Archive 1: 2012-2016

132: Influence with a Heart: Find Your Secret Sauce and Purpose with Ben Gioia

Ben Gioia, author of Influence with a Heart and Marketing with a Heart, tells us how to use trust marketing for greater income, influence, and impact.

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: We're here with Ben Gioia, who is a speaker, coach, trainer, and author of the number 1 bestseller, Marketing With A Heart. He's the president of influencewithaheart.com.

Ben has helped AARP launch one of the world's biggest magazines with 32 million circulation, and he's a trained, or he's trained top business leaders at Stanford University, and supported the ALS Association in improving healthcare and quality of life for thousands of people with Lou Gehrig's Disease after almost dying 4 times in 72 hours on a hike in India. We're going to have to talk about that for sure. Ben received a gift, a fire inside to make a bigger impact. Today, he teaches entrepreneurs, visionaries, organizations, and leaders how to communicate with more influence by using more empathy, story, and thought leadership. Lots of cool stuff. Welcome to the show, Ben.

Ben Gioia: Thank you so much, Robert. It's a pleasure to be here, thank you for asking me.

Robert Plank: Awesome. I mean, yeah, I'm glad you stopped by. Can you kind of tell us, I mean, there's that little bit of bio there, but can you kind of tell us in your own words what it is you do, what's kind of driving you right now, and what makes you special?

Ben Gioia: Absolutely, absolutely. Thank you so much. Gosh. Yeah, I'm going to, I guess, start this off, kick this off with a little bit about that story in India. Basically, I had this incredible hike, 72 hours, where I almost died 4 times, and it was ... My bus going, almost going off the road as we're going up a windy mountain curve. I mean, literally, the back of the bus was like skittering the edge and almost sliding off. The second time was running from a fire. It hadn't rained where we were in about 4 months, and literally, my guide turned to me at one point because he heard some agitated yelling, I couldn't understand it in English, off in the distance, and he said over his shoulder, "Run," and I said, "Run?" He went running off down the path.

Third time, we came upon a poisonous snake that I wouldn't have seen at all, just right in the path, tiny snake. My guide fortunately stopped me, and then ... The last time was running into a mountain lion, kind of stumbling upon a mountain lion. I think we were surprised, he or she was surprised, and fortunately, the mountain lion ran away; so, that was a wake-up call or a series of wake-up calls that just made me realize, "What an amazing gift this life is, my life. If I'm here on this Earth, and I'm functional and capable, I'm going to do good in the world;" so I started thinking about, "How could I do that?"

I pulled together talents, experience, all that kind of stuff, and that was the thing that brought Marketing With A Heart to the light; because I realized that there's so many people and good in the world, there's the whole idea of conscious business and transparency and ethical communication, all that stuff, and I realized that that needed to come into the marketing space as well. People felt good about their marketing, really would lead with value, be transparent, and really resonate and connect with the right audiences, so they could stop focusing so much on competition; and really focus on creativity and collaboration, and magnetizing the right people by speaking truthfully and honestly about themselves, who they served, what they do, and their secret sauce, and how that all makes it happen, so ...

Yeah, so did that for a bunch of years, and then Marketing With A Heart kind of morphed into Influence With A Heart, which is what that is today. I launched that just a few months ago, and it's been a rocket ship since I changed that. Influence With A Heart was what, I realized, made so much more sense for who I am and what I want to do in the world. Right after that happened, I got this 2-day training at Stanford. I wrote my second book, and I actually just got asked by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company to create content for a customer ... Like a front-line customer service program that would basically help the employees be more mindful, use more empathy, and they want to roll that out to 15,000 people, so ... Really, really excited about that possibility. I literally heard that, about that 2 days ago.

Robert Plank: Awesome. I mean, lots of cool things happening. As far as what it is that you do, I mean, you have the book, you have this writing ... I mean, what is your business exactly that you have? Coaching clients, do you have products, like what are the pieces to it?

Ben Gioia: Yeah. Yeah. I do have coaching clients, and I'm doing speaking gigs and then a couple of consulting gigs as well. The essence of what I do is really help people articulate their purpose much more excitingly and effectively than they ever have before, both in terms of what they're displaying to the world and in terms of themselves. Because when people get really, really clear on their purpose and are able to articulate it and get behind it, and get behind themselves, that it just, it changes the whole game. Articulating that purpose on a much higher level and then weaving that energy and even the direct articulation into their messaging, into how they're delivering their products, into how they're presenting themselves. When you're operating from a place of purpose, people really resonate with that. That comes through your face-to-face energy. It comes through your writing. It comes through you on video, through how you're presenting on video, so help get really super articulate with their message and then really also articulate their secret sauce, right?

We all have amazing history, amazing experience. Sure, not all of us died 4, all died 4 times in India, but that's not even the point, right? It's our story that ... It's the stories that we choose that we know are going to connect with other people, and that our great expressions are for. I help people also connect to that story, bring that out through their writing, through their communication, and kind of getting clear on that purpose and getting clear on that story. That's the articulation to the secret sauce. When you can get that together, your positioning as a thought leader just becomes so much more powerful, because you're not just an expert, but you're this unique expert with this unique offering, with this unique story or set of stories, and that's the stuff that really, really makes you, can make you resonate with the right audience and the right kind of people.

Robert Plank: Along those lines, could you share with us a little bit of maybe like a case study or something where you had one of these coaching clients, or maybe they had some good things to say, maybe they were onto something, and then you kind of ran them through your system and you were able to reposition them and articulate them better and share their secret sauce? Do you mind sharing a little bit of like a before-and-after with someone that you've gone through?

Ben Gioia: Yeah, I would be delighted to do that. Yeah, I have a couple of quick examples. One is, excuse me, have been working with a high-end boutique technology company here in the area that does customized apps, web apps, and websites also, but their apps are probably functioning things for hospitals, serving people with AIDS, all sorts of deep impact. What the CEO of this company really wanted to do was to do many more projects that were exciting to him, not only exciting, but really connected to his sense of purpose. We dug and dug and talked about stuff, and we realized something very, very simple and yet profound, that this person, what his secret sauce is that he speaks the language of tech and non-tech, so he can speak just as easily to a non-technical person as he's getting a contract together, or he can talk to programmers down in the trenches and really get the things done. While it sounds like such a simple articulation, so straightforward, it has really shifted both his energy around his business, and the people he's starting to attract.

Then another quick example is a health coach that I work with also here in the Bay Area. She does some, they have straightforward nutrition and health and mindfulness kind of things, and she also does a little bit more of what some people might consider some woo-woo healing techniques. I mean, she's legit, don't get me wrong, but a lot of people don't, are still learning about alternative non-Western ways to do stuff.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah.

Ben Gioia: It took her years to figure out ... Thank you. It took her years to figure out how to express that. When we started working together, she still wasn't there, and what we realized was that she helps stressed out professionals and urbanites in the Bay Area in Silicon Valley be happier, healthier, and more aligned with their purpose. That was a huge, huge thing, because it wasn't just, "Oh, I'm a health coach," but it was, really gave her the ability to do the thing that she loves, that she's excellent at, and position that around the people that she wants to attract most.

Robert Plank: Along those lines, is there a little bit of a method to the madness? Like when you look at these businesses to help, do you eyeball it, or do you list out hundreds of things, or do you ask any deep probing questions? What goes to your head? What's the process between going from, you hear about their business, into what they should be doing instead?

Ben Gioia: Absolutely, absolutely, yeah. I will check out their website, of course, and kind of do, I think, what many marketers would do when they were looking at somebody's content. Just basically go, "Okay, are they talking to one particular audience, or are they are connecting with the pains and emotions and fears and dreams and desires and all that stuff?" I look at that and get a sense of what it is, and then what I do is, I give them a questionnaire. I have a customized questionnaire that I use, and I ask them kind of like, "What's your purpose? What's your secret sauce?" I ask them in a more kind of one-to-one way to answer all of those questions, and those questions are geared toward the information that they should ostensibly be sharing through their marketing, through their communications, etc. What I often find, like 9 out of 10 times, is that what people say in that questionnaire to me is radically different than what they say on their websites and what they say on LinkedIn about themselves.

I think the reason for that is because there's the whole notion of what I should say, quote-unquote should say and how I should present myself, and how I should look to the public. Then those things are fine, but this is a human-to-human interaction all the time, even when we're on the web, right? The stuff that needs to come through is the human stuff, and my questionnaire helps people really, really get to that human stuff. After they do that and I review that, the questionnaire, I get back on the phone and I say, "Hey, your website says this, but you say this, and this sounds true, and you sound excited over here, so why don't we look at bringing more of you, your story, your amazing background, your secret sauce, into the mix, and really put you, or at least put your energy right out front?"

Robert Plank: Do you think there's a reason why the public-facing bio, I guess, and the public-facing stuff doesn't match up with the questionnaire? Is it a matter of people being too careful and afraid to look stupid, or was there more time to kind of think through their message between when they first put up the webpage versus when they came to you? What do you think is the reason for that kind of disconnect there?

