Archive for October, 2016

Robert Plank: Our guest today is Ric Thompson. He's the CEO and Founder of Done For You Solutions. His website is DoneForYouSolutions.com and he's helping small businesses around the world put into action the principles he teaches every day as far as outsourcing, as far as getting more leverage in the day, as far as improving the operations of your small businesses. We're going to have a lot of fun, we're going to talk about a lot of ways that everyone listening can get more done in less time and have more fun and remove themselves from the business, so how are things today, Ric?

Ric Thompson: Things are fantastic, Robert. Great to be here.

Robert Plank: Awesome, I'm glad you're here. As far as what it is you do and as far as outsourcing, what would... Just to make sure we're all on the same page, what is outsourcing and as far as outsourcing goes what makes you stand out, what makes you special?

Ric Thompson: Great questions, thanks for that. There is some debate like a technical or legal definition of what outsourcing is. There's a blurring of the words of outsourcing and out-tasking. Without being too anal, shall we say, in general outsourcing is having other people get tasks done that are not inside your company. They're not you, they're not your employees, that you are going beyond those boundaries to get tasks done that have to get done for your business to grow and to succeed.

Robert Plank: Okay, great, so then how do you stand out from everyone else who teaches this kind of thing?

Ric Thompson: Great question and, of course, a lot of folks do. A lot of folks have heard about the Four-Hour Workweek and getting a virtual assistant. What I came to the realization of was before VAs and outsourcing really became the hot trend I had already been doing that. I had sworn off having employees years ago for a variety of reasons and realized rapidly that you can't rely upon one person to do all the things that need to get done in today's modern world of technology, of business building, of marketing. You've got to have a team. Whether you have... I used to have employees, I had a team, I got away from that, went into the outsourcing and found it was exactly the same thing, it didn't matter. One virtual assistant couldn't do everything.

When I started Done For You Solutions back a few years ago I said, okay, I'm going to build this company based upon what I know what works for me which is let's get a team going. Instead of the virtual assistant company I'm a virtual team company. I've got web developers, I've got graphic designers, I've got, yes, virtual assistants, too, and I've got coordinators to help the clients move all that forward. The idea is that with another company if you have a single hole that you need to fill and a VA can fill it, great. For us we fill a wide range of those day-to-day holes, if you will, for website work, for research work or customer support work. Again just a wide range of that, that worker B did A type of stuff, so hit the button and get an entire team instead of having to build yourself one by one.

Robert Plank: That's cool and that sounds like... If you hire all these little specialists as opposed to the jack of all trades person then that way you have the best people for each job. You have the best writers, or the best graphic designers, or the best virtual assistants and things like that and because... First of all because you have this team of specialists then you can get the best of everything. The other side of that is that you also don't have to risk your business on some stranger, some random workers in India or the Philippines or even in the U.S. You don't have to give out your password to someone just who found you off the street that you don't trust, is that right?

Ric Thompson: Yeah, a number of things in there are all right. Yeah, and all these folks work full-time for me, so it's not like some pool of random contractors like you said. Of course, obviously at some level there is still a trust level, Robert, and let's be honest, no matter if you've got an employee or if you're outsourcing you're going to have to trust those folks with the logins to your hosting account or what have you if you want to do website work.

The biggest thing there I think to comment on is that a lot of entrepreneurs would love to have that magic, silver bullet. Let me just get that one person and have them do everything. Once in a while you do find one person with such a huge range of skills that are good enough that you can do that with. The challenge is is that I've never heard of a situation where that ends well because if you get one person doing all those things in effect that one person's your business.

What happens when they get a better job offer or god forbid, something happens to them health-wise or family-wise. When that one person is gone so is your business. By having a team you not only, like you mentioned, leverage experts at their own fields of experience and skills you're also spreading that risk around. If one person becomes sick or one person has a family problem, whatever, your business does not stop. It hits a little bump in the road, but then you keep on going.

Robert Plank: That makes a lot of sense. It's like if one piece of the machine breaks down and you can get a new part to put it in the machine, but they're not the whole machine. It's not just something where if that one person goes away you don't have to replace your entire business. Kind of along those lines as far as having a team and building a team, have you found... Is there a secret to avoiding the traps, the traps of...

One trap might be if someone ends up having to become a micro manager and they've almost made a whole other job that entails babysitting all these other workers or the trap of maybe this whole thing becoming too expensive. Or maybe if someone's paying all these other workers all this extra money maybe there's no money left over for the business or for the owner of the business. Or maybe even if they're at the mercy of some of these workers. Have you found... Is there a secret or a few secrets to building a good team like this?

Ric Thompson: Yeah, of course, there are lots of secrets that come, “secrets” that come with hard won experience. Let me share with you the top ones that I've seen, that have really tanked people's businesses or have proven to be the most costly mistakes. Number one, when you're outsourcing wherever humanly possible start small. You and I I'm sure... You've heard the nightmare stories of I hired a web design company, I paid them $10,000 to do the site, it's eight months later and I still have nothing.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah.

Ric Thompson: It's like why, why'd you do that? Why don't you hire them to build you a homepage or break that project down to milestones where listen, I'll tell you what, first step let's design a new homepage for me. If you guys can do that on a great timeline and I like it we'll continue with the rest of this $10,000 project, but I'm not going to cut you a blank check in the get go. Start small, get them to prove themselves. Whether you're outsourcing with me or you're outsourcing with anybody else that's the idea because if they can't do that small part of the project first the odds of them doing the whole thing the way you want them to do it are slim and none.

Other scenarios like that. I have people, gosh, I'm on the speaker. I've got 120 slides, I need to make this new presentation or rebranding because I just did my logo and I need them next week. Okay, great, how fast can they turn around the first 10 or 20 slides? Did they do a great job with that? If so then give them the rest of the project. Don't give them all 120 slides and find out that next week they haven't even done one for you. Just whatever project it is start small.

Now the second biggest mistake is one that a lot of people don't think of. There's a lot of confusion with this. I draw a very, very hard line between strategic level outsourcing and execution level outsourcing. Let me dive into this here, Robert. Strategic level outsourcing is where you're at the point in a project or your business where you're asking the question should, what should I do here, how should I do this. It's conceptual in nature. If you're like hey, how should I drive more traffic, how should I use SEO, or how should I use social media, or how should I do this? That's a question for a consultant or a coach. You don't ask a web developer about marketing. You don't ask a VA about a business building

device. That is way beyond their skill set.

When you're down to this is what I need, I need these webpages built, I need this opt-in page built, I need this research done, I need these clients handled with these tasks, now we're down to execution level and you're looking for execution level workers. Two very, very different types of areas of skill set, shall we say, areas of knowledge and, quite frankly, pricing. Just like you don't want to hire a VA to give you business building advice because, of course, it's going to end in disaster you also don't want to pay a consultant for worker B level tasks. They're going to charge you consultant rates for little day-to-day tasks.

In your own mind make it very clear what you're trying to outsource. Are you trying to outsource the planning, the strategic side of things, or are you trying to outsource specific tasks and be clear in your own mind what direction you're going in. Not only do you find a good solution, you're paying appropriate pricing. Does that make sense?

Robert Plank: Yeah, it does and I hadn't even thought about that until you explained it that way. It's so simple, but I think that a lot of people are missing out on that, that there's a clear difference between a coach and a worker. It sounds like a lot of the disaster stories, so to speak, where someone turned over too much to someone or where they weren't satisfied with a job was due to the fact that they were trying to hire a worker for more of the creative or the decisions or the strategic stuff as you said.

If someone's looking to outsource their business or to remove some of the load off of themselves in the business then they'll get some time back. It might cost a little bit of money, but they can pay the high dollars to a coach to figure out the planning and figure out what should I do next and what should the webpage look like or what should I do in my marketing, get the real CEO-level types of decisions. Then when it comes time to implement then go to a worker with that clear final picture in mind and tell the worker what you want and start small on all that good stuff. That way you go to the coach and you figure out the plan and then you give the plan to the worker. Then it's very clear if the plan was fulfilled or not. Am I understanding that right?

Ric Thompson: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, because kind of flipping this around you get in situations where somebody pays a web designer thousands of dollars for a great new website. It looks great and from a marketing perspective it's horrible, it doesn't work. Or gosh, in our house with new clients I'll have a number of conversations where people are like you guys are the experts, you tell me. It's like, well, I'll tell you, I can consult with you, but my personal time having done this for decades is going to be very different than a virtual assistant or a web developer who's in there just building your WordPress pages. That WordPress developer, they'll do anything you want them to do. If they were a master marketer they would not be building WordPress pages. It's almost commonsense and yet it's just so tempting, it's so easy, Robert, to say you guys are the experts, you figure it out and let me know what I need because I'm too busy. That's never a recipe for success, shall we say.

Robert Plank: Yeah, and I think we've all heard of... We've all had at least one or maybe even one person per year or even more frequent than that try to coast on that, try to coast on saying I'm going to have the idea and I'll just give it to this team and the team will do it. Is that possible? Is it possible to have a 100% outsourced business or do people have to have at least 5 or 10% of themselves in it?

Ric Thompson: That's a great question, that's a great question. There are certainly situations where you can create systems, so that at some point in time you are removed or mostly removed because the business is on autopilot. That can absolutely be done. If you are at the very beginning stage where this is your baby, this is your vision, then like it or not you have to be involved.

Let me dive into this real quick. For any project you're looking to do or even your overall business there are four phases that a project has to go through to succeed. Phase one is dream it. This is, wow, Robert, wouldn't it be cool if we did this. Let's create a killer new podcast called The Robert Plank Show. You got all these why's. Here's why I want to do it, here's why it'd be a great idea. It's very, very sexy, very high-energy and not very structured. Phase two is to think this out where you're working with a... either by yourself or with a coach or a consultant, so you can outsource that mapping process. You can say let me go find a podcasting expert to create a game plan for me. Then you can walk through that and say here are the pieces that I need, you have to be involved.

Now as you move into the third stage which is tasking let's break this down, what does this have to be? We got to have the interview done every week or every two weeks. We got to have a webpage we have to do, we got to edit those audios, all those different pieces. Then phase four is do it where somebody's actually doing it. Now obviously in your situation your podcast is an example. You're doing it, it's your baby, you're the great interviewer, you want to have hands on.

There are larger companies, publishing companies, or even smaller companies where the interviewing skills are not the wheelhouse of the CEO. They can get somebody on their team, they can outsource that interviewing task and it could literally get to the point where the owner, the CEO is not doing anything once those systems are created and up and running. In the beginning stages, that dreaming it and the thinking it they have to be involved. It doesn't matter who it is, you can't pass off that strategic level to somebody else because you're the one... It's your vision, it's your dream, it has to be you involved at some level. Does that make sense?

Robert Plank: Yeah, it does and so I'm sort of a computer programmer and just my computer programming brain hears from you that there's a little bit of debugging involved, I guess. As you figure out what you want to do and you figure out the system and you get the kinks worked out and what it also reminds me of is... I'm sure that you have some favorite channels you watch on YouTube, right, Ric?

Ric Thompson: Sure.

Robert Plank: I think about the most successful YouTube channels or the ones that I watch a lot of are the ones that they consistently put out content, maybe something like once a week and they've been doing it for years. When I go back and look at the earliest, earliest stuff, I look at... There's a channel called Epic Meal Time or there's Gary Vaynerchuk. If you look at any of these popular YouTube people, if you look at the earliest stuff from five, seven years ago and it's drastically different. In a lot of cases they didn't have the character, so to speak, worked out. They didn't have the format worked out. Some videos were long, some were short and then you compare it to what the result is today and it could just have been a matter of they outsourced pieces of that business to make it more professional.

I always look at those content creators and just YouTube video stars springs to mind in this case. I look at the early stuff where it's rough around the edges, they haven't quite gotten all the bugs knocked out yet, but then you fast forward to today and it was definitely not an overnight process. Then the more current day stuff is better video quality, better editing, better sounds, just more slick and smooth and rehearsed and stuff like that. That's what I'm hearing from you is that there definitely is a point where people can get the well-oiled machine in place, but they definitely have to be along for the ride in the getting it all figured out stage just so that they know if they're happy with the end result or not.

Ric Thompson: Absolutely, absolutely. It's like anything else in life, it's not going to be perfect the first time around. It's going to be a learning curve for you to outsource to your team. It's going to be a learning curve for your team potentially and to get clear on what you're trying to do and how you're trying to accomplish it. Just overall anything's going to get better the tenth time you do it, the fiftieth time you do it, the hundredth time you do it. That's just how it works. When you want to get started, when you're in the very, very beginning stage and here are these tasks that I've got lined up to get my first episode or my first few episodes up and running, a quick rule of thumb, and this is not mine by the way, I've heard this probably a bunch of different times, probably a dozen different times from different experts.

When you get that list of tasks and you look at those tasks, hey, I need this video edited for my YouTube channel, ask yourself can somebody else do this task faster, cheaper, or better than I can. If the answer is yes outsource it. You just created leverage in your business. Whether that leverage is speed or that leverage is cost or what have you or quality, so just use that as a rule of thumb as you go through with your first episodes and you're trying to figure out it as part of that machine you were talking about, what do I want to do versus what should I have my team do for me. That's a great way to do it. Can they do it faster, cheaper, or better than me? Yep, fantastic, that should be somebody else's job to do then.

Robert Plank: Am I hearing and understanding you right in that you said faster, cheaper, or better, not faster, cheaper, and better. Is that right?

Ric Thompson: Absolutely, and that's a great point. Obviously, in a perfect world, Robert, hey, fantastic, a massive leverage if somebody can do it faster, cheaper, and better. Yes, that does happen. However, let's be very clear that if any one of those three conditions exists you've created leverage in your business. Yes, in a perfect world I would love to have somebody who could do it faster than I can, so I can leverage speed, who could do it cheaper than I can, so I can leverage money and who can do it better than I can which would leverage quality. That's certainly very, very possible. If only one of those exists I still win, my company still wins, my business still wins.

Robert Plank: Right, yeah, because even if one of those things are met and someone performs this task that maybe you could have done it 10% or 1% better, but that just might be a matter of you being a perfectionist. Then now that someone is performing this task that you don't have to do and that frees up an hour or a couple of hours in the day or in the week that you wouldn't have had otherwise then that's time you can then dedicate to more revenue-generating activities.

Ric Thompson: Let's take it even further out. Let's say that you can do a task in an hour that takes somebody else five hours to do it. What is that hour of your time worth? Could you be out landing the next interviewee? Could you be putting together your next product? Could you be... All those high-revenue items that you could be doing with your one hour could be worth tons more than the five hours of somebody that can do as good as a job, but they're slower at it. It's not a black and white type of question.

You really have to weigh all the different aspects and what your time is worth and what you could be doing with that because at the end of the day, Robert, here's one more huge, huge mindset shift for a lot of entrepreneurs. We are action takers. We want to jump right in there, we want to get stuff done and why would I pay somebody to do a task that I can do in an hour that takes them 5 hours? That's ridiculous. Here's the problem. You as an individual only have 24 hours in a day. No matter how efficient you are, no matter how productive you are, no matter how good you are you will never, ever, ever get more than 24 hours in a day.

You've got to treat that as your most scarce resource because you have a hard limit. Whereas with your business you are not your business, your business is not you. Your business can have 24 hours in a day, it could have 48 hours a day, it could have thousands of hours in a day because it can borrow time from people all over the world to be applied to the business needs. You, you only have 24 hours, so you really have to weigh that. Is my 1 hour of time out of that very limited pool worth it to do video editing, just to put things in perspective.

Robert Plank: Yeah, that's a pretty good insight in a number of ways because if someone were to calculate their income versus the time they put into that business and let's say that that's $100 or $200 an hour and then there's some video editor that they can hire for $50 an hour then great, in a way you just made $50 per hour that that person's working because you didn't have to put in that effort. As you're describing that it's almost like it's okay to take a little bit of a hit as I'm understanding this. It's okay to take a little bit of a hit on quality or even things like if this task takes me 1 hour to complete, but it takes someone else 5 hours, who cares, that's not my 5 hours. If I was going to edit a video and it would have taken me from 9am to 10am, but then I hire somebody to do it at 9am, I do whatever I'm going to do and they come back to me at 1pm, who cares if it took all that extra time because, guess what, it got done and I didn't have to do it.

Ric Thompson: Exactly, that kind of situation it's more a matter of what am I paying, what's my cost there. If I'm hiring somebody else to do that task for five hours and it's costing me X, or like you said what was my one hour that I regained it in my life worth X dollars or better yet X plus. If it was then it's a no brainer unless you want to be the one doing that task for the rest of that business's life.

Robert Plank: There are tasks that you've seen or that some of your clients have seen that they want to continue doing because that's what makes their business unique and that's what makes their business do its thing.

Ric Thompson: Absolutely. For instance, let's go back to your great show, The Robert Plank Show. If you had anybody else doing interviews it would be a hard sell to say this is The Robert Plank Show.

Robert Plank: Yeah.

Ric Thompson: You're a fantastic interviewer. There are other great interviewers out there and the tradeoff there would not be worth it. There are some things that as the CEO, as the visionary, as the president of the business, if you will, that's not worth trading off no matter what. However, the list of what you can get rid of is far larger than what a lot of entrepreneurs initially think of.

Robert Plank: You know what, too, if I was ever confused or lost or indecisive about what tasks that I could take out of my business, I could always go and hire a coach and have that figured out for me. I could outsource the outsourcing.

Ric Thompson: Absolutely, absolutely. I do that all the time as a matter of fact with my company, Done For You Solutions. A new client comes in, I do an introductory call where we talk about that. What are you doing in your business right now? What is not getting done? What are you doing repetitively? Let's go back to your YouTube channel. Maybe I'm talking to somebody who's got a YouTube channel. Gosh, Ric, every week I have to edit this video and get it uploaded on the YouTube channel and then I go do these postings on my social media.

It's like why are you spending your time as the CEO doing that. Go shoot the show, we can go ahead and edit that video, we can get it loaded up in your YouTube channel and update your website with it and post it on social media for you. All those tasks that are repetitive it's a great place to start to say stop, I'm done with that. Let me get somebody else to do that. I'm going to remain shooting the show because that's what I love to do and I'm the star, but all these other maintenance tasks there's no value in it. Yes, it has to get done, but not by the CEO of the company, not by the president of the company.

Robert Plank: Interesting, so the repetitive, the maintenance, the non-creative tasks are the ones that can go. Speaking of this and speaking of Done For You Solutions can you walk us through really quickly some case study where someone came to you and things just were not good and maybe they were stressed out or overworked. Things were not in the place they wanted to be and then you refined things and made it better.

