. That was like, that’s been like your flagship. That’s like the, the first course you kind of launched and built and have built on, right. For the, the last few years that’s been your flagship. Right?
Speaker 2 (13:37):
I mean, the first thing I ever launched was coaching like one on one. Got it. And the reason why was because my videos, like honestly, when I started my business, I just want to be a YouTuber. My goal is like, I wanna be a full-time YouTuber, make money off of a sense. And you know, I’ll be happy with that. But what I realized is that as I was creating more videos, talking about my story, my journey, and, you know, eventually I started sharing some social media tips that were doing well for me, just cuz genuinely I wanted to share. I started getting like DMS from people being like, Hey, can I actually pay you to help me privately with a question that I have? And I was like, what’s this, you know, a few years ago I had no idea what coaching even was. And so that’s when I started experimenting and just taking on a few clients at first I did for free cuz I had no idea what I was doing.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
And I was like, is this even for real? Then I got confident cuz I was like, okay, I’m getting busy. I’m actually good at what I do. And people are getting results. So let me start charging. Then the next phase of my business was okay, no, now I’m booked out. I am booked out. And at the time I was working with 12 clients, which to some people isn’t a lot, but to me who’s just starting out. That’s a lot at once. Like for someone who doesn’t even know what they’re doing, right. And then I noticed like, okay, there’s some patterns amongst these clients who are the clients that I love working with, who are the clients that maybe weren’t a good fit? Who did I get results for? And through that process of working with one on one clients, it also helped me identify like what my strengths were too.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Like there were some questions that I was like, mm, I could answer that, but I’m not really passionate about it. Or I’m not really qualified to answer this question. Other questions were asked. I was like, ah, this is like my zone a genius. So eventually because of pure demand, I was literally rejecting so many people and closing out my programs cuz there was so much demand from it. Thanks to the traffic that I was getting on social media. I then decided to package everything that I knew into a course. So I didn’t necessarily build a course because I was like, ah, everyone’s got a course and I’m gonna a lot of money from this. It was really because of like, okay, I’m basically repeating myself to a lot of these clients. I have a whole wait list of people that wanna work with me. So what’s the easiest way to like still create impact for people without trading too much time. That’s when I created the course and now that course is my flagship.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Yeah. And that, that, you know, we talk about how services are always the fastest path to cash, but they’re the least scalable long term. And coaching is one of the services that has the least barrier to resistance. Like, you know, being a speaker, which is kind of how I came up as a classic kind of corporate keynote speaker. It’s a, it’s a hard road. There’s, you know, a long time for decision making and a lot of competition and you’re book events way out in advance. But when you’re a coach, it’s like, if somebody’s a fan, they could just hire you it’s and they can hire you tomorrow and you can like start working right away. But when you repeating yourself over and over and then going, I just need to package this. So how did you then launch the course? Right? So you, you realize, all right, I’m good at this.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
I’m gonna start charging started for free, love that. Super common in the journey. You’re repeating yourself. You go, okay, I’m gonna package this up. I get it recorded. I get it edited. Now it’s up inside of, you know, whatever, some LMS somewhere then what is the ma the mechanism or the process? Cuz we have a lot of clients that are in this, but, and they could even be like not online marketing coaches, they’re they’re, you know, whatever they’re CPAs or their lawyers or their, and they cannot, they can’t take on any more service based work. They have to commoditize that knowledge. And I don’t think the hardest part for them is creating what to say and getting it recorded. The hard part is going, how the heck do I sell that thing? So talk us through that.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Yeah. Well I actually did it a bit different where I just sold the sales page first. So I marketed the program and I, I, I basically, I come from a corporate background and one thing that I learned from being in corporate was you all always want to prototype something. I learned this from one of the people who worked at Google that came in for a keynote. And basically what prototyping means is instead of just CR building the product first and seeing if people are gonna buy it, because you could waste a lot of money, time, resources, building a product that’s not gonna sell. When you prototype something, you just create like the bare minimum of what needs to be marketed and sold to. And then if there’s demand, then you build the product. A good example would maybe be like Elon Musk and his cyber truck.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Right? Like he didn’t even build it yet. He just kind of sold the I idea on it are people interested, do a wait list, get a deposit. And then he uses that money to actually build the cyber truck. So that’s essentially what I did. Even back then, when I worked at keels, I worked for a skincare brand. I was doing marketing. We would prototype like skincare kits. Like we would create the mock up of what the kit would look like and the then just put it on the counter and see if there was anyone that would pick it up just to see if there was a demand for it first, before we actually built the thing. And so I use the same approach to selling. My course is I didn’t want to waste a lot of time. Like it’s a lot, it’s time consuming.
Speaker 2 (18:43):
It’s easy to do, but it’s time consuming work to film a bunch of modules, a bunch of lessons and figure or all that stuff out on top of marketing it. Right. So I just went straight to marketing it. I started off with just doing a poll. Hey, if I launched this program and it had these modules and these lessons, would you be interested? Yes or no? A bunch of people said yes. Okay, cool. Now there’s some sort of demand there. Let me go on to create the sales page and actually outline it. And you know what it would be, what would include now again earlier I said that one thing that made me stood out was community, not just building an audience but community. And so on my stories, I would tell people, Hey, I’m thinking of like creating this course. I haven’t built it yet.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
I’m thinking of doing these modules. What do you think? Or like, what lessons would you wanna learn? And so my audience felt invested in this product because they’re like, we’re basically building it with Vanessa. So obviously when I launched it, a lot of those people who built it with me kind of, they bought it because it was everything that they asked for. And so that’s kind of what I did initially was I pulled my audience just asking, Hey, I’m creating this program. And you know, to those listeners who, if you already have a course, this method still works is like making people feel involved in your launch, making people feel involved in the campaign. And so that’s kind of what I did. Then I launched the the sales page with all like, this is what we’re doing, all this stuff. We like, this is the time that we’re gonna start, but
Speaker 1 (20:06):
The thing still didn’t exist yet. You just created the sales page for it.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
No, I just created the outline in our everything. And then I also, like, didn’t say, we’re gonna start right away. I’m I, I basically sold it first. And then I said, we start a month from now kind of like when you register for school, like, you know, you’ve enrolled, you apply, you get accepted. Okay. School starts on this date. So I had like a month to kind of at least build something on the back end. And so I sold it and first launch made about $200,000, which was beyond me. Like I had no idea that I was gonna make that much, my very first course launch. How much was it?
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Like, it was
Speaker 2 (20:41):
Like, it was like, it was like a $500 product. So I enrolled quite a bit of people 40
Speaker 1 (20:47):
Wait. Yeah. Several. What is that? Yeah, so it would be like 400 like 400 customers.
Speaker 2 (20:53):
Yeah. It was about like 400 customers. I think I had different price ranges. I had like 500 to like 700, depending on if you were an early bird or if you were I, yeah, I had different pricing tiers, but the total amount was about $200,000 that I made. Yeah. And I didn’t have, you know, this, the audience that I have today. So it was crazy for me. And did just like
Speaker 1 (21:14):
Tell people, go to this sales page and check it out. Or did you say come to a webinar or
Speaker 2 (21:19):
Did you do a so challenge? Yeah, you’re bringing me back to memory. So what I did was I was like so I, I, I did tell people that I was building this program and I was like, you know, polling people. I was doing market research. I had a Facebook group at, at the time too. So I also looked at what people were asking in my Facebook group to help inform what was gonna be in the program. And then afterwards I said, Hey, you know, I’m doing three free like trainings over on Facebook. Live of like not even a fancy webinar platform, nothing. It was just Facebook live, cuz that’s all I knew how to use. And so then I, I hosted three master classes and those classes really taught people kind of like here are the things that I’m actually gonna teach in the program.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Here’s like a little preview and each training kind of walks through three different, you know, CATA GOs. Like one of them was about how to like find your niche. Second one was about content. And then the third one was about like, here are some Instagram like strategies that have been working really well. And then at the end of those trainings, I would just tell people, Hey, if you want to learn more about this or if this like really helps you out, I wanna let you know that I, my program’s ready. Like I have this program am now here’s the link to the sales page. If you wanna buy it by X date, we start on April 1st. Like, so that’s kind of what I did and I not expecting that.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
It’s not, but it’s like, it’s not rocket science. It’s kind of like, if you knew nothing about marketing, how would you do it? You go, I would, you know, come up with an outline, see a, if anybody might be interested, invite ’em to a free training and then offer ’em thing, it’s kind of like, you know, you go through whole foods and they hand you a, a piece of chip on a, a stick and they get a sample or, you know, my mom sold Mary Kay or like people do tapware you come to a party, you try on the makeup. You like, you see the product, you get a sample it and then you buy it. Like, it’s, it’s really not that rocket science. And like, I love how you’re saying that, you know, if you don’t know anything about technology, a start a private Facebook group, and that can be your email list opt in, you know?
Speaker 1 (23:21):
And then it’s like, you just go live and that’s the version of your webinar. And then people can VE mow you the money. Like there’s no reason not, not to to, to do this stuff anymore. Who, so who was who was the first person you hired? Like talk me through your team real quick. So you, you do that, you do that launch, you keep growing on social. Clearly you are reinvesting into your brand and your website and your team. How, how, how did you bring on the roles to start scaling towards your first seven figures?
Speaker 2 (23:52):
I mean, even with my first launch the, I only had one person helping me out and we don’t even know what her title was. She was actually someone from my community. And I remember I was, I was, is growing my Facebook group. Right. And, you know, after your Facebook group gets a certain size, it just kind of becomes chaos inside. Like I would say after like the 3000 person mark, it just becomes like a spam Fest. And you know, you get people who might have found you through cold traffic and just say really mean things or something. And so I actually had someone in my community D I mean was like, Hey, like, do you need help? I think you need help. And I was like, I do. I was like, can I let me just pay you like $15 an hour and just try to help me out.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
And so she was, I think looking back, maybe her title was more of like assistant or general VA. And so she started off just helping me moderating my free Facebook group. Then she also helped me with like designing lead magnets, like for my YouTube videos. Sometimes I would have a lead magnet attached to it to grow my email list. But when I actually did my course launch, you know, the fact that I didn’t create the program yet, she really helped me create some of the slides as we were drip feeding. So the basic to kind of close the loop on how I launched the, the program because I didn’t create the program yet. I had 30 months, like runway to just create something so that when people start on that day, there’s something for them. And so during those first, like 30 days, I created the first module first.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
And then as the program went on week after, I would just drip feed the remaining modules. And after each module too, I would have a feedback form so that our clients could like tell me, like what worked, what didn’t work. And so I would just adjust as I went. And so that’s how I got a lot of good testimonials and social proof on my program because it was exactly what people wanted and people needed. So I’m really glad I to like that approach. And so my first hire, what she helped me with was I would, because it was a lot of modules and like to do in a week, I was kind of like, that was a lot of work back then. I would just do the outline of my slides and then I would send it to her and she would make it pretty. And then when she made it pretty, she’d send it back to me. I would record it and then I would upload it to whatever course platform that you decide to use. So that was really what she helped me a lot with. And she also,
Speaker 1 (26:13):
You signed like skeleton slides of like, here’s the content. And then she would use like Canva or something. And like,
Speaker 2 (26:18):
Exactly. Like, I would literally use like aerial font, like just blank, like, you know, placeholder here, like please create like a, a picture of, of a graphic here. Like it was just really, really rough draft slides. But the content itself was all me. She just made it pretty and presentable and also checked for any spelling errors because when you’re in creation mode, like you’re just, there’s gonna be typos everywhere. Like, and she just polished it up and cleaned it up. She helped me upload it. And she also helped with just like interacting in the Facebook group not necessarily answering questions. It’s kind of what I still did at the time, but like rooting people on like, Hey, you’re doing a great job. Or she would just flag anything that I should know about, but I was pretty involved in, in my first launch and how I delivered the program.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
I also, after every module that dropped, I would do like a, an FAQ call or a Q and a call live. And so if people had questions about the material, I would answer those questions. Now, obviously this was my first time doing it. And that’s why I was so hands on. But to answer your question of how we sit scale to seven figures is eventually after each launch, I would, it, my, my involvement would be less and less because the program became better and better where it, the curriculum could really stand on its own at that point. And people could get results technically without me because the program was so refined and it’s been about like, this is our fourth, third year having the program, I think. And every time that we’ve done an update, we still keep in mind customer feedback and we just streamline the curriculum so much to the point where the version we have now basically can stand on its own.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
I love it. I love it. One last little quick, quick question. How much has paid ads played or no, not played a role in what you do.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
I it’s so funny cuz I feel like I’m one of those maybe rare entrepreneurs where paid ads don’t work really well for me. Most of my sales and traffic come organic, I believe maybe paid ads contribute to 30% of, of like one third of everything. But it is something that I still need to scale up and optimize. So yeah, but I have found that like obviously eventually with organic, you do start wanting, you do start going into paid ads to kind of increase your reach. But I am that one of those entrepreneurs where organic is still kind of my bread and butter in terms of how we get our results in our traffic.
Speaker 1 (28:47):
Awesome. Great to know. So where should people go Vanessa? Like if they want to connect up with you, see what you’re up to? I mean, obviously you’re on the socials. Is that, is that where they go or where would you point ’em?