Ben Gioia: Yeah, thank you. That's a great question, and I think it's a few things, different people, but the things that I see most often is because somebody put up a website a long time ago, didn't update it as their thinking and perspective changed. For some people, it's that putting themselves, putting their face out in the world, that there's still some hesitation around putting themselves out there, bringing their best and most badass self, whatever that looks like to them, out front. Because there's so much messaging, I think, that so many of us were raised with, around, "Be quiet. Don't make too much noise. Behave. Do things like everybody else is doing," or even the worst kind of messaging of like, "Oh, you won't be able to do that because you don't have the looks, the skills, the grades," all of that kind of stuff. I think there's so much embedded learning probably from when we were about 3, 3 to 5, that gets stuck in there. Then the other part of it, too, I think, is people spend so much time looking at what other people are doing, which is important, of course.

You want to see who else is in your market and outside of your market to have a comparison, but at the end of the day, you have to be yourself and you have to really put yourself and your best foot forward. I think the last part of it, and this comes up with some people, is that they're not super clear on their purpose, on their core purpose, and then when they're bringing that, or attempting to bring that out through their business and what they're offering, then messaging is a little behind because they're not totally aligned internally.

Robert Plank: I mean, that makes a lot of sense. What I'm hearing a lot of what you mention is, when you're looking at anyone's business, it sounds almost like the things you're looking for are like the emotional hot buttons, and a lot of people are missing the emotion in their websites, it sounds like.

Ben Gioia: Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, that's true. They're not speaking to the experience of their ideal client or their audience. Right? I mean, it's so funny, because in a lot of ways it's like marketing and communications 101. Communicate to people in and around the things that they care deeply about, and show them that you have something for them in that context, a solution, a next step, whatever the case may be, and a lot of people end up talking about themselves, like, "I can do this. My product does this," but it's not customer, client or prospect-focused.

Robert Plank: It's not focused on, "What's in it for me?" Right?

Ben Gioia: Exactly. Exactly. Thank you, yeah.

Robert Plank: Would you say that if you were to look at, or think back about, the different clients and people you've worked with, is there a huge number 1 mistake, and would you say like maybe, is that the mistake that people are talking about themselves and not their clients, or is there an even bigger mistake, even bigger common thread you're seeing with all these people that you help out?

Ben Gioia: Yeah, yeah. Great question. I think a huge, huge one is talking too much about themselves, and another one, huge one, is not talking enough about themselves. The reason why I say that is because one of big things I teach is this idea of story, storytelling. I mean, storytelling is the oldest ... It's as old as human history. Before we had any kind of written communication, before people were drawing on walls and caves, they were telling each other stories. It was oral tradition, and that was the way to cultivate all that stuff around trust and connection to community, connection to tribe, and to safety, right? To have that circle be safe, and a lot of people today, they don't go enough into their story, right? They might talk a little bit about it, "I was CEO of such-and-such a company," but they don't actually say, okay, what did they do there? Not just the actions did they take, but what results did they bring, who did they bring it for, how did that create a transformation for the organization for an entire population of people? Whatever the case may be, right?

There's this funny balance of, yeah, absolutely you have to talk about your customer, their experience, etc., and, says me, and this is, I've proven this with a whole bunch of clients now, you have to talk about yourself, tell your story, and ask people to tell you stories. Right? Like you want to create empathy, and empathy that's going in both directions. Right? You want to see the world through this other person's eyes, and you want to give this other person the opportunity to see the world through your eyes.

Robert Plank: I mean, that sounds like some pretty interesting stuff there.

Ben Gioia: Yeah.

Robert Plank: I mean, with all this ... I mean, all these little things I think about here and there is, there ... I don't know, is there something kind of interesting you've been working on lately? I don't mean necessarily in terms of like, I know like you mentioned that, you had your new opportunities, like published stuff to different audiences, but just as far as like some kind of marketing technique or tool or just something like that. What's just the latest kind of cutting-edge thing you've been playing around with?

Ben Gioia: That's a great question. Yeah, gosh, it's ... One really interesting thing, and this is circumstantial, is getting ready to do a talk and actually a training. This training is going to be with an international audience, most of whom don't speak English, so I'm actually doing it with a translator. This is a really, really interesting exercise for me, because it's, how do I get super ultra crystal clear in everything that I'm saying, and chunk it down into really, really discreet packages of ideas, so I can say something, say a few sentences, pause, and allow the translator to understand what I say, translate it in her head, and then say it out to the audience in a way that they understand. Right? I'm looking at my language being really, really spare with the things that I'm saying, taking out colloquialisms, taking out jokes, all of those kinds of things. It's an interesting exercise in this really crystal clear communication, and it's also a really interesting exercise in being a presenter in this situation.

How do I maintain that energy, that high level of engaged energy in myself, when I have to pause and wait for the person to translate? Right? I have to be like, "Ya-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta," and then wait and hold that energy in myself, so the next thing I say is, "Ya-ta-ta-ta-ta."

Robert Plank: Interesting.

Ben Gioia: Yeah.

Robert Plank: I mean, yeah, it seems like kind of like a new adventure to kind of push you outside your comfort zone, because like you said, you need to kind of strip a lot away and use simple language, but also seem smart and have something good to say, but then the rhythm and the pacing's going to be weird, but then maybe you can use that to your advantage to kind of let things land, or pause to think, I guess.

Ben Gioia: Yeah, and thank you for saying that. It's interesting, too, because the audience is a whole bunch of super, super successful business people, six-figure kind of earners. This is not an audience of beginners. These are people who have been doing their thing for a whole bunch of years now, so there's that added dimension, for me, of, "Wow, I have to make this potent and insightful," and all of that stuff, and do all the things that I just mentioned before about keeping it super clear and spare.

Robert Plank: Right. I mean, yeah, sounds like a lot of stuff to kind of keep straight in your head, but once you figure it out, sounds like a lot of fun.

Ben Gioia: Yeah. I think so. I'm really, really, really looking forward to it.

Robert Plank: Well, cool. If anyone wants to know about you, Ben, no matter what language they speak, what country they're in, if they're newbies, they're advanced, where should they go to find out about you and your stuff that you sell, and your books, and everything like that?

Ben Gioia: Thank you, thank you. Yeah, so my website is influencewithaheart.com. Basically all the stuff is there, and you can also find my books on Amazon. Again, the beauty of Amazon is that it's also worldwide. I have 2 books now, Influence With A Heart, which is the new one, and the first one, which was the bestseller Marketing With A Heart, as well. I'd be delighted for anybody who's listening to this podcast to come check out my stuff. I think you'll get a whole lot out of it, and it'll really serve you and your business in a great way.

Robert Plank: Awesome. I think so too. That's Ben Gioia, influencewithaheart.com. Thanks for stopping by the show.

Ben Gioia: Thank you so much, Robert, and appreciate all the things you do. Like I said, the audience doesn't know this, but you and I met several years ago, and I really learned a ton of things from you back then, and was really inspired by the way you do your things, so thank you so much. It's nice to come full circle and be on your show.[/showhide]

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130: Fix Your Process and Goals to Undo the Past and Create the Future with Personal Growth Innovator Matt Powell

Entrepreneur and martial arts teacher Matt Powell from the Pramek organization tells us why we fail, how to stop being "right" all the time, gain focus, break the cycle, set goals, and so much more. He's also the author of the book UNDO: Get Past The Past and Manage Your Future, which tells us how to cut ties to the past.

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: After over two decades of teaching thousands around the world, Matt Powell know how to teach and motivate, think better under the stress of every day life, improve and grow, and create success. He has his latest book out called Undo: How to undo the past and plan your future. He has a website as well called pastless.net. Matt welcome to the show. I'm glad to have you here.

Matt Powell: Hey I'm glad to be on. I appreciate it Robert.

Robert Plank: Heck yeah. I understand that you have a lot of things to say and you have a lot of hobbies and you have this martial arts stuff, so can you kind of tell me a little bit about who is Matt Powell and what it is that you do, and what makes you unique and special?

Matt Powell: I know what makes me unique and special. My mom might say something different. About 20 years ago, I started learning this strange martial art no one had ever heard of, and that lead me to spending time in Russia training at their schools in martial arts in the early 2000's, and then coming back over here and teaching over here. Over time, we built our own organization called Pramek. That's P-R-A-M-E-K. We have a website, pramek.com. That started off as just guys in a garage, and I built it online and then in real world into an international organization with teachers all over the world.

The whole time I was doing that, I was also working my way up the corporate ladder into the corporate board room. I was starting online businesses. I was doing everything that I could possibly do. I'm not one of those people that sit still for very long. Over time I've published five books that are on Amazon, hundreds of videos on youtube, two dozen instructional videos for sale in the martial art world, as well as teaching seminars around the world. I learned a lot from that side of teaching, and teaching all those people in the system that we developed and the way that it developed. There was also the lessons learned of being in the corporate world and being an entrepreneur.