Ric Thompson: Oh, gosh, we do that all the time. That's the whole idea of taking these things off of people's plates that are stressing them out or because they're having to do them or because it's not getting done. It could be a website. Hey, in the past couple of years if your website is not mobile-friendly you're toast. You're losing 60, 70% of your traffic typically in many markets. My website's 4 or 5 years old, Ric, my traffic has dropped dramatically, my sales have dropped. I have no idea what the heck I'm doing here. Now it's time to get a new website. Let's get it redesigned, let's get it modernized, let's get it going. We do that all the time.

Repetitive tasks, we mentioned that. A number of years ago one of my first clients was an email marketer and he managed multiple accounts and was constantly getting out... managing these email lists and getting out promotional emails. He spent 20 hours a week not looking for fantastic new deals and vetting new products, but 20 hours a week just taking those emails, formatting them for each of the different platforms he had and getting them out there, the grunt work if you will.

Once he turned that over to us you could imagine. Imagine adding 20 hours a week to your life. It's huge, it's transformational. It could be a matter of time and reclaiming your life a bit or it could be a matter of expanding your business or moving your business forward by getting those tasks done like websites or other type stuff that are not being done and really should be done to make your business succeed.

Robert Plank: Awesome, and I'm looking at Done For You Solutions right now and what's cool about this is that... It looks like this whole outsourcing thing isn't as expensive as many people might think that it might be. I'm looking at right now you have a package that for $400 in a month someone will put in 20 hours and for tasks like if someone needs blog content or if they need a membership site or WordPress site or even office stuff like Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint or Keyword Research.

It's pretty cool and I think that a lot of people out there maybe they think of themselves as a starving artist or they need to do everything, but what I'm hearing from you in this whole conversation is a lot of people need to figure out where the herd is and where are they working themselves too hard with these repetitive tasks. Once the business is chopped up in that way then once it's in pieces then they could hand off just a little piece to an outsourcer to try them out. Then if that's a success they can hand off a bigger piece to that outsourcer and if that's a success they can go to another outsourcer with a different skill set.

That all sounds good, but it just sounds to me like if someone were to try to do that all themselves they'd have to do a lot of research, a lot of hiring and firing and trying people out and things like that. I understand that you have this thing called Done For You Solutions where you take a lot of the guesswork out of that. Is that correct?

Ric Thompson: Absolutely, that's the whole reason we're here, kind of think of us as an HR department. We've got all those different people already in place. They're the exact same people I use for all my stuff, we use it for clients around the world. The idea here, Robert, is to keep the client focused on the more strategic aspect of their business. Like, for instance, you've got a new information product that you're going to launch out. You've got a new audio series shall we say. Okay, so your job is to figure out what's the sales model. I'm going to do an opt-in page, I'm going to do a sales page, I'm going to do a thank you page. Here's my copy for those because we don't do writing, we don't do copywriting.

Once the client comes to us and says, okay, here's what I need. I need an opt-in page. We're going to connect that to AWeber or MailChimp or Infusionsoft or whatever I've got. Here's my sales page and the copy for this. I do need you guys to find some great images. Let's connect that to PayPal, let's connect this to my shopping cart and here's the thank you page they should get when they buy. If you can map that out, if you can say this is what I need, here's the flow, do you really, really want to be the one to have to figure out all the different platforms, figure out how to build those pages, go research those images.

You've taken a project that could be up in a week, maybe two weeks by outsourcing and you've now turned it into a five or six-month project. Speed is a massive, massive advantage in your business and so you're sacrificing it if you're putting all those tasks on you. Now if you're absolutely, completely flat broke and you have no other options I understand, but be aware that you're adding a boatload of time before you can actually be making money. You're losing months potentially of that income potential, so again it's a tradeoff.

Robert Plank: Right, and as you're describing that if someone is delaying the destination, I guess, or they're delaying the time it takes to get to that moneymaking stage they might give up. It's like if you have this business and if someone's only a month away from making money then great, they can have that month to power through and do those things that need to be done. If you tell someone you're not going to make money for nine months, you're not going to make money for two years I might as well give up now, so that sounds really great.

Also, as you were describing that, going back to the computer programming brain that I have, there's this thing called the Iceberg Principle where you see an iceberg and it looks really tiny because what you're only seeing is 10% of it. The Titanic sunk because they said oh, it's just a piece of ice above water, but then the whole city-sized chunk of ice was underwater, so there's that part of it in that a lot of the time and work that goes into things is just getting it just right.

It's easy to say, okay, make a landing page, hook it up to AWeber, make a webpage, hook it up to PayPal. Then if the AWeber form isn't performing correctly or if the PayPal button doesn't work or if that form or that landing page is a little bit off, that could easily be hours or days or weeks for someone who is inexperienced going down the rabbit hole trying to learn. It's almost like getting multiple college degrees just to do this thing that would take an expert two minutes to get figured out. I love this idea of outsourcing, I love the way that you've laid it out for us, Ric. Your website is DoneForYouSolutions.com and you have a free gift for our listeners for this show, correct?

Ric Thompson: Absolutely, and this goes back to some of the comments you made earlier in the show. We didn't really dive into it too much, but we want to start small, kind of going back to that. I understand that people had challenges with outsourcing before, so what I'd like to do for the listeners of The Robert Plank Show is I'd like to offer to buy the first 10 hours. We're not talking about a life-changing offer here, we're not talking about totally revamping your business, but there are a number of things that can get done in 10 hours to really give us a great trial run, shall we say, see how we do. Then we can go into from there an ongoing membership with you of a minimum of 5 hours a month up to 40, 80, 100 hours a month, whatever your business needs. The idea is let's go back to start small. I'll pay for the first 10 hours, give us a shot. That is at DoneForYouSolutions.com/trial.

Robert Plank: Awesome, DoneForYouSolutions.com/trial. Everyone listening should go right there right now and once again that is DoneForYouSolutions.com/trial. If you're listening in the car, pull over, write that down. If you're listening on the website we'll have a link to that in the show notes. Thanks so much, Ric, for opening all of our eyes about outsourcing and showing us that there is a better way where we can have a better business, have a business that grows more, have a business that is less stressful, takes less time and at the same time having all of that doesn't require having a lot of overhead. We can have the best of both worlds, we can have our cake and eat it, too, whatever analogy people want to use. Outsourcing is definitely the way to a better business and a better life. Thanks for telling us about all that cool stuff and DoneForYouSolutions.com/trial, so I appreciate you being on the show, Ric.

Ric Thompson: Thanks for having me. I'm very excited to be in the latest episode here and in a fantastic, fantastic series.

Robert Plank: Amy Coello is going to be talking to us about spiritual dream interpretation, and she is the wife of Robert Coello and the mother of 11 children. A successful author, teacher and business owner with 20 years experience in the legal field. She's currently filming the show "Journey into your dreams" so Amy welcome to the podcast.

Amy Coello: Thank you so much for having me.

Robert Plank: Glad that you're here so just to kind of kick us off I have two quick questions for you, but I think they're easy questions. The first question is why are dreams so important for us, and the second question is what makes you stand out as opposed to anyone else who does this dream interpretation stuff.

Amy Coello: Well they're important because... I've been teaching on dreams for well over a decade I traveled internationally. I've studied every culture out there. I've studied the psychology of dream interpretation the young and the old and the understanding having a tour of a brighter understanding, and everything in between. I really wanted to hone in and grab on what is this. I've always been a dreamer. Of course everybody is a dreamer. One time I had a dream that was so specific and it actually came to pass. It flipped me out. I was like wait a minute there's got to be something to this. I kind of honed in on that, and when I realize I could interpret dreams it was like this parabolic language. This hidden language. I kind of dove in this study and culture.

I come from the corporate world. I am in more analytical. I've been in law for 24 years. I ran my own company for a number of years it's kind of like a odd change for me to move from corporate over to spiritual understanding and I think that's what makes me different in that I combine the two. A lot of corporate people either teach from a corporate aspect, and spiritual people teach from a spiritual aspect. Very rarely do you find that type of market where it's both We're starting to see this kind of a up-rise people in the corporate world saying hey there's something bigger out there why don't I take my spiritualism and bring into what I do every single day. Dreams are important because they give divine guidance and divine wisdom, and they will actually give you very specific information about what to do next. They will guide you. I run a mentorship group of corporate people. The mentorship group is called dreams for launch. It's basically gain your dream assignment project into intervention, and bringing that to a place where you launch it. Putting a action play into those dreams.

I'm giving an example because it's so interesting because just last... three nights ago I had this dream. It was a very very specific and very clear. I was directed to do a info product on the freedom spirit which basically means how do we walk in love, peace, joy, patients kindness gentleness and self-control. How do we stay in that and not I've home at 5 o'clock in the evening and somebody cut us off and we draw the finger and start cussing.

How do we stay in that so that we can hear relevantory information. The moment you step out of that peace love Joy... the moment you step out of that you don't hear anything. Really you're just like fair game to lack of control, chaos, stuff like that. In the dream, I was given this dream and it was a very specific info product to sell and in the dream I was given the introduction. The dream told me, God told, me circle the introduction around perfect love cast not fear. I woke up and I'm like hey that's the next info product. Here we go how can I lose? I think that's why it's important because we have a group of people experiencing just that thing just exactly what I mentioned. Maybe they're creating a service. Maybe God's telling them to market to a certain audience. Maybe he's honing in on a target audience or... so dreams are not so much about... we think dreams are this weird ton of pink flying elephants kind of dreams that we just don't know what to do with, and until we hone in and start reading our dreams and learning how to interpret the symbols of the language there's so much more out there that were not tapping into as entrepreneurs.

Robert Plank: All of that kind of just starts my brain almost lit on fire just thinking about all the ways that Life can be easier and life can actually have meaning. I mean you've spent 20 years in the legal field, and we all know that stereotype. We have all experienced some of that I don't know losing your soul to the corporateness of it and just... working those long hours.

Amy Coello: All the devil.

Robert Plank: Just getting through the day, and having more caffeine, and putting in those long hours and all nighters. Especially like the last month or so for me, Amy, I've just been very aware of the importance of that self-care, and self-reflection. Waking up early and having the quiet time, and getting on all these long walks. It helps so much just to reduce to stress, and at the same time, sort of like you mentioned before, to not become like the person that meditates 8 hours a day. Only eats all vegan food. There's definitely a way to have your cake and eat it too it sounds like where you can only be the best self you can, be fulfilled, be productive, but then also have these tools and tap into your dreams to solve the problems in your waking life it sounds like.

Amy Coello: Yeah. Absolutely. It's interesting. You can either... there's a balance between hugging a tree and hugging a pencil. We come to that balance, and what I found and what I teach to my mentorship group, is that you've got to hone in because if you don't as an entrepreneur. You and I both know you will cast seed everywhere all day long, right, because you're just spinning wheels. What will hit. If not this, then this, and if not this, then this. You spend all your time building this product, and yet now you don't know how to market it. Entrepreneurs struggle with having to be their accountant, their marketing department, their writing department, their video department, their... As entrepreneurs, we will... we can have like to hone into what we are good at, and fail to do that other part. Well, guess what, God can be your business partner. If we listen, and we tap into that, the direction that we hone in on. I could've gotten up that day from that dream, and thought "Oh, whatever." Gone and did some filming on whatever it is I was doing instead of going "you know what, I'm going to tap into this." That dream. I'm going to follow this dream out. AS I begin to follow that dream out, it's going to save time. It's going to save energy. It's going bring peace because you know what you're doing is locking arms with the spirit realm. How do we loose, right?

Robert Plank: Yes. Just drive it, and see what happens. AS you're explaining this, it kind of just makes me think that well... I wish I could remember more dreams, and I wish that my dreams were as specific as what you described where I dream specifically said make this 9 part information product. Is there a secret to even remembering dreams? Because I know that I have them. Some days I'll wake up, and I'll be in a good mood for whatever reason, or I'll have some kind of random thought in my head, or some kind of problem that I hadn't had solved. I went to bed, and I wake up and now I kind of figured it out. I know I have dreams, but I would say that I only remember maybe one dream a year. It's usually something weird, and I'll remember that thing. I'll go to a dream dictionary, or I'll do a Google search, and Ill search for "I dreamed about eating steak," or I'll dream about some kind of person was like arguing with me. I've heard about that part, and I've heard about things like have a dream journal next to your bed. I did that, but I couldn't remember anything to write down in the journal, and I've earn about things like play some kind of hypnosis video. Say something mantra before bed, and I've tried all these different things, but no matter what I do. I'm not able to remember dreams on a consistent basis. Is there a secret to remembering more?

Amy Coello: It's not really a secret. A few things you just said are what we recommend. One of the things that I recommend is just getting all the electronics out of your room. We spend so much time looking... going to bed after we scrolling through whatever it is on our phone. That puts off energy. Dreams are energy. God is light. Light is energy. Here's this fight. We have the host energy, which is our electronic, EMS, and stuff like that. We help people get all of that out of your room. Prepare a place to hear.

Open the dream journal next to your bed. Here's what I tell people. If you do it consistently. What I mean is, don't go "Oh, I tried that." No. What I mean is give your heart permission to dream again. Like you said, I said all the mantras and whatever, yet you say I believe that my dreams contain a valid message from God. I'm going to pay attention to my dreams. You may have to do that for as long as you have failed to pay attention. You just keep going into that.

Even if you wake up, and you just remember writing on a piece of paper. Okay, I'm going to write that in my dream journal. Writing on a piece of paper. Why? Because why do we write it down? Because when we're writing, there's scientific evidence that says that when you scribe. When you write. You're actually writing on your heart. Your heart has memories. We tell people write in your dream journal even if it's just a little bit. Maybe a glimpse of something, or maybe you just feel something, and you write that down on your journal. You got to pick a time because as entrepreneurs, we are so passionate. We'll get up and go "Oh, that was weird." Shake the dust off our feet, get your coffee, and head out to whatever we're doing. We busy, busy, busy. When we take that quite time, and we take those walks, and we ponder and meditate on what I call the Night Season. The ministry of the night season. We enter into that place. We give our hearts permission to dream again. When you start opening up your dream life, when you start writing it down, it starts to come little by little. Here's the thing, God's going to speak to you anyway. He'll speak to you through dire situations. He'll speak... he's going to get your attention. I would rather it be at night, and me in my quiet time versus a tragic situation. Take that time to meditate. Make those declarations. Get all the electronics out of your room. Pay attention to what you're feeding off of, so if I'm watching like crime or murder mysteries before bed. Clearly, I'm setting myself up for something that I don't want. I make it a habit to make sure I'm eating on things that tare fruitful for my life. The dreams come. They do come. You have to be faithful on your end to continue writing them down even if it's just a little bit. Even if you're just journalism your feelings of what you though when you were sleeping. Here's the deal. I can tell you when I go speak at places, I can tell where a person is spiritually the dept of the level of spirituality based on their dream. When you're just starting to dream, pay attention to those twilight dreams. Those are the ones that happen 5 minutes before you wake up. Those are very very powerful dreams. If you're on a Sunday afternoon, eat some lunch. Set your alarm. Set it for about an hour. You will wake up in the middle of a dream. You got to practice dreaming. It's a gift. It's an art form. When you do that, go ahead and hone in. When you hone in, it's like God, the Universe, the Great light whatever you call this thing that's bigger than you that's pulling you into your path of destiny. It's going to meet you where you're at, but you can't just try it out. We're entrepreneurs. We'll bounce.

Robert Plank: We'll get distracted. What you're saying is instead of treating it like a hobby, it needs to be something that maybe you dedicate yourself to. What you're telling me is, a quick boost or a quick fix first of all is to remove electronics from the bedroom, and to not look at any screens for maybe a while before going to bed. It's not going to happen overnight, but maybe I have to decide I'm going to spend the next thirty nights, the next ninety nights, just repeating this thing over and over. The best part of all that of what you said is that at first it might just be a stance, it might just be two sentences. AS it repeats more and more as I build up this skill, it's kind of weird to think of remembering your dreams as a skill. But the way you're describing it sounds exactly like that.

Amy Coello: Absolutely. Here's the great part. They become more and more specific to where it's not always very symbolic, but very direct like it was with me.

I was just talking to a counselor before I got on the show, and we were talking about one of her clients. She had a dream about this certain client maybe a week before, and in the dream the client was very resistant to something she was... She was at the client's house swimming in their pool. The client came out, and was very resistant to her. Now, this client and the counselor are... have been together for many years, and it had never been a real problem. Water represents spirit, so she was swimming in the water, and there was something that the counselor was going to bring to the next session that was spiritual that the client was going to resist.

It's unusual because that's not that client's typical behavior, so she kind of didn't have a break for it until the very next session. There was resistance. She was already prepared for it, so she was able to say listen I understand you're resisting because it's spiritual. I understand all of your thought processes on that, but could you just trust the process and bring your guard now so we can test this theory out. She was already prepared for that just based on what she does for a living. It gets very specific the more you do this the guidance becomes very clear. Your dreams go from being pink flying elephants to write this information product, and it's going to be a nine week course and here's the introduction.

Robert Plank: Nice. I mean, that is the goal. If I could get my dreams that specific, then that's what I want. As you're describing all this, you're talking about like God, and spiritual stuff, I'm not super religious. Lately, I've just realized that whether I fully believe in it or not or whether I believe in a divinity or I'm tapping into whatever. It's like I realize as I'm sitting at my desk, or I'm walking, I'm driving my car, or whatever I can only really focus on maybe four or five things at once. There's this subconscious mind that's this huge computer. If we knew everything out subservience was thinking, it would be a firehouse of information. If we're locked out of , then that's not good either. This seems like a skill that everyone needs to pay very close attention to and as we get our dreams skill built up. We get it to more advanced stuff, do you know much about lucid dreaming? Do you have any advice about really going into the power zone with that?

Amy Coello: Right. Lucid dreaming is a gift. I have found that either people naturally can do it, and they've been doing it since they were young. But there's also a place where you can practice lucid dreaming. It takes practice. It takes awhile. I know people who just do it on a regular basis, and I'll give you an example of someone who would... someone in our group who practices lucid dreaming.

The woman was not typically a lucid dreamer, but she came home. It was a Sunday afternoon. She had been at a restaurant with some friends. She comes home and she takes nap. Her daughter who's 17, she's out doing her thing on Sunday afternoon. In the dream, she saw a car crossing on intersection, and it got hit on the driver side door. She realize it was her daughters car. IN the dream, the police came to her house, knocked on the door, and she woke up in a panic really. She said she of course texted her daughter, and she said "Where are you, what are you doing." Her daughter's like "I'm fine." So she said "Just be careful," so she goes back to sleep. She practicing lucid dreaming. She's very involved in dreams. She goes back to sleep, and she goes right back into the dream. Just like we do when we're dreaming. We get up, go to the bathroom, we come back and fall right back into the dream. When you do that, that's the first level of being able to lucid dream. Level number one.

