501: Earn More Money from Fewer Clients: Big Goals, Mindset Shifts, and Marketing Experiments with Joe Sanok

Robert Plank 0:00 Joe marketer of the day number 501, earn more money from fewer clients, big goals, mindset shifts and marketing experiments with Joe Sana, Hey, everyone, we're so glad that you're listening right now to the marketer of the day podcast. We're talking with Joe Sana. He's a counselor, a consultant, a speaker, and he has the number one podcast for counselors, called the practice of the practice podcast, and he has a bunch of interviews with all kinds of amazing guests. He's a writer for Psych Central, he's been on Huffington Post, Forbes good magazine, and he's a keynote speaker and author of five books, and is a top consultant. So Joe, glad to be talking to you.

Joe Sanok 0:38 Robert, thanks so much for having me.

Robert Plank 0:40 Glad to have you. So I mean, with all these, all these crazy things going on, what's on your mind lately? What has you fired up?

Joe Sanok 0:46 Yeah, you know, one thing I do is, every year I look at what's my big goal for the year that's going to make everything else easier, the book, the one thing has really helped me structure that out. So every year I have a big goal that's going to move the needle forward in a massive way. And each year that I do that, I've been able to usually achieve that goal, but then also take a massive step towards my bigger goals. Well,

Robert Plank 1:07 great. So you're ahead of most people who kind of make the goals and the goals fall apart or make them too big or small. So do you mind sharing what's your big goal this year?

Joe Sanok 1:15 Yeah, for this year, we've launched a supportive member community for people that are in the healthcare professions that are just starting a practice, and rather than just have it be E courses or, you know, just like a supportive Facebook group, we've really looked at what do our ideal clients want, and we interviewed a bunch of them, and they wanted a supportive community of people. They wanted a small group connection, but they also wanted that training and feedback. And so we've really looked at, how do we create something that from the second somebody says, I want to start a private practice all the way through scaling it and making it into a million dollar practice? What do they need along the way? So we're starting at the very beginning with people starting then as we build content, then we can add people in throughout. And for me, that's a big step forward, because to go from a couple years ago where it was getting more one on one consulting clients at a higher rate, and then last year, launching a bunch of mastermind groups and conferences. Now I can really start to scale where, if I get 1000s of people in this that's gonna give us the infrastructure and the finances to really grow and disrupt the industry in a positive way. Well,

Robert Plank 2:13 super cool. I mean, there's so much good stuff in there, not only from talking to people and asking them what they want. I mean, what a concept, right? But also, kind of, it sounds like this strategy of of like building things up to the point where you can't build it anymore, and then maybe, like forcing yourself to reinvent things. It sounds like, yeah,

Joe Sanok 2:32 for me, I try to get each goal to a point where it's as automated as possible. There's always going to be things that I have to touch within it. For example, if I have a mastermind group, obviously I have to show up for that, but if I can automate all of the onboarding, if I can automate all of the resources, if I can have an assistant doing a lot of that, then the mental and creative space in my brain is freed up to work on the new project. A lot of entrepreneurs will have all these ideas and go after whatever their big idea is right now, but they add more to their plate without taking things off that plate. And so I found that if you can keep offloading things from your plate, then you have more creativity, more ability to come up with new ideas, and then you're an innovator in the field, rather than just someone that's trying to do something that everyone else is

Robert Plank 3:14 doing. Yeah, and it seems like, and I mean, first of all, like, I'm super jealous of your lifestyle here, of just being able to kind of, you know, do what you want and focus on the thinking. And it seems like people like you, who basically have it all figured out, it's like you're able to move fast enough to actually do something, because it seems like when people, when they don't offload things, and they keep taking on more and more. I mean, I can, I'm better now, but I can still relate to maybe taking on too much. It seems like all the action taking is taken up by switching gears, and then it's tough to make any progress. And by the time you do make a progress, make progress, a couple of years have passed, and then everything's changed around us, and then it's like we're always kind of playing catch up. It seems like Yeah,