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Yeah, my socials my YouTube channel is probably the best place. If you guys want to learn more or about social media, about building a business entrepreneurship, and if you wanna hang out on Instagram, that’s great too. I do a lot of more personal stuff on Instagram. But yeah, those are like the top two places. And then from there, you’ll see all the other places you can connect with with me with, so those would be the top two.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
I love it. Well, thank you so much for are sharing. Keep going. We believe in you like you’re you are so cool and there’s just no doubt the trajectory that you are on Vanessa. Like it’s gonna end up somewhere really, really exciting. And, and you know, you’re helping a lot of people, so we just wanna encourage you in your journey and, and thanks for being here. We look forward to watching it all unfold.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Thank you for having me, Rory. This was awesome.
Speaker 3 (29:50):
Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if, if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group.com/pod call brand builders, group.com/pod call. We hope to talk to you soon,
Speaker 1 (30:37):
What a fabulous and encouraging and practical and inspiring interview there with Vanessa. And I like, I mean, I’m, I really think Vanessa LA is cool. Like I have been following her and watching her she’s she’s humble and practical and not pretentious. And you know, you get a sense of that just from, from listening to her. So I wanted to take everything that she’s talked about and I’m gonna share with you kind of like my three highlights, which are, you know, I kind of take this as three steps to making money from social media and, and, and you know, she’s taking us on her journey. And then as, as I sort of assimilate that into what we know and teach and think about how does it apply to you to go, all right, if you wanna make money from social media, how do you, how do you actually do it?
Speaker 1 (31:27):
And I think the, the, you know, the, the first step that she talked a lot about is to basically let your difference be your advantage, let your difference be your advantage. I love when she was talking about how people take notice of things that are different. So the fact that you don’t do things the way that everybody else does, or that, you know, people who are already well known do gives you in advantage. Like you have the ability to take risks and to take chances and to do things differently and even be beyond that, she said, what you think is not your advantage is actually your advantage. I was thinking about how does that apply to us at brand builders? Like, you know, a lot of our clients have more social media followers than we do a lot more cuz some of our clients have millions of followers.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
Literally, and yet it’s like the thing that we would go, oh, well maybe that, like why would they hire us? Well, it’s because that’s not really what we teach. Right? Like our focus is not on making, you know, getting millions of followers. It’s on getting millions of dollars. I mean, frankly, like we’re really good at scaling the infrastructure, the strategy, creating you know, the systems, the operations and, and organizing things in a way to go. Like, how do you, how do you make a business? Like how do you actually build a business? And I, I changed my Instagram, like header here recently, you know, that kind of says what I do. And in a, it says helping personal brands build better businesses. And you know, that’s what I realized is like, you know, what we teach is business. And then underneath that, it’s like entrepreneurship.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
And then underneath that, it’s like specific for personal brands and, and that’s sort of like the, the place that we play in going, ah, they’re not hiring us cuz they don’t need that. The, they already have that. They know how to do that thing. So a lot of those things exist only in your head as insecurities and you know, self-doubt when really that thing, whatever that thing is that you think is your disadvantage often is your advantage. Like that’s what she was talking about is she was able to build a following so fast because she didn’t have a following. And she was basically documenting this whole journey and sharing what works and just being open and, and honest about that. And it reminds me of what Gary V one of the things that Gary Vayner check says, which I think is an awesome one, is don’t feel like you have to create just document, right?
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Like don’t feel like you have to create just document, talk about, share the story of you trying to build and learn about whatever the thing is that you that you are doing. And I think that’s super duper powerful. So your, your, your difference is your advantage. The second thing that she brought up, which I really love, and it was such a sharp, such a sharp distinction and, and such a quick distinction is there’s a big difference between community building. Like there’s a big, there’s a big difference between building a community and building an audience. Like most people on social media are trying to build their audience, right? They’re trying to like get a large number of people to pay attention, but they’re not actually that focused on building a community. They’re not actually, I mean, in, in here’s the difference to me, which she didn’t say this per se, but here’s how I process it.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
Building an audience means you’re broadcasting, right? It is one way communication. Building a community is, is multidimensional or it’s like omnichannel. So meaning not only is it two-way communication. So like to me, you know, an audience is you broadcast. When I do a speech, right? People hire me to come in and speak. I’m I’m broadcasting to an audience and it, and you know, there’s very little response other than like maybe a Q and a portion or people come get a book sign at the back of the room or whatever. And if it’s, so if it’s, if it’s one way communication, that’s a broadcast, that’s an audience. If it’s two way communication, that’s a conversation. But I would say that’s not even a community. So I do think that is part of it is going okay, let’s have a conversation. And that’s part of the power of, even if you think about web one, like one was basically broadcast.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
It was like, you could throw up a website. People could come read web two is social media, which is like, oh, now we can have conversation. Like I, you can leave a comment. I can reply. We can get to know each other, but it’s really even con connecting people inside that conversation separate from you. So it’s connecting two of your list centers or two of your fans or two of your clients. This is a huge focus of us for, of ours at brand builders group for our monthly members, because we now have almost 400 active monthly clients, 400 people that we’re doing one-on-one coaching with who are coming to our events. And what we’re realizing is, oh my gosh, the power, or like in addition to amazing world class content that we teach in our curriculum, the power is the community it’s going. You should do a podcast with you and you should be an affiliate for you and you need to help this person get into that company.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
And you guys should share speaking leads and, and you know, this person write Forbes and they need articles and you have this big story that they cover and, and that’s happening all the time. And so brand builders group is really transforming on, on the paid side of our business to community. I mean, the content is always gonna be there. We’re always leveling that up. You know, but the content’s dialed in, I mean, we spend a lifetime learning this and it’s, it’s like, we, we know it. It’s not super dial. It doesn’t change that often. It’s a lot to learn a ton. I mean, it’s, we have 14 different two day experiences in our full curriculum, but the community is the part that never ends and is always growing and strengthening. And so I just encourage you to think about that as like, are you even approaching social media as it is a one way channel of broadcasting?
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Is it a two way channel of communi, like of, of conversation or is it an omnichannel omnichannel or inter channel connectivity, which is really a community. And that community makes a huge difference. A small community can be tremendously powerful versus a big audience is not that powerful. Right. I think of the, the, like a billboard which is, you know, that reaches a huge number of people, but they’re not really engaged. It’s very passive versus a community is like, we’re living together. We’re doing life together. We’re so supporting each other. We’re we know each other, we’re helping one another and that’s a really, really big difference. And as you know, so conceptually, that’s the difference, I think, between building a community and building an audience now, pragmatically, there’s other parts of this that really roll out in terms of how does this work to your advantage when you’re monetizing.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
And I think it specifically showed up when she was saying, make people feel like they’re involved in your launch, give people a chance to have a backstage pass. Right. That’s really how what I think of like stories on social, or even like Twitter, you, you could think of it this way is, or Snapchat is they’re getting to see your daily life and like follow what’s going on. As you, as you document, as you document your journey. And so when you, you tell ’em the moment, you have an idea for a product and then you get feedback on it and then you kind of like share your rough out line and they get you feedback on it. And then you say, Hey, if I put this together, would, I mean, if you buy it and you get feedback on it and just, it’s almost like they’re sold by the time you create it because they, they wanna see it.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
Like they’re, they’re a part of, of creating it. I think that really applies for, you know, a book launch and for, you know, launching anything, certainly a course launch for her. So build a community, not just an audience. And then the third, the third thing here for how to monetize your social media is do a simple launch, do a simple launch. What is a simple launch to me, it is telling, you know, it’s building an audience and telling them that you’ve created something. And I guess I would add an intermediate step. I would say, you know, you gotta build an audience first. And that’s the part that everyone screws up. Everybody wants to build a product and then, and then find an audience to sell to. You have to flip that you gotta twist that around you don’t, you don’t find an audience after you’ve sold the, after you’ve created the product, build an audience, and then you build the product for that audience.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
Don’t build a product and then hope you can build an audience, build an audience, and then build the product that they need. And so if you flip that, then that becomes the first step is you, you build, build the audience. Then the second step is give ’em a free sample, give ’em a free sample, let them sample it somehow and then ask them to buy it, tell ’em how much it is, what it is, where they get it, how much it costs and ask them to buy it. And so often we get lost in the, you know, the technological complexities of all the different ways to do this. And of course there’s a lot of people that make a lot of money from teaching it and making it complicated. But you could do this, like with a Facebook group. It like, you don’t even have to have an email responder.
Speaker 1 (41:04):
You just start sharing content and you say, Hey, if you want more, come join our private Facebook group. And that basically functions as like your early email opt-in list. Now, long term, we would tell you, you need to, you need to focus very intentionally about getting people off of social media and onto an actual email list. But the point here is just that you could start right away without knowing anything and having any team or ever any technology leverage the idea of a Facebook group or a LinkedIn group. And you say, Hey, come join this group. Now they’re in the group, you’re posting content in there. And then you say, Hey, everyone inside this group, I’m gonna host of free training. And you could literally just go live and it could be one long free training, which would be the equivalent of a webinar.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
You could do three short trainings, which would be the equivalent of a video funnel. Like over a few days, you could do, you know, seven micro, 10 minute trainings five to 10 minute trainings over a week or 14 days. And now it becomes a 14 day challenge or, or something, right? It’s it’s, it’s not, we get lost. We get so lost. And when we so consumed with like, what’s the right technology and what’s the perfect process, and those things are important, they add a lot of value in there’s details. But the big idea is the same. Always it’s like add value to people’s lives, give them a ch you know, to build your audience, give them a chance to sample the product, and then let ’em buy the product. It’s the, the same thing that happens in the food court or at the grocery store.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
They, they, they let you sample it and then they B your chance to buy it. It’s the same thing that, you know, you do with a direct sales company. It’s the same way that you get booked to be a speaker, right? You go speak for free. You let people sample you, and then you let, ’em hire you to bring you in for more. So it, the modality isn’t so much important as just the high level concept of going create something awesome, like add value to people’s lives, make an impact, give them a chance to sample and then show ’em how to get more and whatever the mechanism is, the modality of how that happens. It almost doesn’t matter. It’s just that you’re doing that. You’re connecting with humans and you’re thinking about them as real people. And not just, you know, faceless entities with a credit card in hand that you’re trying to access.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
Like, that’s, that’s what you have to move past. So those are three steps. You know, I, I, I think there’s psychological steps. There’s, there’s three mindset shifts that need to happen that also have corresponding technical, you know, or practical action items that you could take. So I hope you enjoyed the interview. Thanks for tuning in for the highlights. We love you. We’re so grateful for you. If you haven’t left us a review, please leave us a review on iTunes, share this podcast with somebody who you think would benefit from it. Check out our free trainings that we, we have available for you request a free call. If you want to talk to one of our strategists about creating a custom plan for you. We work with all types of people, you know, billionaires and celebrities and people with millions of followers. Most of our clients have smaller followings. They’re they’re, they’re just beginning, or they just have an idea or they’re, you know, intermediate. So talk to us, right. Request a call and keep coming back more, more than anything. Just keep coming back. We’ll keep bringing awesome guests and sharing with you the best of what we know. That’s it for this episode, we’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand podcast.
Ep 258: How to Execute a Book Launch with Chandler Bolt
RV (00:07):
You know, it’s, it’s not all that often that we’ll bring somebody on the show who services an audience that’s closely connected to ours, but we do it for Chandler bolt. And the reason is cuz I, I love Chandler, I believe in Chandler and I’ve known Chandler for a really, really long time. And we’ve heard great things about everything that he does at self-publishing school. So he’s the CEO of a company called self-publishing school and he’s the author of several books and his most recent book is called published the proven page from blank page to 10,000 copies sold. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. You, I was showing Chandler before we kicked off, like I’ve gone through like the whole back half of this book especially like, and just earmarked stuff and underlined stuff. And I love how practical it is.
RV (01:02):
I love that, you know, what Chandler does is like a very, you don’t have to be famous to do this. It’s like, these are things that anybody with a book can do. This is actually the second time that we have had ’em on the show. We did another episode a while back where we talked about basically how to construct a cell published book. And then now we’re gonna talk about what do you do once you have the book in your hand and how do you launch it? You can go to brand builders, group.com/sps. Okay. So brand builders, group.com/sps which is self-publishing school. That’s our affiliate link that if you wanna check out a free training beyond what we talk about with Chandler, I’ll mention that again. But the book again, published the proven path from blank page to 10,000 copies sold Chandler bolt, brother.
RV (01:52):
Welcome back to the show.
CB (01:54):
Great to be here. Thank you for having me.
RV (01:57):
I’m so proud of you, dude. Like you are serving your audience, you, you serve such a, a specific in, in such a deep way. You’ve made a great business out of it. Your ink 5,000 business, you guys are booming and you just really, you know, in the world of self-publishing, it’s just like, you just know this, this space inside and out. So my first question for you is, is there anything that has changed about self-publishing in like the last two years specifically? So obviously there’s been a lot of talk about how traditional publishing is changing and why you might self-publish by the way, one other little disclaimer for everybody, if you’re a traditionally published author or you want to be, I promise that this episode be extremely relevant to you, like sure. So it, even though self-publishing is sort of Chandler like bread and butter, these principles, I mean, that’s why I took notes cuz I’m like, I’m gonna some of these things I’d never heard before. I’m gonna do ’em but what what’s changed recently.