She goes back into the dream, and she's able to recognize that she's dreaming which is what lucid dreaming is. You are in the dream, and you are aware that you're asleep and you're in the dream. She is able to change the scene. She has the dream completely over again, but this time it hits on... the car still gets hit, but it hits on the back end of it. Not the driver side. Sure enough, if she did not wake up again from that dream... her daughter was in a car accident. It hit in the back end of that car.

Robert Plank: Woah.

Amy Coello: You and I can say "Well, why didn't you dream that she didn't get in the car, and get in the car accident in the first place." I mean, if you're lucid dreaming, those are different steps in lucid dreaming. You're able to go in and change the dream. I tell people all the time well... They tell me you have this dream that is a reoccurring dream, it happens all the time that someone's chasing me, and I'm running and I'm running. I just can't get away. I'm running molasses. A lot of times we say, go back... when you have the dream again, recognize you're dreaming. When you do, turn around to the pursuer and tell them to stop. Or we'll tell people to turn around for the pursuer, ask them what they want from you. That's even greater. That's the next level of dreaming being able to communicate with whatever you're having this reoccurring dream. Reoccurring dreams are very very common. Reoccurring dreams are like God with a megaphone going "Hey, we can't take you to the next level of success and abundance until we deal with this issue right here." Reoccurring dreams are generally... the issue you have. That core issue that you have in your life. I'll give you an example. Mine is running like I'm running and being chases, and I can't chase. I'm running through molasses as well. That core issue is thriving. I'm an entrepreneur. We strive that's what we do until we learn not to. If I'm not careful, I'll kick open doors because I'm educated. I'm talented. I know what I'm doing. I'll kick open doors that were never meant to be open, and then a year later I'm spinning out of control because it wasn't a door that God was opening for me. Because of my striving, I can kick that door open and go do it anyway. When I have that dream, I can recognize "Oh, I look around and think Amy what are you striving for. What door are you trying to kick open that you're not supposed to walk through." Those are why we have reoccurring dreams.

Robert Plank: Interesting. It's like our subconscious subtle way of telling us "Well, if you don't deal with this problem soon then it'll be worse" or this is a thing you've been ignoring, and we need to fix. As far as like... let's say we get to the stage where we can remember our dreams more, and they get more specific and move into lucid dreaming. IN that category, many a few years ago, I read upon stuff like this. They said things like if you're in a room while you're awake, flick light switches, or look at a clocks and numbers. Look at your hands a lot. It's only worked once in my life. One time in my life I had a dream where I looked down at my hands, and it was almost like I was blinded by the sun. I couldn't quite look at my hands without it like hurting. Maybe for minute or so, maybe two minutes, I was aware of the dream. I knew I was dreaming. I could control things, but that is literally the only time in my life that I was able to get that. Are there things that we can do once we start remembering our dreams, stuff like that, things we can do dive into that lucid dreaming?

Amy Coello: Yes. I typical will tell people in my classes. What you can do is... use Sunday afternoon to do this, and instead of working crazy amounts of hours on Sundays like we usual do. Take the time. Go to bed. Set your alarm. Try to wake up during that REM phase which is every night you're having a dream, you go from alpha to delpha to beta. It's in that REM phase that you start dreaming. In about that hour, hour and half, set your alarm and wake up in it. What's happening is you're making yourself become aware of when you enter into REM.

Throughout the day, throughout your day, you start telling yourself "I am in a lucid dream, and when I'm in the dream, I will know I'm lucid dreaming because I will look at my hand. I will see my hand, and I will know I'm lucid dreaming." You begin to give yourself specific instructions, and it may not be tomorrow. You probably had it once in your life because you're focused on other things. My focus is on dreams. That's what I do. I'm n business, but I'm in the business of dreams. But you're not. If you're a car dealer, you're not. You're just not, but if you take the time to make this a part time job of yours because why. Why? Because there is a place where you are specifically guided and given direction that will make your schedule and your business streamline. It will streamline. It will give you... here's the deal. It'll even tell you who not to do business with. It will reveal agendas.

Robert Plank: Interesting.

Amy Coello: Not only that, it will also remove the locks out of your way that when you're trying to manifest something, and you're believing in something enough to be able to bring it about. A lot of times, we can't. It just will not manifest. Because there's a block there, and to even hone in and go in and tell you where that block is. We call that inner healing.

I had a client in my group who had this dream. Struggling with rage. Struggling with rage. Nicest person I've ever met, but then there was this part of them just got really angry with his family. If he has a dream, he comes back, he says okay I've had this dream. The whole dream is taken place in an amuse park, but there was once part of this amusement park that was blocked off. When he peered in the window, there was nothing in there. He thought maybe even there was supposed to be some construction or something, but at this amusement park there's nothing in there. Well, there's some other parts to the dream, but what that told me was that amusement park is his brain. There's park block off. We need to let's go in, look at where that part is, and we're able to guide him through. When part of the dream had to do with a girl who he was naked with in the dream, and then she didn't want to be with him anymore. Okay, well that tells me something. Who was the first girl that you exposed yourself and was transparent with and protected you? Sure enough, seven years old, her name is blah, blah, blah.

We're able to go in and talk about that. Bring it to the surface because that was an underlining trigger. It was a trigger point for this person. We can even go in and look at a lot that will help you get tot he next level.

Robert Plank: It sounds amazing, but also kind of spooky in a good way. As you were describing this, what was going through my head about that was just that we all do things that keep ourselves healthy. We eat right. We exercise. We take our car to the shop. We all should also take care of our mind as well as our body. It sounds like a lot of people who aren't aware of their dreams, or people who aren't aware that they should be improving this dream skill. It sounds like a lot of people are missing out on the insights and all trial and error. It sounds like a lot of people, especially us entrepreneurs, could short cut years maybe even decades of mistakes, frustrations, loss time, aggravation, and all that good stuff. If someone is listening to this, and they like what they hear, or even if they're just a little but curious. They want to know more about this dream stuff. They want to know more about us Amy. Where can they go to find out about all of this?

Amy Coello: I want you to join me on Facebook at Amy Coello. My public page, I don't have anymore room on my private page. Go to my website amycoello.com. You can click on the learn tab, and we've got our dream circle mention ship group right there. We also have eyes2c.org. That's our dream journal. It's an online dream journal. Go int there, start recording your dreams in there. Put even just the tiniest bit. Record just even... you know, feelings. It's a spiritual journal. It's not even just a dream journal. It's a spiritual journal. Keep your thoughts, and what's going on in the morning. Spend sometime and go do that. If you have trouble with the dream, you can click Submit my Dream Team. We've been together for many, many years, and they will help you interpret that dream. It's actually a research project. We believe. We know that God is speaking to you individually though your dreams, but what must he be saying to us collectively. We might go through dark theories with the Dallas shooting. We knew the time, the place, and the city that the city was going to happen. If we called the FBI and said, "Hey. We had couple of people who had dream about the shooting." The FBI would have profiled us and hung up on us. What if we had 241 people who had that dream now with us?

Robert Plank: I think so.

Amy Coello: Yeah. I think so too, and that's our research project. Go in and champion with us. Keep your dreams in there. Submit it because when you pay for that dream interpretation, that's what helps us pay for our research project.

Robert Plank: Cool. How much is a dream interpretation for you these days?

Amy Coello: I think it's $19, and you have the opportunity to keep going back and forth with the dream interpreter. They're doing to interpret the dream for you, and give you some advice and stuff.

Robert Plank: Cool. I mean, yeah, especially for us people who are not necessarily employees or might have high stress for us to make these decisions. $19 in order to solve even a small problem that prevents us from losing $1000 or cost us to make $10,000. That is for sure a bargain even if it is kind of weird, and maybe what people aren't used to. Everything that you described today sounds like this is something that literally every human being alive needs to pay very close attention to.

Amy Coello: Everybody dreams. No one's talking about it.

Robert Plank: They need to. The thing about all this dreams stuff is, I'm not just here to listen to some facts and figures. I'm going to be applying this myself with the dream journal. The meditation. The Sunday afternoon naps, so that I could get back to not only remembering my dreams, getting them more specific, and also controlling it. Replaying it and reliving the dreams so that I can change the outcome, and get those breakthroughs. That is AmyCoello.com and that is on Facebook Amy L Coello and that is eyes2c.org. Thanks for being on the show today, Amy, and sharing all your unique and clever insights about dreaming. I really appreciated you being on.

Amy Coello: Thank you so much for having me. I truly appreciate it.

Robert Plank: John Lagoudakis is one of Australia's leading internet marketers and back in 2007, he stumbled across affiliate marketing, and within two years was able to go from zero dollars online to being one of ClickBank's top 100 affiliates worldwide.

He's been featured in the New York Times best seller, Get Rich Click, list for his book, and has authored several books and has a long running internet marketing podcast.

Today, John helps businesses to get more exposure online, more leads, and to make more sales.

How are things today, John?

John Lagoudakis: Great. Thank you, Robert. Appreciate you having me on your show today.

Robert Plank: Awesome. I'm glad you're here and I'm sure that having you on, we'll be able to fill in the gaps for a lot of people. Your whole business and everything you do is through this process called ClickBank. Is that right?

John Lagoudakis: That's how I got started. It was a great place to start. There's many ways to get started online. I chose ClickBank. That was really big back in 2007. A lot of people were making good money from it. You didn't have to have your own product. You can promote other people's products, their commissions, excellent. Anywhere between 50 to 75% of the sale is yours. Sometimes even 100%. That was rare.

It was easy to promote, too. Back in 2007, you could go onto Google AdWords. You had heaps of traffic. It didn't cost you too much back then. You could do it back then. You can't do that now. It was just very easy. I opened up a Google account, promote the ClickBank products. You could see your commissions instantly. I was totally guilty of this. I think many people are guilty of this. We log into our affiliate accounts and want to see, have we made a sale yet? Have we made a sale yet? It was a fun, easy, way to get started and I had success with it.

Robert Plank: Awesome. A couple of things about that, one is that I'm kind of hearing that a few times you're mentioning that maybe in this day and age, is ClickBank still a good option for people to use nowadays? What's changed in the past 10 years or so with ClickBank?

John Lagoudakis: ClickBank is still a fantastic place to get started. How you promote your ClickBank products is very different today. As I mentioned, you can't use Google AdWords as an affiliate. You can create your own... Sorry, I should clarify, too. What I mean by that is, I was sending people from Google that would see my ad, that would click on my ad, and they would go straight to the product sales page on ClickBank. It was just my direct affiliate link. You can't do that today, but what you can do is send traffic to your own website where maybe you're reviewing products or you're an authority site and you're recommending products. Whether through your email list or directly on your website through links and banners. You can do it that way, send traffic to your own site and then from there, send them to ClickBank.

Robert Plank: That makes sense. What you're saying is basically, just to make sure everyone is all on the same page here, ClickBank is this platform where anyone who wants to sell anything, make a website and then take payments and deliver a product, can deliver that in ClickBank. The power of what you're saying is that they have a huge network of affiliates. If anyone has something to sell on ClickBank, then there's all these affiliates already ready to promote, already plugged in. Then from the point of view of anyone who's first getting started, looking to make that first dollar online, they can register with ClickBank as an affiliate and promote something there.

Having said all that, what you're saying is in the past ten years or so, there's a few extra hoops to jump through. One of those that you're explaining is that it used to be that if you found a weight loss product or something, you could go and find it on ClickBank, grab your link, set up a Google ad, and then just be running, keep refreshing your stats, and see if you're getting traffic, if you're getting sales, then that would be it.

What you're saying is now, there are more rules in place than there were before. Now if someone was looking to do that method, they still could target Google traffic and Google ads and send people to a site, but now they have to have their own site. Now they have to send that Google traffic to an authority site, to a blog, or maybe they're making reviews on this weight loss product. Then, once someone clicks from Google onto that person's blog, then they can click on those affiliate links, and then go to the site and then buy. It's similar but there's a few steps and rules nowadays it sounds like.

John Lagoudakis: Yeah, exactly.

Robert Plank: Cool. ClickBank's great, selling on ClickBank is great, being an affiliate on ClickBank is great. As far as John Lagoudakis goes and ClickBank, what makes you stand out as far as the other ClickBank sellers, and as far as other people teaching about marketing on ClickBank?

John Lagoudakis: I used to teach people about ClickBank and how to do that, but because things have changed and I've sort of moved away from that myself. What happened was, knowing that Google was going to stop allowing affiliates to promote ClickBank products the way I was doing it, I decided to move onto something more stable where I wasn't relying on one thing, putting all your eggs in one basket. What I started doing, Robert, was email marketing. You have more control over lists. The problem with sending traffic straight to, whether it's your own product or someone else's product, straight to a sales page, the problem with doing that is that you're going to make some sales, yes, but what about the 98% that don't buy? Typically on a sales page, a good one converts at around 2%. You'll make 2% of the sales. The other 98% of visitors, you lose them.

The better strategy is to get people onto your email list and then start promoting your products, and not just promoting your products, but it's a better way to create a relationship with people, too. When they're on your email list, you can give them great content as well, create that goodwill, as well as promote products. Not just once, but for as long as they remain an active subscriber.

I took my focus away from promoting products again as an affiliate just straight on Google AdWords, two, building my list and email list, and then promoting products. Then I took it a step further and I started creating my own products and promoting those first. For those that weren't interested in my products, then yeah, I could promote related affiliate offers as well. That's definitely the way any business needs to go. It doesn't matter which business you're in, you need to be building your email list. Sometimes an SMS list is appropriate, especially if you have a local business. That's a must also, as well.

Robert Plank: Is this the correct order someone should be going in? Would a good plan for someone who is looking to make a new income stream, should they be doing it in this sequence? First, they promote an affiliate offer, then they look into adding on the email marketing piece, then if they're having success there with some sales and with some subscribers, then they should move on to their own product? Is that a good, logical step-by-step sequence for people?

John Lagoudakis: That would be a good strategy if you're not sure if the offer that you're going to promote to your list is going to convert well. You don't want to go through the trouble of creating an email marketing campaign, meaning setting up your landing page and setting up an email campaign, writing up the sequence, and then sending it to an affiliate offer, if you didn't know it was going to convert well.

However, because we know which products convert well, the great thing about ClickBank and other networks like JVZoo today, if you're promoting physical products, like Commission Junction, is that you can go in and you can see how each product is rating as far as an affiliate is concerned. You can see in an instant how many affiliates are making sales with a product today. What I tell people, what I tell my clients, is if you're going to promote affiliate offers, go into the networks, pick the ones in your niche that are selling the best because you know that they're going to convert well. They're typically good products and products that sell. The conversion rate of the sales page is really good.

Knowing that, having that information before hand, what I tell people when they're starting out is start building your list right away. It's the most important thing. The number one regret of most successful marketers have is that they didn't start their list earlier. Right from the beginning, I say, start a list and then once you get people on your list, and even immediately, you can start. When someone ops into your list and subscribes to your list, you can send them to an offer straight away. That could be a "Thank You" page, if you like. It's not like you're delaying the sales process or anything, but it is so important to start building a list. It's the most important thing you'll do in any business that you have.

Robert Plank: I like that advice. I also wish that had been my advice starting out. If you think about it, there's all these products plugged into ClickBank, and these are all products that someone took the time to make the product, whether that was recording videos or whatever, to make the sales letter, to change it over how many years to make it to convert, to reduce the refunds, to add all these up-sells. What's cool about starting as an affiliate is all those things are already done for you.

If an affiliate focuses just on building the list, then that's a lot of steps taken out of the process. They only have even an hour or two a day to focus on building their online business, well then that doesn't have to be. They spend an hour writing emails and making products. They can spend an hour setting up ads, or they can spend an hour getting new link backs and things like that. It sounds like because of ClickBank, and because of affiliate products and affiliate networks, and especially that these networks show how well these things are selling, that people can just hit the ground running. Is that right?

John Lagoudakis: Definitely. You'd be surprised just how long it takes to do all those things you mentioned, Robert. Picking a niche, creating a product, a sales page, everything that's involved with having your own product and selling it, there's so much involved. If you don't have a product that you want to sell online, one of the worst things you can do is spending a lot of time creating a product and then trying to sell it. Definitely being an affiliate first is so helpful because what you learn in the process is which products sell. By being an affiliate and looking at what's the highest converting products, you learn a lot about your market.

If you don't do that first, if you just come in and say, "I'm going to create a product," not only is it going to take you a lot of time to set that all up, but many times, you're not going to create something that the market really wants. Unfortunately, what necessarily we think will be a good product is not necessarily what the market wants.

Robert Plank: That makes a lot of sense, and it makes me think of all kinds of historical examples where like some car came out that everyone hated, or everyone hated tablets at first. It seems there's all these cases in history or in businesses where businesses spent millions and millions of dollars, and they still got it wrong. Even if Apple or Microsoft or Ford can't get it right, even with their millions of dollars of research, then I don't think I'm going to get it right just by guessing. The only way I can really trust it is, like you said, promote some stuff and see what makes sales.

John Lagoudakis: Yeah, and what a lot of email marketers do that's a great idea as well, as you build your list, ask your list, too. Send them an email and say, "Hey, I'm looking to create a product and I want to know your feedback. What is it you want?" You don't even have to say you're going to create a product. Email your list and say, "What's your biggest frustration?" Then find out. What is their biggest need? What's their biggest desire? If you see a trend, especially if there's no one in the market providing a solution for it, then that is where you want to be.

Robert Plank: I like it. I'm thinking and looking at the ClickBank market place right now. I like to go to ClickBank to get ideas about different angles of things and that. What's cool about ClickBank products especially is that it's not like the highest selling weight loss products will be just about generic weight loss. When I think about a ClickBank product for weight loss, I think, okay, there's a ClickBank product for how to lose man-boobs, or how to lose a belly, or how to remove cellulite. I think about all the products that you always see in the top ranking. That's kind of cool. It's almost like they've blazed the trail before all of us. ClickBank was going after that with that approach. People have a problem, they have a need. The ClickBank products, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like the ClickBank products are really geared towards these desperate kind of problems, right?

John Lagoudakis: Exactly, Robert. That's exactly right. You don't want to go too broad and say, "Weight loss products." You want to break it down to a sub-niche. You want to get rid of your man-boobs is one. Do you want to get rid of your thighs for women. Exactly. By doing that, as well, you can create specific demographics. For the man-boobs one, you can gear your sales copy, and your images, and your colors, and the title of your product towards men rather than trying to capture men and women's interest with a generic weight loss product. It's definitely a great idea to break it down to a specific sub-niche rather than trying to sell to everyone. That doesn't work.

A good way that someone put it to me, recently, was it's harder to catch a small fish in the sea, than it is a big fish in a small pond. That's what you're trying to do, when you're targeting sub-niche.

Robert Plank: That makes sense. The other thing that's great about the internet and affiliate marketing is that you're not limited to just one product. If someone finds, like you said, they find the weight loss product for the man, if there's a weight loss product for the women, and so on, then those are different funnels and things like that that an affiliate could set up.