Joe Sanok 3:56 and I would agree, to an extent, the me having it all figured outside, I would say definitely not, and that's hopefully refreshing for your audience. The big mindset shift that I've seen people take, where they go from being just a solopreneur or maybe having a couple virtual staff to really having a CEO mindset, is that those that are most successful are those that see everything as an experiment. And so for this member community that we just launched, we started it as an experiment, I interviewed about 20 of our ideal clients. Said, what would you want? Sketched out a landing page. Didn't put much into the infrastructure. And then we had a pre launch invitation, and then on the day of the launch, then we opened up the doors, and we had 200 people on the wait list, and we only had 50 spots, and we sold out in about an hour, and with 35 of those spots going in the first seven minutes, but we viewed it as an experiment that was going to give us knowledge either way. So if it was a fall on your face, failure, and nobody signed up for it, nobody gave money, nobody was interested, we learned from that. And if we did it successfully, we learned from that as well. And so the most effective marketers are those that are constantly. Looking at, well, what do I learn from this? This is an experiment. I'm doing my best stab at doing something amazing, but also realizing that there's not really pass fail. It's just information, no matter where you're at.

Robert Plank 5:10 I love it. So that way there, there's less hesitation in saying, well, there's a lot of writing on this. Or what if this messes up, at least this way, if it messes up, then you're more open to tweaking it, or trying again or or something else like that,

Joe Sanok 5:24 yeah. Like this launch we just did. There were so many mess ups. For example, we got to 42 of the 50 that sold, and then all of a sudden, the sales just dropped off. And I was in the system like, what happened? I'm sending emails to people like they're still spots. But really in Paypal, instead of having the top amount be 50. It was somehow at 42 and so we screwed that up, and then we didn't realize that people's PayPal email might not be the same email they signed up for our email course, so then they weren't added to the appropriate list, and all the automations were off. So that's super frustrating when it's happening, but it's also good knowledge, and I'm letting people know we're doing our best with this. We're trying to help you join this group, but we're also going to screw up too, so it shows people you don't have to be paralyzed by perfection, because you really just need to get things done and get information on those activities.

Robert Plank 6:10 I love it. And what you're making me think of here is, in the past, when I partner with people, or when I hire people to do things, it seemed like, you know, like the launches would never really go as planned. There would always be some kind of a hiccup, like you mentioned, like the automation wouldn't work, or I'd have to scramble and make some accounts by hand, because when we tested it work, but then under load, it didn't work, or whatever happened. And it seemed like in the past, I'd work with people who would just give up at the first little, tiny pebble in the road, like one thing wouldn't work and they would just be given up, unreachable. Off to the next thing. And it seemed like it took a few iterations to get to the point where I would team up with someone, where if the launch either didn't go as planned or there was some technical problem, then that would give them the motivation to rise with the challenge and fix it, as opposed to it didn't go my way. I'm just giving up,

Joe Sanok 6:58 right? And I think that's where my psychologist background comes in, in our negative self talk, if we already think, man, I'm a poser. I shouldn't be in this industry. Who am I? Everybody else has their act together but me. If then, when we screw up, then that negative self talk is reinforced and we say, see, this is proof that I should not be in this industry. I should just give up. Whereas, once you get a little bit of traction, when you really are listening to your audience and they recognize that you're human, you're doing your best, you're trying to do a good launch, but you're gonna screw some things up, then people have so much more grace with that. So for example, our webinar platform, we were having so many issues with it, so I went back and I took all the slides. I just used quick time on my computer to record the whole webinar so that it was just in our private Facebook group. It wasn't perfect people that didn't have as much of the Q and A interaction. My daughter walked in in the middle of this, and she was like, I need a band aid. And I'm like, Honey, please leave. Like I told you, please leave. And people loved it. They said, You are demonstrating that you need to just get things done sometimes give as much of the content as you can, and you don't have to be perfect. And I actually found that people liked hearing my daughter in the background asking for a band aid, rather than me go through and edit it out. It made me a real person that they could actually connect with and say, you know, Joe is doing his best. He sometimes screws up, but I want to follow him more, because he somehow balances all of this lifestyle mixed with his business together.

