Ep 130: How To Get Rich in a Niche with Clint Salter

Clint Salter Interview [Full Edit]
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Hey brand builder, Rory Vaden here. Thank you so much for tuning in to listen to this interview. We are so excited to bring you this information and wanted to let you know that, Hey, there’s no sales pitch coming from anything that we do with this is all our value add to you and the community. However, if you are somebody who is looking for specific strategies on how to build and monetize your personal brand, we would love to talk to you and we offer a free call to everyone that’s interested in getting to know us and is willing to give us a chance to get to know them and share a little bit about what we do. So if you’re interested in taking us up on a free strategy call, you can do that at brand builders, group.com/summit call brand builders, group.com/summit. Call, hope to talk to you soon on with the show.
It’s so fun over the course of my career, to look back at people that I’ve intersected with along the way. And I used to be the young guy like trying to like come up and meet people. And now I’m the old guy looking back. And Clint Salter, who you are about to meet is one of my favorite people I have met on this journey. He is such a cool guy, such a warm spirit. And I think I was interviewed on his podcast like six years ago when he was just kind of like coming into the online space and now he has built this empire. And here’s, here’s, what’s amazing about it. He’s done it in a very, very narrow niche, vertical. So he is the CEO of something called the dance studio owners association. And it is a community of dance studio owners worldwide.
So he, he is from Western Sydney Australia, and that’s where he grew up. He was involved in, you know, he was owning a studio. He owned a studio when he was like 16. He’s sold multiple businesses. He’d sold three companies by the time he was 28. And now the group that he runs, the DSOA dance, suitors dance studio owners association has 32,000. There’s like 32,000 members in this community that reach 800,000 kids every week through dance. And so I just, we, our paths crossed here again recently. I hadn’t seen him in years and I couldn’t believe the success that he was having. So Clint, thanks for being here, buddy.
Rory, it’s such a pleasure to reconnect and I’m so excited for our conversation today.
Yeah, totally mate. It’s going to be great. Okay. So buddy, can you just give us like a super quick history of your journey, you know, because you really are an example of you had a passion, turned it into a business, then turned it into a personal brand. So can you like, just give us the highlights of, of what that looked like? Yeah,
Totally. So as you mentioned, I was 16. I started a dance studio with a friend, cause like, that was my, that was my thing. I love dancing. I come from a family of teachers, I love teaching. And so I put those two things together and said to my friend, like, why don’t we, why don’t we start a dance studio? We were living at home, didn’t have to pay rent, like, like why not do it? There was no risk there and we started it and it just took off. And we actually grew a business. We weren’t making millions of dollars in our dance studio, but for, you know, 16, 17, 18 year old kid, like I was taking home a few hundred dollars every week. And I was really, I was really happy with that. Why was it school? And then sold that business. We both wanted different things in the business and sold that business and went on to do some different things. I was an agent for five years managing TV personalities. I worked in news.
I manage the Jersey boys at one point.
I was. Yeah. So it was touring in company manager for Jersey, boys, the musical managing a team of 56, highly creative people, which was a very interesting part of my journey. And then I started consulting and at the beginning I was consulting to every type of business, whether you were a gym or a lawyer, a graphic designer. I think I had a Gardner at one point I was helping, I was helping every service-based business owner on how to generate new clients into their business. And I had a dance studio come to me, a owner that I’d worked with previously. And they were like, Hey, can you help me? And I was like, yeah, sure. Like I know this space. Like I love this space. And I started helping Sarah and I was like, I love this. Like I get to blend business and my passion, which was dance and working with dance studios.
And I had my own dance studio. And I was having dinner with a friend one night and they were like, you know what? You need to go all in on this dance studio market. And I was so afraid cause I was like, there’s not enough of them. And I don’t know if they have enough money to pay me. And so I was this person that was working with everyone and I didn’t want to limit the opportunity by just working with dance studio owners, but I treated it as an experiment and six years ago, I said, you know what, I’m going to do it for a year, just for a year. If it doesn’t work out, I can go back to helping everyone. But for a year I’m going to become the dance studio owner guide that studios grow their business, get back their lives. And that was six years ago and I haven’t, I haven’t looked back. Wow.
Wow. So I just, I love this story because I think that’s what you know, so we, we, we teach a thing called she hands wall, which is like trying to break through this wall of, of becoming, from being unknown to becoming known. And in our minds we go, I don’t want to limit my opportunity. And so I want to talk to lots of people, but the real way you break through the wall is by becoming known for one thing and being the go-to person on that one thing. And then when you break through the wall, if you want, you have a much better opportunity to expand into various stuff after. So, so what happened? I like to just flat out ask you, did they have enough money? Like, I mean, clearly you’re, you’re living in a high rise, brand new high rise in Miami, like doing, you’re doing your thing. So you, you had enough to survive, but, but did that take a while or was it actually pretty quick? And, and, and did you, did you also have to charge really high prices? Cause when I think of, you know, dance studios and gym owners, they’re not, you know, it’s are people rolling around in Bentleys and living in mansions, they’re doing it for passion. So you probably were, were you charging high dollars or were you doing like lower dollar stuff?