CB (02:59):
Yeah. There’s a lot of changes and, and you’re right, Rory, everything we teach, well, I’d say probably 80% of what we teach you can do, whether you’re self-published or traditionally published. And there’s a lot of good crossover, but you know, kind of over the last, you know, over the last couple decades self-publishing has become the preferred option. For most authors people who wanna make more royalties key, keep creative control, have flexibility, move faster through the process, you know, used to be that the only way you sold books is to get into bookstores will now 70% of all books sold or, or are sold on Amazon. So that’s been a massive shift. It continues to shift. And then the shift over the last couple of years is that it’s just gotten more competitive, just writing and publishing a great book isn’t enough anymore. And, and you know, it used to be in the early days of self-publishing it was like, oh, if you just put it on Amazon, it’s gonna sell.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
And there’s so many buyers, there’s not a ton of competition, but the market has gotten more sophisticated. You know, kind of like the levels of market market sophistication. So it’s gotten more, it’s gotten more competitive. And there’s a bunch of things that have progressed. And I think it’s a really exciting time to publish a book and to self-publish, but the big thing, and I think what we’ll be talking about today on, on this interview is you’ve got to learn sales and marketing. I mean, obviously we are, we, and then both of our companies are very aligned on this is like, Hey, you’ve got to learn and invest time, money and energy and, and become friends with Sam sales and marketing. And, and if you build it, they will not come. You have to tell them about it. And so, I mean, that’s with your book, that’s with your business, it’s, there’s their synergy across the board.
RV (04:32):
Yeah. I, I’m excited about that. Part of the conversation. One of the things that we were talking about recently with some of our members is that, you know, I Pete there’s, this people are pure artists, right? They go, ah, you know, I just wanna create my art. I wanna create my art. And what we realize is that marketing is art. Like marketing is part of your artistry. Like what good is the greatest painting that nobody ever sees or the greatest book that no one reads or the greatest music. Of course your brother is in my all time, favorite re band need to breathe. So any of you need to breathe fans out there, Chandler’s brother, it plays and they like if no one hears the music, like what good is it? And so marketing has to be part of your artistry.
RV (05:17):
You know, the, the other thing that, you know, when I look at what you’ve done, what is happening in the marketplace, you know, there’s always been these things that, that traditionally published authors do like book launches and media tours and, and book tours and bookstore signings and all that stuff. But in the self-published world, there’s been this whole immersion of, or, or immersion of like tactical things that anybody can do if they’re not famous and they don’t have a huge email list and they don’t have millions of social media followers. So talk us through that. Like, how do you even start? How do you even start to think about your launch if you’re, you know, if you’re not Insta famous, like what do, if you can’t get on good morning America? Like, what do you do?
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Yeah. And, and so I, I look at this in a few different ways, so you’ve got the, what are the, what are the fundamentals of a bestseller? So how do I make sure I structure the book in a way that it’s gonna sell well, long term, then you’ve got kind of what I call the envy P launch, which minimum viable product launch, or you’ve got the traditional launch. And so a, a lot of, a lot, if you’ve ever seen a book launch, I mean, it’s the traditional book launch. I mean, like a traditional published book, it follows what I would call the traditional launch and that’s chapter 19 in, in the new book. And then chapter chapter 18 is MVP launch, but really it comes to down to, and I don’t know if anyone will see the video version of this, but it comes down to a, what I call the launch triangle.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Right? And so it’s these three core elements you’ve got first off creating a launch team, second off, getting reviews and then third off its promotions. And so the, the first two, I mean, it doesn’t matter what type of launch you’re doing create a launch team, which is a small group of people that support you or the topic of your book, right. Could be 15 people, 50 people could be more, they get a free digital copy ahead of launch. And then they leave a review on day one. So now all of a sudden you’ve got 1550 reviews, right. Outta the gates. And this is kind of an army of people who support your book, right. Or the topic of that book. And so these could be family members, friends, customers, all that. So you’ve got launch team that helps with reviews. And then you’ve got the, the third component is promotions and that’s kind of the accordion is how I look at it.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
And so that’s based on the time that you have the money that you have, the resources and energy that you wanna put behind this and is on also somewhat correlated to whether you’re self-publishing or traditional traditionally publishing, right. Is how much are you you putting into this, the success of this launch, and that’s where you can kind of accordion based on that. And so these, those are kind of the three fundamentals of, of the launch. And then I think there’s an important distinction, which is I, I talk about the the Lamber launch versus the Toyota Camry launch. Okay. Or the Toyota Camry approach. And just, most people look at book launches like a Lamborghini and, and, and, you know, Lamborghini, they’re fast, they’re sexy. They use up a lot of fuel, so they’re gone. Right. And so, so they use up all this energy on week one and launch week, and they don’t realize that it’s not, yes, launch week is important, but it’s more about I call the Toyota Camry approach.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
It’s like, how do I just create a book that sells for years and for decades? And that is the mindset of what I call the one year launch. And so launch your launch. It’s not a week, it’s a year. And I forget, this is a quote that I, I was reading this book the other day and I, and I, and I, I saw that and I was like, yes, that’s the one year launch. It’s a mindset to keep marketing your book after the launch. So I think all those things kind of combined to set up the book for success. And then that book goes out and brings back more, leads, more sales, more referrals for your business, builds your personal brand, all that good stuff.
RV (09:06):
Yeah. I think of one of my good friends is Phil M Jones. He wrote exactly what to say which is a self-published book that sold a million copy and he sells them because it’s the only book he has and he sells it constantly. And he creates custom versions, like for Remax and for like, and he’ll sell 200 at a time, a thousand at a time, like, and it’s just, you know, it it’s, he built his whole career on, on this. He has some other books too, but really that’s, that’s the one yeah, so that’s so great. So let’s talk about the launch team real quick, because there are different ways to get on the launch team, right? So a lot of our clients that we’ve worked with that are, you know, maybe have a larger following online, they make people buy the book to get on the launch team. But then if you’re a newer author, maybe you’re like a, you’re a younger author, or you just don’t have as big of a platform for whatever reason. Usually you just kind of make the ask for people to join. So how do you, what, what do you do there in terms of getting people onto the team?
Speaker 2 (10:14):
That’s a great question. That’s the thing about having new concepts as you gotta look ’em up I’m like, look, I’m, I’m flipping up in the book. I’m like, right. What are so when I think about team, so you’re right. I love the, if you’ve got an experience or if you’ve got an existing audience, either having them apply or having them buy a book as a, as a, as a prerequisite to join, I think that’s super smart. Because at the end of the it’s quality, not quantity. Mm. You don’t want a bajillion, half committed people on, on your launch team. You want less but better. Right. And so I look at team as an acronym. So T a M so the T stands for tell everyone, you know, about the launch team and just in a clear, concise way a or, sorry, the E stands for enroll. The people who say, Hey, I’m interested in that, right. Who’d be interested in a free digital copy of the book. And to C the behind the scenes of the launch, people raise their hand and supporting the launch. Okay. E is in enroll, instead of expectations, a is ask for review, which is like, dove, of course you would do that. A lot of people, I mean, very specifically, I wanna
RV (11:20):
Talk about reviews in a second, cuz it’s not as much of a does you would think, so. Keep going. All right. Ask for, review
Speaker 2 (11:27):
It really. Yeah. And so ask for a review and then M stands for a message everyone individually and follow up because you don’t just send out one mass email and say, Hey, everyone, leave a review. It’s launched day, but the, the powers in the follow up. So that’s how I look at a launch team. And then you’ve kind of got the two ways to recruit your launch team, which is kind of what you talked about, which is, Hey, either mass outreach, like, Hey, I’ve already got a big audience. And I could just blast out an email and say, who wants to be on the launch team or for a lot of people who are getting started. It’s one to one and sure. I might have a small social media following or family and friends, that sort of thing. But it’s in one to one conversations about the book leading up to the launch, that’s where you really build, build a healthy launch team. And then, then you’re launching with reviews and with momentum.
RV (12:11):
So
RV (12:14):
You get the people on. Okay. And you can do, I mean, one of the things that’s, I mean, there are some amazing things about a lot of amazing things about self-publishing one of which is that you can do things like get a free audio copy of the book or get a free PE book version of it. I mean, it is really things like that, especially if you’re are just beginning and you’re just starting out, like you can really use it as a list builder and credibility booster and lead magnet and all the things that a book really should be. You, if you, you are traditionally publishing, you can’t do some of that, but you can give away, sometimes your publisher will say, give away the first three chapters or the first chapter, or, you know, there’s other, and you can use to get people to join. We go through a bunch of ’em in, in our training, but once the people are there, okay. What do you do with them? And also, is it, is it typically a Facebook group? Is that typically the mechanism you’re using to manage the launch team?
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yeah, that’s what I like to do. I I’d say go where your audience is. Right. And so is your audience on Facebook? Awesome. Do that is your audience somewhere else do that and you, I, I would do dual, so Facebook and email, so, so that it’s, you’re getting in front of people and, but then it’s pretty simple. I mean, you form the launch team a few weeks before launch, and then I like to give them one assignment per week for the two to three weeks leading up to the launch and starting with reading the book ahead of time. And then the most important thing is that they leave a review on day one. I mean, that’s kind of like, you can very clearly communicate expectations. That’s the E and team right. Is expectations setting. And so just saying, Hey, if you do nothing else, I need you to leave a review on day one as part of this. And so mark this on your calendar, set a reminder on your phone, whatever you need to do, like that is the most important thing. Anything else is a bonus above that, right? Because that’s, what’s gonna help drive the book long term is the social proof. It boosts your discoverability on Amazon and all other PLA like that is what kind of feeds the flywheel for long term book sales.
RV (14:21):
Yeah. So, so you’re gonna say, read the book, leave a review. And then other than that, it might just be like, you know, make this post on social media. Yeah. Or, you know, send this email to your friends and family like that. It’s just all that kind of, it’s not rocket science. It’s just like following up with them. And it, it really hit me hard when you were like in, so in, in the book again, the book is published, it’s called published the proven path from blank page to 10,000 copies. So we’ll link to it in Amazon on our, on our site in a show notes following up with people one on one and like, yeah, going, Hey, I, yeah, I run, I need your help. Would you be willing to help me?
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Yes. Yes. And, and being very specific, which that’s the piece about reviews, right? Is, is give them an exact link on where to leave a review. Right. And this is one thing that, that might help with your, your clients and, and with book launches that you do as well is just a quick link. That’s easy to remember. And so for me, it’s published book.com/review brand builders.com/like what, whatever the URL is for that person, or then forward
RV (15:29):
The
Speaker 2 (15:29):
URL slash review, and then us forwards to the exact place on Amazon, where they can select the stars and fill out the form. And then anytime you’re asking for a review, I mean, I do it in the book, but then obviously within this context is specifically to your launch team. You say, Hey, go directly to this page and leave a review, take two minutes to do it today. Okay. Our goal is ex by the end, like just very specific. And then anytime someone says something positive about the book, it’s like, Hey, thank you so much. Would you mind copying pacing that into our review link?
RV (16:02):
So I have a confession to make, and I want you to slap me and tell me what I should do. So we have completely ignored reviews, never, never driven people there. Take the stairs still sells very, very well. My second book doesn’t sell as well. But my, my very first book still sells, you know, pretty consistently. And you know, we have, we had, we had 300, we had 300 units last week. Like we get these, we get pops of like big 300, 600 unit weeks. Of course, if I’m speaking, it’s more. And one of the things that we did is we had a, we have like you talk about inside your manuscript, you have to offer lead magnets, right? So you put a link to go download a lead magnet. So we, we did that. We created a test called the focus 40 to test. We’ve been so busy building brand builders group. The last three years, we have completely ignored. All of those people haven’t even looked at it. We just looked at it and we found that 1000 people last year, apparently bought, take the stairs, read it, saw the link, went to the link, filled out the assessment, and then they’ve just sat there and I’m going, we don’t even have a thousand reviews on the book.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Yeah.
RV (17:24):
We have like 700 reviews. And so I’m just like, I have just missed the boat on the reviews. So why do reviews matter and what we do to, to really drive them? I mean, we’re clear on the launch team. That’s a great one. Yeah. And I hear you saying they can’t leave a review until the pub date. Of course. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Yeah.
RV (17:45):
But what do you do after the fact and like, what
Speaker 2 (17:48):
Should I do? Yeah. Oh, that’s a great question. Or I I’d say I mean they matter cuz they highly impact Amazon’s ranking, right? So there’s two ways you discover, well there’s two or three ways that people discover books. Right. They’re searching for something on Amazon. So they’re actively searching for a book or someone refers it to them and maybe there’s which you’re looking in like a category that they like and saying, Hey, what are the top sellers here? But really it’s the first two. And so how do you show up in search? Well, keywords categories and then reviews because obviously it’s like Amazon is a search engine of buyers. Google is a search engine of browsers. So when people go to Amazon, they got a reason to buy stuff, right. They one click purchase, their credit card is on file. So I wanna bring them into my ecosystem and then show up when they search topics that are what I would call high buyer intent for my business.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
Right. So for us, if they’re searching how to write a book, how to publish a book, like those things we know through all of our content marketing, I mean, that’s someone, who’s a buyer for self public. And so reviews help fulfill that for Amazon. Right. Because they wanna say let’s recommend stuff that they’re most likely to like, well, how do we know that as Amazon? Well, other people said they like it. How do they say they like it through reviews? Right? This is not anything that you don’t know. But what I would do like one or two very practical things that I would task to your this week or next week is I would send a follow up email to anyone who’s ever opted in to that challenge or anything related to take the stairs, the book specifically. Yes. And I would do the book specifically and I would do some sort of giveaway.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
And it’s you know, Hey, if you’re getting this emails because you, you checked out, take the stairs. I’d love to hear what you think. Take two minutes to go here and leave a review on the book. I’m gonna read everyone. So, and I’m gonna randomly pick 10 people who click this link and send you a signed copy of take the stairs. You don’t have to, you know, you don’t have to you don’t have to leave a review to enter to win, but you can click this link and I’d love for you to leave a review and hear what you think. I did that one time got 188 reviews in 48 hours. So that works unbelievably well, second piece that I would do, and this is most important for long term. I’d do this with every book that you have is I called a us the review sweeper.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
It’s just a simple automated email sequence, three email sequence. And anytime anyone opts into anything related to the book, they get dropped into this follow up sequence. 21 days later, they get an email from you that says, Hey, looks like you grabbed a copy of my book. A few weeks ago. I’d love to hear what you think hit reply on this email. What do you think about the book so far? And then your team, you got kind of a customer support macro that just says, Hey, oh, Hey, if it’s positive, obviously is, oh, Hey, thank you so much. Like this is really helpful. Would you mind copying pacing that into an Amazon review? Here’s the link? So you’re kind of doing a two step into leaving the review and then, you know, maybe you have a, a, a, if they don’t reply to that, you’ve got one or two other emails. That’s like, Hey I’m not gonna bother you about this anymore, but I’d love for you to take two minutes today and leave a review with what you think about the book. So I love it.