Robert Plank 8:17 Super funny, and I can totally relate to that because, um, like, I come from a computer programming background, and I used to make all these products that would show on video how to program stuff, how to code stuff. And as you know, with computers, I mean, we just, the last, you know, eight minutes of our conversation is all about computers messing up. So I'd show people how to make an app or something, and then it would mess up. And at first I think, oh, no, I'm such a bad teacher. But then I would go and fix it really quick, and then I would forget to edit it out. But then I found out years later, I just happened to run into someone at a conference, and we were talking, and he was like, I'm so glad that you didn't edit that out, because it showed me your mindset. It showed me how you fix the problem. And then there was that aspect that you mentioned there, of like, the transparency, that it's okay if he messed up, it's okay for me to mess up as well. And so something that really, and also, you know, what else is cool about that is, uh, if I had the choice of seeing something that was a little rough around the edges but had good information, versus something that was super polished but had bad information, I mean, I'm going to take the rough with good information. So, I mean, I think we're on the same page there. I like that, that mindset. But something that you mentioned, that I want to make sure that we get to is, so you mentioned that you yourself are a psychologist. So how the heck did you go from point A to point B there? How did you go from being a psychologist to this whole business that you built here?

Joe Sanok 9:40 Yeah, so I had a full time job at a community college. Before that, I was a foster care supervisor, making 30, $40,000 a year, and I started a private practice on the side, just as a way to pay off student loan debt. So, you know, sessions were 100 to $150 and over time, we were able to pay off student loan debt before we thought we would, but I picked. Up some really just easy things that the general kind of marketing and business world finds as kind of like no duh, things that most of us in the counseling world had never heard of, like return on investment or SEO optimizing a website, things that everybody seems to know in the business world, but we were never taught in counseling school. And so I just started a blog practice of the practice.com talking about the books I was reading, what I was testing, what I was trying, totally as this side gig. It might take off. It might not. I might make $12 off amazon affiliate links or off an occasional Bluehost sign up. But it really was just this way to express what I was learning as a co learner. And then in 2013 i i was listening to a ton of podcasts, people like Pat Flynn, John Lee, Dumas, a lot of these people in the passive income space. And I thought, well, you know, I'm going to launch a podcast to go deeper and explore some of these issues, maybe with it being a viable business model, but we'll see. And so then it was in 2014 that I had really realized that the income I had made in the previous year matched my full time income, working about 10 hours a week and podcasting while my daughter was taking her nap, and at the time, my wife was pregnant, and so really just kind of tested it out, and then at each step, said, Well, what's the reasonable next step? So I started consulting with people, one on one, really learned the value of my time. So started raising my prices. Tried some things that didn't work, tried some things that did work, like hosting conferences that were face to face. And then each year just continued to grow off of that. And then this past year, we hit half a million dollars for the first time. When, you know, just a handful of years ago, I was making 40 grand a year at a full time job at a community college.

Robert Plank 11:40 Super cool. So it remains true to your philosophy of trying different experiments, of not just drop you didn't just say I'm going to put in my notice today. I'm going to drop everything. I'm going to make all this stuff it better work. You tried out different experiments, and it sounds like one thing led to the next thing led to the next thing. And then when you came across the doors closing it in your face, so to speak with, for example, the conferences, you didn't just say, Oh, well, this is a reason to give up. You just found another avenue,

Joe Sanok 12:10 yeah, and I think that really optimizing my time. So right now, I work three days a week, and have four day weekends every week. And so I set very clear boundaries around my time, which has forced me to really have to get as much done in a short period of time, but then say, well, what's left undone that I could give to somebody else. And so then bringing on assistants that are at a lower hourly rate, and bringing on different marketers, different people that can help grow the business outside of my own time. And when I made that switch, that really allowed me to continue to scale even while I was stand up paddle boarding with my family on the weekend.

Robert Plank 12:44 Well, super cool. So, so all of our time is valuable. We only have a limited amount of it. But then something I'm curious about is how you make that choice of what is deserving of your time and what can be outsourced. And it's easy to say, you know, oh, I'm just gonna do the things that make it unique to me. But I mean, for example, like, You're slowing it here on the podcast with me, right? So I mean, not, not to self deprecate myself too much, but like, you know, there's other places that you could be. And I think that for myself, like I do all these things in my business, and I'm like, oh, that whole thing of, you know, guessing on other people's podcasts. I kind of go on one or two shows a month, but I really want to ramp it up. So how do you decide, with your time being so limited, what's worth your while, what's not?