Yeah. So at the great question at the beginning, I was selling a five 99. It was $599 for my 12 week course. And so that’s what I was selling at the very beginning. I was selling a 12 week course it was $599, or you could buy it for $399 plus $47 a month to get support. So I was selling like the subscription model on the back of the course where they could ask me questions, you know, inside a Facebook group. And after about doing that for nearly a year. And I was like doing a webinar every week and I was getting really good at the webinar and for selling the webinar exactly to sell the program, to sell the program. You know, I had one, I had like one funnel, one channel, you know, I had Facebook ads, I had a funnel tool webinar and I was just getting good, getting really, really good at delivering that webinar and enrolling people into the program.
And that’s how I started. And I did that literally for a year of just building, building getting better, better, better. And I’m so glad I did that because now when people come to me or they see what they’re, you know, what we’re achieving and they’re like, Oh, you know, I’m signing up and I want to create five courses and I want to be on Facebook and Instagram and doing all of these things. I’m like, no, have one great course or program Maso, one distribution channel and just stop by getting really good at that before you do too many things and don’t master any of them,
Preach it, brother preach it, preach it loud. That, I mean, that is so, like I said, you’re, you’re such a great example of this. So you not only did you have one product for one audience, you had one vehicle of selling it and one traffic source of getting people there and you just, so you just dominated that thing, like you just mastered it and you were running one webinar every week. Like a live one.
Yes. Sometimes I do too, but mostly it was one, one live one day of the week. Did you do it on, I’m pretty sure it was Wednesdays. And they think it was I think it was around like 10 or 12:00 PM Eastern. And I was in Australia and I was like staying up surface super late and be like 11 or 12:00 AM. I’d be like running these webinars or I’d wake up super early. Or I do something, you know, on a Monday to get them on a Sunday night. You know, I w I was, I was just like doing the work, you know, I was doing the work. I had the background with this audience, with this industry and I knew them. I think that’s the other thing is that I’d been a part of this industry for such a long time, that I, I knew what their challenges were. I knew what they wanted. I knew how to make their business achieve more success. And so my focus was really on delivering value. You know, that $599 program had like 35 videos in it, you know, with worksheets and check. And those videos went for like 30, 30 minutes to an hour, you know, like I wanted to just like give them like everything I knew. And, and that’s a reason I believe…
And you say 30 minutes, 30, like 30 minute 30 videos at like 30, 30 to 60 minutes.
So they were there, there was 35 videos and on average are about 30 minutes. But a lot of them, there was a few that went for an hour and I had the time
Talking about a thousand minutes of, Oh yeah,
It was, it was, it was a lot. And that program though, birth really kind of put our business, our DSOA on the map. And from day I was able to launch share, you know, we launched a $47 a month membership. So that, that piece that I was tacking onto the program actually became a standalone program itself, a standalone membership level. And so from that 47, then we created a, our inner circle, which is our, our main coaching offering that we have now for, you know, for studio owners. So, so,
So do you still have the course, or the course get absolved into the $47 membership?
I actually didn’t get put into the $47 membership. It got put into our inner circle membership is like the foundation, the baseline. So when you join us in the inner circle, the first thing that you do would be to go through our studio success formula program, which is our 12 week foundation covering every piece of the dance studio or our flagship program. Now that we sell, which I created, I think it’s going to be nearly three years ago is our student attraction intensive. And that is a program that is just focused on how to attract enroll and retain students, because that is our audience’s biggest challenge. And if we can get them doing that, we can really help them transform their business. And then we can look after them with their finances, their latest sheep and their operations.
So is that the student attraction intensive? That’s a course.
That’s a course. Yeah. That’s an eight week course that we sell. Okay. How much is that? That’s $2,000.
All right. So that’s kind of like your, you have that and the $47 membership as like the two entry points.
Exactly. Most people will come through the student attraction intensive. So if you’re looking at like the core business model, now it’s focused on the student attraction intensive and then the inner circle program, the coaching experience.
Oh, I got ya. Okay. So the membership isn’t so much like a main thing anymore. Okay.
We still have it. We have we have just over a thousand members in, in DSOA, but you know, for us, our focus is really on, we get the best results when we can work with people in a deeper, in a deeper way. And so yeah,
A thousand members at 47 bucks a month, I mean, that’s 50 grand of 50 grand a month to help.
Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s fantastic. But you know, for me, where we’re at now in the company is where looking at, we know which of our members get results the fastest and how can we continue to accelerate their growth and their progress. And we can do our best work at our inner circle level. You know, those people are paying anywhere from 500 to a thousand dollars a month, depending on which level they’re at in the inner circle whether they’re a launch member or their premier member. And then, you know, we get to do awesome work in our student attraction intensive in our eight week course. And so that’s, that’s where our focus is currently.
I love, I love how you took, you know, like your first course was 600 bucks. You gave away the goods, right. To get yourself out of the, out of the ground. And then as you started to scale, you realized the number one pain point that my audience has is blank, you know, attracting new students and just focused on that. So, and that’s now $2,000. So it’s like, yeah, he took one sliver of this thing, you know, of this whole big thing. And now that one thing is, is, is so focused upon it’s three times over three times the cost of what the whole thing used to be, because you just really honed in on what they need. And then from there you move them up into, so for 500, a thousand dollars a month, then do you guys have other coaches? Or is it,
Yeah, so it’s it’s awesome. So inside of the inner circle, we have studio growth coaches. So these are studio owners who are doing over a million dollars a year in their business. And so they come on board as coaches in the inner circle. So we have a few of those. We have a Facebook ads coach, a profit first coach, and in-classroom coach a website and tech coach. And then we bring guests coaches in every month as well. But yeah,
But the one on is they have one-on-one calls with these people.
So the one-on-one calls happen with the studio guardian.
Yeah. And then you have, so, and then you have like other resident experts that kind of teach like that
Coaching calls. Yeah. So, so our, our kind of like expert, expert coaches, they teach like the Facebook ads and the finance and the legal and that piece. They do a group call every single month. And then our studio growth coaches will take one-on-one calls. And we also provide virtual retreats in person retreats curriculum. We do round tables. We have squads where everyone’s in a group of eight to 12 studio owners. Like we’ve got a lot of, a lot of cool stuff inside of the inner circle for them.
I just, I love, it’s like you’re serving this one niche in such a deep way, because it’s all you’re focused on. It’s what, you know, it’s what you’re passionate about. And I just, I just absolutely love this man. So interesting. So, so, so looking back here now is that basically the essence of the advice you would give to somebody who is starting cause, you know, we’ve got some of our clients are celebrity mega superstars. A lot of our clients are intermediate, but we have a good portion of people probably who listened to the podcast who are not yet clients who are just like early in the journey. And I think it’s kind of like they’re struggling to go, you know, to figure out their positioning in the world and who they should serve. And are you, I mean, would you say like, would you just basically recommend that path that you followed and just figure out what it is for you? I would,
I would. And I think important thing with that is that you stick to something, you know, I see a lot of people who are chopping and changing, they’re chopping and changing their message they’re chopping and changing their audience. They’re chopping and changing the content that they’re teaching because they don’t get a million dollar launch, you know, three months out of the gate. And you know, for me it was persistence, it was resilient. It was making that commitment to an audience, you know, sharing my message with them for a year. And so I would, I would ask everyone and challenge everyone. Who’s he is to pick it, pick a niche, pick an audience, you know, decide on what you’re going to share, what wisdom, what insights, what teachings you’re going to share with that audience, make sure it’s in alignment with what their challenges and their struggles are.
And that what you’re teaching delivers value and gets them results and focus on them deeply for a year, commit to that market and that message for a year. And I think anyone can do extremely well if they’re, if they’re focused and they have clarity and they’re delivering value at the end of the day, why we’ve done well is because delivering value to our customers is absolutely, you know, at the core. And it’s never been more than, than this year with COVID. You know, when our studio owners had shut down, when we had to take them virtual in four days we were doing one or two calls every single day, you know, with our members for like four months you know, to get them through this and, and to support them. And that, that is why we’re still standing and we’re surviving and we’ve had a terrific year, but we’ve also been able to really make a huge impact on our, on our members this year as well.
That is what it’s all about. My friends, Clint Salter where should people go, man, if they wanna, if they wanna like follow you. And I mean, gosh, if you’re a dance studio owner, you, you, you gotta be plugged into this community.
Yes. If you’re a studio or a no, please come and visit [email protected]. If you’re not a studio owner, I still love to hear from you. I’m on Facebook, Clint Salta. You’ll find me there, shoot me through a message. Love to share anything that I, that I can with you, but you’re only in a really good hands with Rory and he’s amazing company. So yeah. I’d love to hear from you.
Well, thanks brother. Clint Salter, ladies and gentlemen send him some love if you can. And we wish you all the best. My friend. Thanks for [inaudible]