John Lagoudakis: Yeah. One of the biggest mistakes, Robert, that a lot of people make when they start out with their online business, I've definitely made it in the past, I don't know if you have, Robert, but is that we get excited with all the possibilities, and we have too many projects going on at one time. The counsel I always give to people is, pick one area, one niche, get the marketing right for it, be happy with your sales form and make sure it's profitable. Once it's profitable and you're making money with it, if you want to go to a different area, a different sub-niche or a different niche all together, then great, go for it.

Until you do that, don't have more than one project going at the same time because there's so much involved in getting it right. If you're working on two or more projects at the same time, it's very hard to have success. Then you get discouraged because you're doing a lot of work and no particular project is gaining traction and making sales. Definitely encourage people, when you're starting out, pick one strategy, whatever clicks with you, find someone that's having success with that strategy, learn from them. Do everything they say to the T, until you are having success. Once you're having success and you're making at least a full time income from that one strategy, until you're doing that, don't move on to another one.

What I've also found is there's just so much with even just one niche or one sub-niche, it's better then to go deep. Once you're having success, go deep. Create a funnel where you can sell even higher end products in the back end so you can make more money with that niche rather than going into two niches. It's a better way to go anyway.

Robert Plank: I can totally relate to that. I see a lot of people where I'll give them an idea for a website or a landing page or whatever that they should create, and then they're response is, "If I could make one, I'll make 50." I think well yeah, like you say, get the one working and then maybe get to two. I think we've all had to go through that phase. You have, and me especially, I've gone through that phase for sure, early on where I said, "I'm just going to make 10 landing pages. I'll make 10 opt-in forms. I'll make 10 sequences." I'm pushing the goal post too far out and I'm delaying the amount of time it would have taken me to get to the money making stage. It might have taken three months or it might have taken a month before hand, but how I'm pushing it out to nine months or a year, or probably never, because having to switch all those gears and have all those half finished things. Super discouraging. In addition to what you said, a lot of time, a lot of effort, and no money yet because the focus is too split.

John Lagoudakis: Exactly. Again, I made that mistake when I started out. We get so excited. I see a lot of people making it.

Robert Plank: As far as what you're doing with ClickBank, I know that you said you promoted stuff as an affiliate at first, then you built a list, now you create your own products. You're a top 100 listed seller on ClickBank. What is your setup? Are you all in one niche? Is it spread out? Is it some vendor stuff, some affiliate stuff? What do you have setup on ClickBank?

John Lagoudakis: There might be confusion. Definitely, I achieved the 100 ClickBank affiliate status very soon after I started with internet marketing, but I no longer sell a lot of ClickBank products. My focus is on my own products. What I do today is two things. I help people that are getting started online, and definitely I'll point them to networks like ClickBank and JVZoo, where they can promote other people's products, but also, Robert, I help people, and this is the biggest part of my business today, is helping other businesses. People that already have a business, they're already selling products. They maybe have an offline business that they're struggling to get online, or maybe they have an online business and might purely be online and they just needed to take it to the next level because they're not making many or not any sales yet. They just want that help getting traffic, leads, and sales. That's where I focus my time today.

Robert Plank: What you're saying is that where you focus your time on today is with coaching clients? Is it more coaching clients and less of selling your own stuff?

John Lagoudakis: It's a bit of both. You have to be doing it yourself as well to coach other people and to keep up to date. It's always changing. I have a business that is not internet marketing, is not in the internet marketing space, if you know what I mean. It's separate to my coaching business. I have actually two businesses that is not IM related at all. That allows me to, again, keep up to date. Keeping myself in the real world where I'm promoting those businesses and making sales in those businesses. Then I have the coaching business where I'm able to help people, again, anyone that's just starting out online, or those that have businesses that want to improve them.

Robert Plank: Nice. What I've been hearing all through our discussion today is that when you find something that you want to do, and you do what's practical, and you get it set up and you grow it, and then you get it to the point where there's a next logical step to get to. You started with the affiliate marketing with AdWords, then when the game changed a little bit, then you started building your own list and your own SMS list, so that way you can build it up. Then you started making your own products. Now, you're diversifying into these other businesses.

That's what I've been hearing over and over again. You're not locked into one money making strategy. You're not locked into one particular platform, but you're also giving it a chance to work out. Right? You're having enough focus where back when you started with ClickBank, you spent those two years building that up, then when maybe there were other alternatives to ClickBank, or there were other ways to make money. Some of us might get bored with a certain way of getting a income in. Then you kind of transitioned or you diversified and tried out different ways of making money, as opposed to just being stuck with ClickBank, which might have limited your income as the rest of the world changed around you.

John Lagoudakis: It's definitely not good to have all your eggs in once basket. While I tell people, especially when you're starting up, focus on the one niche. What happened to me, I'll sort of give you an idea of the logical progression. When I first started trying to make money online, I found out about affiliate marketing, about ClickBank. I was using Google AdWords, mainly, to promote the ClickBank products. Then, I started using Yahoo and Bing as well, because they had their PPC platforms, that was while Yahoo Overture was still around. Most of my sales were coming through Google AdWords, about 90% of my sales because that's where most of the search engine traffic is. Then, Google changed their policies. That was, I started in 2007. 2009, around the middle of 2009, Google changed their policies and they said, "No, we're not going to allow ClickBank affiliates to promote products online with direct affiliate links."

Overnight, Robert, I tell you it was shattering. Overnight, my income dropped like 90%.

Robert Plank: Oh no.

John Lagoudakis: It really hurt. However, I knew it was coming so I already started building an email list. Then I spent my time focusing on building my list and promoting my products to my list. Then I decided, instead of promoting someone else's products, I'll promote my own products. I created my own product. It's called the List Marketing System, where basically I set up list building sites just like I've created, for other people. I knew that's where I felt people needed the most help. People coming along wanting to make money, they knew they needed to build a list, but it's so hard to get started. Learning email campaigns and setting up high converting squeeze pages and sales funnels, so I just did all that for them. I set it up for them. I did that and I promoted that mainly through webinars.

I got people onto my list. They went to a webinar and I taught them in the webinar, how to build a list, the importance of building a list, why they need to do it in their business and then how to do it. At the end, I said, "Look, you can do all that yourself or I'll create it for you." That's what I did for a while there.

I went through a rough period. I went through a divorce back in 2011 that was the worst thing ever. You wouldn't wish it on your enemies. You know what the great thing was, while I was going through that, because I had automated a lot of my business, I automated a lot of the way I got the traffic. The webinars were automated. They were evergreen webinars, they weren't live webinars. Even while I was going through a tough period, around two years while I was going through that divorce, my mind was so gone I couldn't really focus on my business at all. The beautiful thing is, because I had set up what I had set up in my business, I was actually having the income coming in. I was just doing the things that I needed to do to keep it running. I was able to have my full time income coming in while I was going through that rough period in my life.

When I got out of that, when things started to pick up for me, mentally anyway, and I could focus again, I got approached by a friend of mine who was starting a business in a different niche. He wanted someone to do the online stuff, like take care of the website and do the traffic generation, generate the leads. I went into partnership with him. That's how I started my first non IM business.

Recently I started a second one because of a need. I had another friend approach me, needed to get leads for his business. I started generating leads for him mainly and then that's sort of grown from there because other people in the industry in other areas of the world are having that same need for those kind of leads. That's how the second business got started.

At the same time, while I was working on those two businesses, again, being out of the IM, Internet Marketing, niche, being outside of that, learn a lot in those two niches as well. I thought I've come back and I said, "There's a lot of businesses out there that need help with their internet marketing." Someone like myself that's got experience, been in the industry many years, eight years full time now, eight and a half years, I've come along and I thought, you know what? I should start a consult and see where I basically help these businesses. Yes, there's a lot of people out there, a lot of Internet marketing consultants and agents and agencies out there.

What I have noticed, Robert, is a lot of them, it's like a mechanic. We dread taking our car to a mechanic because, especially if we don't know much about cars, if we don't know the mechanic, it's 50/50 really. Are you going to get the job done properly? Are you going to ripped off? Unfortunately, in the IM industry, Internet Marketing space, it's the same thing.

That first friend of mine that approached me about his business and wanting me to help him out, for example, he had just recently hired an SEO company that were doing work for him. They'd been on board with him for three months. When I joined my friend as a partner, I had a look at their initial proposal and the keywords they were targeting for him. They'd chosen 20 keywords for him. They said, "These keywords we're going to work for you and if we rank on the first page of Google, this is how much traffic you're going to get."

I looked at those keywords, I did the research. The number they'd given him were a total lie. They were saying he was going to get tens, hundreds of thousands of views for these long tail keywords. I did the research. He was lucky to get five, ten views per day. Actually, it was even less than that. It was less than five views per day if you ranked for those key words.

Robert Plank: Oh no.

John Lagoudakis: Yeah. I saw that. He's not the only one. I've hear many horror stories like that. That's where I come in. I figure, look, I'm going to come to this space because there's a lot of good that I can do. I only do work for clients that I know is going to get results. Actually, I give my clients a guarantee. I say to them, "If the leads I generate for you, if you're not making at least enough sales in profits to cover my expenses, don't pay me."

Robert Plank: Nice.

John Lagoudakis: Again, there's that need, that's why I've come back into that space as well.

Robert Plank: Cool. If people were looking to hire you for something like that, or even just see what you're up to, what website could they go to find out all that stuff?

John Lagoudakis: Thanks, Robert. The website, it's just my name, which it's not easy to spell, but I'll spell it out. It's JohnLagoudakis.com.

Robert Plank: Awesome. We'll also toss that link in the show notes. That way even if people don't have time to write all that down or didn't get all that, we'll link to the John Lagoudakis site.

John Lagoudakis: Great. Thank you for that, Robert.

Robert Plank: No problem. Is that the only website? Do you have the Get Rich Click book? Or is that not being promoted right now?

John Lagoudakis: I was a guest in that book. I think the last edition they did of that was back in 2011. It might have been updated 2013. You can get that from Amazon still. My main site, JohnLagoudakis.com where you can find out more about what I'm doing. You can get in touch with me. Also on my website, I do have something that may interest your listeners, Robert. That is, I have a Platinum Online Business Coaching Program. What it is, it's video training I've done myself, step-by-step video training on how to go from choosing your niche all the way through to creating your sales funnel, and even driving traffic and making sales online. All of that's free. Anyone, you go to JohnLagoudakis.com and you click on the banner there, follow the Platinum Online Business Coaching Program, you can get free access to that right now.

Robert Plank: Awesome. They should all go there right now. One more time, it is JohnLagoudakis.com. Thanks for being on the show today, John, and sharing your unique insight and your story, and all that kind of cool stuff.

John Lagoudakis: Thank you, Robert. Appreciate you having me on.

Robert Plank: We're here with Dr. D. Anthony Miles, he's a PHD and entrepreneur and founder and CEO of Miles Development Industries Corporation, a consulting practice and venture capital acquisition firm. Dr. D. Anthony Miles is an award winning professor, a researcher, a leading expert who provides expert testimony, he's a radio talk show host, and executive producer of Game On Business Talk Radio Show. He's nationally known and has a new book out. He's a best selling author of Risk Factors and Business Models: Understanding the Five Forces of Entrepreneurial Risk, I'm super excited to talk about that. How are things today Dr. D?

D. Anthony Miles: Great, thank you for having me today Robert. I really appreciate it.

Robert Plank: Cool. I'm glad you're here. Can we talk about how you're different, just to start us off? Sure, there's lots of PHDs and lots of people who say here's what you should do in business, but what makes you stand out as opposed to everyone else?

D. Anthony Miles: I think what makes me stand out from a lot of academics is I have over 20 years of industry experience to back up my academic work. I would say I'm active in the business world. I'm always doing things, I'm always doing partnerships, I'm working on different ventures. I would say that I have more of a duality to my skills and experiences because of what I do outside of the academic world as well as what I do in the academic world. I'm also a statistician, so I'm always working on statistical things and looking at different things. That's what gives me an edge over, say someone who's just a professor.

Robert Plank: Okay. Yeah. Either someone who's over educated or has the experience but not the education, not the way to express it and make it easy for others.

D. Anthony Miles: Absolutely. I think nowadays colleges and universities are looking for people with an industry experience as well as academic. You probably went to college like I did and you most likely taken a class from a person who's never had a real job, only works out of the TA and then they're trying to tell you about business strategy or they're trying to tell you about industry things.

Robert Plank: Oh yeah.

D. Anthony Miles: Sometimes I think business students need a little bit more from there professors. They need someone who's actually been out in the jungle, who's actually had to learn the school of hard knocks as well as the school of education, all of the above critical.

Robert Plank: That's cool. Yeah, me in college, I was a computer science major and that's an area, that's a field where in the real world things change drastically with computers, with programming languages and Facebook. Computers get faster and all of this and when you're dealing with a professor who's in his ivory tower, still kind of teaching the same thing he taught 30 years ago really doesn't cut it as opposed to someone who had the same duality as you. Those are my favorite kind of teachers because they would know what to say but then they would go off on a little bit of a tangent or use a real example or a case study. I thought, "Okay, great. This is really reinforcing the long term, the ever green academic stuff," but also the nooks and crannies, being in the trenches, being in the jungle as you put it.

D. Anthony Miles: Oh, absolutely. One of the critical factors as why I won an award as an adjunct professor. The reason that I was strategic and how I taught my students is I could always relate something from my experience. I worked in retail, I use to be a loan officer, I actually used to be a collector. You can't be a good loan officer unless you're a good collector. I was out there in the jungle. I re-pod a car, we have to talk at another show about that.

Robert Plank: It sounds like you've done a little bit of everything.

D. Anthony Miles: I would say I'm a little seasoned. What taught my students in a classroom is I would say, "The five forces, it may sound good as a theoretical model but in the actual business practice you really don't do business that way." You really need professors like that, you really do. I brought realism to my classroom teaching, that gave me an edge. It was so bad how students were trying to find out what I was teaching before the semester started. They wanted to know what classes I was teaching, what time.

When students see that you have a passion about what you're teaching and you bring a knowledge there. Again, if you go back to the academic, he has the knowledge yeah. He's a academic but he's not a practitioner. I would say both schools of thought are needed. You need the practitioner side, you also need the academic side. One without the other is one dimensional but you want to have both of those. Absolutely.

Robert Plank: Okay. You have both of those. You mentioned this thing called the five forces, what is that exactly?

D. Anthony Miles: There's a common business theory and every business student, anyone who has a BDA or MBA knows this, the Michael Porter model of the five forces of the industry. That's what's commonly been taught in most MBA programs and business schools. It's the basic framework of how you look at the industry. Do you want me to go through that, I could tell you really quick?

Robert Plank: Yeah, real quick's good.

D. Anthony Miles: Threat of substitutes, threat of new people coming into the marketplace, the threat of the customer, power of the customer and industry, power of supplier, I believe of something like that. Basically what I would tell my students was that that model came out in the 80s when I was a student. You have to understand something, that model came out before the internet, before globalization. The model is, I wouldn't say it's strictly outdated, but it needs to be updated because the industry is never that firmly or that neatly aligned. Here's a new emerging thing in industry right now, have you heard of a term called showcasing?

Robert Plank: No. No I haven't.

D. Anthony Miles: Marketing, that's an emerging term, showcasing, what that means is, I know I've done this and everybody has done this. You ever go out to a store and you whip out your smart phone and you go to a store, you see what they're charging for a particular item, let's say a bookstore. You go out to, let's say a common retailer. You go in there and you see what the book costs, you whip out your smart phone, you go onto the Amazon.com app and you go price that book to see what the basic pricing of the book is. Then you may also find that the book may be, you may find it cheaper used, it may be you look at the condition of it, say, just like new or like new. It may be a fourth of the cost that's in the retailer, what they're selling the book for. Now you have new smart customers.

The smart customers are not like the customers that your parents were. Now customers are smarter, customers have more information at their access. Your smartphone is like a mini computer. Anytime you go out into a retail establishment, like a bookstore, and you price the item and what you're interested in, you can price shop and price compare. Then you say, "Why don't I just buy it on Amazon right now? I was going to spend 30 bucks on a book, I can get the book for 10 bucks." I seen people do that. When Porter built his model, Michael Porter the Harvard professor, that was unheard of when he built the five forces of the industry. Those are the kinds of things I'm talking about.

Customers are showcasing now because now, remember that model was built before smart phones, built before the internet. Not only customers are smarter now, customers have power. A customer doesn't have to rely on you to tell them that the price is, they can price shop you. That could be for cars, that could be for any other item, that could be for appliances. Now we're living in the age of the smart customers are in power or consumers rather or in power. They don't have to accept your pricing. Not only are you competing with your main competitors, you're competing with people on best selling items on Amazon.com. That model does not have that in the five forces. You with me?

Robert Plank: Yeah. Just to make sure that we're on the same page here, there's this one example. There's the five forces which are from the 80s and things but then now there's all these new changes in technology and things like that. The example that you used is for example, one of the new forces I guess, is showcasing where someone can take their smartphone to a book store, find a book they want, scan it, order on Amazon for half the price and get it shipped home to them in a day or two. Things have changed but are there new rules or are there a new set of five factors? Is there some kind of response that us, as business owners, can now move in a new direction as the rest of everything else has changed?

D. Anthony Miles: Yeah. You have new frameworks and new models. I don't want to get all academic on you, I'll just say this to answer your question, competition is maybe four tier now when it used to be three tier. Not only are you competing locally or regionally or by a state or whatever, now you're competing globally and global also means the internet. You're competing with people all over the world. People not necessarily compete on price. That used to be the other thing, "I'll match their price." It's not about price now. Warren Buffet had said this, "Price is what you pay, value is what you get." The same people that want value aren't the same people that are concerned about price. We have a totally whole new ball game.

I'll give you a great example of this. I'll use Wal Mart as an example. What if you went and bought a laptop at Wal Mart? Wal Mart is considered a low price retailer, correct?

Robert Plank: Right.

D. Anthony Miles: Okay. The people that buy laptops from Wal Mart are concerned about price. What do you get when you buy a laptop from Wal Mart? You get no technical support, you get no help in terms of selecting item that you're interested in buying. Let's flip that around. That's a person that shops on price. The person that shops on value will go to a retailer who specializes in computers and they want value for their money. They don't care about the price. The guy that goes to say, let me give you an example, Best Buy or a place like that. You get more technical support from Best Buy when you buy a laptop than you would, say Wal Mart. People will say, "I spend extra money because I'm getting value, I get technical support. I get a 1-800 number. I can go back to the store and if the computer doesn't work, they'll do a charge back and I can just go get another one off the shelf." Can't do that with Wal Mart. You probably could but I'm just showing you the differences between the two. Most people shop on value and most people shop on price but you never see people shop on value and price. That's why some people go to Wal Mart and some people go to Best Buy. That make sense to you Robert?