Joe Sanok 13:27 Yeah, so in regards to podcast discussions, even if there's a podcast that gets 50 or 100 listens per episode per month, and so it's a small, like a super small podcast, if somebody said to you, can we record a video of you over the next 20 minutes, and we're gonna have 100 people that are gonna show up every month, and they're gonna watch this video of you, and they might become people that wanna work with you. You would say absolutely it's 20 minutes of my time. And you know, over a year, I'm gonna potentially reach 1000s of people, and then over time, that might even grow for me, especially podcast interviews are a great way to spend your time. There's very few podcast interviews that I turn down because you never know who's gonna be that next person that's hustling so hard that they really take off, and then you're one of their first interviews, or you're somewhere in the middle. And so it's just to me, that's a great use of your time, because it's tapping into other people's audience that may never have heard of me. Now, outside of podcast interviews, I start with what's the thing that needs to keep getting automated and that I need to keep working on that I've committed to? So for me, that would be ongoing, one on one, consulting with people that would be the mastermind groups, and then I have a conference in the summer called Slow down School, where we slow down for a couple days, go hiking, we drink on the beach, and then we work on people's businesses for a couple days. So those are the things that I've already committed to. People have either paid for them. They're something that takes up my time. So that's first. Then I look at what's my big goal for the year. So for me, it's building this supportive online community that's teaching and supporting people. And so then I need to put time into that Facebook group, into developing that side of things. And then, after. That kind of all the rest comes in. And so then, for example, about a year, year and a half ago, I realized I was really falling behind on email. So I have all of these email sequences that are happening, and in some of them, people reply and say, Hey, I have a quick question. I don't personally need to reply to that two or 300 emails a day. So I pay somebody to go in there. She has scripts for almost everything. If she doesn't know how to answer something, or feels like it takes my attention, she just stars it. And if it's hyper important, she'll text me and say, Hey, your TEDx pitch just got accepted, so congratulations, or something like that that she knows that I really want to know about. And so then I go in and I do 15 emails instead of 300 and so she's then able to reply from my email as herself. So she says, This is Emily Joe's director of details, excuse me, and she's herself, but she's saying, in order to help things move along, let me just give you these links that you asked for. So those are the little things that, yeah, they take a couple minutes a day or an hour a day. But by having that hour back, it has freed up so much time that I can do things like this that are a better use of my time.

Robert Plank 16:07 Super great. And it sounds like by sort of having, having this, this virtual assistant in the in the email example, you have the virtual assistant kind of go through and get 90, 95% of it taken out, and then pass the rest of the ladder to you. It sounds like that. Number one, that you don't have to completely remove yourself from the business. You can still be in there for the really important stuff. And the number two, that it doesn't have to be on or off with this kind of scenario. You can just have someone jump in a little bit as needed, and kind of and build them up where they're handling more and more of your emails as as your assistant here develops more and more of the responses. But it's not like it has to be just suddenly rushing into things. You can gradually bring these people in here.

Joe Sanok 16:55 Absolutely. Rory Vaden, he has this wonderful kind of funnel of decision making that's all about procrastinating on purpose. And so he walks through, could this task be automated through technology? Could this task be automated by someone else? And then when it finally gets to you to say, is this a pressing task that I need to do for moving forward in my business or an emergency? And then, if not, then we intentionally procrastinate that task and move it back to the bottom till we can find either a need to do it for ourselves, a virtual assistant or assistant to do it, or a technology to do it. And by doing that, that then has helped me be able to decide where to best spend my time. And that's

Robert Plank 17:36 really great, and that's reassuring for me, because I do something similar, like there will be things that are somewhat pressing items, but really not important, and I'll push it back a few days, and I'll do the more important things. And then there'll be, like, these little things that I keep pushing back, pushing back, but I don't feel I've been telling myself up until now that I don't feel as bad about it as maybe I should, because they're just not very important. And it's still, I'm still aware of them, but they're little things like going and, you know, checking footer links on a web page. And it's one of those things where I just could go and jump and do it in, you know, 1020 minutes. But there are more important things, so maybe I shouldn't feel as bad about pushing those low priority things to later.