I decided about a year ago that I would start to take these and combine them into more of a, kind of do what Pramek did for martial art, pastless and Undo what do for the personal growth sector. I started to focus on taking the concept that worked so well for teaching people, everybody from the special forces to soccer mom, and starting applying it to personal growth. It's a very methodically laid out system based on what we saw work teaching people under the most stressful situations that they could apply towards personal growth, personal success, and the happiness side of the world, you might say.

Robert Plank: That's kind of interesting. Can you kind of tell me about this whole undo book and just basically, what are the steps, what's it about, how it all relates to the martial arts, the success and all that kind of stuff?

Matt Powell: We developed this learning system in martial art that we called the CLM. I developed it with a couple of PhDs that had PhDs in adult learning and psychology, because we found that the way that we were taught didn't translate to the way that people learned very well if they were learning mental and physical skills. We developed over time this learning system that now all these other schools and systems have adopted as their learning system. We found that people were learning skills faster than they were learning in other skills by using this.

I said okay. Let me look at ... It's all about the human brain. It's all about how the brain works, it's all about how the brain processes memories, how the brain forms habits. Let me take that over to the success side because whether you're learning to punch or whether you're learning to operate as an entrepreneur, you're going to develop physical and psychological habits to go along with success or failure. Life is a little like quicksand day to day. You can't unstick yourself until you stop moving and take stock of the situation around you. What Undo the book is is that Undo is ... We're undoing the past. It means that we're recognizing the why we fail, not what we fail at. A lot of people confuse that. They focus on the what they're failing at. People set goals, but then they don't consider if they're setting the right goals. They end up with a decent process to achieve goals, but they've set the wrong goals that weren't attainable. They kind of circle for a while.

What we do with Undo, is we try to break these cycles. We break that cycle. Then you're set up to where you can start setting goals because you've taken care of the underlying reasons why you're failing. Now you're able to start setting goals. What we do is then we have a workbook that goes along with Undo. It's a 40 page workbook that take you step-by-step through the whole process. It starts you at the goals that you had last year, the failures that you had last year, looking at those underlying reasons to why and not what, then setting up a process to fix that day to day so that you break that cycle of failure that's been going on, but there's the habits that you've picked up over time.

Then we do this long process of setting attainable goals all the way from the very beginning of free-writing out your goals to how you set your life on auto pilot using the book, to basically make goal achievement a habit. It's really about the book is kind of a, I don't want to say colloquial, but it's a very ... My editors hated it because I wrote it like I was speaking to somebody. I didn't write it like I was writing a book. Then the workbook follows along with it. Page by page, as you go through the book, you're going through the workbook at the same time. It's a very interesting process to kind of develop habits for people, to get out there and achieve the goals that they want to achiever.

Robert Plank: I love that. I think that ... Yeah, I know that over the years if I'm ever trying to get out of a funk or I'm always trying to switch to some kind of time management system, it's always like if the underlying foundation or whatever you want to call it, if that's still messed up, it doesn't even matter what I'm building towards, or what kind of system I'm using. It's like if the insides aren't right, then what's the point of anything. I like that. I like the Tim Ferris or the Matt Furey kind of stuff where it's like ... I don't know a thing about martial arts or any of that stuff, but I like the idea of breaking yourself down and then building yourself back up and having the discipline and the habits and the repetitions and all that kind of stuff. I like how, kind of like you mentioned there, that people kind of learn the stuff, but they also go through the work books so that way it kind of avoids the foo foo, hippy sort of feel good stuff. Is that right?

Matt Powell: Yeah. What we found ... Matt Furey. God I haven't talked to Matt in probably a decade. I used to talk to him back in the day, in martial art, I guess back in the mid 2000's. Tim has done some great systematic methodology to kind of exposing people methods so that other people can pick them up. I think ... I differ a little bit when you ask what makes you different is that you can have the best process in the world, but if you don't have the right goals, you're going to consistently get into a funk. You're going to go after 2016 with a 2015 mindset. A lot of times people have all these processes. That's why I did Undo because I saw that was happening in the martial art world. I traveled and taught thousands. Personally laying hands on what they were doing. I was seeing that these people, they've got this process but what they're trying to do, they never really thought through what they were trying to do at the end.

Steven Covey says, "I'm going to begin with the end in mind." Look at the goal and work backwards. Page by page and when you look at the reviews on Amazon, everybody says the same thing, like "Wow. This book actually works."

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool. I'm kind of looking through the reviews and things here. Could you kind of tell us about how this all happened for you? Was there a point where ... Was there a period of time before you discovered all this martial arts stuff, was there a period of time when there were specific things that were really wrong in your life and then kind of stumbling on this made you the person you are now? Does that kind of thing happen?

Matt Powell: There's nothing ever really ... I know a lot of times people have some epic moment or they have some type of challenge in their life or obstacles that they can't over come, and then they overcome it and it becomes inspirational. I love those stories ... A friend of mine that is a martial art instructor. He was born with half a heart, and he had steel rods in his back, and he's out there doing incredible karate stuff. I never had anything like that. I learned through kind of trial by fire between the martial arts and doing executive protection and law enforcement, and being under extremely stressful situations and then teaching other people extremely stressful situations.

What made me switch from martial art and move in this direction was that I did have a situation that really ... It's still tough to talk about a little bit. I had a childhood friend of mine, and over the years he and my brother stayed in contact, but I hadn't stayed in contact with him. My brother called me up one day and he said, "You know, he's got cancer, and he loves what you're doing with martial art, you really ought to give him a call." I didn't realize that he had stage four rare cancer and he was dying. We spent hours upon hours on the phone just talking. He was a business owner, he was an entrepreneur. We would talk at night and he would pass out for 30 minutes because he was under so many medications. He would come back to and we would talk and talk.

He passed away one day, and a few years later I was driving to Florida to the beach house and I've done it successful at what I've done. I just kind of said, "Man, I'm tired of teaching people how to punch somebody in the nose. There's got to be more." I remember those conversations with Barry because he would say, "You know Matt, I feel like you could do more. If you just took these processes and taught somebody about business, or maybe you talk to a new college graduate and give them some processes, that way they're not learning this 10-15 years into their career, when they could have done better at the beginning." I got down to Florida and I just started ... I pulled out all the notes and pulled out the Glenfiddich and really had a heart to heart with myself.

One of the things that one of my teachers told me one time was, "Only you look in your mirror." I looked in the mirror and I thought, "You know, I can do more than this, and I can help more than just teaching people this over here." A bunch of books were started. That was a couple of years ago. Out of the books that were started, Undo was a bit of a composite of the different books that I'd started at the time. I never really had anything that was a big challenge or obstacle.

I put myself into a lot of challenging situation through the decisions I made in my career. But the biggest obstacle that I really ever overcame was to take what was 20 years of an identity as a world class martial art instructor and developer and teacher, and to have to make that internal switch to saying, "I'm going to do something different. I'm going to do 2016 or 2015 with that year's mindset. Not try to do it with 2010's mindset."

Robert Plank: It's kind of interesting. Could you kind of tell us about, aside from the book, what is it that you do now? Do you have products? Do you have a blog? Do you have a podcast? What are you up to these days?

Matt Powell: A couple of different things. I do security consulting as a day job. I've always kept a day job. I remember my primary teacher a long time ago said, "Always have a day job, because if you have to do your hobby to food on the table, you'll end up hating it, and you'll sell it out and you'll water it down." I've always kept a day job, and I've worked my way up the corporate ladder. Day job I do that. It allows me to go wherever I want. Live how I want. I really built my life around what my goals were, which was to have a very free life to be able to explore and do things. Then you have pastless and you have Pramek.

Pastless.net is the home of Undo. Yeah, you can go to pastless.net. We have the free eBook over at pastless. It's called Open In Case of Life. It's a concept that I've learned over 20 years traveling the world learning from different teachers. It's eight things that people said that really stuck with me. I put them in format that you can just, here it is. In case of you feel like you're not communicating correctly, in case you feel labeled, in case you're feeling anxious about the future, and here's the wisdom behind it. Then you can also pick up Undo over at amazon.com if you just type in Undo, I think it's like the second thing that pops up on amazon.

Then over at Pramek, that's a whole different animal because Pramek is ... It has four books that I've written about it. It has, I think we're at 201 videos on youtube, two dozen for sale instructional, and that's very martial arts, fitness, movement. Yeah, there's movement videos. How to increase your movement, get your range of motion. There's combat intimate videos. There's videos on how to develop habits. We've done a lot of different things with Pramek. That's pramek.com. P-R-A-M-E-K.COM.

Robert Plank: Cool. Do you ... I mean in all your writings and your adventures and talking ... What do you think is the place where everyone is going wrong? Is it that people aren't awake or they're not disciplined or they're not self aware or they're backsliding? What do you see where everyone is going wrong it seems?

Matt Powell: I think, if you're talking about people in general, I think everyone focuses on the what and not the why. That is one of the most ... There's two things that most people do wrong when it comes to achieving success for their life.