RV (21:05):
I
Speaker 2 (21:05):
Love that. I mean that I call it the review sweeper, cuz it just sweeps in reviews month after month, year after year, I’ve
RV (21:11):
Heard that you can’t incentivize an Amazon review. Is that, have you heard that?
Speaker 2 (21:17):
Correct? You cannot pay for a review and you cannot in like, I will give you X, Y, Z, if you leave a review. Correct.
RV (21:25):
Okay. But you, you could say leave a review to be entered in a drawing and that’s different.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
I’m going all the way up to the line. So I’m saying click this link. I’m gonna click, I’m gonna select 10 random people who click this link. This Link’s gonna take you to where you can leave a review. I’d love for you to leave a review. You don’t have to leave a review.
RV (21:46):
Oh. But basically if click the link, you, the click, the link is the entry
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Point. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And I’m not doing what Amazon doesn’t wanna do is, Hey, I’ll give you a $10 Amazon gift card or I’ll give you blah, blah, blah. If you leave a review, because then that’s compromising the integrity of the review system. But kind of going up to that line while still staying within Amazon’s guidelines and hooking people up and saying, Hey, I’d love for you to leave a review kind of in the process.
RV (22:13):
Yeah. And I’ve also heard people say, just send them a free gift, you know, kind of like a, a law reciprocity. Just send them a free gift. Hey, thank you. I love hope you love the book. Here’s another free gift. You know, by the way, if you ever get a chance, I’d love a review and that’s totally fair game to do. Cause it’s not a quid pro quo. Exactly. Type of type of thing. So so that’s, I, I love that. It’s so as many
Speaker 2 (22:36):
Readers you got, I bet you do that on take the stairs. You’ll be over a thousand reviews within the next three months.
RV (22:42):
Do you think I would get flagged for sending a blast to like whatever that list is?
Speaker 2 (22:47):
No, I, I,
RV (22:48):
I mean it shouldn’t, it’s just a bunch of people, but it, they would probably see the pretty big spike. That’s amazing. You got 188 reviews in 48 hours. That’s like a third of the total reviews I’ve gotten in 10 years.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
Like it’s crazy. That’s amazing,
RV (23:00):
Dude.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
It’s well, cuz that’s the big thing. Right? The overarching thing that I think maybe is major takeaway for listeners is ask like so many people to, they want to help and they enjoyed the book, but all you have to do is just say, Hey, could you take two minutes today to leave a review exactly here. Right? Like here’s the link. So I’m making it as easy as possible and just asking and then doing so you’ve probably got hundreds, if not thousands of people on the sidelines that are like, oh yeah, I love that book. You, but I never left a review. Right. When’s the last time you left a review on a book, unless it was audible at the very end, like, Hey right now, like please click the start. I mean, you know, you got a physical book, you set it down. You’re like, oh, that was good. And I’m not gonna log into Amazon. So it’s like leave review and all that. But, but if someone asks, I’m like, oh, I like that book. Sure. I I’d take two seconds, two minutes to leave review. So,
RV (23:53):
So I love it, man. This, this is the kind of stuff that I’m talking about. Y’all so again Chandler has a, a training brand builders, group.com/s P S. That is where you can go watch the, the free training. That’s our affiliate link. You can check it out, you know you can tell like he he’s giving the goods, right? Like he’s not holding stuff back cuz he’s got a lot of stuff to offer. One of the reasons why we, we love him. It’s not like he can teach you everything. He knows in one 30 minute podcast interview coming back to the search thing in Amazon. Yeah. So the keywords and all of that, that you know, it makes sense just like YouTube is a search engine, just like, you know, Google is a search engine. Amazon is a search engine. Where do you actually go to optimize the profile? Like where do you go to say, I want this book to show up for these terms.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Yeah. there’s well, there’s a bunch of stuff and, and Amazon doesn’t publicly give information about the, their algorithm, just like Google doesn’t, but we know, I mean you just know what their major influences on that. Right? And so the first they give you seven keywords. So Amazon does, when you publish the book. Now, if you’re traditionally publishing, you can recommend to your publisher. But at the end of the day they’re gonna have kind of the final call and final hands on keys for that. That’s another benefit of self-publishing, but they give you seven keywords that you can target. Those are helpful, but really more so than that, I mean, Amazon’s gotten a lot more sophisticated. It used to be that you could just put that in your keywords and in your title or subtitling, your description is like, cool, no on ranking for this, but like all algorithms they learn and get better.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
And so what they’re trying to say is they’re kind of aggregating a lot of search and when people search these things, they end up on this book and they purchase it. Right. And, and they’re going into the me metadata of the book and, and there’s a bunch of different things like that. So for me, strategic, like if you even look at the table of contents for my book, I’m thinking like I’m thinking in SEO and also in helpful content. Right. So if you see like we’ve got let’s see self-publishing versus traditional and publishing that’s chapter three, we’ve got how to hire and work with an editor that’s chapter nine designing your best selling book cover that’s chapter 11, chapter 12. How to format your book. Right. I, I mean, I could go on and on how to build, how to using a team to sell more books.
RV (26:21):
You’re choosing titles, like chapter titles that people would search for answer a question, same way you would construct a YouTube bid or something like that. Is this reverse, reverse engineer. What would someone be searching for? Are you saying that you, your hypothesis is that Amazon reads the book and can under no doubt the con yeah,
Speaker 2 (26:42):
Really. And, and I think it’s probably a tree, right? That we’re the top things are the keywords, your title and subtitle, your book description. And then I would guess like your back cover your editorial reviews and like maybe some reviews and stuff like that. But I think it pretty summer along that path that goes inside the actual book, because previously people were just gaming it and they were just keyword, stuffing, all the other stuff. So it’s like, Amazon’s gotta go in and say, right, what is this actually? And they’ve got a text file of the whole book, right. It’s if it’s
RV (27:14):
Self publish
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Kindle. Well, no I’m saying like the version, like, yeah, they’ve got a text file. And so it’s very easy for, to aggregate that and improve their search quality. And then that combined with all the other machine learning around what people are searching, what they’re clicking on.
RV (27:31):
Yeah. So, but title, I mean, it’s just the things you would think title subtitle, but there’s not, it’s not like on a webpage where you can go in the back and change your H one tags and your H two tags and update your image, tags and stuff like that. You can’t do that on Amazon book.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Not quite. I look at that as selecting my keywords. I look at that as like the actual, the structure of the blog post. Okay. The structure of the book. And then I look also look at that as you know, some of the things that you do on the page itself. Cause that’s another thing. I mean, my we’re getting the, I weigh into the weeds, but I mean, when I, your Amazon page, that’s the sales page for your book and people are either gonna come on there for a, a, you know, 15 seconds and leave or a minute and a half and buy. And so on this note I look at, and if you look at my my book page for publish, we’ve been testing and, but we’ve got they call it a plus content. So there’s extra pictures. There’s from the back cover, there’s video reviews.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
There’s a bunch of stuff that’s designed to keep people on the page because the longer that they’re on that page, the more likely they are to buy. And then there’s something like within that. Sure. That there’s a, an image. That’s how to write a book. There’s an image. That’s how to publish a, there’s an image that sell more books and I’m titling those images. I don’t know if that has anything, like, I don’t know if that does anything for my Amazon SEO or not. They won’t tell me, but but that keeps them on the actual page. And then makes it, makes the book stand out and makes them more likely to actually purchase the book.
RV (29:04):
I’m looking at your, I looking at your Amazon page. Yeah. From the publisher. You have pictures in there. Yeah. And that, again, those are things you can’t do when you’re tr you can, you can do them. If you traditionally publish, the problem is you’re not in control of it. You have to convince them to take the time to stop and go update your Amazon page. Meanwhile, they’ve got other authors who are selling, you know, bazillion books every week.
Speaker 2 (29:29):
Yeah.
RV (29:30):
That’s you
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Can tinker with that. Well, I’ll tell you R one of the things I’m trying to figure out right now Michael Bunge, senior wrote a book called the coaching habit. Great book had him on the self publishing school podcast. One thing he did his book page is really good. And I’m, I’m, I’ve got one of the guys on my team trying to figure out how we can do this right now. But is he uploaded a video? It’s a video from the merchant and he’s his, self-published that, I mean, that book sold million, if not millions of copies as well, but he’s got a video that’s from the author which I think is really clever. It’s right. Bef as you get to the reviews, cuz again, I’m trying to figure out how do I get this to jump off the page to where people say, oh, I I’m interested.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Like this stands out from the other books or other things that I’ve looked at and increasing that final mile kind of that conversion. So we haven’t figured it out yet, but I also encourage people to lead video reviews. And you’ll notice that when you’re on my book page, as well as there’s at least a few of them and th those and I, that’s a, that’s a hack, I think as well is leaving video reviews on other people’s books that are similar authors or SIM it’s. Hey, my name Chandler bowl. I wrote a book called published. I’d love to give this review, take the stairs. Right. And then that’s just a way where those videos are getting a lot of traffic because they’re prominent. And if I’m, if I’m someone scanning this, you don’t see it too often. So I think that’s kind of a hidden gem within the
RV (30:55):
It’s like a, yeah. A pattern like a pattern interrupt kind of a thing. Yeah,
Speaker 2 (30:59):
Exactly, exactly.
RV (31:00):
I was just, I was just looking at my Michael’s thing. That’s awesome. The yeah, I mean, I just, I think I just totally missed the boat on, on the review scenario. So when you,
RV (31:14):
Yeah, so, so, so when you get into, so you have your launch team, you put this together you gotta drive reviews. You have a simple my for doing that when it comes to promotion. Yeah, I believe that was, that’s the other part of this of course time and money. Yeah. You know, costs a lot relationships count for a lot. Right. A lot, a lot. Like even, I mean, that’s almost all we’re doing with our clients is we’re just constantly trying to introduce them to people that are sort of like, you know, in their same ballpark, you know, if you had to, if you had to do three things, when it comes to promotion and you were like, these are three things that I would do that, you know, maybe you don’t hear about that often. What, what comes to mind?
Speaker 2 (31:59):
Yeah. I would say the launch team, if you, if you do nothing else to do that I would say the second piece
RV (32:06):
Would be, I’ve never done that by the way. I’ve never done that for one, not for one of mine. We’ve done ’em for our, our clients, but yeah. Yeah. So that’s a good, good one. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
That’s unbelievably powerful. That’s that’s the highest and, and best. Then I would say, and this, I don’t know that this is gonna fulfill the intent of, of, of stuff that doesn’t get taught, but it’s tried, I mean, a virtual book tour, AKA, a bunch of podcast interviews. I mean, that is far and away, the biggest needle mover. And then the third piece is is building a pre-release list or building an email list. I mean, like, again, this is not earth shattering information, but those things tried and true work well. And then if you’re going big one thing I’ve had some success with and we had success with is I sent, you know, I sent you one of these influencer boxes. And so it’s just a fun little box. It has a copy of the book in it. And then you’ll probably notice if you remember from that letter, it was very much no obligation, cuz I hate when people send me a book and then they just like relentlessly follow up and it’s like, it’s like, oh this is a quid pro quo type deal where you just, so it was very much like, Hey, I’m sending this because I think you’ll love it.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
If you’re in this camp, go to this chapter. If you’re in, if you wanna use a book to grow your business, go to chapter 24, if you’re blah, blah, blah. So showing how it could be relevant to them and then saying, if you want to help, here’s two or three ways to do it. Right. Bring me on your podcast, take a picture with the book and post about it. Or, you know, I’m happy to give a, do a book giveaway to your audience or something like that. Right. So making it very clear how people can support similar to the, the, the, how they can leave a review, like very specifically saying, Hey, here’s how you can help. That’s worked well for me. And then, I mean, and then if we’re zooming out 30,000 foot is how do you strategically use the book to grow your business? Right? Because that’s, I mean, all that stuff is good to sell copies, but at the end of the day, most people who are listening to this probably wanna use a book to get more leads, sales, and referrals. And so structuring the book to do that and structuring the launch with that end in mind.