Robert Plank: Yeah. Some people shop based on value, some people shop based on price. Is what you're saying that the people who are shopping based on price, there's no keeping most of them in general because of these new technologies, because of the price wars and things like that?

D. Anthony Miles: Absolutely.

Robert Plank: We're going to lose a big chunk of those people. To make up for that we give the people who are looking for value more of what they want?

D. Anthony Miles: Absolutely. Let's say you know someone and this where, I guess, Porter's theory comes in with switching costs. Say, let's say cell phones in particular. Why do people buy Apple's products? Apple's products are good, I have to give that to them. You have something called composition loyalty, which means you make people buy your products so they don't switch. They don't care about the price or the value, they're going to be loyal. It's almost like blind loyalty.

A lot of people, it would take, if you have all your platforms, all your devices set up with Apple, you got the Apple laptop or you got the Apple iPhone, all the other devices. What if you want a regular PC, you don't want a Mac? That's going to cost you money to switch. Those are called switching costs. For you to go switch from a Apple laptop or whatever, all your things on there, all your items, and all of your files on there, for you to go switch to a regular PC that uses a Microsoft platform you're going to have a lot of switching costs. That's one of the things that Porter does talk about is switching costs. People, if it's going to cost you more money to switch products then people are going to say, "I can't afford that switching cost so I'm just going to stay with Apple and that's what I been using. I'm just going to stay with them." Switching costs can be a factor.

As a person is doing business out in the business world or having customers, you want to make sure that your customers are loyal to you in a way that maybe it's not about price, maybe it's about value. You call them every month. You have someone on your staff, like think of a car lot when you buy a new car. That salesman sell you that car, he tries to keep up with you at least once a month or once every 6 months, ask how you're doing because he knows 5 years from now you're going to be looking for another car or if you have children. You may have to buy your daughter a car who's getting ready to go off to college. Salesmen try to keep in contact with you so it's about the relationship. You're not a good salesman or a good business person if you sell something to somebody once. If you can sell them something more than once, you're an excellent business man or excellent business person rather.

Just because you sell somebody something once, that does not end the relationship. It's what you do before the sale and what you do after the sale. That's why they call it relationship. That's what you want to do if you're a business owner. You want to build a relationship. Yeah, your prices might be higher but what do you give them for their money? You give them value. Something breaks down, they bring it to your shop, you fix it, give it back to them. People don't forget that. That's what makes people stay with their particular retailer, their particular person they do business with because you provide a sense of security. When they buy something from you, they don't have to worry about it. It's part of your brand, does that make sense?

Robert Plank: Yeah. It makes tons of sense. It makes me think of a few different experiences I've had with different establishments who did that very well. One example that comes to mind when I bought a car a few years ago, the dealership offered something like free oil change. I think it might of been forever even, for your oil change. You take the car in and as you're waiting for you car to get done, you walk around the lot, you might want to pay for a car wash and things like that. I remember kind of pretty, I don't know what the word is even, but it made the gears in my brain start turning as I was realizing that they had this one little schtick of, "You can bring your car in as much as you want however many miles to get your oil changed."

Even things like my dentist is really good at the follow up, the email follow up and stuff like that. I go to a dentist, it cost the same and it's more or less the same service as any dentist in town but this dentist is pretty good about letting me know when appointments are coming up and things like that. What really impressed me recently in the past week is I recently had a birthday and my dentist sent an email. I'm sure it was on an automatic sequence but still, it was cool that my dentist had somehow, somewhere figured out my birthday. I don't even remember when they discovered my birthday but they put it in some kind of a system, some kind of a database so that on my birthday that would send out an email saying, "Happy birthday." There might of been some other businesses that might have sent me some kind of a message like that but if there were, it was only 1 or 2.

Just the way that you described that with things like... Just have some kind of afterwards support. Then, like you said, even before the sale, have just those little touches in there to build up that momentum so at least people will know who you are. Would you say, is that the attack plan more or less against the big retailers? Retailer could even be Amazon but, I guess, the advantage to an Amazon or a Wal Mart is that they're competing on price but they don't have the, I don't know what you'd call it. They don't have the time to give that extra care.

D. Anthony Miles: Support.

Robert Plank: Yeah.

D. Anthony Miles: The customer support. There you go, right, the customer support.

Robert Plank: They can't support all of those customers. They're all doing it on volume so their weakness is they can't support those customers. Now the plan of attack is to play your own game and support that smaller pool of customers that a Wal Mart or an Amazon wouldn't be able to support. Is that right?

D. Anthony Miles: That's an excellent point, Robert. Excellent point. You also have to remember this, and because of customers being in power with smartphones, I know I heard Bill Parcells say this, or I heard someone else say this, the coach that used to be with the Jets. He said, "Customers don't marry products, they date them." What does that mean? That means that if you don't give the customer the proper support, they're going to jump ship. It maybe involve switching costs and it may not involve switching costs. The guy who can maintain a higher customer support level is the guy who wins.

You made another excellent point we talked about Amazon. Yeah Amazon is a huge retailer. If I was competing against Amazon I would say, "Okay, what would make people come to me as opposed to them?" You raised an excellent point. I would say my customer support is stronger. My customer called my 1-800 number, I get somebody on the phone. If he called Amazon, and I've seen this, you may get some guy in India who doesn't know nothing about your product but he's just doing caller support. Just the things like that that makes people want to go do business with you because you have a stronger customer support mechanism. It's like I go back to this all the time, customers don't marry products, they date them. When you are no longer, and I don't want to get too technical on marketing and all that, but when you don't put the customer first everything else goes to hell.

Yeah, they'll buy from Amazon but Amazon might be second choice. What if they go on to your establishment or you store and look for it first and they say, "You don't have what I'm looking for," stop them before they leave out of the store. You go, "Hey, I can order and have it FedExed here tomorrow. I'll let you know. Let's do business. I want to take care of you, I can have it here tomorrow." How could Amazon compete against that? Amazon is trying. I don't know if you've seen this Robert, Amazon has some type of relationship with some of the retailers. I've seen this done with bookstores, where you order the book and then the retailer might have the book, say a Barnes and Noble, and you go over to order the book, you pay for it and everything and they'll say, "Okay, it's located at the Barnes and Noble on Main Street. Barnes and Noble will hold the book, you go pick it up." Amazon is concerned about that, they're trying to make an adjustment to their customer service model. That's a little bit scary but you can still compete against it.

The thing you compete against is what is your customer support mechanism or infrastructure look like? That's what people look for. I'm not going say, you don't have to pamper people, you just have to take care of them. If you take care of your customer, you don't have to worry about your competition. I think Mark Cuban said that. That make sense?

Robert Plank: Yeah. Compete in the area where Amazon can't, at least not yet, at least until they figure out the artificial intelligence. Then when they do, there will be some other open area where we can adapt and kind of play our own chess move against them.

D. Anthony Miles: Absolutely. Think about this, I don't know if you ever been into the Apple store or you been into the Microsoft store, have you seen those establishments in your area?

Robert Plank: I've been in an Apple store maybe four or five times but never a Microsoft store.

D. Anthony Miles: We have them here. I been in both of them and I'm going to tell you there's a difference. What's the difference? The Apple store is cool. You see cool little products. You remember that store, The Sharper Image, in the mall that used to have those neat gadgets?

Robert Plank: Oh yeah.

D. Anthony Miles: You remember that store?

Robert Plank: Yeah.

D. Anthony Miles: That's what Apple is. Apple is the cool store where all the kids want to hang out, but you go into the Microsoft store it's just a different ambiance there. It's like, they got the surface, they got the laptop but it's just not the same ambiance. You see more people in the Apple store than you do the Microsoft store. The ambiance is just different. It's not the same. Microsoft products, I guess maybe they're still working on it, they just don't move people to go to their store. It's like, yeah everybody has laptops. You go to Circuit City, go to what's the other retailer? Best Buy, but okay, you got laptops, do you have the cool stuff? Microsoft, they're not there yet with it. They just not there yet. Like I said, there's a total difference between the two.

I was actually going to get staff together and research the both of the retailers and do a article about it but I put that one later. It's just a different, different kind of feel to both of the stores. It's just totally different. Microsoft products don't seem cool to the consumers. It's something they're missing that they're not there yet. They just don't have... It's just not the same as when you go into the Apple store. Those are the kinds of things that people look at. Are you the guy with the cool store? Are you the guy that has the products that people like and want to play with them? Apple was very strategic in doing that. The Apple store is a really really massive stroke in a retail environment added to their platform.

Robert Plank: Would you say that with the companies that you work with, online and offline ones, would you say that the number one mistake, if there was a number one mistake, is it that people don't have a cool store or is it something even bigger? Is there a real low hanging fruit that all these entrepreneurs and stores should be pursuing?

D. Anthony Miles: It took years for Apple to build up their brand and come up with the cool store. However, what you could do in terms of what you're selling to the public is, and it goes back to this Robert, what's your customer service mechanism? How are you perceived to the customer? You know you heard of the five P's of marketing, right? You have a fifth P called presence, how you look to the customer. What does your presence look like to that customer? Does that customer say, "Hey, this guy has this, this guy has that, he has all the ancillary products that help with the sale?" What you want to do is you want to always measure yourself to whoever your competitors are and you either want to outperform them or you want to take characteristics like Sam Walton used to do. He would shop his competitors and he would borrow ideas that worked for them and he would incorporate those into his Wal Mart store.

You can do the same thing, you just have to find out what works and see if you can incorporate it into your store or your business and try to maximize it. You should always benchmark other retailers that are either a direct competitor to you or some that are not a competitor of yours. You have ideas all over the place, you just have to manage those ideas. Some work, some don't. You want to make sure that you take ideas from other stores or other people and incorporate them into yours and then definitely will build up your customer support mechanism. That's the goal is to build up your customer support infrastructure mechanism.

Robert Plank: That's interesting. That seems like that's what Microsoft is trying to do with the Apple store but as you said, they're falling short and maybe not copying just the right parts, which is weird. For example, Microsoft has a whole gaming system and Apple doesn't, talk about having a cool store, put some more video games in there. That makes a lot of sense there because instead of trying to reinvent everything from scratch, you just look at what seems to be working and what's not and incorporate those ideas in and see where they go.

D. Anthony Miles: Absolutely. A lot of the things that happen between those two companies are based on their corporate philosophy and their corporate culture. Microsoft tends to be an adapter. What that means in terms of innovation, there's two types of innovations, you have adaptation and you have creation. When you are a adapter, you take things that are already there and you just improve on them. Apple is more of a innovator or more of a creative company than Microsoft. Microsoft is an adapter and you say Apple is more of a creative or creator type of store or creative innovation. They always doing radical things like case in point, who invented the iPad? Who invented the iPod? Who invented the iPhone? Those all innovations made by Apple.

Let me give you a great example of this, you have the iPod, so what does Microsoft do? Microsoft went and started, what, Zune tunes? Remember that device?

Robert Plank: Yeah, I remember the Zune, yeah.

D. Anthony Miles: Yeah, Zune tunes just didn't catch on with people. That's a core difference between the two companies. Microsoft tends to be an adapter, Apple tends to be a creative innovative type of company. Apple tends to create things, Microsoft tends to take things and try to improve on them, sometimes it works for them, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes when you create something it just doesn't work. Remember Newton? Sometimes he could be too ahead of the market. Not one strategy works all the time, it depends on the situation.

If you want to look at Apple or you want to look at Microsoft, go, "Okay. Do I need to take a creative innovation strategy or do I need to take an adapter strategy? Like take something that has some weaknesses and improve it and put it up on the umbrella of my business." You got to keep your ears to the ground and take a strategy that may work in different contexts in a way you need to work in terms of building your business or making your business more successful.

Robert Plank: All that makes a lot of sense that, yeah, sometimes you're in adapter mode and sometimes that you're in creator mode. It sounds like today we covered a lot of little things and a lot of ways of thinking about stuff and for businesses to problem solve their way out of wherever they're stuck and things like that. I understand that you have a book and a website where someone can get all this stuff in one place and take the book and use it for their business and turn it around or make it better and adjust the time. Is that right? You have this book for people?

D. Anthony Miles: Yes. I have a book out called, Risk Factors and Business Models: The Five Forces of Entrepreneurial Risk. In my book I looked at business failure and I looked at some of the things that cause business failure. My book is one of the few on the market that's strategically focused on risk and what causes businesses to fail. I did research in over 500 small businesses and ventures. I conducted statistical or empirical research on it. I think that my will be helpful to your listeners because you don't want to make the mistakes that people do when they start a business. Case in point, start a commodity type of business, a business that can't compete in the market place because the level of competition is so high, your business would not make a dent in the marketplace. Those are some of the things that I talk about in my book.

I'm also working on a new book called, How To Get Away With Murder In Marketing but I'll save that for the next time we get on the show or do another interview. I'd love to come back.

Robert Plank: Oh man, I'm excited for that one. That's the future book and the current book is Risk Factors and Business Models and where can people pick up a copy of that?

D. Anthony Miles: Sure. You can pick up my book on Amazon.com. It's funny, right? Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and pretty much established online retailers, you can probably find it there. I do have a clip of my book on my website www.MDICorpVentures.com. I also have some things that I published on my Research Gate page. I have a lot of people that, you can download some of my articles and presentations for free. If you type in my name D. Anthony Miles and go to Research Gate, I have some neat things up there. I've actually done research on Hispanic owned businesses, female owned businesses, I did a national marketing study on businesses that were doing some work with the SPI. Like I said, I have some presentation and workshops that I've done. All that's free for your listeners if they're interested. My treat.

Robert Plank: Awesome. They can get all that free stuff at DAnthonyMiles.com? Is that the place for those?

D. Anthony Miles: I don't know, I've had my website redone. If they want to get the free stuff, they can go to Research Gate. Just type in my name D. Anthony Miles at Research Gate. If you Google my name and see Research Gate, that's where you want to go. ResearchGate.com. I have about 40 items on there, whatever you're interested in. I actually got some research I did with another professor, on workplace bullying, that type of stuff. I got some neat stuff and it's all free. All free.

Robert Plank: Awesome. Free is good and what's also good is as you're talking about emprically done and peer reviewed and stuff like that but it's also on these practical subjects.

D. Anthony Miles: Absolutely.

Robert Plank: MDICorpVentures.com and DAnthonyMiles.com. Then Google search D. Anthony Miles and find the entry with you and your Research Gate content. Before we go Dr. D, what is this D stand for in D. Anthony Miles?

D. Anthony Miles: Oh, it's my first name Derek. Only my mother and my ex-wife call me by my first name.

Robert Plank: Oh, okay. You're saying, I'm a big time business owner and professor, I'm not going to be Derek, right? Got to be Anthony, got to have a strong name, right?

D. Anthony Miles: If you notice something Robert, most CEOs have the initial then their middle name and their last name like H.R. Ross Perot. I did that because I want to reinvent my identity in the business world so I use my first initial, my middle name and my last name.

Robert Plank: Nice. That way your initials spell DAM anyway.

D. Anthony Miles: Yeah. That's the down side.

Robert Plank: When you're passionate you can say, man I'll build you a great DAM business, right?

D. Anthony Miles: Yeah, there you go. I got to use that as some of the marketing.

Robert Plank: Yeah. You work with what you have, right? Cool. Lots of great stuff today Dr. D. Once again, DAnthonyMiles.com, MDICorpVentures.com. I appreciate you so much and I appreciate you hopping on and sharing all these knowledge bombs with us today.

D. Anthony Miles: Thank you so much for having me Robert. I really appreciate it. I love sharing my knowledge with your listeners. I think they'll pick some things from me and I think I can help them out a lot. I really enjoyed it, thank you so much.

Robert Plank: Audrey Bell-Kearney is the founder and CEO of HerTube Media Network, which is a media marketing production distribution and consulting firm that curates and produces digital content for clients and helps them get exposure for their business. Now, Audrey sounds like a pretty amazing woman. She created a plus-sized fashion doll. She has a weekly radio show. She has a documentary. She has all kind of cool stuff. How are things today Audrey?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Hey, everything is wonderful today. It's a beautiful day down here in Georgia. How about with yourself?

Robert Plank: Super beautiful in California. About to take a walk a little bit later, but in the meantime, just enjoying the entrepreneurial journey and all that good stuff.

As we get rocking and rolling here, what would you say makes you stand out from the crowd? What makes Audrey Bell-Kearney special?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: I think, for me, it's my ability to be a good listener to people and help them clarify what they're doing, help them clarify the journey that they're on because I find that- and I didn't know I was a good listener until I actually went to a job interview one time, at Comcast as a matter of fact, and the interview person asked me, "What do you think your greatest skill is?" And I said, "Listening," and she said "You are the only person that answered that question correctly." She said, "It's rare that I find somebody who say, 'listening.'" I would say that listening and helping people pretty much clarify what they want to do with themselves, with their business, with their lives, and things like that.

Robert Plank: Would you say that this whole thing about being a good listener, is this just something that comes naturally to you or do you see other people kind of messing up? Is it just a matter of just slowing down, being 100% present? What's the trick to being a good listener?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: I think being 100% present and really being concerned about what someone is saying to you, because a lot of times people are talking and you're not listening. For me, if someone comes to me with a problem, I'm present. I'm there. When I'm there, I get to be able to find out exactly what it is they're going through.

My mind is so weird because it starts planning out, while they're talking to me, it starts planning out the solution right away. I didn't really recognize this until people started saying to me, "Oh my God! You're so good at this. You're so good at this." It was just something that came natural for me. It's kind of like I'm a listener, and then I play it out. I can figure it out in a picture in my head, like this is what you should be doing.

I remember there was a gentleman who told me I was a clairaudient and I never knew what that meant. He said, "Clairaudients are people that listen. They learn by listening. They learn by hearing what people are saying." He said to me, "They're really to the point. They really don't like to beat around the bush. Get right to the point."

It was so funny because I said, "Oh my God. That must be what the problem is with my daughter and my husband because they like to tell a story, and they want to tell you a long story. For me, I'm like, "Okay, what's the point? Let's get to the point."

I think it's something that I was pretty much born with, didn't recognize it for a long time, but people kept telling me, "You're so good at that."

Robert Plank: I mean, if you're good at it, just go ahead and play to your strength. I appreciate that and I think that the average person probably doesn't pay that much attention. I think about in a lot of the conversations that I have, a lot of people either tell me just what they think I want to hear, or it turns out they only listened to the very last sentence I said, or they kind of tuned in the first few seconds and then they kind of tuned out. I like how you explained that, that kind of like, as they're talking, you're just kind of taking it in and you're already formulating a solution for them, as opposed to just kind of going through the motions there.