The first thing is you have to stop being right. If every time you interact with somebody, you're making assumptions on the way that the interactions going to go, then you're living in the past. Everything that's ever happened in the past is the way that your brain is designed. It's catching up. You want to be right. You want to show them that you're right. You don't really find out what they offer for your future, what they can bring you, how you can work with them ... That if you just stop being right and you start being in the moment and really taking a look at it and thinking about it and changing your anchor point for your thoughts to your future instead of right now or the past, you're going to start viewing people and situations and obstacles or whatever it is as moving you towards somewhere in the future. Then you're going to see how you can use that interaction to get there.

I think the second thing is is that we live in a transactional world. Physically, mentally, spiritually, it's right now, right now, right now. People focus on the what. The what is the thing that you can go and tell your spouse about. The what is the thing that you can go the bar and complain about. But if you focus on the what, then you're just kind of in this linear timeline of a bunch of whats that you failed at. If people take a book like Undo and go through the process to find their failure theme, they're going to find that most of their whats, they never even ... They are forced through a way that they develop their habits over time to consistently fail. You have to start looking at that why. Why did that happen? Why did that happen? Then you can really start to stop the whats from happening.

If you stop being right and look at the interactions that you have as how can they get me somewhere instead of how can I make sure that I'm the person that's coming ahead in this. Also to look at the why you failed through, like I said, a book like Undo instead of what you fail at, you're about 90% of the way to getting more successful than you've ever been.

Robert Plank: I love that message. Not only to stop being right, but to kind of live in the moment. I think that maybe 5-6 years ago someone quoted Dr. Phil to me. There was a situation where I was just kind of, I needed to change my thinking. He quoted Dr. Phil and said, "Would you rather be right or be happy?" Kind of along those lines, with these days with all the ... It's so easy to get distracted. The latest Facebook pop up, the phones blowing up, and even ...

Maybe 14 years ago or so, when I transitioned from high school to college, when there was the orientation day, they kind of had to ... There was something that they said that was along the lines of, "Well, when you're in high school mode, when you're in the high school mindset, you're only really paying attention about 30-30%." And he's like, "Well when you're trying to actually be an adult, being a grown up, you kind of have to be 80% there or higher." That was just kind of like all the things you've been talking about today. All these really simple concepts, but it's so simple and yet it seems like a lot of people are missing the boat and kind of need to readjust, right?

Matt Powell: I think that there's so many options out there, there's so many things that people ... I'm going to try Tony Robbins stuff for a little while. Oh, I didn't get to where I wanted to go, I'm going to go visit Zigler. Oh, didn't get there. I'm going to go to Tim Ferris. Oh, I didn't get it there ... That people are just constantly moving. I tell people if you really want to live in the now, and find out how far off you are from being in the now, take 30 minutes a day, get a book, and read it aloud.

What you'll find is that your brain is so all over the place, that you can barely read aloud. If you go to a zoo, if you go to a museum, you'll find that you don't even read the placards. You kind of skip around real quick and then you look back up because we just don't have attention spans anymore. We're taking in too much information and if you start to ...

That's what we found in martial art is that if I want to something, if I have one thing and that's the only thing that I'm going to try to do, and you have ten things that you're going to try to do, I'm going to win 90% of the time because I'm always focused on one thing. A lot of it is just kind of bringing it back to these useful skills of picking up a book and reading aloud. If you're in your office at work, and you need to read a report, close the door and read it aloud. Train your mind.

Meditation is great. I've been doing meditation for 20 years. I've done it all over the world. You can't sit in the office and meditate all day. What you can do is is you can focus the brain on things like reading aloud. You'll find that you start to, okay there's a whole lot going on in my mind right now. Let me just focus on this. Your communication skills get better. Your memory retention gets better. Your voice annunciation gets better. All by reading aloud. These are the types of little things that we found in the martial arts that we bring over. Then we teach people how to work under stress and duress, but reading aloud is one of them.

If I take somebody and I make you go out and I make you run and sprint and do everything as hard as you can, and I bring you back and your heart rate is really elevated and I make you read aloud, you'll be amazed how much that duplicates what happens in public speaking. You can train yourself for public speaking by reading aloud when you exercise. It's all about just focusing the mind, focusing on the why, not the what. Focusing on being in the moment, not trying to get ahead and assume the conversation. It's just that little bit of focus that ... Just something as simple ... Getting Undo and reading the whole book aloud and you'll find after a little bit of time, you've changed in a lot of ways.

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool. I love that messaged I think that I'm going to be doing that today. I'll read aloud. I hereby promise to you, Matt Powell, that at some point today I will read aloud 30 minutes to find out what all the fuss is about and to regain my focus and kind of reset and stuff.

Great. I like all the things that you have to share today. Not only just the ideas, but also just kind of these little exercises, these little step by step things. I think I mentioned earlier that there's a lot of self help mindset stuff out there that's just ideas, right? Just clutter, just more stuff to kind of gum up the gears, right? Kind of like you were saying a few minutes ago that a lot of people just kind of dabble and sample and just kind of get a little taste of all these little things, but they're kind of become a jack of all trades, master of none.

I really like all the stuff that you had to share with us today, and I think that as you were talking, I was kind of thinking to myself, "Well, all these ideas but how do I get more focused," so perfect. Little 30 minutes of reading something aloud. Could you tell us one more time to make sure that everyone knows where to find out about you, where to find your book, where to find your website, just one more time for us.

Matt Powell: You can go over to pastless.net. There you can get a free book, you can also get the link over to amazon. If you're on amazon once a day like everybody else is and you're a prime member, then just type in Undo. You'll find the book. If you're amazon prime, you can pick it up for $2.99. If you're not amazon prime, you can get the paperback or the ecopy. Both of them are under $10.

You can always hit me up if you're on Facebook. It's Facebook.com/iammattpowell. Instagram is the same thing. On Instagram it's iammattpowell. And twitter, iammattpowell. All of them are the same. Just remember iammattpowell for social media. I do my best to communicate through email or whatever. If people have questions about the book, if people have general questions about anything they want to contact me about, you can go to pastless.net or you can go to social media, and I'm definitely there to help out anybody that needs a little bit of a boost.

Robert Plank: It seems like we all need that. Maybe not everyday, but we all get to the point where we need a little bit of help. Cool. Thanks, Matt, for stopping by the show and sharing what it is you have to share. I appreciate you and I appreciate everything that you have to say. Thanks again for stopping by.

Matt Powell: Hey I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. You've got a great show.[/showhide]

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128: Differentiate, Entertain and Educate with Authority Marketer Jeff Beale

Mr. Marketology Jeff Beale can teach you to become an authority using the four C's: Content, Contacts, Communication, and Consistency. He tells us how to identify and understand our audience, optimize for social media, sell based on emotional triggers, and differentiate yourself from the crowd.

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Our guest today is best-selling author and marketing strategist, Jeff Beale. He helps businesses leverage their knowledge to gain authority status in their industry, and then he uses authority marketing to generate even higher converting leads. Hey, Jeff. I'm Robert. How are things today?

Jeff Beale: Things are going well. Thanks for having me on the show, Robert.

Robert Plank: I'm really glad that you're on. The stuff that you do, you help people gain authority status and do authority marketing, so what does that entail exactly?

Jeff Beale: Marketing basically in a layman's term is to become the go-to person in any product or service. Authority marketing is when somebody's hungry right on the street, they think of McDonald's, because, hey, McDonald's is an authority. When you're thirsty, you think of Coca-Cola, because Coca-Cola is an authority. Things of that nature. Becoming that authority no matter which industry it's in helps you leverage your credibility. It also helps you generate business based off the fact that whenever people think of what you offer or that industry, they think of you.

It's just the process of building that credibility, building that brand awareness so whenever they think of that, you're the first person that comes to mind, and usually the first person that comes to mind will be the one that gets the business unless you do something to mess it up.

Robert Plank: How does someone become an authority? Is it a matter of having a book or a blog, traffic, or social media or some combination? What does someone have to do exactly?

Jeff Beale: It's a combination. Actually, the first thing you would need to do is to first identify your audience. Know exactly who your audience is and then their needs, and then the last piece would be to find out where do they go to get information. Identify, let's say your audience. A lot of people like to identify their audience such as, well, they are this age, this gender, this ethnic group. I'm talking more of the psychological. For instance, let's go back to McDonald's. McDonald's serve people that are hungry. Coca-Cola serve people that are thirsty. It can get as basic as that, but you need to really know your audience, then understand their needs.

What is it that pains them, keeps them up at night, makes them pull the action trigger to do business with somebody? Once you understand that, then you can find out where do they go most often to find out who they want to do business with? What's the authority? Is it a magazine? A lot of people used to do the old traditional marketing, push marketing, on television and radio or a magazine. Nowadays, like you said, there's social media, there's bloggers, there's sites like Yo. There's tons of places that they go to to find out who is the best choice for what they are looking for.