RV (34:14):
Well brand builders, group.com/sps for self-publishing school is the free training that Chandler put together. The book is called published, proven path from link page to 10,000 copies sold. You know, I think a lot of this stuff is simple, but what makes it hard is remembering all of it and doing it in the right order. And you’ve done a great job of checklisting some stuff out here I think to apply to anybody. And there’s not that many books. I mean, we, we created our bestseller launch plan course because it was like, nobody actually knows how to do this stuff. So there’s not that many resources. And this is, this is a great one. So check it out, y’all check out Chandler and so grateful for you, man. You’ve been so generous. Like this is super tactical stuff. You’re helping me like figure out things that we, we, we missed the boat on of completely. I mean, two thirds of everything you’re talking about, we’ve never been done. We’ve never done launch team. We’ve never done reviews. So we got, we got things that we could be doing and yeah. I just wish you, you and your team and your family all the best.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Thank you, Roy. Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much are taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand builders, group dot slash podcall brand builders, group.com/podcall. We hope to talk to you soon.
RV (36:05):
Executing book launches. One of my favorite things to talk about one of my favorite things to do, although it’s a lot of work you know, we’ve been through this so many times we’ve helped so many clients launch books. I mean, we had three clients at the New York times bestseller list last year. We have at least two clients that are gonna make a real run at it this year. And I, I mean, actually at least at least three, I can think of off the top of four. I can think of four off the top of my head brand builders, clients that are gonna make a run at the New York times list. But I, I, I love this conversation with Chandler because you know, it, it shows how there’s something you can, it shows you, it’s like, there’s something we can all do and you need to do it when, when you launch a book.
RV (36:51):
And I, and I’ll tell you this even though this conversation with Chandler was much more focused on people who have like, you know, a small all our platform, just like not as many followers and maybe not as, not as many like assets in terms of their direct reach and the number of people they can access. A executing a New York times bestselling launch is a lot of these same things, just at a bigger scale. Like we still do. We still do launch teams. And you know, launch teams are a big part of that, you know, reviews. The promotion is a huge part. You layer in a lot more, you, you have, you know, speaking as a component that we talk about and then you’ve got doing public seminars is a huge part of it. And so that, that enters into it.
RV (37:36):
And then you have like press and media, like tradit channel media is, is a huge part of it. And then, and then you have like podcasts then you have social media, then you have street launch team. And then you have like the whole mechanism of like, actually, you know, how do you get all the orders placed doing bulk sales and like, how do you get people to, to, you know, anyways, those are the things that we help, like some of our very high profile clients that you see on our website and stuff. A lot of them we’ve, we’ve helped do that, but you know, even though that’s a lot like, and there’s a lot there there is the, again, it’s just a greater, it’s just a greater magnitude of the simple things. A lot of the simple things talking about here with, with Chandler.
RV (38:23):
So, you know, my three takeaways, first of all, is just the launch team because th this, even though I’ve never had one, we’d never used one for our books. We ha it’s been a, it’s been a crucial part of like every launch that we have run for people. And that several of our friends who have, you know, move a lot of books that they have done. It’s just one of the things that you do and, and you gotta recruit people in. So you’re gonna give them some incentive to join, right? But it’s not rocket science. You do have to have a mechanism to do this, whether it’s a website or you’re just using like a Facebook group or whatever, but, you know, you give some incentive to join the launch team. And then the key to managing that launch team is to give them specific action items of exactly what to do every single week and in our a traffic strategies training, which is our phase two course phase two course, two training of our 12 part brand builder journey curriculum.
RV (39:26):
We, we teach affiliate launches and how to do affiliate launches and why affiliate launches matter. One of the reasons why that matters is because all, a lot of the mechanisms and the, the process and the protocol of running an affiliate launch is going to be very much emulated when you get to bestseller launch plan, which is our phase three course two and you know, much of what we’re talking about here. And so you need to, you need to, to know how to create assets for other people and how to keep them excited and how to hold them accountable and how to ask them to share things. And, and so that’s a huge part of the launch team, but you gotta, you gotta have that launch team and bring them in early and let them see behind the scenes and spend time building relationships with them.
RV (40:08):
And they’ll help you promote your book. They, they, they will. So that’s really huge. The second thing that that Chandler said, which this was newer to me, I, I mean, I’ve never heard it said like this, I thought this was so sharp the way he said it. Amazon is a search engine of buyers, whereas Google is a search engine of browsers. And that’s really true, right? I mean I mean, there is when you’re searching for something on Amazon, like you are searching to buy, you are not spending free time, like just searching around for no reason you go to Amazon to buy something. And that’s, yeah, I think YouTube specifically is a search engine of browsers. Like those are people just like searching for information. The there’s certainly a level of buying intent. You know, when you search on Google often too which is different from like you know, paper, click ads where you’re trying to, to shove an advertisement in front of somebody versus showing up when they, they do a search.
RV (41:18):
Amazon is, is definitely a next level of that. And so, you know, very similarly because of that, you have to think of your Amazon page is your sales page. So just like we would teach you to construct a sales page for your funnels. Of course, you know, our method for that is what we call the 15 P the 15 P of copywriting, which we teach inside of revenue engine. But like, those are the, you know, the words that you put on the page to get somebody to, to buy. And we talk about all the things that need to be on there. You know, the promised the, the, the, the promised the problem, the pain et cetera, cetera, as you work your way down and the order, well, your Amazon page is a sales page. And like for whatever reason, that never sunk in with me quite in the way it did in the moment that Chandler said that, and going, man, you need to optimize that page.
RV (42:10):
You know, you just gotta like pay 10 to it and, and think about what can I do to make this page more engaging? What can I do to keep, make it more valuable? What can I make it to, you know, what can I put on there to make it, you know, more user friendly and, and to encourage them making a decision, which leads to the third big takeaway for me, which was obviously a huge part of that conversation is which is review. You gotta get reviews. And I think, I mean, here’s the part that, like, I haven’t just missed the boat on reviews. I’ve missed the boat on Amazon altogether. Like, I haven’t even thought about optimizing anything related to my profile or the book itself or reviews, or even, you know, looking at my Amazon page, like other than popping in there once in a while, because we’re buying a copy and it’s just easier to send it to somebody through Amazon versus shipping it ourself, or, you know, something like that.
RV (43:05):
Or occasionally we’ll check like best seller rankings and stuff to see how, how the book is doing long tail, but to go, oh my gosh, like you gotta get reviews and all you have to do is ask for. And so my action item that I gave myself was to do, you know, Chandler calls it, this, the review sweep. I’m just calling, you know, I’m just calling this like the review sequence. And so we already have mechanisms built inside of both of our books that, that have people on opt in. And so I actually did the search between when I finished the interview with Chandler. And we have 2,102 people in our database, 2000 people in our database that we know bought the book, read the book, clicked on the assessment and completed the assessment. The meanwhile I have 723 reviews on Amazon that is crazy like 2100 people in the database that we know bought and only 700 reviews on Amazon.
RV (44:09):
And these are just the ones we know, like we have a huge database. I’m, I’m sure that we’ve got many more, many more people inside of the database who have bought the book. And I just, I’ve just totally missed the boat. So I you know, first wanted to identify the list. So I had to go like, you know, fortunately we’re very organized with how we keep our database and all of our tagging structure and all this, all this kind of stuff. So I was able to pull that up quickly, then I’m writing an email to all of these people. That is the subject line. Super duper quick question for you. And then I wrote this, this copy, Hey, you know, Hey, you know, name, thank you so much for buying a copy of my first book, take stairs and for completing our, our focused 40 self-assessment.
RV (44:51):
I have a quick question for you. 20, 22 actually marks the 10 year anniversary of the book, yada, yada, what were some of your biggest highlights from the take the stairs book? And we’re gonna send this out and then everyone that replies, we are going to reply back with a, a message. Oh, that’s so wonderful. Thank you for sharing that with me. Any chance you would leave a review, so we’re gonna do this because it needs to happen and it’s time it’s long overdue and yeah. So stay tuned. You know, I’ll probably by the time that this episode goes live, we will have done this and we will have data to report back to you, but, you know, that’s simple, like it’s, it’s simple things I think launching a book is it, it’s kind of like, you know, people say there’s death by a thousand paper cuts.
RV (45:42):
Well, launching a book is like success by a thousand micro steps. It’s it is doing all of these little things and they all add up to be a big thing, but it’s, it’s a lot of just little minute details like this that you, you have to, you have to build into your process. And of course, if you wanna learn more about that, we, one of our courses is called bestseller launch plan. We teach the full system, how do the bestseller list work? How do you get the book deal? What needs to be the book proposal, you know, how to negotiate advances how to write the book so that it sells what needs to be inside. How do you create the pre-sales? How do you do the pre-launch? How do you run, you know, all the orders through, how do you you know, what do you do on launch week?
RV (46:26):
What do you do with the media? What do you do, you know, for, for weeks two through eight, I mean, it’s, it’s just a monster. And it’s, it’s incredible. And of course, you know, if you’re a brand builders group, client, you already have access to that and we’ll walk you through it, or we’ve got, you can come to our live events. So you could check that out or just hit me up with questions. I’m happy to answer your questions on social media. If you’ve got questions about it, I’m, I’m happy to answer ’em, but yeah, so that what we’re doing, practical things, actionable things to learning them here. Watch, watch these launches y’all and, and, and pay attention. If you’re following me on social, we have some pretty massive book launches. We’re a part of, and I can’t, you know, release publicly who, who they are for, but they are huge.
RV (47:15):
And if you’re following me on social, once we get closer to the actual launch date, you’ll start to see us promoting these things. And you’ll, you’ll see who the people are that we’re working with, and you can follow ’em and, and watch it happen in real time. And those are big ones, but for yours, you, you, you start with what, you can get five people in your launch group, your launch team have ’em support, so you can do it. It’s, it’s all simple steps. They’re not easy, but they’re simple. And most of these ones actually are pretty quick. So you can make it happen and keep coming back every single week we’re sharing the goods, right? Like we got guests coming in, sharing you some of the best secrets for building your personal brand, helping you get your expertise out to the world. So you can become more well known and you can make more impact that’s it for this episode, we’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand podcast.
Ep 257: How To Set Your Coaching Prices with Mary Sobon
AJV (00:08):
Hey everybody. This is AJ Vaden here and welcome to another episode on the influential personal brand podcast. And I am specifically a excited for this episode because I get to talk to someone who I actually work with personally. So Mary has been my business coach for over a year. And so to get a chance to share her expertise with all of you is such a great honor and privilege, but let me give you just a little bit of her background. I can probably talk about and Rav about her for the next 30 minutes, but that’s not why you’re here. So I’ll make this short and sweet, but here are some things that I think is really amazing and some kind of sneak peek into what we’re gonna talk about on the show. Today is one, Mary has a very extensive executive corporate background in like fortune 50 companies, fortune 20 companies. I don’t even know like it’s extensive, but what I love most is she’s been able to take this amazing executive experience from these, you know, multi-billion almost probably trillion dollar companies and then apply it to small business and entrepreneurs like me. So I’ll get the benefit of all, all this worldly expertise that allows me to tailor it to my own business. But she’s worked with more than two organiza 200 organizations. Yeah. More than 2, 200, 200
AJV (01:34):
Organizations since she started her consulting firm, it’s called M two consulting here in Nashville. She works with EO the entre nos organization all over the world. She helps with people with mergers, acquisitions, exits high growth companies. And today she is here to share some of that expertise with our audience. And I’m so excited to have you, so Mary welcome.
MS (01:57):
Yeah, it is wonderful to be here, AJ. And again, it’s hard to believe that it’s already been a year boy time class, especially when the clients are great
AJV (02:06):
Or, or complicated either way.
AJV (02:09):
OK. So give everyone in the audience, just a, a high level background of your corporate world experience. And then when you left that, I guess that’s like over 15 years ago to what you’re doing now. Cause I think one of the things that will really resonate with our audience and our listeners as so many of the people that we work with are probably in a full-time job or in corporate job. And they’re trying to figure out, it’s like, how do I exit this to do this thing that I’ve always dreamed of whatever that may be. So since you’ve gone through that process from you really high up, I’m working with these massive companies to go, no, I’m gonna call it a day and I’m gonna go do my own thing. So give us a little bit of that story.
MS (02:49):
Yeah. And I would tell AJ, I don’t know that I’m gonna be the most helpful role model on this because like a lot of entrepreneurs I actually started as an entrepreneur because I lost my job. The biggest company that I worked for is McDonald’s corporation. I was a regional marketing manager for them and I was with them at a pretty interesting time in, in terms of learning a lot of things, leadership, finance, because they were probably at, at one of the worst points of their professional, all trajectory. And they went through their single ever reorganization that the corporation has ever had. I was working in Nashville in a field office that was servicing about 500 restaurants. And interestingly enough, I’m probably gonna get in trouble for saying this. They closed our office, even though we were number one in the country in terms of improved sales transactions, because we had an inexpensive lease buyout.
MS (03:43):
And I guess when you’re looking at 40 regional offices around the country with a lot of space that matters, but I had a choice. I had a choice to transfer to another city with McDonald’s. And at the time I thought I was gonna go, and then I, then I actually, if found out my dad was really, really, really sick. And I knew that if I left Nashville and went to another city and, and they were gonna help me kind of commute back and forth because my significant other was here. I knew that I couldn’t be taking care of all three things at one time. And so I decided to leave. And I went out and I did some consulting in marketing for a little while, which is really the worst job on the planet. And because small businesses and I’m talking really small businesses, don’t understand why you can’t get a story on their company in the New York time.