It's cool that- I see this all the time. Let me know if you experience this or not, but whenever I have someone who's outside of my business looking in, or I look at someone else's business as an outsider, they're are all kinds of things that are right in front of their face that they're completely missing. Do you see these kinds of things happening?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: All the time. All the time. I talk to women all the time. We do mastermind groups, and a lot of times you can't see what's right in front of you. Even myself, even me, I have to go to my coach, and walk through things, and talk with people, and I do my mastermind. A lot of times it's right in front of your face and they can't see it. Then, once they talk it out to somebody, then they can see it. It's declared for them. With me, I find that when they start talking, it's automatic with me. I have to turn it off sometime because I get so excited about what I hear and what I'm seeing, I just want to jump in and start blurting it out. Yeah, that's pretty common with a lot of people, even with myself.

Robert Plank: Okay, so you're a good listener. What has that listening got you? What have you done recently that kind of has you excited?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: What has me really excited these days, and it's pretty easy to get me excited because I get a lot of ideas. I'm working on a new series called Campus Crimes. It's so funny because we did our casting last week for the show. We cast about, I want to say, 22 people for the series. It's an Internet TV web series. I think just meeting new talent and young people who want to get their names out there. They want to be actors and actresses.

My daughter is a actor as well. My daughter had said to me that Friday morning, she said, "You want to know what really pissed me off?" I said, "What?" She says, "When I go on a audition, and I come home, and you guys say, "How did it go?" She said, "I don't know how it went. Every time you say that it just drives me crazy." So I said, "Okay."

The next day, I was casting. There was a gentleman who came. He said, "You know, I really want to do this. This is all I want to do." He said, "My wife has really been supportive. She's holding everything down for me." He said, "I'm out of work right now, but I really want to focus on my career." He said, "When I go home, she always say to me, 'Hey babe, how did it go?'"

It was so funny because my daughter conversation the day before gave me the opportunity to say to him, "You know what? When you go home and you see your wife, you tell her it went well and you got a part in it," because he say, "I get parts but I'm a extra. I never get a speaking part." I said, "You tell her you got a speaking part."

That makes me excited. It makes me excited that I could help people bring their dreams to life and be in this creative space right now, in this whole video space right now. That's got me excited. It keeps me up at night.

Robert Plank: Nice. It sounds like you're helping other people out or giving them a better experience when they go home with the little things, right? You picked up that, when other people go in for auditions and they don't know how it went, at least now you're saying, "Okay, right off the bat, I'm telling you if you're getting it."

Audrey Bell-Kearney: I only said it to him, because he said what my daughter had said to me, "I go home and she says to me, 'How did it go?'" Nobody else said that. I told no one else that day that they got the part except for him, because I just felt like, "Okay, here's a guy who really wants to do what he loves." You know when you want to do something that you love, you pretty much make huge sacrifices. I could tell he was making sacrifices. I could tell he was passionate about having this whole actor career. I wanted to make his day, so I said to him, "When you go home, you tell your wife not only did you get the part, but you got a speaking part," and he was like, "Oh my God! Thank you so much!"

By the time he got outside, I got a message on my phone. He had found me on Facebook and he put up a video thanking God. Just be patient. Just believe in yourself. I was like, "Wow! That's pretty cool."

Robert Plank: That's awesome. This Campus Crimes Internet TV web series, what is that? Why did you make it?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: I've been a business owner now for 20 years, 18 years full-time working from home. When I invented the dolls, I call that my real business. I invented the dolls in 1999, so the dolls are turning 18 years old next year. I was sitting here and I said, "Man, I really need to create something for HerTube," which is my TV network, HerTube TV, "I really need to create something that's going to stand out."

I'm sitting in my office and I'm looking at my doll. I haven't gotten her manufactured, probably in about 7 or 8 years, but I said, "You know what? I'm going to get a limited edition manufactured. She's got on the outfit that my daughter wore to the prom. My daughter wore the exact same kind of dress to the prom. I loved the dress so much I had it made for the doll. I sent the samples to Hong Kong and I said, "You know what? We might be able to do a story around her." Her name is Dasia. "Maybe I need to do a story around Dasia," and the more I thought about it, the more it kept coming to me.

Maybe she's in college now. Let's make her want to be a FBI. I came up with this whole story of mine about these 3 friends who meet in college. Dasia's from the inner city. I grew up in Newark. I was born in Georgia, but I grew up in Newark, New Jersey, which is pretty tough. You've got to be pretty tough to live in Newark, New Jersey.

I kind of thought about my life: pretty smart girl, book smart, street smart, can hold her own. I said, "You know what? I'm going to make Dasia like that," but because there's so much crime in inner cities, I wanted her to be studying to be a FBI. I created the story around her and she wants to be an FBI. She meet up with 2 friends. I'm here in Georgia now. One of her friends is Macie and she is a beautiful white girl who lives in Savannah. She was raised on a farm. All she cares about is keeping the Earth and the planet safe and clean. Then there's Terri who is raised in Los Angeles. Her family is rich. She's a black girl. She wants to find money. She loves fashion and she wants to be a fashion model.

They meet up on campus and because Dasia is training to be a FBI, the police and the campus police are always coming to her when something's missing, for her to help crack it. She may be hacking a computer. She may be tracking somebody down, you know, just solving cases. That's pretty much the gist of how I came about with the story line.

Robert Plank: Cool, so am I understanding you right in that, so you have an Internet TV station, and you have this show called Campus Crimes. Is it live action? Is it that these plots, and these stories are being acted out, but then there's also the doll version of Dasia. Is that right?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Dasia is actually a doll. The show is actually a real version of Dasia. Dasia is a limited edition that I'm putting out because she's turning 18. In the doll world, there are a lot of people who knew Dasia when we had her out there actively selling her and promoting her. She hasn't been out now for some years. Because she's turning 18, we're doing a limited edition line. I decided to spin it and turning her into a real person, so we cast real people to play the role of Dasia and her friends.

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool. What's the deal with these dolls anyway? I know that we mentioned it a little bit as we were ramping up. I didn't realize that some of these different things connected.

Eighteen years ago, the thing that started all of this off, what was the idea here? I guess these are plus-sized dolls and you have the African American one and the white one. I mean, how did all this doll stuff start?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: I was working at Verizon in 1999 and hated every second of it. Verizon had- I didn't like it. It was a customer service position, but I was also trying to figure out my next move. I said, "You know, I want to do a business. I want to do something." I had just retained a representative for Primerica Financial Services. I was in the back of the room recruiting my friend to Primerica. I said to her, "You know, I was at work and I had this idea for this doll," and she said, "Yeah? What kind of doll?" I said, "Like a fat fashion doll. You ever seen one?" And she said, "No, I never saw a fat fashion doll," she said, "but I collect dolls." She said, "You've got to stop by my house and look at my collection." I said, "Okay."

The weekend, I went to her house and when I got to her house, she had just got this really beautiful doll by Mattel. She paid $250 for the doll. I'm looking at the doll. I said, "People pay this kind of money for a doll?" She's like, "Yeah, it's a collectible doll," so we took that and we started running. She said, "Listen, I want to know, can I be the vice president?" I was like, "Sure," so we founded a company called Big Beautiful Dolls and we just hit the ground running.

For 6 months, we looked in every corner of the world trying to find a doll manufacturer, and we came across the one guy down in Maryland who had his own doll company. I reached out to him. We drove to Maryland because at that time, I was still living in New Jersey. We drove to Maryland and we spent 8 hours in his warehouse. He told us everything we needed to do to launch this company, including giving us the name of a sculptor. He said he could manufacture the doll. He said, "I can manufacture it for you," he said, "but it's going to be really expensive to get the molds." He said, "You've got to think about that," He said, "but the first thing you've got to do, you have to actually get your doll sculpted."

I came home and I looked online. I pulled up some plus-sized women. I sent a picture of myself because I'm a plus-sized woman as well. I sent that to the doll sculptor. You know, what was kind of funny about that whole situation, she lived in Kincheloe, Michigan and she said to me, she says, "Well, I thanked Percy for sending you to me," she say, "and it's a good time for you, but it's a bad time for me." I sat there like, "Okay." I didn't understand what she meant and I said, "Why do you say that?" She said, "Well, I can't charge you what I'd normally charge you because I'm going through an estate settlement right now."

She said, "My son just learned how to fly a plane and he was graduating. His father came to visit us, and he took his father up in the plane to show him that he could fly, and the wind blew the plane into a tree and they both passed away." I was like, "Oh my God!" That was such a sad story. I was like, "Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that." She said, "Me too," she said, "so right now, this is going to give me some kind of break from thinking about that whole thing and I just can't charge you what I would normally charge," which was great for us, but it was sad for her.

That's pretty much how the dolls got started, so for 5 years, I ran that company, running up and down the east coast doing doll shows, talking to people, getting written up in magazines, doing press and all that kind of stuff.

Robert Plank: Awesome, and there's a lot of interesting things in there. I mean, one thing that I liked about that whole story there is that, first of all, you had your friend, the one that jumped on being the vice president, who is just as excited about it as you are. I think that what was also cool was that instead of just looking at this as some kind of dream, you broke it down, or you at least did the research and figured out what were the smaller steps that you had to do. Right? You had to figure out what the doll would look like, have it go to the designer, have it go to the manufacturer.

What I also like is that that manufacturer was very helpful, right? A lot of people just want to say, "Just give me money," or, "give me this lump sum and I'll figure it out," but he was very helpful, it sounds like, in educating you and getting you kind of brought up to speed to the point where when it came time to buy from him, then you were a more educated buyer, right? That way, you could come- like, he told you all the stuff you had to figure out and then what you would have to come back to him with. That way, it just seems like an easier transaction, and more of a long-term thing, where it seems like everyone involved, number 1, was super excited to get it done, and then number 2, was very clear about what the prerequisites were in order to move to that next step in the process.

Audrey Bell-Kearney: That is absolutely the truth. His name is Percy Sutton. His company is called Integrity Toys. He was so instrumental in helping us get this off the ground, and not a lot of people are like that. There's so many coaches out there. There's so many mentors and all these different people. It's very rare to find somebody who will take the time to sit with you for 8 hours. We sat for 8 hours, all we had was water, because we were like the student in the classroom and we wanted to get it done.

He sat there with us and he told us. We met his team. He walked us through the process, so for him to sit there and do that, I will forever be grateful because of him I would not have gotten the doll done as quick as I got it done because it took us 6 months to go from an idea out of my head to actual physical product in December. The doll was actually sent to us, the prototypes were sent to us in December. Him being that person to help us get to that level, that was something. That was priceless for me.

Robert Plank: Awesome! When you look back and you look at the creation of the dolls, your Internet TV station, and your web series, and things like that, and you look at what you've done right, what do you think it is that you've done right that a lot of people aren't doing out there?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Being focused. I've got to tell you, Robert. That is the one thing that I will tell anybody. I had a coach, probably back in 2006, and he said to me, he said, "Audrey, you need to just pick one focus," and I was like, "I'm a wonder woman. I can do it all. I can do all the things. I can do 10 things." He kept telling me, "You need to pick one thing because that's why you're not hitting the level of success that you want to hit, because you're all over the place." He said, "Your site is beautiful." I had just paid $1,500 for a new site. He said, "The site is beautiful," he said, "but nobody knows what you do." I kept saying to myself, "but it's right there!" It was clear to me, so I didn't listen.

What I would say is, listen to the people that know more than you. Be focused. Pick something and be focused. Now, I'm not saying that you can't expand your brand later, but right now, pick one thing. That's the one thing that was pretty tough for me about being an entrepreneur because I have so many great ideas most of the time. Sometimes, somebody have to smack me side my head and say, "Hey, listen, focus."

When I realized that that was a big key for me. When I started HerTube, I said, "Okay, what's my focus going to be?" What I did was, even though I have several different subsidies to the company, I have people in place to handle those subsidies. I handle the basic overall operations of the company, the marketing, and the expansion of the company. I have a person that handles the production, and I have a person that handles the content curation and stuff. Even though I have all these ideas, and each one of those can be separate businesses by themselves. I would say focus is the main thing for anybody.

Robert Plank: I like that. I think that's a really powerful message for a lot of people listening, especially because I think about the times that I told myself that I could have the split focus, or that I could have the multi-tasking, and when I think back on it, I realize that, okay, let's say if I had to switch careers between three different businesses. In your head, you think, "Okay, I'll just put in 33%, 33%, and 33%," but as far as the having to switch gears and remember stuff and all that, at least for me, it was more like 10%, 10%, 10%, or maybe even 5% in each of those things.

I think that is so huge. Once people get past that initial crunch time, for example, you mentioned that there was that 6 month period when you were probably not sleeping a lot, or doing all the stuff to get that idea to the prototype phase, or to get it finished. There's, for sure, the crunch time period when you're figuring things out, but then after that time, when you're looking more long-term, then it becomes time to kind of take yourself out of the business. It sounds like you've kind of had that similar path, where you say, "All right, well, there was that period of time when I was super overworked, but then in the long-term, I need to have the focus to not be burned out, and then I'll go and look and see who can fill what gaps for me.

Audrey Bell-Kearney: You know, it took some learning because with the doll company, I didn't know that. That was my first real business. My partner and I, we were running. We were grinding it out. Then she moved to Texas because her husband works for Fox Television, so they moved to Texas. I was in New Jersey by myself and at the time, my boyfriend who is now my husband for the last 13 years, he became my partner sort of. We just did the highway thing, up and down the highway. I had to find some balance because I was really burning out.

I remember my daughter was about 9 or 10 years old at the time and her teacher sent me a notice home and said, "Hey listen, you need to come in so we can talk." I go into the school and I said, "Yes?" She said, "You know, your daughter grades are slipping." I'm like, "Why?" She said, "You work all the time," and I was like, "Oh my God!" Which I was. I was working and I was doing a business. I had to find some balance.

What I did was, when she was home I gave her all of my attention. She went to bed about 8:00 at night, so when she would go to bed, I would start all over again and I would work to probably like 2:00 in the morning. At 3:00 in the morning, because I quit my job at Verizon, my husband and I would go and sling papers. We had a paper route at 3:00 in the morning. We would sling papers until about 5:00 in the morning, come back home. I'll lay back down for about a hour and get my daughter up around 7:00 for school. She would go to school and I would start my day all over again.

You can get burned out but when you're focused and you're passionate about what you do, you don't feel like you're getting burned out until it hits you. Then all of a sudden, you're like, "Bam! I'm tired. I'm drained. There's nothing else I can do." I learned over the years that I have to take time for myself when I get like that because, I don't know if I'm a type A, but I know that when I'm into something, I'm into it. I've learned that when my mind says, "Okay, you're just looking at the screen. You're not really seeing anything," it's time to take a break.

Robert Plank: Yeah, and I think we've all been there. Does this same thing happen to you, where like, I'll be in that exact mindset you just described, where nothing's working. I'm super, just like, staring at the computer screen, can't really make any progress. I take a break. I do something unrelated, away from the computer. I come back and in 5 minutes, I've figured it out. Do you have the same kind of experience?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: I do, but mine is a little bit longer. It might take me a couple of hours and it only happens to me late in the evening. I'm a morning person so I'm at my best in the morning. If I'm working on something, I want to get it done, so I work all way through to the evening, and then I kind of lose it. I start to drain down, but if I step away for about 2 hours, normally that's like 10:00 at night, I want to go back and start working. It's like, "Oh man! Now, I've got it. Now I can go back," but I won't go back. I say, "You know what? I'm going to go to bed now and start again fresh in the morning."

Normally, it happens to me at night time, like around 7:00, when I guess most people should be shutting down, I'm tired. I'll take a break for a couple of hours and then I'm fresh again. I don't start again because I know if I start again, I'll be working until the morning, which is really going to mess up my day for the next day.

Robert Plank: Nice, but it sounds like that's a good problem to have, right? You think about the typical employee and they're dreading to go to work, and they take their time to get into the office. If you're holding yourself back from using the computer until 12 hours later, that sounds like a pretty good place to be. Right?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Oh, absolutely. I could tell you, when I used to work at one company, I would go into work, Robert, and straight break out in hives. I remember, I went in one day and I broke out in hives. They thought I had eaten something and I was having an allergic reaction, but it was just I hated being there. I was out of work for 3 days, sitting home all day with Calamine lotion all over me because I just broke out in hives. I just hated to be there.

Robert Plank: Oh man, so now, you figured out a better path for yourself. I mean, I really like everything that you explained. Today, it's even easier for people to do that kind of thing with Alibaba Manufacturers and Amazon FBA, and with Youtube and Vimeo, and all this kind of stuff. Am I right about this? All the things that you've done as far as making the plus-sized dolls, making your TV show, and all that stuff, you had to go through it the hard way, right? It's a lot easier these days, isn't it?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: When I tell you it is so- and I'm so excited because I think it is so funny you say that part. When we started in 1999, I had to build my own website with FrontPage from Microsoft. That's just to give you a idea of where we were. FrontPage was a website building software from Microsoft. Because we didn't have any money, I had to learn how to build my site. I learned how to build a site using Microsoft.

I was just sitting here thinking there's probably a couple days where I was like, "Man, when we launched those dolls, there was no social media." I'm really excited. The doll is going to be a limited edition of 3,700. We're doing a pre-sell of the doll. There was no social media. It was me going to doll shows up and down the highway. Now, fast forward to today. I can't wait to see how this is going to play out on social media and all across the web, because there was no social media. I don't even think Youtube had came out yet. I know Youtube wasn't out in face, but none of those guys were out. By the time they came out, we had pretty much halted production. I think that was right around 2005. I think Youtube and all those guys were just coming out.

I was saying to my husband, I said, "Man, I want to see how this is going to work out with pre-selling the dolls using social media when there was no social media when I started." Now, with this whole Internet TV thing, man, I'm loving every second of it. I'm on Roku. I just got a partnership with Amazon for their video program. We're going to be on Apple, so it's a great place to be. Technology is really opening up doors for a lot of new entrepreneurs and making things a lot better. It's a lot easier. It's still a lot of work, but you just have a lot more resources at your fingertips these days.

Robert Plank: Nice. It sounds like no one's going to push the button for you. You still have to take those steps, but you can get a lot wider reach instantly from your house, as opposed to getting in the car and having to drive around.

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Absolutely. That's the thing. You still have to push the button, Robert. You still have to take yourself seriously. I still talk to a lot of women who want to start a business. Even my husband, my husband makes this really good chopped barbecue. He says to me he wants to do it as a business, and he knows that if he tells me that, he has to do the necessary steps. I say to him all the time, "I can't run the barbecue business so you're going to have to do the necessary steps." He doesn't want to do that part. You still have to push the button on your dream if you want it to be a business, if you want it to come true.

Robert Plank: Nice. If you think about it, if it was that easy, if all you had to do was just think it and it would happen, then it would be super crowded. It's almost like, the fact that you have to pursue that dream, take all those steps, and manage all that, it kind of weeds out a lot of the weak people who otherwise would have been your competitors.