Once you find that out, then it's all about quality content. It's all about putting out the best quality information for them to make an informed decision. That can be several ways. That can be social media posts. That can be blog posts. That can be what we're doing right now, podcasting is a great way of doing that. It can be videos. It can be many different things that you could put out as far as content, the type of content, but you find out what resonates the most around your audience and you deliver your actual content in a way that they easily digest it, they can get the information, they can make an informed decision, and they feel comfortable doing so.

Robert Plank: That all sounds like a pretty good plan, and that makes a lot of sense to me. How does this relate to what it is that you do? Is this a service you provide to others?

Jeff Beale: I do. Actually, I provide marketing strategies. With marketing strategies, my goal is to make you the authority in the industry, to make the brand awareness resonate amongst your audience. What I do is I look at putting together a strategy that makes sense for your company and finding out your audience, the need, your benefits, what's a good message for the audience and how to deliver it, what mediums and channels and platforms make the most sense, and then of course piecing it all together, putting it into a strategy that gets you in front of them in a way that they desire to see you, and help you deliver a message that they actually want to hear.

A lot of times, that's something that the business or business owners have difficulty doing because they're so close to the business that they assume a lot. First thing I tell companies, I tell the executives, "You are not your customer," because in most cases, you're not. In most cases, you don't buy what you're selling, and you're so informed because you started the company or you've been working in the business for so long, you have little things that you assume that you don't even think is a challenge or think is a point of decision that really is.

You might, for instance, for you doing podcasts, one thing that you may think of is, well, "Everybody uses Skype to record," but that's not true. To someone else, that might be something very, very difficult to understand. "How do I record? I understand how to sign up for Skype, but how do I actually record?" To you, it's easy. If you were selling, let's say, a course on how to podcast, you would just assume they knew, and you wouldn't even put that in your message, which that might be one of the biggest selling points of, "Let me show you a way that you can record with Skype in 5 minutes." That might be something that will make somebody pull the trigger, because they're like, "Oh wow. I can just 1, 2, 3, and do it. Great. I'm on," versus, "Let me show you the best way and I've been doing this for a hundred years."

"Yeah, okay, but I haven't, and I don't know what I'm doing. I just want it easy," and easy is the selling point, not the technology. It's just the ease of use.

Robert Plank: Right, and it seems like if you position it as ease of use, that's more relatable as opposed to if you just show, "Well, look how cool I am," then you're just showing off. You mention that little example about the podcasting and Skype. Even with that kind of thinking, some people don't even know how to install Skype or where to install Skype, even how to install the iTunes program to check on their podcast. They don't know what hardware they use to record. Yeah, that's huge and I totally agree with all that.

Kind of along those lines, I know you mentioned a lot of the things that you do when you're looking to improve someone else's business, do you have like a story or an example of a case study where you had a client and there were some things in their business that could use improving, and you kind of put them through your process, you went through and you found the best market, you figured out their customer, and you figured out what kind of things they should be doing?

Jeff Beale: Sure. One example that I found was a client that sold jewelry. They thought their audience was one thing, and come to find out, the audience was totally different based off of buyers, based off of research on who interacted with them. The interesting thing is, offline their audience was one thing, on-line their audience was totally different. They were taking the offline approach to an on-line audience, and that doesn't work.

Offline, you don't have things such as comments, likes, shares. Offline, you see it on TV, radio, and you are at the mercy of the television or radio. On-line, you can make choices and you can change and you can share your opinion, and that makes a big difference. After looking at it and finding out that you might even want to look at a different way of approaching it, more of an interactive approach was developed to help them.

Same thing with a client that I worked with that did media. One of the things that they did were, they were looking for how can they have more people engage with their shows? The key factor was they were looking at the old way to where ... Remember when you used to come in in prime time and you had to wait for prime time to watch a show?

Robert Plank: Oh yeah.

Jeff Beale: You would actually schedule your day around it. Well, that's not the audience of today. Today everybody's on demand, and most people aren't watching it on television, they're watching it on a mobile device, and they may cast it to a larger monitor, which is the television, but they're looking on the go when they want to watch the shows. Nowadays, shows are even coming out before they're supposed to air. Like a show may be airing tonight, but if you subscribe to a cable provider, you can watch it midnight the night of, or you can watch it even a day before, and Hulu and Netflix have shown you how people love the fact that they can watch any show whenever they feel like watching it.

Looking at that and changing the approach on how to deliver these shows helped them change from a linear to a digital age, and it really helped improve them all the way across the board: viewership, search engine optimization, to search engine ranking, lowered their spend, and it helped because now that you know your audience, you're not fighting to find as many new audience as you are retaining old audience and having them evangelize the experience. Then that gets you new audience.

That's one of the challenges I found with many companies. They're so focused on finding new audience that they neglect the current audience, and then they spend additional money in reputation management, damage control. You have a cellphone, I'm assuming.

Robert Plank: Yes.

Jeff Beale: Like everyone. I use it as a cellphone theory. How many times have you seen commercials or heard of people that have plans that aren't available to you as a loyal customer? Then you call them and they say, "Well, that doesn't apply to you because you're already in a contract," or "You're already a customer." You're like, "Well, I'm a loyal customer. Why can't I get the discount that the new people get?" Well, that's the challenge is, they're always fighting to find new, new, new, and not trying to retain who they have. The interesting part about retaining current customers, first of all, they're easier, because they're already experiencing your brand and your product or service.

Second of all, they are, if happy, ready to tell somebody, if they're happy. They're ready to tell somebody if they're not, but you can leverage that to not only have them share the message but also get feedback from them to help improve what you have already. Improve either the marketing message, either the product or service, the customer service.

You can improve things because they're already dealing with you, and if you just look at your last, let's say, 5, 6 customers if you're smaller, or if you look at your last 2, 3 months of customers and you look at what their actions are, what their engagements are, what are their questions? What are the things they complain about? What are the things that they share? What are the things that they like? Then compile that information and make some marketing decisions based off of that, it's easier to find like-minded people than to just spend a lot of money on campaigns, and you're spending all this money on campaigns, throwing it out, seeing what sticks.

Once it sticks, if you're still not doing this type of backend research, you still don't know what to do next because you're still just throwing out stuff because you're not figuring out what worked, how can we now duplicate what worked and keep that going on and on?

That's one of the things that I always say. When you're doing authority marketing, it's all about being the 4 C's. It's all about having good content, making good contacts, have good communication, and then be consistent. That's the 4 C's. If you do those 4 C's, you will win when it comes to authority marketing.

Robert Plank: That's really cool. I think that's one of those things where it took me a while to kind of get it, especially seeing what a lot of these companies were doing, especially like the ones on social media where ... At first I thought, "Okay, well it's like this company, and they're just posting stuff on social media every now and then," but then when I've seen ... There's like a cupcake ... I don't know what you'd call it, the kind of person that bakes and sells cupcakes, there's this cupcake lady in our town, and she'll post pictures, and she'll do contests, and even the local news, they'll put full-on clips of their show just right there on Facebook, and I'm thinking, kind of like a little bit as you were describing what you were describing, I'm thinking, "Man, why would they put like a clip of their show right there on Facebook when ... ?"

I'm thinking, "Well, wouldn't them posting a clip take away from me watching their show?" And kind of the way you were explaining it, it's like, "Well, hardly anyone's watching on the TV live anyway, so it's kind of like a trade-off. They're giving away some of their best stuff in exchange, not only are they hoping it'll go viral or get some shares but, as you said, now they can look at the most popular content, or they can look at all of their audience, their likes, their fan page insights, all that stuff and figure out exactly who they're talking to, when it sounds like this out-of-date model that a lot of these companies are still hanging onto was just guessing. It was just let's just put out some stuff. Maybe the ad money worked, maybe not. Now you can go back and after running your experiments, go back and see how they did. Is that right?

Jeff Beale: That's correct. Also, with them putting the show on-line, it helps them separate themselves from their competitors because, think about this. If you had 2 cupcake bakers, I guess you would call it, or 2 cupcake stores in the same area, 1 has a show and 1 doesn't, how much advantage do you have when you say, "Well, you know, they may bake cupcakes and they may be good, I don't know, but we have a show, and you can see us bake our cupcakes, and people like our show."

Now you seem as if you are really an expert. Even if you're not, even if you have quick mix or something, you just seem, because people are like, "Well, they have to be good. They have a show." That gives you an advantage. Also, within the show, you can let them get to know you a little bit, and that's the beauty nowadays with social media, with Facebook Live and You Tube Live and all these other streaming, they can get to know you now.

You know the old saying in sales: People buy from who they know, like, and trust. They get to now know you. They get to see you enough to like you, and because you're up there in a credible source, they get to trust you versus an advertisement, which is cold. I don't know the last time you fell in love with a banner ad where you're like, "That banner ad made me feel all warm inside."

Robert Plank: Never.

Jeff Beale: Exactly. Now with the personality being displayed, you can have that feeling. So you say, "I really like that person." That's how it works.