Joe Sanok 18:18 I agree. I actually keep a today list, and I keep a someday list in my phone, just in the notes section, so if I have ideas or I have things that I want to get to, I put that on the someday list, and I put one or two things on my today list that are the big things that I really need to get done. And if I get those things done, I'm happy if I get to other things. That's great for me. This really, kind of naturally came out of 2012 it was a really rough year for our family. My daughter, right before her first birthday, had open heart surgery, and then a couple weeks after that, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. My wife had a miscarriage. It was just one of those years that when people have it, you're like, what more can hit our family. But that was the year that I launched practice, the practice, and I was kicking off the podcast in the midst of cancer treatment. And for me, what I had to ask myself every time I made a podcast or was working on a blog was, why am I spending time doing this rather than hanging out with my daughter who's about to have open heart surgery, or hanging out with my family before I'm about to go in for cancer treatment? And so it made those top things that are going to move the needle forward, that will help people, but also help my bottom line come top of mind. And so what I hope no one has to deal with that, but they can just learn from it, that if we just say, What is my biggest priority, that moves the needle forward for my business, but also impacts the world in a positive way, that formula is going to help you grow and scale in a way that just kind of going after money, or going after your email list or whatever the specific kind of thing is that's front of mind if you have that guiding question that's going to really help you make better decisions as a business owner, but then also as someone that's bettering the world.

Robert Plank 19:52 And along those lines, something that that I've noticed that has helped me is being more. For people, person and breaking down to my shell. And I mean, as a psychologist, I assume that you're pretty good with people, but you know, there are these things that are the high value activities that we're talking about here, right? Like going on the other podcast, being on your own podcast, making the the YouTube videos, the live action stuff, talking to people one on one, doing the conferences all involve talking to, you know, reaching out and talking to people. And I'm definitely better at the the people skills than I was, you know, years ago. But still, sometimes I'll be making that discovery call, and sometimes the phone will be ringing and I'm like, Oh, I hope, I hope they don't pick up. I'll be like, I feel bad, but I hope they don't pick up that way, I can just chill out for half an hour or an hour. I don't have to always be on and I know that a lot of people who are listening to this show are somewhat computer geeks or marketing nerds, and just a lot of them are afraid to break out of their shell, or they don't have the confidence. So what would you say to people like that, who they might be seeing what you've accomplished with all these great things that you've done, which involve dealing with people, but how the heck? What's I mean? What's your secret to breaking out of your shell? And what would you tell the people who have trouble with that?

Joe Sanok 21:11 Well, I think for people that have trouble with that, I would start with that's super normal. There's a lot of people that are not energized by other people. They're called introverts. That means that their energy comes from not being around people, having that alone time, reading a book, playing a video game, somehow getting away from those social interactions. So I would start with more than half the population doesn't get energy from other people, and so that's super normal. But then we'd want to look at, well, if your business, or if your marketing requires that look at when you are best during the day. When do you have the best energy for those social engagements? So if it's after doing four one on one calls, that's probably not the best time for you to have another one on one call. It may be that you have those really important social engagements earlier in the day, or maybe your energy peaks right after lunch, figuring that out, and then I think, also looking at, well, what are your biggest fears about what's going to go wrong? And then challenging those and asking, are those actually true? So a common fear is, I'm not going to know what to ask these people. Well, you know how to have conversations with your friends. You just ask them about their day, ask them about what they've been up to. There's people that you probably have natural conversations with that you don't get worried about, and if you don't, then maybe if everybody you're having anxiety over, that might be a bigger issue that you know, speaking to a coach or a therapist might be helpful. But say that it's itemized, thinking about, well, how can I think about these new relationships in the same way as I do with my friends? So it might be I'm gonna just ask a bunch of follow up questions. I'm gonna be curious. So what's your business like? Tell me where you're struggling. What do you wish you could have happen later on this year, if we work together? And then when you hear all of that, then you can frame what you wanna talk about around what they've just discussed. And so I found that the more curious you are, the more that you engage in getting the other person talking, oftentimes, that makes it a lot easier to worry about how you're going to come across to somebody else.