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Absolutely, because it's a lot of work. Once you say, "Yeah, I'm going to do this," you have to keep going. I've been doing HerTube for 3 years now. October will be 3 years and people are still amazed. My first year, I had to figure out exactly what it was. The second year, I had to tell people what it was because they still didn't understand it. Now, the third year, I know what it is, a lot of people know what it is, but now it's just about making great content. With that type of focus and that type of clarity, you can move forward along with the work.

Robert Plank: There's the work, or the grinding stage, and then the period of looking back and reflecting and figuring out, "Well, how do I get this out here more?" Or "How do I explain this better?" All that kind of look back at all the random stuff you did and kind of connect the dots.

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Absolutely. I was in an investment meeting last year with some investors. I worked on an accelerated program called Launchpad 2X, and they put me in front of some investors and I thought, "They're going to get it because I'm going to tell them, 'Listen, just think about a hybrid. It's a hybrid between Netflix and Youtube,'" and they didn't get it. I'm like, "Really?"

It took me a year just to kind of crack down on, "What are you?" I just started to say, "I'm an Internet TV Network Woman, so think of me as an NBC on the Internet for women." Then people got it. "Oh, okay. Okay, good." It took a year for me, because I'm thinking in my head, "It sounds pretty simple. Don't you get it?" They didn't get it, so you have to really get your message down pat for people to understand it. People started to get it, like, "Oh, that's really cool." Then I started getting, "Man, that's really cool. Wow! How did you come up with that idea?" I tell the story about how I came up with that idea, but yeah that's really important for anybody who has a business. Your message has to be clear so people can understand you.

Robert Plank: It makes a lot of sense, and it might take a few years or a few iterations to get that down pat. Could you tell us about all these different things, about HerTube, Campus Crimes, Big Beautiful Dolls, and all this kind of stuff, especially HerTube TV in particular? This is a network for women on the Internet. What kind of things do you air on this?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: What we did was, when I first had the idea for the company, I was at a film festival. I had just moved to Georgia and I was at a film festival. I had written some books so I knew about self-publishing and how to distribute this stuff online. At that time, I had already produced a documentary that sells on Amazon right now along with one of my books.

I was at this film festival and I was sitting in the front. They were doing a workshop on distribution. The people that were presenting the workshop, they were telling the filmmakers, "Yeah, we can get you distribution, but you probably won't see any kind of royalties for 15 years." I'm thinking, "15 years?"

Robert Plank: Oh, no, no.

Audrey Bell-Kearney: That was crazy!

Robert Plank: I might be dead by then, right? In 15 years, you never know.

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Exactly! I was like, "Are they serious?" I thought they were joking at first, but they were serious. They were saying, "We've got to put a lot of money in packaging," and all this stuff. I'm thinking, "I know how to distribute stuff on Amazon, CreateSpace, FastPencil, Lulu, and all these different places. It can't be that much different for a film." I sat there and I thought about it.

On my way home, I said, "Okay, how can I help these filmmakers do this better? How can I show them that, man, you're really getting robbed?" HerTube was the idea that came to me. What was interesting about HerTube, because I am a woman in business, it started out as a way for me to help filmmakers get their stuff out there. Probably the next year, I became a panelist at a film festival here in Gwinett County. I became this panelist, then talking with people about distribution. They loved it, but what hit me was, "This could be a great platform for women who are in business also," I said, "because it's like a marketing tool."

I started to lean that way, you know, leaving the filmmakers and kind of going to the women in business because I was a woman in business and I was always looking for a way to market my business. Well, the women in business said to me, "Yeah, we don't want to be making that many videos. We don't want to be in front of the camera." I was like, "Huh? Really?" I kind of had to pivot. I said, "Okay, now, who am I talking to?"

I went back to talking to filmmakers. Filmmakers are a little funny too, Robert, because everybody wants a Oscar. Everybody wants to be in the movie theaters. Everybody wants to be all over the world instantly, but not this way because they didn't understand the platform. I started getting really stressed out, saying, "Okay, this is stressing me out."

On our Roku channel, we have 500 videos produced by 19 women, so we said, "Okay, now we have this working for us on Roku." There's not a lot of income coming in there because the ad-serving company that we have, they just don't pay a lot of money. I had to think, "Okay, how am I going to make this where it's going to make some money, you know, bring in revenue for the company?" That's when we launched our online platform called HerTube.TV.

We launched that and I said, "Okay, we need to have our own content as well as content produced by other people." That's how Campus Crimes came about. We had a whole list of shows. Campus Crimes was the one, after I thought about how to incorporate the doll, that's when I took it back to my team and said, "Listen, this is what I want to do."

What's funny is, when you make up your mind about doing stuff, everything and everybody kind of falls into place. When I made up my mind that I was going to do Campus Crimes, a friend moved from Jersey. He was a cinematographer. He was like, "Listen, I'm going to work for you to get it done." I said, "Wow! That's so cool." Everything has kind of fallen in place. I think I have a great cast of people. I sat there last Saturday and I talked to those people and I think this is a really, really great cast. That's pretty much how HerTube, Campus Crimes, and all the dolls tie together.

Robert Plank: I'm looking at HerTube.TV right now. There's a couple of videos of just homemade stuff, but as far as the actual shows, there's Yoga shows, learning, shopping, and stuff like that. Even just seeing the still thumbnail screenshot, this is some professionally lit and shot stuff. Isn't it?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Oh yeah. A lot of the stuff is very professional because we have some of the real filmmakers. Some are filmmakers. I have some people who would want to do stuff at home. I have some people that started working with me and decided they wanted to be coaches. I had one young lady, she did a lot of cooking things on there. She was doing a lot of cooking videos at home, real nice stuff, and she realized, "I'm really good at being a coach," because people started calling her because she was talking about how to eat healthy.

Some stuff is homemade, some stuff is very professional, and some stuff is kind of like the lady I just talked about, that producer right there, the one you see now. She does a lot of training stuff. She's in a whole other country. What's cool about her is she said, "Hey, listen, can I partner with you? Can I distribute my content on your network?" I said, "Absolutely."

We come up with these great plans to partner with people and bring that content to life and help distribute. I'm almost like a marketer for other people at the same time. That's why the whole description was I'm a marketer, distributor, curator, producer, and all that kind of stuff, because that's what we do.

Robert Plank: Awesome! It's not just you. You're helping everyone else out. HerTube, is that at HerTube.TV? Is that the best place for people to go?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Yes, if you want to check out HerTube, just go to www.HerTube.TV. If you want to check out Dasia, you can go to DasiaDoll.com. She's there for pre-order right now. I only have 3,700 of her coming in. I'm believing I'm going to sell-out those pretty quick because I haven't even mentioned it to the doll world yet. There are a lot of people out there who followed her when she first came out. This is the first time I'm making it public, Robert. I haven't made it really public to anybody, so the first time, on your show that's public.

What happens is, when you go to see Dasia, when she comes back. You can pre-order her now, when you come back, she's going to come to me and I'm going to sign her and I'm going to have the 3 main cast members sign her, and send it off to the people who order it. Check her out. She's going to be 18 and the dress that she wore, if you go to DasiaDoll.com, my daughter is standing right next to her in that same dress. My daughter's a lot smaller now. She grew up. She's a beautiful young woman. She lost a lot of weight. She's acting and all that stuff, but that's the dress she wore to the prom.

Robert Plank: Nice. This is amazing that this has been around for as long as it has been, and even some people who were little girls when the first one came out, are now full grown and might have, even, kids of their own to get it. That's pretty awesome.

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Yeah, my daughter was 9 when I started. She's 25 now.

Robert Plank: Oh man. Time flies.

Audrey Bell-Kearney: It does.

Robert Plank: Time flies so fast that you never know if your plane might get blown into a tree, or things might not work out in one way or another. Time is short and we have to kind of step it up and be entrepreneurs, do what needs to be done, do it quickly, and do it so that we can get that knocked out and move to the next thing.

Two websites there: DasiaDoll.com and HerTube.TV. Thanks for being on the show, Audrey, and telling us not only about your cool story, but giving us lots of little nuggets and all kinds of business advice. I really appreciated having you on today.

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Thank you so much for having me. It was really a pleasure. It's always nice to be on the other side of the microphone and the TV camera.

Robert Plank: Yeah. It kind of makes the scenery different, right? Breaks up the day, makes it so you're not just doing the same old thing every day, right?

Audrey Bell-Kearney: Yes it does. Yes it does.

Robert Plank: Zach Smith is going to talk to us today about crowdsourcing. Now Zach is a serial entrepreneur, never having had a real job his entire life. He is always starting, selling, running, and managing businesses. Zach loves helping others turn their dreams, ideas, and inspirations into successful companies, and this passion lead to his creation of Funded Today LLC, which is America's most successful crowdfunding firm, and the largest provider of crowdfunding marketing services worldwide. I'm excited. Can we talk about it? So you guys strap yourselves in. Zach, how are things today?

Zach Smith: Doing real well. Thanks for having me on your show today, Robert.

Robert Plank: Cool, I'm glad you're here, because this is a new topic that I don't know much about, but I've seen it kind of take off. I've seen it get popularity. So crowdfunding, what the heck is it?

Zach Smith: So crowdfunding is basically a way to raise money, that over the last few years has become extremely popular. There's a lot of different types of crowdfunding, but we'll just cut out all of that. The part of crowdfunding that we focusing on is called rewards-based crowdfunding, and that means that people essential preorder new ideas on sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. So let's say I've invented a cool new watch, and this watch does all kinds of fancy features. I might have a prototype of just one such watch. Well I film a video, I talk about this watch, I talk about how I want to bring it into mass production, and I tell people for $250 you can preorder this watch that I have on my wrist, and I'll make one for you just like the one I have here, and then people pay $250 to get this watch. There's no catches, there's no strings attached. You don't have to give up any equity in your business, and people do this to the tune of millions and millions of dollars. Funded Today, like you mentioned in your intro, has done that more so than anybody else in the world for thousands of different inventors now.

Robert Plank: Awesome. So you're the guy to talk to. I've seen every now and then... Before the show started recording we were talking a little like, Indiegogo and Kickstarter, people have used that to bankroll movies and TV shows and stuff like that. Plus on the practical side, every now and then I'll see something. I'll see someone will invent a camera that allows them to talk to their pets and dispense pet food remotely.

Zach Smith: I saw that one, yeah.

Robert Plank: Yeah, that's the most... That's the one that comes to mind the most when I think of crowdfunding and Kickstarter type of stuff, but it's also practical enough, something like a multimillion dollar movie and stuff like that. Using the watch example, someone says "I'm going to design the watch." So what are the steps then? I guess they sign up for a site like Kickstarter, they make a webpage. I guess maybe they can make a prototype or a graphic, and then people can preorder the watch. So the thing that I was curious about as you were explaining it, let's say that you, Zach Smith, say you can preorder this watch for $200. I preorder the watch and then what happens, because I've seen some of these say we need a hundred backers or something like that. What happens if they don't get adequate funding for that project?

Zach Smith: Yeah, great question. As an entrepreneur, you want to know how much it's going to cost you to build this watch, so let's say that your MOQ, your minimum order quantity, is 1000 watches. You've talked to manufacturers, you've talked to suppliers, and we can help with all this stuff as well. We can help with almost anything, and because we've done this so many times, anybody who needs help with, oh I don't know how to prototype, okay great. Oh I don't know how to make a view. I don't know how to do a design. We can help with all those different things, but let's assume you've got all that covered, and now you've talked to all those people. You've done all that stuff. Getting the extra prototypes made is going to cost $10,000. Ordering 1000 of these watches, let's say it's $20 for each watch. That's $20,000. You add up all your total costs, and that's what you want to set for your goal.

Kickstarter has what's called all-or-nothing funding, so on Kickstarter, that means if you set a goal for let's say $100,000, that means that's what it's going to cost you to bring this watch into existence. That's factoring in all the product you have to buy, all your costs of goods sold, whatever overhead you have, all your prototypes, and whatever it's going to cost to deliver and ship the finished product off to all your preorder backers. That's what you set your goal for. On Kickstarter if you do not hit that $100,000 goal, let's say you're $99,999, that means you don't get any of your money, and so it's very important that you set a goal as low as you possibly can so so that you can get funded, but then as high as necessary so that when you do get funded, if you don't get whatever you need, you can still deliver it to your backers.

Kickstarter, I say particularly, that particular website, is a paradoxical vehicle in the sense that you might set a goal for $100,000, and until you get to $100,000 you might not get a lot of excitement and a lot of traction. Once you hit $100,000 the crowd engages and says "Oh wow, this is great. This is funded. This is going to happen" and then they get behind it and the momentum rolls, and it's like a snowball going down a hill. That's why I recommend setting a low enough goal that you can get funded really quickly so you can show that you're successful to get that paradox of success to happen, and then you will really become successful. But again, you want to be careful, because if you set your goal too low and you only end up raising $50,000 when you actually needed $100,000, that's a bit of a problem. So I always recommend setting your minimum viable goal so that you can create your product, but not setting a goal so high that it's impossible to real, or it looks just so daunting to people and it takes many weeks or a month or so before it gets funded, and then you don't ever get the momentum that's so exciting about crowdfunding.

Robert Plank: Right.

Zach Smith: Does that make sense?

Robert Plank: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. If I were to go to your Kickstarter page, and you have this watch, and it says we need $1,000,000 raised and we've raised $100, I could look at that and say there's 0% chance this is going to go through, but if you said we need $50,000 and the thermometer was at 60 or 70, I'm like, well great, they passed their goal. I can buy this and I'll be guaranteed to get it.

Zach Smith: Exactly, yep. That's exactly right.

Robert Plank: Let's say someone set up a Kickstarter, they calculate their MOQ and stuff like that. As far as setting the goal and all that, do you recommend that your clients have any wiggle room, or is it just set the goal based on the costs, and then hopefully the Kickstarter will overfill, or whatever the term is?

Zach Smith: I think that's a great question you asked. I think it's very` important to add some wiggle room. Good examples of not having enough wiggle room are the Coolest Cooler, one of the most funded projects of all time. They didn't factor in that it was going to cost a lot more when they went through all kinds of different change orders, and because of that they still have 50, 60% of their coolers that 3 or 4 or 5 years later, they still haven't been able to ship out, however long it's been. That's just because they didn't... Even though they raised $12 or $13 million, I forget the total number. That still wasn't enough to deliver to their thousands of backers because of fancy and how amazing they ended up making the cooler. If you have a little bit of wiggle room, you avoid those issues.

Robert Plank: I looked up the Coolest Cooler while you were talking, and I've seen this recently, but I didn't know that was the name. It looks like they had 62,000 backers pledge $13.2 million dollars.

Zach Smith: Yeah.

Robert Plank: Crazy, the amount of money some of these types of sites raise.

Zach Smith: He's a good guy, too. People make him out to be like he screwed everybody out of things. I think he just kind of made some common mistakes of an entrepreneur. He didn't set his margins right, he quite know what he should have charged, and he was way more successful than he ever planned. A lot of people don't know, but he ran his first project and he raised $125,000. But guess what his goal was? $250,000. So guess what? He had to cancel it. He didn't get any of that money. He relaunches, and look what happens. $13 million later, he doesn't know what to do with himself, and he wasn't ready for it to become that successful. Interestingly enough, one of the most successful crowdfunding projects of all time on paper, it has been one of the most unsuccessful crowdfunding projects of all time in practice.

Robert Plank: Oh no! Have you seen this happen over and over again, or does it go right more than it goes wrong?

Zach Smith: I'd say it goes right more than it goes wrong. We've worked with lots of creators, and I've worked with a few creators. I love Jon Richards and Jacob Durham. They're a couple guys out of Utah, where I'm from. These guys have done four or five crowdfunding projects now, and they've all been successful. They usually fulfill on time, if not earlier, and because of that they just got done running a product called NOMATIC. It's a bag that has all kinds of different features. It's pretty amazing. Nomatic raised over a million dollars. This is from two guys that came to me two or three years ago wanting to raise $10 or $20 thousand for a wallet. We ended up raising $171,000 for the wallet, then we raised money for a notebook, then we raised money for a laptop stand, and then they did really well on their own with this NOMATIC and brought us on at the end, and we did pretty well raising the money for their bag as well. You can have stories like that where you keep coming back to crowdfunding because your backers love you, you build up that customer lifetime value, and everything new you invent, everybody wants to be a part of, because you've created that tribe, as Seth Godin likes to call it.

Robert Plank: Nice. So is that the secret to getting a campaign to... By the way, what's the term for if a campaign completes or whatever?

Zach Smith: Yeah, funded is what we like to call it. That's why our company name is Funded. Funded Today.

Robert Plank: Today, not tomorrow, because tomorrow is too long to wait, right?

Zach Smith: Well, we got Funded Tomorrow too, when you raise enough money with us, we take you over to Indiegogo inDemand, and we raise you more money tomorrow, too.

Robert Plank: Oh nice. So it's today and tomorrow.

Zach Smith: Yes sir.

Robert Plank: That means you cover all the bases. Is there a secret to getting a project funded? Is it a matter of building up these followers? Is there any amount of outside traffic involved? What's low hanging fruit there?

Zach Smith: Yeah, the secret is... And again, there's no secrets really. I mean, it's obviously a secret I guess, because not everyone can do it, but the secret is putting in the work. It's hard work. In order to get really successful on Kickstarter particularly, and I'm talking about Kickstarter generally, but I mean crowdfunding holistically, because Indiegogo is the same sort of thing, but everybody is a little more familiar with Kickstarter. Indiegogo has a couple different things than Kickstarter. For example, in Indiegogo you can choose flexible funding and you can keep all of the money that you raise. You can set a goal of 50 grand, but if you only raise 48 grand, you get to keep it all. Indiegogo likes that. I'm kind of torn on it, because if you don't get the money you need, how are going to go and get the extra money so you can make sure you fulfilled your backers.

Robert Plank: Right.

Zach Smith: But maybe if you get close enough, you can get a little bit of capital or self-fund a bit and deliver. It seems to work for Indiegogo, but I'm kind of 50/50. I like the idea of setting a fixed goal. The other reason I like that too, total divergent here, is because if you can't raise the money you need, it probably means you don't have that good of an idea, right? Or you haven't marketed it right.

Robert Plank: Right.

Zach Smith: So if you can't raise the amount of money, you probably shouldn't bring the product into existence, because that means the market doesn't want it. That's a whole other topic. In terms of what you do to raise money, You need to start out just like you would in any other business, just like they teach you if you're going to be an insurance agent or salesman or something. Start with your friends and family and tell your friends and family, "Hey Robert, I've got this amazing idea. It's this cool watch. Here's what it does, and I'm going to be launching it on September 22, 2016 at 11 o' clock AM Eastern Standard Time. Can I count on you to give me $200 at that time to back this?" "Oh yes, for sure I'll do it!" Right?