Robert Plank: What you're saying is there's hope for the rest of us. We don't have to be super polished and rehearsed. We can just be ourselves and they'll fall in love with us as us.

Jeff Beale: That's the key, being yourself. The interesting thing with on-line especially, offline is still more polished and better, but on-line is the more authentic you are, the better. People don't mind the mistakes. It should be as good of quality as you can get it, but it doesn't have to be polished, because sometimes when it's too polished, they think it's paid actors and they don't think it's real. They think, "Oh well, they paid for that. It's advertisement. Of course, they're going to say it's great because they were paid to say it's great." When it's a person and it seems authentic and it seems as if you're just everyday Joe, now it's something that's relatable.

If you noticed over the past few years, what's the biggest craze on television? Reality TV. Reality TV is because it makes you feel as if you know somebody, even though working in that industry, I can tell you it's scripted, and it's all planned and so forth, and they know what to say next, so forth and so on, but you think it's real, and it feels real even though it's not. They do that to make it more personal. That's the beauty of now on-line, you can do things and it doesn't have to be 100% professionally polished, and people will resonate.

That's why You Tube videos can go into the millions, and it's some little kid dancing. Of course, I don't know if you can be able to sell anything with it unless it's a choreography or something of that nature, but people are like, "I just like it. It was so cool," and they share it, but when's the last time they've shared a polished commercial? They don't.

Robert Plank: Never, unless it's really funny.

Jeff Beale: Unless it's really funny. Yeah. I think the only ... The one I remember, the latest one I remember that was shared that was viral was the Van Damme when he was straddling those 2 tractor trailers.

Robert Plank: I think like every now and then there's something like a Dollar Shave Club commercial or something, but very rarely.

Jeff Beale: See, but they've figured it out, though. They figured out that men ... They don't really key in on the quality of the razor, if you think about it. They figured out that the humor will get people to share it. The mass volume of numbers will get in front of enough men, and those men will look at the deal and say, "You know what? That's a good deal, because I'm already spending X amount of dollars," and it stays in your head because you think of the entertainment of the actual commercial.

Those type of things do work, but most companies don't execute it in that way. Most companies execute it in the same way that they would a television advertisement, and it doesn't go viral because people are like, "Oh, it's another commercial." That's the reason the Internet has been so successful when it comes to video, and you look at any other type of source like Sirius Radio, any type of streaming source, what is the biggest thing that they harp on? "We don't show commercials." People don't want to see commercials. That's why.

Robert Plank: That's a pretty big insight right there. I think that that's why people need you to kind of clean up the marketing efforts, right?

Jeff Beale: Yeah, and the best thing about a commercial, people love a commercial that they don't even know is a commercial. Like I said, the Dollar Shaving Club, yeah, we know it's a commercial, but they don't say how great their razors are. They don't say anything about that. They don't say anything about, "We have been in the business with titanium and platinum," they just have fun, and people like that in the entertainment. If your commercial can entertain and educate, then you can win. You just figure out how can your commercial entertain and educate?

I was telling one client about floors. Well, when a person is looking to buy new flooring, the biggest thing on their mind besides cost, and they'll be willing to pay more if you can get the other values in line. They want it to be fast with installation, they want it to be painless with dealing with your business, and they want other people to say, "Wow! You've got the best floors ever!" Of course, resale value helps, if they can improve the resale value.

Most people don't really care about the type of quality of the wood, and they don't care about this is cherry oak versus ... They don't know and they really don't care. They just want when people walk in the door saying, "That is beautiful." Now, what I told them is, a lot of things they'll have questions about, you can put into some sort of advertisement or social post in which you're explaining to them some of the myths of floors. For instance, they may say your floor is water resistant. Being water resistant doesn't mean it's waterproof. If enough water gets on it, it's still going to damage the floor, and that's not what's told when it's sold to you, but that's what it is. It's not waterproof, just water resistant.

You could spill a glass of water and don't worry about it, but if you have a water leak, you'll still have to replace that floor. Those type of things make a person feel as if you know what you're talking about, because a lot of other people aren't going to tell them that. They may also know what's the difference between hardwood and laminate. Your knowing that difference and the difference of how you lay it to make your house look larger, and you have examples to show them, now make you a very credible source when it comes to dealing with somebody with the floor.

The last thing, most people when they get floors, especially when it comes to floor damage, they go through their insurance company. What are the 5 things you need to know when you talk to your insurance company? Because most people want the best value for what they're going to claim, so they're not going to want to be cheap, but they're not going to want to have to come out-of-pocket either. That's why they have insurance. You letting them know how to deal with your insurance company, the right answers to the right questions, this type of thing makes it easier to deal with you than other flooring companies that might just come in and give an estimate and say, "All right, this is how much we charge," and they maybe try to haggle with you to lower their rates.

People will pay more if they feel there's more quality. Think about this. When's the last time you went to a Bentley dealership and argued about how much a Bentley cost? You don't. You don't even know how much a Bentley costs half the time. Yeah, because you just know that they're said to be the top-of-the-line car. If you really did research on a Bentley, you find out they only get 12 miles to the gallon, you always have to take them in for service and everything at 5,000 miles, so they're really ... I talked to a guy that sold Bentleys, and he told me it's not affording owning one as far as like purchasing, it's actually the upkeep that most people can't afford.

Most of the time, these cars come back within a year because the upkeep is so much, people buy them and they can't afford them. They have to bring them back. Knowing that, the value has been put up so high with that quality of car. If you can do that with your business, to put up the value so high that people don't even want to ask how much do you charge, you'll win every time, because they've already made the decision that if this is not extremely out of my means, I am going to do business with them, they're not going to bark about the price.

That's the whole goal of authority marketing is to become an authority so much, now I'm not saying that you escalate your price because of it, but so much that that isn't even a concern when you get to the actual closing of the business, because they've already decided they're going to purchase. It's sort of like ... Think about it. How many times have you met people that say that they don't have any money, but then they show up with something that you know costs some money, and you're like, "I thought you didn't have any money?"

Robert Plank: They have priorities.

Jeff Beale: People buy what they want. Exactly. They'll go out and buy some Jordans for $200, but they might not pay their light bill, so you're like, "I thought you were broke." No, they were broke for that. That wasn't of value.

Robert Plank: That's funny, and it sounds like all the things that you're mentioning here today, it seems like you're going after like the emotion of some kind, whatever the hot button is there, like in the case of the Bentley thing it's like, well, who cares about all these little facts and figures when how cool for you to be driving it, and drive it off the lot, and drive it home, people see it. Even like with the floor case study you said there, the number 1 reason to get a new floor is to show it off so everything thinks, "Dang! How'd you get that?" Sure there's like a few little objections or common things there, but it seems like that combination you said there about how you kind of have the wow factor, I guess, have the big raw feeling from using it, and then you kind of have these objections that you know they already have but you explain them away quickly, and that way people can tell that you know what you're doing because you already have their questions in their mind before they even ask them.

Jeff Beale: Exactly. Exactly. It's all about emotions. It's all about understanding what drives a person to make a decision. To be honest, a lot of it doesn't include price. Truly, if you can tap into what makes them work, you can understand that. For instance, people that buy security systems, they don't buy security systems for all the features. They buy to be secure. You can have it to where your mobile phone connects and this and that but it never sets off an alarm ever, people aren't going to buy your security system, because they're like, "Well, that's nice, nice features, but if somebody breaks in, it's not going to help."

You find out what the emotional triggers are. That's why you can't just base it on demographics and geographics. You just can't say "Just because you're this age, this gender, this ethnic group, this income level, you will buy what I'm selling." It's really finding out what keeps them up at night?

Volvo did a great job when they went after the soccer moms. What did Volvo hang their hat on the most? "We are the safest car you'll ever buy." That's what they hung their hat on. They would show the mom with the kids. Moms were like, "I like BMW's, but if I ever was in an accident, I'd be safer in a Volvo," so they bought Volvos. For many years, they thought Volvos were the safest cars out. You look at, let's use televisions. We all love 4K, right?

Robert Plank: Oh yeah.

Jeff Beale: The funny thing is when you ask the sales guy, which if you get an honest one who'll tell you, most of the time you'll never see 4K, because first of all you have to have the right cables, you have to have the right television station, you have to have the right cable box. You have all these things have to be in order for you to even see 4K. They can't sell you a 4K and say, "Well, you probably will see 4K once in a blue moon."

Same thing with cameras. They show you these pictures. It was funny. We was watching a commercial last night. My wife was telling me ... She has an iPhone, actually, and she was like, they were showing a commercial with all these pictures of great photos, and they said taken with the iPhone. My wife was like, "My iPhone pictures don't ever look like that." I said, "Yeah, because it's not Photoshopped." They never said it wasn't edited. They just said "taken with an iPhone."