MS (04:36):
And so I did that for about a year and it was, it was pretty profitable, but not much fun and then sort of accidentally. And I think this is the thing that it really stood out for me in my story that I want to make sure other people pay attention to. I met one person who opened a door for me that led to possibility after possibility after possibility. And I’m gonna give her a shout out. That person was actually Julie May who, who ran an it company here in Nashville. She was a member of EO entrepreneurs organization. And she said, wow, our organization is kind of a mess and you seem kind of smart and you know how this works. Can you come in and help us? And I had no idea at that point, what they needed or how to do it, but just went in and did the job.
MS (05:25):
Mm. And it went pretty well. And I did my best. And if I look back, I would be appalled at what I did wrong, what I did silly, but I think the most important thing is that I did it. And that led to me meeting different people who were also in need of, of people to come in and just sort of help them with business coaching. It’s an interesting thing to think about when I started, I was the only performance coach that I knew. I wasn’t even a performance coach. I was a facilitator who sort of did some coaching incidentally with that, but now almost 20 years later, you at any room you’re in, you’re in a room with two or three other coaches. So it makes a whole lot of sense that we are, we live in a world in which things are so complex.
MS (06:10):
And so interconnected, you need a partner who can help you sort of sort through things. You just wanna to make sure that that partner has something that’s really valuable for you. And for me, that thing is scaling. I have spent more time working with entrepreneurs, scaling high growth companies. These are companies that are growing 200% a year, 500% a year, and have seen pretty much all of the good, the bad, the pains, the joys of, of that. And it just excites me. It excites me to this day. So I work still with entrepreneurial companies who are focused on growth. I work with entrepreneurial teams, even in larger corporations who are interested still in doing things smart and fast and growth. And when you do that, boy, you never stop learning. And that would be maybe the second thing that I learned is that, man, if you’re coaching, you are a full-time learner in addition to being a full-time coach, because whatever you are working on today, it is gonna be disrupted by something maybe three to six months from now at the most. So that’s kind of my journey in a nutshell, I’ve been doing it for a long time, man. There are a lot more people on the space and boy, I gotta stay sharp if I wanna continue to be successful.
AJV (07:25):
Okay. Well the very first thing I heard and I think this is really important is the importance of saying yes. Yeah. Even if you’re not completely ready and I’m just like, we were talking about this a little bit before, or we started, and I didn’t even know you were gonna say this, but it’s like in your experience, how many people do you think that you’ve worked with who simply don’t succeed because they don’t just do it.
MS (07:49):
So more than 80% of problems in businesses come from people not being willing to sort of lean into the things that are really available to them. That will be really helpful. I was just on a zoom call with a client right before we jumped onto this podcast. And she was talking about the struggle that she’s having with her team in data. And she said, data makes them uncomfortable. And so every time we get busy, they use that as an excuse to say, well, we, we don’t really have to look at the data. We’d have to work, try to work with the data, cuz it’s hard for us. And, and I was guilty of that as well. It was really hard for me to put myself out there. I engaged a sales coach early on and I did my pitch for him. And he said, Mary, not only have you not sold me, you’ve given me a lot of reasons not to use you as consultant.
MS (08:41):
And I did it because I was scared. Mm. And the one thing that I could offer that made me feel so much better about everything is that as a coach, it’s about fit. And you’re not gonna be a fit for everybody. And so being open to the idea that you’re gonna have to meet a lot of people, a lot of those people are not gonna be a good fit for you in order for you to find the people that are is just part and parcel of it. And now I used to go out kind of desperate to you. I wanted to land the business and now I go out and I say, I’m so excited to meet you. And we may or may not be a fit, but more than anything, I just wanna have a lovely conversation and get to know this really great person on the other side of the table.
MS (09:22):
And I get to do that because I’ve been doing this for a long time. And I get when you’re starting, it is really scary. And, but the thing that I often coach my high growth teams on is you gotta bet on yourself. Like it’s okay for you to get involved with something that you don’t know how to do. As long as you are willing to bet on yourself to figure it out. A great example of this was way back when a, a, a, a company had an RFP out to go do something around high performing teams. And my husband came across it and said, you should do this. And I said, I don’t know anything about high performing teams or how you teach it. And he goes, yes, but you’re really good at figuring things out. So maybe you trust yourself. And that started a 15 year relationship with that particular company.
MS (10:10):
But at the very onset, the first sentence out of the guy’s mouth was, well, we’re talking to six or seven experts it, and I thought I’m cooked. So I’m just done. But as we talked, I realized, again, it was about fit. It was about my ability to understand them and listen to him much more than it was about any of my bonafides or whatever model I had. And I would say that’s true for coaching. In general, as you’re starting your practice, if you make it a about you and how smart you are, that’s kind of helpful if you make it about them and making them feel seen and being smart about helping them to know what they already know, man, that’s valuable. It took me much longer to learn that than I wish I had. That’s so
AJV (10:53):
That’s so insightful. Cause I think, I think for most people, and I can at least speak for myself. It’s like any time where I don’t think I’m a good fit, it’s, I’m totally focused on myself. Yeah. And it’s like, at the end of the day, it’s like, who knows and who cares? It’s it? Who I don’t wanna do things that aren’t fun and I don’t wanna work with people. I can’t help. So if I just take that approach and so for that person, who’s rather just started out or their in growth mode or their scale and eight figure coaching. This is wherever they are. How, what would you say are some best practices of figuring out how you figure out who’s the right fit for you? Cause I think a lot of coaches and I can speak for myself for a lot of years, worked with a whole lot of clients that I didn’t wanna work with because I wasn’t clear on exactly who was the fit for me.
MS (11:38):
Yes. And so this is the, maybe the one part where away from clients, you wanna understand how you are very differentiated from anyone else who’s coaching. And, and there’s a weird thing because again, there are a lot of coaches out there and there, there are coaches who coach from technical expertise and there who are, there are coaches who work much closer to for lack of a better word therapy life coaches who just wanna be there for you. And you can find a lot of both. I think the key is to understand in yourself one what, what you are really, really, really gift that that other people may not be. And so for me, early on, early on, early on, early on one thing that I knew that I was pretty gifted at was conflict. And in my mind, conflict, isn’t more mad at each other or hostility.
MS (12:25):
It’s like, Ooh, we don’t agree. We’re in different places on this. And you know, as luck would have it, I just happen to have some gestalt training before I met EO who values the use of this idea of Al and we’re in that world, there is no conflict. There’s only people in different places which allowed me to come into some situations with an approach that felt later easier. This isn’t the end of the world. Nobody’s right. Nobody’s wrong. Let’s just go. And so that was helpful for me to learn that easy early on, cuz that led me into high growth is chop full of conflict. And so I had a lot of opportunities to work with bigger corporations and I know big corporations and this kind of maybe gets to your point, AJ. But I also know that I don’t wanna do work. That doesn’t go and I don’t wanna work in the bureaucracy. I don’t want to sit in meetings and talk for the sake of talking. And so by definition, that’s screened out almost every large corporation. I have an utter respect for the fact that that building consensus and working things through needs to take place. It’s just not fast enough for me. Oh. And so that, yeah.
MS (13:38):
Yeah. And so I think that I always encourage my clients when they’re thinking about the clients to think about the work that they’ve done that has made them happiest and to think about the people in that work that made them the happiest and what qualities the work and the people had. And so for me, it’s, you have to be honest, you have to be a little vulnerable and I don’t mean woo woo. Vulnerable. I mean, you have to be open about the fact that there are things that you need to learn, grow do. And I’m fine with just about everything else. Like I’m good with people who have very strong personalities who have tempers who have a lot of things, but what I knew I wasn’t good at is people who just wanted to make the conversation singular. And so I got there pretty quickly by looking at the work and saying where, to your point, AJ, where am I happy in the work?
MS (14:28):
And where is the work that I come home feeling fatigued and kind of down on myself and really doubting myself as a, as a, as a coach. And so in doing that, I realized I need smaller firms who are moving quickly and who were willing to be honest with themselves about what their challenges were and for anybody else, who’s just starting her out or in the middle of it and is looking for a refocus, where is the work that you have had the best results and that gives you the most energy and who was in that work and what were they like? I might flip, I might turn the tables on you AJ and say, well, how did you learn about clients that were good for brand builders or not?
AJV (15:09):
Yeah. You know, it’s so interesting is as soon as you were talking, my very first thoughts went back to, you know, the first 15 years of my professional career as we were building our previous business coaching, training consulting and speaking. And I think one of the things that I realized during that tenure, which made brand builders group so much easier is I got super clear on what my natural strengths were, but that did not happen organically. It was almost forced by, by having so many clients for so long that just burned me out. Yeah. And it wasn’t until I think I went to a conference or I had a coach or something where I really said that, what do I want to be doing? And I knew, I knew for a really long time what I didn’t wanna be doing, but I wasn’t focused on what I wanted to be doing. And I feel like for me, it’s like, I was clear on what I didn’t want, but it took a lot of focus and effort for me to get really clear on what I did want. And I think for me, what I discovered in this process, it’s like my superpower is to be able to come into it. It’s a a blessing and a curse, really, if you think about it, but it’s a, it’s my ability to come into any single situation, any room, any, anything, and immediately see what’s wrong.
MS (16:26):
Yeah.
AJV (16:27):
Yeah. Probably think it wonderful. I, your team loves you. But it’s like any situation I can immediately go, that’s how you make it better. Yeah. And I, I started attracting clients who wanted that type of feedback who wanted that type of directive, that type of momentum, because I just remembered my sales calls. I’m like, listen, if you don’t want someone to come in and tell you what to make better, I’m not the fit for you because I’m never going to be like, it’s great. I’m just never gonna do that for you. But until I figured that out and it really took 10 years, so it shouldn’t take everyone else that long like take, you know, lessons from this, but it wasn’t until then that I was like, I actually really love my clients because they were fast paced action oriented. I didn’t have to follow up. I didn’t have to hold ’em accountable. They were action takers because they knew, but by the next time I talked to him, I was gonna have three more things.
MS (17:17):
Nice. So people who were happy and people that would tell me people who were happy to be pushed. Yeah. Cause that’s not everybody. Right. And so again, yeah, it’s just, but I, at the beginning of my career on this, I wish I did a much better job of sort of documenting how the work went and because you would get there faster. And so if you are just out today, document your clients, what is working about this client? What do I not love about this client? And as you said that AJ, it reminded me of something that really helped me from a long time ago, there’s a, there’s a gentleman named hum cloud who does sort of these back of the cocktail cartoons that are mini lessons in business. And he does a lot of work on culture now. And one of the things, one of the ones that really stood out for me is he said that, you know, when we think about work, you have this sort of, this ven diagram of work that is really sexy and fun.
MS (18:07):
And then that pays you a ton of money. And he said, people who are starting out have a tendency to think that that ven diagram completely overlaps that all your work should be super sexy and grow your brand and, you know, be wonderful to do and pay you a lot of money at the same time. And that’s a short road to unhappiness because what you realize every time. And I think you probably realized is that, is that there are clients who you adore and there are clients who pay you incredibly well. And the number that are a 10 on both of their scales is actually relatively few. And that’s okay.
AJV (18:43):
Yeah. One of the things that I started reminding myself of when we started brand builders grew what should I like almost almost four years, which feels like yesterday and 15 years ago at
MS (18:54):
The same time and a hundred years ago at the same time
AJV (18:56):
Time. But I said, if I wouldn’t want to coach you for free, then I shouldn’t coach you at all.
MS (19:02):
Yeah.
AJV (19:03):
It’s like, if I, if I wouldn’t wanna do this without making money, then now, you know, 15, 20 years later, I’m in a position you that’s clearly not. I would take anyone in the beginning. For a very long time, I was like, whatever it is you want I’ll, I can do it. I’ll figure it out. But now it’s like, if I, if I didn’t wanna coach you for free, then I shouldn’t coach you at all. And I don’t think that’s how we start. But for me now it’s more about mission and passion of going. It’s like, I wanna be able to do this without having to only do it because you pay me. So it’s like the more I can find those people, the naturally the happier I am and the happier my clients are.
MS (19:43):
Yeah. Love that. But it takes a little bit of time, right? Because you immediately think it has to be bid to those things and to start. And I think that you’re onto something that’s really, really important also, AJ, as you start and, and my view on this shifted a little bit, but not too much. And I’m sure your has, but it, yours has as well, but it is the idea of what is my business about am I in it for the experiential point of, I wanna love what I do. I want to have a blast with everyone that I work with is the purpose of my business to create financial freedom so that I can go out and do whatever I wanna do go climb a mountain or take a month off or take three months off. And it’s kind of related to that thing, but I have always chosen the experiential over the money and that has been great, but also not because when I get too happy with people, I don’t want them to not like me.
MS (20:36):
And so one of the biggest challenges I’ve had as a coach is how do you take people’s money up and learning how to have that conversation was really tough. And I’m sure that you had to do the same thing. Yeah. Okay. But it occurs to me that you were on the same side of that equation, which is, I know what I want my business to do. I want the work to give me energy and make me happy first. And so I’ll take a little less money to do that. Like you don’t have to pick between the two, but it’s helpful to understand. I know other coaches that are like I’m in it to make money. And I do a great job deliver a great service, but the work feels a little different for them. And they get to do a wider space of clients because their needs are different.