Everybody has friends on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. Contact every single one of those people privately. Build up the spreadsheet. Use a Google Spreadsheet. Use a Google sheet or a Google doc. Write them all down, commit them all, get their names, emails, phone numbers, and don't just let them tell you it's cool, it's a great idea, because everybody is going to tell you that. Really ask if they'd pay money for it. If they wouldn't pay money for it, say "Be honest with me. If you really can't buy this from me, why, why not?" You'll kind of get a good idea if you have a good idea or not. There's it all from your friends and family. Once you have them committed, try to get 200 or more. The reason why is because the day you launch, if you have 200 or more of your friends and family, there's a good chance that you'll pop to the top of Kickstarter, and when you pop to the top of Kickstarter's popular and magic rankings, you get millions of eyeballs on your page. When you get millions of eyeballs on your page, if your idea truly resonates, you could have what we like to call a supernova, which is a good product and good marketing. Factored into Kickstarter's algorithm, that results in millions of eyeballs and thousands of pledges on a product. All you had to do was sign up a few friends and family.

Robert Plank: Nice. That's cool, so you have your launch team or whatever you could call it, which is your close friends and family, and they all buy right when the thing opens, get it ranked, and then get noticed and going on from there. Is there a way, or do you know off-hand, is there a way to... I'm even kind of afraid to ask this, but is there a way to pay people to buy your Kickstarter, or is that too black hat for them?

Zach Smith: That's a good question. To gain the system, I see what you're saying. I don't recommend doing that. Kickstarter is really good too at... They have what they call an integrity team. They look at a lot of things like that. The other reason I don't recommend it, even though it is a good idea and we've thought about it, but we ultimately decided not to, because if you don't have a good product, paying people to buy it isn't a good idea because no one is going to buy it when it ranks in popular anyway. You want people that actually want your product, and you want legitimate people seeing it and ready to buy.

Let's say you don't have that many friends and family. Let's say you maybe don't want to do the work. That's why a lot of people come to Funded Today, because we have a network of thousands and thousands of people, and we can tell those thousands and thousands of people about your product, build you up an email list, get them ready to go, and tell them the day you launch, and then they will back your project. Or while doing that, we'll let you know if you have a good idea or a bad idea before you even launch. Hey, nobody wants this. We can't anybody to sign up or opt in. You probably shouldn't go any further, and you won't waste the rest of your life chasing an idea that people don't want. Does that make sense?

Robert Plank: Oh yeah. That way they can move on to something that does make money.

Zach Smith: Exactly. So many people chase their dreams without ever taking action. Crowdfunding has made it so that you can quickly chase your dreams, figure out if it's right or not. If it's wrong just a little bit, you can pivot, or if it's completely wrong, you can move onto something entirely different and make money, and create a good job or create a life you want to live. Sometimes it's not your first idea, it's your second. Not your second idea, might be your third or fourth idea. We have guys that come to us the fourth time, and finally we're raising them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Where their first, second, third ideas were complete failures, we didn't raise them any money, even knowing everything that we know and having access to everything that we have access to.

Robert Plank: Right, so it's like they had to go through those failures and get those ideas out of their system to get to the good stuff that people actually wanted.

Zach Smith: Exactly. We call it product validation, and Kickstarter provides the best possible way to validate an idea than I've ever seen. You have everything there.

Robert Plank: Right. It sounds like it puts the funding people need with their businesses within reach, whereas before they would have to... Like in the 90s they'd have to go to some venture capital meetings or -

Zach Smith: Oh, you're so right.

Robert Plank: They'd have to to go on Shark Tank, or there's always all the stories about people who spend 30 years just making $0 trying to get on the shelf at Walmart, and after 30 years they finally get it, and now they have to come up with 10 million units and they just totally go bankrupt. It's like your reward for 30 years of waiting was bankruptcy.

Zach Smith: Your pitch you just said there is exactly the pitch why I believe crowdfunding is the new economy. We are literally branding a new economy. You no longer have to have a rich dad, rich family, rich uncle, venture capitalists, angels. You can literally bring an idea for the crowd, get your friends and family involved, and let the crowd decide if you've got a winner or not.

Robert Plank: Nice.

Zach Smith: It's powerful.

Robert Plank: That's some internet democracy right there. We mentioned a couple of platforms like Kickstarter, and there's Indiegogo. Are those the top dogs, or are there any others?

Zach Smith: There's others, but I'm the biggest in the world, and I don't know who they are.

Robert Plank: So why bother, right?

Zach Smith: Exactly. 80/20 is what I preach quite a bit, and you want to be on Kickstarter if you're raising money, and after you want to go to Indiegogo inDemand. That's the process.

Robert Plank: So why is that? Why Kickstarter first, and then Indiegogo?

Zach Smith: I love Kickstarter. I love Indiegogo. I love Indiegogo a hundred times more than I love Kickstarter. They're just such a good company, so many nice people, but for some reason their platform just doesn't convert as good as Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a lot bigger, so Kickstarter has a lot more traffic, and so if you have a good idea, going on Kickstarter you're going to raise more money, but Indiegogo is going to treat you way nicer. So if you want to be treated nice, have amazing customer support, all kinds of help, all the bells and whistles, everything for you, and maybe you don't have the best product ever but it's good, Indiegogo is going to be your best bet.

Robert Plank: I'm trying to figure out if I'm understanding you right. When you say Kickstarter then Indiegogo, do you mean launch your product on Kickstarter and then once that's done, launch it on Indiegogo, or are you saying -

Zach Smith: Yes, that's correct.

Robert Plank: Okay. So you can take the same offer and do the Kickstarter launch first and then the Indiegogo launch.

Zach Smith: Yeah, so what you do is you launch a Kickstarter project, and then once your Kickstarter project is over, you go to what's called Indiegogo inDemand, and Indiegogo inDemand is simply a way for you to continue to take preorders while you are in that final protyping manufacturing fulfilling stage for your Kickstarter. You set your shipping date back a couple months, you charge a few bucks more for your price, because obviously people didn't take action on Kickstarter so they have to pay a little bit more, and then you continue to raise money for your product, and you get it closer and closer to what you're going to charge for retail pricing instead of the early bird pricing, so it gives you even more time to validate, more time to raise money, and more time to cover your overhead as you go about building your new business.

Robert Plank: Nice.

Zach Smith: It's pretty powerful, and Indiegogo is way better than Kickstarter at that.

Robert Plank: That all sounds like a kind of cool strategy.

Zach Smith: It's amazing.

Robert Plank: So if someone is either on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, and they calculate all their costs, and they list their product, and they have their initial sales, and they get a bunch of backers, and let's say that the project gets funded. Is there a way to back out? Like you said in that once situation where the cooler raised $13 million, he was totally overwhelmed. If Ryan had decided that he just didn't want to deal with it, is there a way to just hit a cancel button and refund everybody, or is that not a thing?

Zach Smith: Yeah, you absolutely can. Now Kickstarter is going to charge their fee, and Kickstarter and Indiegogo both charge 5%, and so you're not going to get that back. Kickstarter is not a store, so when you back a project on a crowdfunding site, even though I call it a preorder because that's an easy way to understand, you're not preordering, you're preordering the idea should it come into existence. Like I said, most of the time they come into existence, and they're usually pretty good. Sometimes they don't happen, or they don't materialize, or other unforeseen costs happen, just like when you invest in a normal product and it doesn't work out. Kickstarter is not a store. They are a place for people to try to bring new invention and new innovation to life. I've seen a lot of creators refund, but you usually won't get back all of your money because Kickstarter takes their fees. Obviously the creator probably spent a lot of money trying to build out the product or do whatever they could to try to make it happen, and so if they were to not ultimately fulfill, you'd be out whatever money that is.

Now that's one thing we created to mitigate that because sometimes the risks to back a project, especially if the project seems really crazy or really tacky or intense, it's like wow, how are they going to really pull this off? Like Oculus Rift, it just sold for several billion dollars to Facebook. It was one of the first crowdfunding projects ever. They took three or four years to deliver, and I think they're finally delivering. They ultimately delivered, but look how long you had to wait. What we've done to mitigate some of that risk, because we've created something that we call the Cashback Network. The Cashback Network is a place where you can go and back projects and get 10% cashback on everything that you back.

Robert Plank: Now how does that work? How are you able to pull that off?

Zach Smith: Because we work with tons of projects on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Any project that's in our network, we simply give a kickback of what we're charging to all of our backers to mitigate their risk for backing.

Robert Plank: Nice.

Zach Smith: It's a win-win-win for everybody. The backers love it because their risk is mitigated, and they get a deal, and like I said, it's not too risky. Most people deliver. Literally every client Funded Today has ever worked with has delivered a product. We have a lot that haven't delivered yet, but all signs point that they're going to deliver. We have a pretty good track record, and since we work with lots of the big projects, I think it's safe to say probably 80, 90% of projects you back are going to deliver. They might be slower because obviously these are new businesses, and when they get injected with tons of capital, sometimes it's a bit confusing or crazy, but there's a lot of good stories too. Literally my entire wardrobe is from projects that we've raised money for. It's pretty cool.

Robert Plank: Awesome. With all that stuff, is there any kind of legal risk? If there is a Kickstarter or something, and someone buys it, and let's say that it's late or it's inferior or it catches on fire or something. Is there any kind of protection on Kickstarter's end for that?

Zach Smith: Yeah. There's a lot of legal risk. If a project doesn't deliver, I've seen quite a feel backers combine together and form class actions. I saw a case that I was reading yesterday about... I can't remember what project it was for, but a bunch of backers got together I believe in the state of Washington, and they ended up winning, and I believe they got trouble damages, so if you try to screw the backers and you don't even make any attempt at actually delivering, you're going to pay the price. There's some pretty good laws in place to help that out, and fortunately Kickstarter does a good job with their integrity team. We have our own internal integrity team to make sure the projects we're working with are going to legitimately deliver.

We like to require a prototype, so we'll look at and review a prototype of any product that comes our way to make sure it does what they say it's going to do so that we know they're going to be able to do it. Now will they be able to do it en masse? That's always the question, but generally if they get a prototype down, there's a good chance they know how to build it out massively as well. But there is a risk. If you don't deliver, if you're trying to screw people, people will take action, and fortunately the Kickstarter ecosystem is pretty good at finding those before, and Kickstarter does a great job at suspending them. We've worked with probably 5 to 10 projects that have been suspended because they were doing different things. They were either reselling products, not inventing something new, or probably blatantly trying to rip off money, but Kickstarter has pretty good ways of catching that, even after they start raising lots of money, so you definitely have to have a legitimate idea and have plans for how you're actually going to go about fulfilling or you could be in trouble, even if it's five years down the road.

Robert Plank: Fair enough. It is a little scary, but I guess it's no more risky than anything else on the internet as far as physical products and stuff, right?

Zach Smith: Yeah, I mean the risk is... And again, Kickstarter has something called the prototype category, so any product you back in the design category, you can look at all of the prototypes and see what you think can this really happen. You're kind of an investor in a way. I don't think Kickstarter calls their backers investors, but in a way you're kind of an investor, but your investment is being able to get the product before anybody else, and saying that you helped bring something into existence, and having the joy of helping an entrepreneur realize the American dream or something, right?

Robert Plank: Yeah. Thanks for clearing that up too a few minutes ago, because I didn't even realize that Kickstarter and Indiegogo are investing site, that they're not stores. This whole time I was thinking that people go and they just click and buy their little doodads here and there, but it's making a lot more sense to me now. The find a project, they read all the stuff, and if they believe in not only getting the item, but also in the person who's making it, then they can provide that support in that way.

Zach Smith: Exactly, yeah. That's right.

Robert Plank: I've seen a lot of the... I don't know what you'd call... The prototypes, physical products, e-commerce kind of stuff where they're making an item, and I've also seen some of these weird Indiegogos where people say like, help me pay my hospital bills, or pay me $5000 for me to go to a cabin and write a book. Have you seen those? What's your thoughts on those?

Zach Smith: Those are more on a site called GoFundMe. Maybe there's some of those on Indiegogo, I'm not quite sure. We don't work with projects like that. I love charity, don't get me wrong, but I believe you got to have a product that stands strong, and then leverage those profits from the product to go ahead and do charitable good. So look at Facebook. Facebook makes most of their money from Facebook, but look at all the cool stuff they're doing. Same with Google. Google makes 80, 85% of all their revenue from Google search, but look at all the amazing stuff Google is trying to do on the charity end. Don't create a charity and ask people to throw money at it. Create an amazing product and then use the money from that amazing product to go ahead and do charitable good. People don't want to give money to those kind of things. And there's so many. Use a site like GoFundMe and get your friends and family involved in something like that. I don't think the crowd is going to go crazy. But then again there's always the one that raises a million bucks and every talks about. Look at this guy, he wanted to start a lawn mowing business, and everybody loved his story so much that he made a million bucks. There is those stories, but those are one in a million, and that's just the nature of virality.

Robert Plank: That makes sense. I'm sure that someone out there has made it work, but for the average person not very likely, not very practical as opposed to creating something that provides value. Even that you mentioned Facebook making the drones that provide internet to Africa and stuff like that. The amount of money that Facebook and Google pour into the charity stuff, they would never have raised that amount of money just asking. The only reason they can provide that amount of money is because they built their own company, and then they choose to allocate those funds. That's cool. As we're winding this town, let's talk about Funded Today, because that's come up a couple times, and it sounds like you guys provide an all-in-one solution, and all the stuff in there that makes Kickstarter campaigns a lot safer, more reliable, and likely to succeed. So can you tell us about Funded Today and what it is?

Zach Smith: Yeah, so Funded Today is an all-in-one crowdfunding marketing agency. We can do everything. If you have an idea in your head and that's all, come talk to us. If you've got everything ready and a video make and a page designed and you're ready to push go but you don't know how to make money or you don't know how to launch, contact us. We'll chat with you. If you're all the way into your project and you haven't raised any money yet and you think you maybe have a good product, we have something called the crowdfunding success matrix. You can link to this in your podcast if you want, but it's basically just a little matrix, just like you see in business school.

There's four quadrants. Outer darkness, black hole, shooting stars, and supernovas. You might be a shooting star, where you launch well, all your friends and family liked it, they backed it, other people backed it, but then your marketing died off, so it's just like a shooting star. It's fleeting, it goes away. We can turn a shooting star into a supernova, and a supernova is a good product with good marketing. A shooting star is a good product with bad marketing. A black hole is a bad product with good marketing. You're just throwing money in and it's getting sucked away. Outer darkness is where you definitely don't want to be. That's a bad product and bad marketing. If you have a shooting star, my most recent example that I love sharing is a guy named Timo Heino from Finland with a product called SpineGym. He came to us when he had 41 backers, probably his friends and family, and $8047 raised. If you look up his project on Indiegogo inDemand now, I believe we're at $1,300,000. We raised him $463,000 on his Kickstarter, so 463 minus 8,000 over $450,000 raised for this product that was pretty much dead in the water. It had a little bit of a shooting star and then it died.

At any stage of the crowdfunding process we can help you raise money, it just depends on where you're at. Worst case, we'll validate your product, and we'll tell you, look, we've raised millions and millions of dollars and we did the exact same thing we've done for all these products that we've raised millions of dollars for, but for your product it didn't work. So chances are you've got a bad product and you probably need to pivot or tweak or disband, and here's some things we recommend. Or you know what? You've got a terrible idea. Nobody wants it, and as hard as this is for you to accept, it's time for you to move onto something new or go get another job, because this one's not going to do it for you.

Or best case, we turn into a supernova and we do what we've done for the $80 million plus we've raised for hundred of good Kickstarter projects, and everybody's happy. Those are my favorite. We have a lot of them right now. We have the second most project on Kickstarter running live right now. It's called Flag, a really cool idea for photo sharing, and we have probably 5 to 10 more in the top 20 on Kickstarter, and tons on Indiegogo inDemand. We're Indiegogo's number one partner, we're Kickstarter's number one source of traffic aside from Youtube and Google. We even pass up Reddit most of the time. We're doing big things, and we're working with big companies. We've worked with lots of big names. We worked with the guy that invented Furbee. We've worked with Samsung. We've worked with the Coolest Cooler guy on quite a few things. Baubax Travel Jacket, the fifth most funded project of all time. That's Funded Today. Hiral Sanghavi is a good friend of mine. I could name drop all day with all the random stuff we've done, but we're doing big things and it's exciting, it's fun. It's great to see these new ideas get brought into existence when you get to be a part of it.

Robert Plank: Nice. Who knows, maybe someday you'll be bigger than Kickstarter and you can start your own, right?

Zach Smith: I don't know. We've thought about it, you know?

Robert Plank: I'm looking at the site, and you guys have like $80 million total in funds raised in all kinds of cool stuff. What's the website? What's the address to get to you and your company.

Zach Smith: It's funded.today. We also own fundedtoday.com, but I think that just redirects to funded.today and the reason we do that is because we get your project funded today. Pretty easy to remember, but it's not a dot com domain name. A lot of people mix that up. We went with something kind of weird with all those neat domain extensions.

Robert Plank: But weird stands out.

Zach Smith: Hey, exactly.

Robert Plank: Cool, so funded.today and before I let you go, do you have off the top of your head a super weird and crazy successful project that you've backed with Funded Today?

Zach Smith: That is a great question. Let me scan our site real quick. I'm going to do what you do.

Robert Plank: Cool.

Zach Smith: So we'll just go to Funded Today. If you go to the Get More Pledges page, you can scroll down and see a ton of the testimonials. We try to get a video testimonial from every client too, so we have lots and lots of video testimonials. People are slow to give them, but they all eventually come in. I think we've got 30 or so on the site. Let me find one that I really enjoyed. You know, I like the BetterBack. The BetterBack comes to mind. I use it almost every day. It's sitting on my desk right now. It's a product invented by Katherine Krug. It raised $1,193,776. It's an apparatus you wear for 15 to 20 minutes a day. It helps you maintain perfect posture. In fact, I'm not wearing it right now as I'm doing this interview, and I lean back, deep in my chair, horrible posture. Katherine would be ashamed of me. I should probably be wearing my BetterBack. It's a cool product that I don't think anybody has ever heard of or seen. I really love it, and it's very well made too. It was better than you even expected when you backed it.

Robert Plank: I'm scrolling through, and I'm seeing the BetterBack. People are selling wallets and clothing items and shoes and sunglasses, all kinds of stuff. It's crazy the amount of money that people are raising with some of these sites, especially when they use Kickstarter plus Indiegogo plus Funded Today and all these other tools that are out there. So look at all the great ideas that people have and all the money flying around. I think that anyone would be silly not to use crowdfunding to fund their physical projects and things like that. So once again, that webpage is funded.today, and thanks a bunch Zach for stopping by and telling us all about the exciting world of crowdfunding.

Zach Smith: Thanks Robert. I appreciate it. Glad to be on.