What you're seeing is after it has been taken, put to production, post production has been done, Photoshop has been done and, yeah, now it looks beautiful, but they're not lying, but they know that most people buy these phones and they take selfies and they want to take pictures, and that's a driving force. People will buy a phone, and I'm guilty, because I just bought my last phone because of that, because I want to make sure my pictures are high quality. I want to make sure my videos are high quality, because I do videos for my marketing, so I want the clearest videos I can get from my phone.

What I found in my research of going through phones, here's the secret with that. Your cameras mostly have ... Most of them have the same megapixel rate. The key is the lighting. That's the key. You can have the highest pixel rate, but if you don't have a lot of light, you're not going to get those great pictures, so that's the secret to it, but they don't tell you that, because if that's the case, you wouldn't buy another phone, you would just go buy some professional lights.

Robert Plank: Interesting.

Jeff Beale: And they sell phones.

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool. Lots of good stuff today, and you had lots of cool stories and little lessons here and there. Where can people find out more about Mr. Jeff Beale? Where can they find out about your book, your blog, and all that cool stuff?

Jeff Beale: Sure. They can actually go to MrMarketology.com. That has everything about me, but even more important, actually the all about me funny is 1 paragraph. You can only find 1 paragraph, but what you will find are marketing strategies such as this, and I'll be talking with other experts and sharing my point of view as well, and you'll find that on the site. Also, my social, all of them: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, not LinkedIn, Google Plus, are all Mr. Marketology, so if you go to those platforms, look up Mr. Marketology or put Mr. Marketology at the end, you'll find me.

Then you can even find me easily at JeffBeale.com. I try to make myself very accessible, so hopefully if I'm doing my job correctly, you can find me easily.

Robert Plank: Awesome. Thanks for all that stuff and, yeah, I really liked all the marketing nuggets you dropped on us today, and I think that ... The big thing other than the stuff like the 4 C's of marketing and differentiating and course correcting and stuff, I think that, especially that little Apple lesson about how ... That was pretty dang powerful for me. You want a camera that takes good pictures, and they kind of get you with this thing that's true, but also really dang cool, and even showing all these pictures taken with the iPhone, man, it kind of messes you up a little bit, doesn't it? Because you think, "Okay, I want to take good pictures for myself but, man, imagine the possibilities if I could use this same device to take all these awesome photos." Thanks for that lesson there.

Jeff Beale: Oh, you're welcome, man. If there's 1 takeaway that I would like the listeners to know is that understand your audience. Find out exactly who that is, what their needs are, and then find out how can you benefit them? If you can do that and put that into a compelling message, you won't have any problems becoming an authority in your market.

Robert Plank: Perfect. Well said. MrMarketology.com. Thanks so much for being on the show, Jeff.[/showhide]

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124: Discover Your Own Passion, Knowledge and Advantage with Agency Consultant Jason Swenk

Jason Swenk talks to us about creating the resource you "wish you had" that satisfies the criteria of: 1. something you're passionate about, 2. something you're knowledgeable in, 3. an area where you have a unique advantage, and 4. something that is helpful and educates people.

He tells us how he started, grew, and sold an agency, and shares some cutting edge techniques including the early bird list and progressive profiling with thank you pages.

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Today's expert guest is Jason Swenk. Have you ever asked yourself how can I start an agency? How can I scale my agency? How can I generate more leads? How can I find time to do work on the business and not in the business, and what systems do I need in place, or even how do I position myself to sell my agency?

We're in the right place. We're talking to the right guide. We're talking to Mr. Jason Swenk. How are things today Jason?

Jason Swenk: A man. How's it going?

Robert Plank: Super fantastic. This whole agency thing, or web agency, I've got to be honest. I've heard it thrown around. I've heard this term being used at live events. I've been to events where it's like these talks offer agencies only, but I have to admit after seeing it thrown around and seeing a few different, I guess, agencies, I'm still at a loss as to what an agency is. Could you fill us in a little bit?

Jason Swenk: Yeah. It's basically a professional service firm that does marketing or technology for their clients. There's so many forms of a digital agency. The traditional agency everybody thinks of Mad Men, right? I create the Super Bowl ads, commercials, that kind of stuff, but on the digital side there's so many agencies that actually creates websites or do just social media, or mobile apps, or email marketing, or whatever it is. That's what a digital agency is.

Robert Plank: Does it have to be a team?

Jason Swenk: Yes, because if it's just one person you're a freelancer.

Robert Plank: Oh, okay. You could have a 2 person agency technically.

Jason Swenk: Exactly.

Robert Plank: Well, cool. Now that were on the same page with that could you tell us about yourself and about your agency, and what it is that you do?

Jason Swenk: Yeah. Back in 1999, back when Al Gore invented the Internet, thank you Al, I worked for a company called Arthur Anderson who was the paper shredding company of Enron, and worked for them for about 6 months. At that time I was a computer programmer and I really hated what I was doing but I didn't know what I could do next. I was just lucky my friend looked like Justin Timberlake so I created a website making fun of of NSYNC back in the day when they were popular, and it was called NSHIT. It got really popular and started designing websites for people because people were like, "Hey, can you design me a website?" I was like, "Yeah, sure." I was like, "Five hundred dollars," and they were like, "Yes." I was like, "Oh. Cool," and then the next person comes along and I was like, "a thousdand dollars," and I just kept going up until someone said no, and just started doing websites for a lot of cool people.

I struggled for a couple years just because, we were always profitable, but for the first couple years I didn't know even what an invoice was. I didn't know how to run a business or really how to get it off the ground. I didn't have that clarity of where we were going, and then when I started focusing on that that's when we started making, crossing over the 7 figure mark and crossing over that mark, and all this kind of stuff going forward.

Robert Plank: How much of this do you do yourself? Do you just manage a team or how hands-on are you personally?

Jason Swenk: I sold my agency in 2012, so I ran it for 12 years and sold it. Now what I do, and I'll explain what I did in the past. In the very beginning I was doing everything myself. I was doing project management. I was doing design. I was doing development, hosting, everything, clean the toilets, wash the sinks, feed the birds, whatever it was. When I started getting smart I started hiring people for the things I didn't want to do, or hiring for the things that I wasn't good at, and just started expanding, and grew an amazing agency from that.

Since I've sold, that's why I work with digital agencies now, it's just to show them how I started, how I grew, how I sold, and just walk them through the path that I did, and create a resource that I wish I had.

Robert Plank: Is that what you do mostly is you get these agencies to the position where they can be sold, or do you also look at these agencies and maybe refine their system and figure out where they could be doing better?

Jason Swenk: It depends on what they ultimately want. Some people, they envision, they think that in order to be successful I have to get to a point to sell my business one day. I'll tell you that is farthest from the truth because if you truly love what you're doing, why would you sell it? Even after, when I sold my agency, great. I got a great big check. I thought cool, I'll go buy an island or whatever stupid people do, but you're so unfulfilled now because you had all the significance with all your employees that you had, all the contribution that you were helping them out, helping their clients out. That all goes away after you're sold.

If you're just looking for success then that's the perfect scenario but if you're looking for more, which everybody wants more, everybody needs to feel needed. I always tell people, "Look. If you don't like doing the particular business you're doing now you can sell it if you want, but you can also create it as an incubator and build other stuff, and you put the right people into place to do the stuff that you don't want to do," which probably leads you to the next question is, why did you sell it, because I loved what I did.

I had a business partner and we did it for 12 years. I knew I wanted to do something different. I just didn't know what it was. We had a 50-50 partner split and a bunch of companies wanted to buy us and we were like let's do it. We don't know what's next. We don't know what is through that door, but it was the best thing I've ever done as well.

Robert Plank: Did you know that void would be there? Like you said, you were glad to have the big payday but did you, even at that point, did you plan on just taking a break forever or for a year? What was happening at that time?

Jason Swenk: No. I'm a creator so I always got to be building something or creating something, like my wife sees a cool furniture piece and she'll be like, "Man, that's kind of cool," I'll be like, "I can build that. I'll go do it." I have to be building something so I couldn't just sit there. I mean yes, I could've. I guess I could've just do nothing but then I think that's when people die, when you just sit around. You know?

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah.

Jason Swenk: I don't truly believe in retiring. My dad tried to retire many, many years ago, played a year of golf and was just bored, went back to work. For a couple of years I struggled because I couldn't find my purpose of what I wanted to do, what I was really good at, what I was passionate about. You take outside the money. You're like I don't care if it makes money or not, I just want to enjoy it. That's why so many people get into philanthropy and all that kind of stuff, but I just couldn't figure it out until I was lucky to fall into it like I fall into everything else.

Robert Plank: What happened? You had the agency going and then you sold it off, and then at that point then you decided that you were going to build back up just some kind of training or some kind of coaching for other agencies?

Jason Swenk: Well, no. I thought the grass was greener on the other side because I wanted to build a product. I was always in the service-based business, right? I'd sell something. I'd have to deliver something. I would look at people building these technology products and getting huge accolades. I was like, all right, and that was at a time when Instagram just sold for a billion dollars. I was like, maybe I need to create an app.