Robert Plank 23:08 That's a really good strategy. I like your way of thinking, and I can, I don't know much about psychology, but I can hear a little bit of the therapist in you, as far as saying like, well, there's this big, scary cloud of fear that's in front of you. And instead of just saying, I can't pass that, you're breaking it down. You're unpacking stuff. You're looking at scenarios and like commonalities and other situations where that that little sub problem that you're now afraid of, instead of attacking the big problem, that little sub problem, you compare it to something else that's that you're not afraid of, or even just reframing things in a new way, where you have this conversation, and it's not like you're the one talking, you're being curious, you're asking questions. It's on the other person to answer these questions. So I really like your thought process as far as kind of attacking that problem and unpacking that and, and, and also, of like your mindset in general, of experimenting, right? Even that, that concept of knowing when you're best during the day is you try some stuff out, and then you go back and look at at the data, and you look at how your energy level was, or how you felt, or how well you know yourself, and then you can go from there. So I mean, this is a really great, uh, just a really, other really great way of thinking that I'm hearing from you, as far as just that experimental mindset, that it's really almost impossible to fail. The only way to fail is to stop trying well, and yeah, and

Joe Sanok 24:32 when you get paralyzed by perfection, nobody wants to see someone that's perfect anyway. And so for you to have unfinished work, because it's not perfect, versus work that's completed and it's not perfect, but at least you're taking a stab at it, you are slowing yourself down from learning by not putting things out there. So if it's I'm gonna write some blog posts about this specific technology, or I'm gonna do blog posts about this app, if you're just going over it over and over, is it perfect? Does the grammar right? Just get it out there, like, just ship it, you know. So the more that you can do that, then you can really start to get some traction. The other thing that you had asked about that I wanted to circle back to, in regards to kind of leveling up and use of time. One thing that I didn't mention was the service. It's totally free for people that are contributing. It's called Help a Reporter Out. So Help a Reporter Out. Every day, there are people in the news. There are writers that are looking for experts to weigh in on a variety of topics. And so that's how I got into Forbes, Huffington Post, a variety of other things, by weighing in as an expert and then getting quoted in these major news publications. And that's how a ton of major news publications get their content when they quote somebody, you know, they can say, Robert plank from the marketer of the day podcast says this, and then you can say, as seen on Forbes money entrepreneur, all these things. And really, you develop those connections with people over time that are writers, and they'll level up and take you with them.

Robert Plank 25:58 That's a great lesson, and it's a great reminder, because I had someone on this podcast maybe a couple of years ago talking about Help a Reporter Out, and about guest blogging and about getting into the roundups and things like that. And that's totally a great reminder. I need to jump back in and do that. And so as far as your time strategy for for doing that sort of thing, I mean, I know that we touched a little bit about with the podcast guesting and things like that, like you you're looking for, like the rising stars. You can find the ways to do these things. But do you set aside, like, specific time during the day or the week to do this kind of writing stuff?

Joe Sanok 26:34 You know, at this point, I haven't done as much of the writing and content creation to attract people in because the sales funnel we had, we've developed, is so solid, and so really it's getting people into that sales funnel. So if they're starting a practice, you will recommend they go to practice with the practice.com, forward, slash, start. And then we have our free 28 step checklist on starting a practice, whereas we have other things for people that are growing a practice. The things I do every single month are my monthly income report, blog, I do the podcasts, you know, at least, usually six or seven times a month, and then a lot of the webinars at this point I have transcribed into either an e book or blog posts that then we clean up and we reuse. And so something like doing a Facebook Live downloading that, having my assistant upload it to YouTube, pulling the closed captions off of that and then creating a blog post off of that. That only takes me the five minutes of the Facebook Live versus some, some kind of longer form articles that I'm writing. Well,

Robert Plank 27:29 fantastic. Well, I know that we're pressed for time here, so I'll let you go. But everyone should go to practice of the practice.com, forward slash, start to see what you have going on, to see the some of these things in action, and to see just the whole system in place. As far as what you and your team has has going on, as far as you put some stuff out there, they get the rest handled for you. So practice of the practice.com/start and any other links to drop here as we wrap up?

Joe Sanok 27:53 No, that would be the best one for people that are in the healthcare field, starting a practice. Thanks so much, Robert for having me. If you're a future podcaster,

Robert Plank 28:01 new podcaster, existing podcaster, or you're looking to make more money with your podcast with less time, you owe it to yourself to check out. Done For You. Podcasting.com we handle any or all of your podcasting needs go to done for you. Podcasting.com RIGHT NOW YOU.