AJV (21:14):
It’s such an important distinction for anyone who’s in this space to anyone who’s in this industry of being really clear of like, what are your goals of being in this space? Because that really does clearly distinguish your market and what you’re going after. So that actually brings up a really good question because I know that this comes up in our community all the time is people don’t know how to charge. Right. They undervalue their services. They don’t know how to charge. They don’t know when to do price increases. And I, I find this for both businesses and personal service alike. So both on a coach side and then also on a individual who coaches businesses like any tips or advice or experience shares around, how do you determine what to charge and when your prices should go up or come down, or like, how, how do you do that?
MS (22:06):
Yeah. And but prices the stickiest wicket for all businesses of us sizes. Anytime anybody’s working on pricing strategy, I’ll show you some unhappy people, cause it’s really hard and there are no real right answers on this. But for coaches, it’s actually pretty simple. Most coaches start off by either way overvaluing their, their services or way undervaluing the, our services. And so you’re gonna have to make a choice early on as to whether you go with a retainer model. Am I gonna say it’s X number of dollars a month and we’re gonna make the most of that, or is it a delivery fee for delivery, which is for every hour that I coach you, I get money that there are challenges with both to begin with though. It is easier to get people to sign on for a fee for delivery. It is also easier to make the value of a fee for delivery visible when you’re starting out, when you’re on a retainer and you send a very big number to an entrepreneurial CEO, they’re like, what is all this money for it?
MS (23:06):
Cuz I sure didn’t see it. I spent an hour with Mary, but she’s got $7,000 on here and say, what is, what is she doing that way? And so I find that it’s probably a good idea to try to sell both, but if you’re selling a retainer to make sure that the value of that retainer is visible and defined, not just, I promised to be there between 10 and and 20 hours, it would literally be the, to give them a sense of I’m advancing these things for you. On that, the second thing that I learned is I’m just gonna be, I’m gonna get in trouble for this. My pricing is highly aligned with how easy and fabulous I think you are to work for.
MS (23:47):
That is probably not a great and scientific way to do it, but there are things that I value. Like if you never cancel, if you, I, I do fee for delivery. I’ve always found that just simpler, easier. I’m happier. But if you always show up when you’re supposed to, if you’re not always moving your schedule around or, or, or canceling, if you actually do something with the work, like just like you AJ. And if you share with me that you think what I’m doing is valuable, you get a discount from me and mostly it’s a discount in, in terms of, I’m not gonna raise your rates as we go. That’s fascinating. Yeah. So that’s an well, and then the other part of it is where people always, if you’re a great client, it’s kind of, there’s an, there’s an analogy with this, with a rental house, which is they say, if you find a great tenant who pays all the time and doesn’t trash the house and doesn’t have pets, you never raise their rent because you never want them to leave.
MS (24:42):
And I think that’s kind of how I feel about the clients that I love of. And I have worked for, you know, it’s funny, like you say, we’ve been working together for a year. The number of clients that I have been associated with, but for more than a decade is more than I cared to count. It’s a great thing. But part of that is because I value them and I don’t, I’m not always taking their money up. The second thing that I will say is take your money up on every next client. Like, as you are building your business, if you got somebody to say yes for this amount, try taking it up a little bit and see if you can get somebody to say yes to the higher amount. And if a couple of people say yes to that, try taking it up to the next level.
MS (25:20):
Until you get people who are one in four might say, oh, it’s a little pricey or I don’t know, or just not get back to you. But if everyone is just like, oh, that’s fine, that’s fine. That’s fine. You probably have room to go north a little bit. And that’s what I have done. So I actually have a pretty big spread in, in, in what I charge. But it says, I said I’m a little wacky that way. However my husband, who is always telling me double your double, your price, I’m like here outta your mind for one thing. But secondarily, I spend an unbelievably small amount of time in business development because I’m not great at it. And so word of mouth and people who stay with me allow me not to have to spend on average. I wanna say beginning coaches spend 25 to 33% of our time developing business.
MS (26:10):
I will joke that sometimes clients are paying me to develop business cuz I’m in a coaching session and they’re telling me about somebody else that they wanna introduce me to. Yeah. and so that was my strategy was make people really happy, generate good referrals, good word of mouth. And try to keep prices a little bit lower. Everybody’s gonna be a little bit different, but if you are taking your prices at the key is you have to show value. You have to show here’s what you are getting and why absolutely why it’s worth it for you to have this time. And that’s something that with good clients, they’ll tell you this is valuable or if it’s not valuable and boy, if I go too long without somebody saying, Hey, that was valuable, I gotta check in and say, Hey, is the work aligned to what you need?
MS (26:52):
But on the, on the pricing front, I have found the easiest way to take prices up is to do it with new clients. And when you have to do it, don’t don’t nickel and dime take the significant price increase so that you only have to do it every couple of years. That is absolutely a best practice in our line of work is people don’t want their fee. They don’t want the annual renewal of your fee went up as if we are Comcast or Netflix these days. And every once in a blue moon say, Hey, I I’m just, I’m adjusting to meet the, the business standard really helpful to invent the standards of our industry. Those are I’m adjusting my these cause.
AJV (27:31):
So many. Those are so many good things. I just wanna make sure we don’t skim over some of those because this is a really challenging thing for most people. I don’t, it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. If you’re in a service space industry where you’re charging fees it’s a big deal. Especially in this coaching training, speaking consulting world. And there’s three things that you said that I think are really worth, just commenting on is. And honestly, one of them is this, this pricing model based on the ease of which it is to work with you. And as you are hourly, it’s like if I have to track you down and follow up with you to show up for my calls, I’m going to charge you more because you cost me more.
MS (28:11):
That’s exactly right.
AJV (28:12):
That’s brilliant. That’s so smart and creates more accountability. I would think in terms of, Hey, listen, if you’re difficult to work with, I have to charge more because you’re holding up space on calendar.
MS (28:25):
Yep. That’s exactly right. That’s so
AJV (28:28):
Smart. Yeah. And I think too, the thing that I love about that is also going, I love that there is a differentiation and although it’s like, I think it kinda like motivates clients to wanna be better clients.
AJV (28:42):
Right. And it’s like, who doesn’t wanna be motivated to be a, a better client of going, wow. If like I’m a really good client then like I would get like locked in at this like grandfathered rate. Like I need to be a good client. And I think there’s like some like reverse psychology. That’s actually really, really beneficial in that. Cuz I think for most people they’re human nature is, well I wanna be, I wanna be a good client too. Not, not, I think most people go into this going, I wanna be a giant pain in the ask for you and then see if you can make it work and
MS (29:09):
Amen. I mean, and you have to have some trust there. Like I don’t say that to everyone. I say that to clients that I really like, and, and it is, it also helps them to understand, Hey, you get a little special treatment, which makes them want to be better clients. I
AJV (29:23):
So smart. So interesting. Never heard that pricing. My I’ll ever love that. So good.
AJV (29:30):
The second thing that I think is really good is this concept of being grandfathered in to pricing. Yeah. Like I think that makes a big deal. I think about some of my longest term consulting clients in my former life. And it’s because I didn’t just raise the prices for raising the prices. I’m like, you’ve been amazing. You’ve been six and seven for your clients year after year. I’m not gonna raise prices just for the sake of raising prices. I’m gonna keep the prices the same. So our relationship will continue. And I, I, you know, I, I can’t tell you how many vendors that I’ve been contacted by. I, since the beginning of this year, letting me though, they’re just doing a standard across the board, 10% price increase and I’m going for what? Like based on what inflation market.
MS (30:12):
Yeah.
AJV (30:12):
And I’m just sitting here going, okay, well, should I increase our, you know, it’s like, and those things where it’s like, and then, you know, Roy and I had a long to sits a lot of discussion around, well, should we be doing that? And then we just set back and we’re like, no, we don’t feel like that’s right. For where we are. And so it’s like one of the things that we’ve kind of doubled down on is we’re not gonna raise prices, but we’re going to be doing new things to increase value without raising prices. And there’s two different ways of going about at it. And it’s like, if you really wanted me to stay and to refer you business, which I would happily do, it’s like raising the prices for no reason, probably isn’t the thing to do. So we’ve taken a counter approach and we’ve added three new, huge benefits to our membership platform going, and we’re not raising prices. Our goal this year is to increase value.
MS (31:01):
So I just love that. And in fact, when I was at McDonald’s, we used to use this very simple but powerful formula that said value equals price divided by experience. Oh, and the idea was to say, as long as you’re providing an experience, that seems better than the price you’re winning on the value score. So you didn’t always have to take prices down. You had to make the experience better. And at the same time was the key to driving value. So what you and Roy are doing is just so smart because it does allow you to but yeah, but it does. And I think that it, so one thing again, that I would, that I would share with, with people who are in this doing, but we do, and even for you guys too, AJ and worry is something that I do and started doing several years ago that it took me forever to do.
MS (31:50):
And this is a, a shout out to a very smart guy named David Baker, who does a lot of writing about business models for advertising agencies. And I got dialed into him on one time ago. But one thing that he says is if it you’re doing it for free, you still gotta put it on the invoice because there’s no way for people to understand the value of it unless they see it. And so I would put it in as a, this line item with a no charge, or I would actually put it in at full boat and then, and then cut it it back out. I’d do it both ways, but helping people to see the, these are things that we are doing that are valuable for you is super, super important.
AJV (32:29):
I love
MS (32:29):
That. Cause they don’t, we do Abstract work, right? Like it’s its, it’s not, it’s not holding something in your hand.
AJV (32:36):
Oh yeah. Out of sight, out of mind, what have you done for me lately? It’s easy to forget like all those things.
MS (32:42):
Right. and so even again, like the last we finish this up by saying, it never felt really great about either one of those things. And so just two weeks ago I found out the thing that I love that I put out invoices. And so now it says, here’s the service with my comp, here’s the thing I did with my compliments. That is like, this is for you. This isn’t even a, a line item. I want you to know that I did this as a little gift for you. Oh that’s. And so as you and Roy are doing things that are really value added, making sure that you find ways to share those that feel good. Yeah. And is an important part for anybody to who delivers coaching consulting as a service.
AJV (33:23):
Oh, that’s so good because it’s true. It’s like, people don’t know what they’re paying for. If you don’t tell them what they’re paying for. Right. And what they’re paying. And especially
MS (33:31):
If you have multiple people, there’s in my line of work, there’s no way for a CEO to know that, Hey, I had a one off coaching session just for the good of the cause with one of your people, unless it says bonus coaching session with my compliments. That’s so good. Yeah.
AJV (33:44):
That’s awesome. That’s so great. And then the third thing you said that I also love because I think this is, I think people do this more than anything else is they never raise their prices. But it’s, I love this. It’s, you know, I would liken it to like client demand. It’s like the more clients you have, it’s like, you have to be raising the prices be, and that’s just, there’s only a limited supply of how many hours you have to deliver. So the less hours you have the higher, the prices must go. So the earlier I think to me, it’s like the earlier you have clients in, they should have lesser rates to some degree because you more ample time. But as that time gets sucked away, prices must increase cuz the value of your time is innately higher.
MS (34:27):
Yep. And on that, I think a couple of things that are important to remember one of which is you can do an introductory rate. Like you can do it. Let’s try very much like what you guys do. Here’s a preview. Here’s a way for you to try me before we get locked in. And people actually love that. Like when I’m selling coaching, I always say to people, well, the best way for you to understand it is let’s just do it. Like let’s just have a coaching session. And if you’re like, yes, that was great. Then we can do next steps. And if you’re like, that was awesome, but you’re coming intense. But then we’re probably not a good fit and great too. But it saved me from doing a lot of pretend work. I’m like, why not just do a little bit of the work and let them see it?
MS (35:10):
And so that I think is something that is important to know that you can also say to people, Hey, we can do my usual rate is like, you gotta know what your actual prevailing rate is. My usual rate is this to us. If we can get to know each other, I’m willing to do three months at this and then we can reevaluate. That’s an okay way to get started. And so that I think is an important thing is that you have some flexibility and don’t publish your rates would be a big one to not publish. Yeah. Your rates. I mean, I go back to you triggered something that was really helpful for me. And I don’t remember who this was. This might also have been David Baker, but I don’t think so, but I ran, I ran across a great formula that said, if you’re working in corporate America and you wanna go out and consult the number that you need to make in terms of breaking, even with your old salary is somewhere between 1.5 and two, just to stay where you were earning your salary in corporate America. Because you don’t think about things like, well now I’m paying my own portion of says social security and now I’m responsible for my own health insurance. And now I have hours that I have to spend an administration that I can’t bill you, but still are a cost center. And so when you set your rates, you have to account for all those things the same way that they do when they set a salary in a corporate world.
AJV (36:35):
Oh totally. Those are such wise experienced comments to anyone. It doesn’t matter if you’re just getting started or you haven’t established coaching consulting practice. Like those are things that so often never get discussed. Like they don’t actually make it to the conversation of how do we set prices. And so funny, cuz this wasn’t an intended part of my interview with you, but this is so incredibly valuable. And all right. So I have just one other quick question, but before I do that I’m gonna put this in the show notes, but when it comes to social media, if people wanna go and connect with you where’s the best place on social media for people to connect with you
MS (37:15):
That’ll be, I’m too consulting on LinkedIn. So I’m an I’m, I’m not young. I’ve been doing this for a long time and had a career before that. And so I have found that for me and really professional social media is my bag. And, and so yeah, reaching out to me through LinkedIn is the best way and to get to me. And just one thing I am so grateful for just the journey that I’ve had and the amount of amazing experiences and fabulous clients that I’ve had that I always wanna help other coaches along the way. And so if anybody wants to reach out with a specific question around pricing or client management, or what did you do about this, please, please, please take advantage of that as coaches, AJ, I’m just gonna share this with you, cuz I think it’s important and know I actually think brand builders, is that a big part of the solution to this coaches don’t have community?
MS (38:07):
Mm, my husband is a political consultant. There’s like 9,000 political consultant bashes a year where they all go together and party it up and celebrate each other. And if you’re a coach that one of the surprising things for me was how lonely it was and how little community there actually is for coaches. And I think that brand builders is actually finding that part of their mission is to create a safe places for coaches to come together and to share. But also just as someone who is a little bit down the PI here, I am so happy to share my experience. If it’s helpful for anyone that just reach out to me at Mt. Consulting on LinkedIn or Mary, so on LinkedIn if I can help you, I will.
AJV (38:50):
Aw. So awesome. It’s why we love you so much and I’ll put all of in the show notes so generous and you might need to prepare yourself. You might be
MS (38:59):
That OS well though, like again, it’s an honor and man, I’m just so grateful.
AJV (39:04):
Oh, that’s so generous. It’s so nice. Okay. Well here’s my last question. And this is like totally has nothing to do with anything other than my own personal curiosity. But I would say and this is connected to this world of coaching that we’re in. But what would you say has been the, your favorite, your most favorite part about being a coach over the last 20 years?
MS (39:30):
So the, the, the obvious answer, right? Like the existential answer, it is such a gift to watch someone change. It is such a gift to be able to watch the light bulb go off in an aha moment, perhaps more importantly. It’s so awesome. And interestingly enough, I didn’t have children, but sometimes I’m like, Ooh, this must be like what it’s like with a kid where you watch your kid figure out how to tie their shoes at a, a sophisticated high level, but to be able to watch people access particularly their own self agency. And that is my favorite part because what I have found with most people is we give up so much of our agency when we are in trouble. When we have problems, we tend to go, it’s all this stuff around me and I’m stuck. And if we just turned inward just a little bit and said, Hey, actually I have more than I need to get out this.
MS (40:24):
And watching people access that part of themselves, cuz then they have it forever in everything. It doesn’t matter what they’re doing. If they’re like, oh, I can figure this out. And that’s pretty much hands down. My favorite part of that for myself if you took the clients away from it, I would say my favorite thing is how much it requires you to stay current. Oh, okay. I can’t think of another business where you do not have the luxury of relaxing and I will share with you that I meet a lot of people who are my age and I’m like, wow, you’ve had pretty much the same job for the last 15 years. And I’d be happy some weeks with having the same job for 15 minutes. But man, it keeps you young mentally. Like there, everyone is talking about the need to keep learning as a way to say young mentally. So that’s my favorite part about selfishly.
AJV (41:13):
Oh, I adore you so much special conversation with so many nuggets and so many awesome tips and best practices. Mary, we love you. And I don’t, I, I don’t know if people caught this, like I’ve had the pleasure of having Mary as my coach. And I mean, it’s like, I, I speak for that. It’s like, I, I know sometimes you say it’s like, wow, just wondering if you still wanna continue. I’m like what, what, what do you mean not be don’t, you’re have to be brave enough to ask sometimes it’s true and I can totally vouch. It’s like when you find that right coach, and this is where coaches out there and finding your clients, it’s like, it’s a really magical, it’s a really magical. And so be intentional with your clients, be intentional with who you do work with because it, it impacts you too, so that thank you so much. Everyone else stay tuned to the next episode on influential personal brand,
Speaker 3 (42:07):
Hey, brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for taking the time to check out this interview as always, it’s our honor to provide it to you for free and wanted to let you know there’s no big sales pitch or anything coming at the end. However, if you are someone who is looking to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and get to know you a little bit and hear about some of your dreams and, and visions and share with you a little bit about what we’re up to to see if we might be a fit. So if you’re interested in a free strategy call with someone from our team, we would love to hear from you. You can do that at brand buildersgroup.com/podcall brand builders, group.com/podcall. We hope to talk to you soon.
AJV (42:55):
All right. Well, welcome back. Y’all welcome to the recap episode of my conversation with Mary Soin. I love her so much. She is just so full of wisdom and experience. And as my own personal business coach, I was so excited to have her on here and I get the privilege of not just recapping our conversation, but also sharing just some powerful insights of things that she has taught me in terms of what, what do you provide really as a coach? And it’s interesting because as someone who considers yourself in the coaching industry and the coaching business, it’s what we do at brand builders group and personal branding. But it’s also really important that I have a coach to constantly get that different perspective for myself. And so there’s a couple of things here that I thought were so insightful for anyone who is in the coaching industry.
AJV (43:51):
And here are the couple of things that I think is really insightful is one. How do you set your prices? I don’t think a lot of people talk about this, cause I don’t really think a lot of people know how to do it. And I love the conversation that we morphed into on our call on our interview. Because that wasn’t, the intent had that naturally came up and we just went with it. But here’s a couple of takeaways from how to set your price and that think are really valuable. And then I can speak to as Mary, as my own business coach, right. One I think this was really fascinating. There’s two ways of looking at this, right? There is a, or really three ways. There is hourly, there is retainer and then there’s project and that’s how I would kind of lump these together.
AJV (44:32):
And on a, on an hourly, it actually puts a lot more work on you because you’ve got to track all of those per client. But then on top of that I think a lot of times I’m going, well, what if I don’t use, what if I don’t need these? And then she gets booked up, right? And I’m thinking like specifically of like how I’ve been as a customer, it’s like, I feel pressure of going well, if I just book hourly and I’m not on your schedule when I need you, are you gonna be available? Right. And for any of you who have ever been in counseling or therapy or, or life coaching, it’s like, no, when I need you, I need you. And if you’re not available well, that is not really helpful for me. So there’s pros and cons on a customer’s per on a customer perspective of doing it hourly.
AJV (45:15):
Because then the pro is, it’s like it’s cost manageable. Right. but for you as a coach, it’s a lot more work. It’s a lot more tracking of going now. I have to track and prove and document every single hour that I was with your organization or with you. So first one is hourly. Okay. Second one is retainer, right? Pros and cons to that one too, because on a customer’s perspective, I’m going, well, I want you to show me what you did for this retainer. Right. I paid you $3,000 for last month. What’d you do? I wanna know. And so there’s, again, a lot of tracking and reporting on that. There’s clearly a lot more security on the coaches side for pricing, right. Because you can plan out ahead and there’s less tracking. But then there’s again, extra documentation, right? So there’s, there’s always gonna be pros and cons to this, but I would say as a coach a project or a retainer model, I would blend my way to that more to quickly.
AJV (46:15):
Except for if you are just in that one, on one space and then maybe it’s the hourly. But I think the benefit of some of this in a retainer perspective is it allows you more opportunity to provide more value. And so now you have to figure out what that retainer pricing is. And maybe that retainer pricing is $500. Maybe it’s a thousand, right. Instead of going, Hey, just tell me when you need me. It’s like, no, we’re just gonna set up. It’s like, we’re gonna do two calls, three calls a month. One is for you. One is for your team. You can set it up however you want, but that can still be a retainer model. And here’s another way to look at hourly, even if you only do hourly, just have people pay in advance for their hours.
AJV (46:54):
And that could be like a project, right? So instead of billing hourly, it’s like, well, I’m gonna bill you hourly, but I’m gonna do it in advance. So right. I’m gonna go ahead and bill you for 10 hours. And you can use that in any increment that you like. It could be in 10, one hour calls, it could be in two, five hour sessions. But it it’s like I’m gonna bill you in advance. And then I won’t bill you again until you use those up. So there’s different ways of thinking about how you price. But then you also have to think about what is that actual personal, hourly rate, right. And I thought this was fascinating cause right. There’s projects. And then there’s retainers, right? Which happened monthly versus a project, which is a one time, Hey, here’s what we’re gonna do for Q1.
AJV (47:38):
And here’s how much it costs versus you’re gonna pay me X amount of money every single month and definitely, or for six months or for a year or for whatever. And then there’s hourly, which I’ll track every single hour and I’ll bill you, or you can have people buy hours up front and then you don’t bill again until you use those up. And then they buy the next allotment. Right. So there’s lots of different ways to do it, but then the next is, well, how do you set your internal hourly? Right. So you know what to charge for in a project or on a retainer or hourly like, well, what should I charge a hundred dollars an hour? Is it $50 an hour? Is it $500 an hour? I don’t know what my fee is. And so I thought this was so fascinating because I’ve never heard this and I’ve been in this industry and I’ve been in this business a really long time.
AJV (48:24):
And she said, that really depends on the client. And then, and it hit me. It’s like it sure frien does. It does depend on the client. And I love this and I have never heard of anyone else doing this. So I think this is really, really cool. But this concept of going, how easy is it to work with a client? And that is a part of how you hard, like how difficult is the project gonna be for you? In other words, if you are doing something that is gonna require a lot of research time and a lot of documentation time, a lot of coordination time, then maybe there should be a higher hourly rate because it’s, it’s making you do things that are not a part of your norm, right. Versus like, no, this is, you just want me on a phone call and you wanna ask me questions.
AJV (49:15):
That’s easy. Are you, are you a client? Are you working with clients that are very hard to track down and they always take out virtual real estate on your calendar that you’re always having to go back and try to refill. And it’s like that to me was like the aha moment of going, how many clients have I had in the past that would book calls. And then constantly not show up and then I couldn’t fill that hour with someone else. So there was a huge opportunity cost, and then I would have to track this person down, reschedule, reschedule. They weren’t prepared. And I’m like, oh my gosh. It’s like, this is so much more work than we had anticip hated for. So it was like, how easy are your clients to work with? Are they people who show up prepared and ready to work?
AJV (50:00):
Are they people who constantly know show and reschedule on you? And I think a lot of that you don’t know until you work with them. Right. so she talked about, excuse me, having a grandfathered price in. So it’s like I start everyone at some point at based on what the project is based on what they need based on my involvement. But my prices evolve and change, right. Just like inflation changes the prices in the markets as does at my prices. Right. and really it’s more of supply and demand, right? The less hours I have, the more I charge, the more hours I have, I don’t have to charge as much. And that’s the case with, you know, anything it’s like the less there is typically the more you pay for it. Right. and so just this concept of how easy is it for me to work with you?
AJV (50:48):
How reliable as a client are you to work with and how much availability do I have and then how much expertise is required. Those are the things that we evaluate as we’re setting prices. And I think that’s really interesting to look at, of going the more that you do this, the more you should charge, because the more experience, the more value that you provide, but you need to make sure that that’s what’s happening. And I, I know some people who just get in and they’re like, my fees are 200 bucks an hour. And I’m like, based on what I have other people who get in this business and they charge a hundred dollars an hour and I’m like, you should be charging five, like legitimate, you should be charging 500. That is the level of expertise that you are providing. What’s the difference has everything to do with the need of the client and finding that right.
AJV (51:41):
Fit, knowing what your niche is and knowing exactly what you’re gonna be coaching on, knowing exactly what your target market is and what is their income and what are their demographics and what are their psychographics on a huge part of this? Isn’t about what it’s about, who it’s about, who are you targeting and what expertise are you bringing? And in what model are you going to be charging? Right? And this is such a detailed conversation to have in this recap, but I think it’s one that’s really powerful and a customer of Mary’s to know, it’s like, I’m sitting here going. I wonder if my pricing means I’m a really good client, or I’m a really difficult client of I’ll tell you what it did for me. And I, I hung up for this interview and I went and I talked to my husband, Rory. Who’s also a co-host as you guys all know if you’re listening and I asked him and I was like, based on these fees, do you think I’m a bad client on a good client?
AJV (52:33):
And it created this internal desire in me to like, I wanna be a good client. I wanna get grandfathered in to really good rates. It’s like, what do I need to do to be a better client? And then I’m asking myself, do I reschedule on her? Do I knowhow? Do I not come prepared? Do I not stuff. And there is a mentality that intentional or not, that has been created since this interview of me going, I want to be a better client because I want to be rewarded for being a good client and being rewarded means I get grandfathered in at my original rate. Heck yeah, I’m not gonna reschedule on you anymore. I’m never gonna knowhow. I’m gonna show up and do the work because I want these grandfathered in fees because I value your time. And if I, if I value and I respect your time, you’re gonna reward me as a customer, sign me up.
AJV (53:22):
So I think there’s also reverse psychology working here in her favor again, intentional or not, that makes me wanna be a good customer. So again, really fascinating conversation on pricing. It’s a really delicate conversation. It’s always changing and evolving as your prices should, right? They shouldn’t be the same that they were 10 years ago, because you are definitely saying that you were 10 years ago or even five years ago, or maybe even last year. So please check out this full interview. Mary also gave the incredible offer to any anyone in the coaching business. If you’re a coach and you just want more community with coaches and you want advice from someone who’s been doing this a really long time, she said look her up on LinkedIn. It’s Mary Soin into consulting. And she said, reach out to me. And I’m, I’m happy to support. I’m happy to help and ask any questions. So if I were you and I was a coach, I would take her up on that because I’m taking her up on it for free. So check it out, go listen to the full episode and we’ll catch you next time on the influential personal brand.