I literally created a phone app on the iPhone where it takes pictures of everything that you ate, gives you a visualization, shares it out with your friends. It was going really well but I just didn't want to take pictures of my damn food anymore. I was like if I'm not doing it I can't be the hypocrite, and I didn't enjoy it. At that time I was just lucky enough that, I think I did that for about a year, and at that time I had a couple of my old competition reach out and say, "How'd you get clients like AFLAC, and AT&T, and Lotus Cars? How'd you get the best placed to work, and how'd you do this?"

I just started helping them out for free and truly loved it. From there I was like, well, what if I create this podcast and just interview other friends of mine at the time, and just tell war stories about running a business, and an agency, and that kind of stuff, and then it just took off from there. Now I just provide a resource where I help people get to the next level of wherever they're going within their business.

Robert Plank: That's cool. Could you unpack a little bit about that? You say some of your friends asked you how you booked a lot of these clients or, I see that on your speaking topics and things like that you talk about how to generate 25 leads every day, so could you give us a little bit of a taste of the agency, I guess, wizardry that you have? Even just a couple of little things you can do maybe for even any agency to help them out.

Jason Swenk: Yeah. The biggest thing that agencies are doing wrong is they're looking at the bigger guys and they're trying to be a me too agency. The biggest thing you need to do is pick your specialization. You can't be a jack of all trades. You got to pick down to one, do that extremely well, and put out amazing content for that particular audience in order for them to build up trust, and authority, and all that kind of stuff.

By doing that you can start eliminating your competition. I tell people there's other people that help out agency owners, but I don't have any competition. My competition is procrastination and cat videos because no one can be me. No one can produce the stuff or have the style behind my style, and I can be anybody else. It's all about picking that particular market that you want to serve, understanding their biggest challenges and desires, and obsessing over it, and creating valuable information that they can go to without you. That's the most important. Stop doing damn videos about your portfolio and how cool your people are, and your culture, and all that kind of stuff. No one cares other than the people working for you. Focus on them.

The other thing I'll tell you, and this works with any kind of business and my website's a good example of this, stop focusing on yourself. Going to your website rather than saying, "Hey, I've done this and look at all my accolades," and all that kind of BS, ask a question right off the bat. If you go to my website, and it depends on when this airs, there should be a question. Always there's a question and it should say, "Hey. Do you want to know how I started, grew, had fun, and sold an agency?" Then I say, "Hey. Start here." Even on my about page that intro that you read was all questions because that focuses on the person coming to your site and changes the conversation. That's probably one of the biggest things, if you don't take away from anything on this, think about what are the right questions to ask and how do I ask questions in order to focus on them?

Robert Plank: When you focus on them how do you reconcile between making fun videos or making podcast episodes where you help them out, how do you decide between what's just something that I'm going to give away for free, like what did you say? You said to make something that's valuable that they could do without you. How do you decide between that and something that's trade secret that you probably shouldn't give away?

Jason Swenk: I basically tell people everything. The cool thing about this particular market is people are lazy. They want to know how to do it but they don't want to do it themselves, right? You want to separate yourself from everybody else so why would you give away your worst tip? Then everybody's going to think that your best tip. If you put out the typical BS e-book saying, "Do you want to know how to get more customers? Download my boring e-book." That's not going to work but if I put out a video that said, "Hey. Do you want to know how I converted 80% of my marketing proposals from AT&T, LegalZoom, and Hitachi? I'm going to walk you through the 8 steps, the 8 strategies that we use so you can do that, and you can learn the number 1 tip for closing, and not having a prospect go completely silent after you send the proposal."

That's going to be valuable. They're going to watch that video. They're going to take away a lot of stuff. They're going to go execute it. It will work and then they're going to be like, "All right. What's next?" I'm in it for the long run, right? I want to help them out in the long run, which they'll come back to me.

Robert Plank: You give them a little bit of a taste you're saying.

Jason Swenk: Yeah. The cool thing about this particular market and this strategy, you got to know what you're actually doing. There's so many people out there that they're 15 years old, or 20 years old, and they've never run a business. They took a course and they figured out how to do Facebook marketing. Now they want to do their own Facebook marketing course. People are going to see through that so when people tell me, they go, "I don't want to give away my best stuff," it's because that's the only stuff they have, so that might be the wrong business to get into.

That's why I do what I do and it makes a huge difference. I mean this business now, it's taken me, I ran the agency for 12 years so factor this in, but in 11 months I built this particular business selling information and consulting to over 7 figure business in 11 months.

Robert Plank: Nice.

Jason Swenk: By doing this strategy.

Robert Plank: That's cool. I'm looking at some of the things that you have for sale like I see one thing that's a collection of documents that agencies could have. I see you have a course on how to generate some leads. Can you tell us about those products, and how they came into being and what they do?

Jason Swenk: Yeah. I really started out consulting first and I think that's where you need to go before you actually start developing information products or that kind of stuff because you really got to get a pulse and make sure that your assumptions were right. I was just lucky enough that I was my audience, right? The materials I was creating and the lessons I was walking my one-on-one clients through, I wanted to scale that up because coaching and consulting is just not scalable. You can only take on so many people and I didn't want to work all the time. I wanted to work less than 100 powers a month at that time. I work a lot more now because of love what I do, but that was the goal. That was what I wanted to prove to everybody that you don't have to work all the time.

By doing that I was able to take what I was using for my one-on-one clients and replicate that, so I started looking at what made our agencies successful, reverse engineering it, and then breaking out into systems. The only difference between where people are at now and where they want to go is the systems that they have, and systems outperform talent all day long. I just literally started thinking, all right. What systems do I need to put in place or walk my one-on-one clients through in order to get them to understand and be able to implement how to generate more leads? That's how I created the Generate Leads Every Day program where it's basically 5 systems and walks you through all that. It's not just Facebook and that kind of stuff. Yes, that's part of it but there's a lot of other stuff in there for agencies.

What I also started doing is looking at, all right, what are all the other stuff that people are struggling with? You mentioned the agency documents. I look back at all the documents we've created over the 12 years, there's some key ones that I wish I had in the very beginning, and so I was like, okay, how do I build this service ladder, or this offering latter, and saying I don't want to maybe possibly offer the top-of-the-line product right off the bat. Maybe I need to offer the proposal template, or the agency documents, to show them that I actually did run an agency, own an agency, and I was successful at it. You go use this and then you'll come back to me for all the other programs that we have.

Over time, I think this is almost the second year, or I think maybe I crossed over just a little over 2 years now, I just keep adding on based on what people need and how the market changes, and I just keep updating stuff. That's how I created those programs. Does that help?

Robert Plank: Yeah. It does. Looking at the things you have for sale and hearing the way that you position a lot of these things, I know that you had something where you said you're positioning this as you changed up to 80% of your lead generation. and stuff like that. All the things that you were talking about and selling, and even sharing for free, they all seem to be things that they all have a real case study, kind of like you said, you use the coaching to get the pulse of these people and uncover the questions and their problems, then you figure out what kind of solutions you personally ended up applying over and over again, so there's the case study, and the steps, and the proof.

I think that, like you said, the difference between taking a Facebook course and just watching some generic videos and making your own even more genericer videos is that with you, you go back and look at, well, reverse engineer you said, you go back and look at all the things that have worked and just put it into not just a step-by-step system but also things that have actually worked. There's something to that, right? There's something to not just, well this is it been proven to work or I've used this, but you say, "Okay, I use this for Lotus cars, or I use this for LegalZoom." I say, "Okay, eill not only do I have the real stuff to find the theory but I also have the belief, I guess, that it's worked for you, so now I'm going to go at it full speed as far as implementing it."

Jason Swenk: Yeah. You just look at yourself and say what am I passionate about? What do I have knowledge in that other people may not have, and what's my competitive advantage, and then how can I help? That's really the step I follow and the formula that I follow. I had to figure out, I could go after and do consulting for any kind of business, any kind of service company business, but I wanted to drill down, and so I drilled down into a particular market that I knew. Then I wanted to say in this particular market, how do I separate myself from all the other jokers out there and be my own joker, and say, "Well, all these other jokers ran business and to the ground or never worked for an agency before." Cool. Separator.

Then I also wanted to think how can I educate them? That's the reason why I put a cat video on my homepage and I do these goofy Darth Vader videos, or whatever. I'm trying to separate myself from everybody else to break that pattern that everybody's used to in their regular educational videos, and then by doing that, and then them actually getting value from it before they even give you anything, that's the secret sauce.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. That way it's almost like they feel that they owe you.

Jason Swenk: Yeah. I literally have a Facebook ad running right now that's been running for the past 8 months. I haven't really touched it. I literally recorded it on my iPad because I wanted it to look kind of raw. I didn't want it professional and I just waving my arms. I'm like, "Hey look at me. If you're an agency owner, and you struggle with sending out the proposal, and the client goes dark, let me tell you how to stop it," and I told them how to stop it right on the video, and then I said, "Cool. If you like this video you're probably struggling with getting the budget from people. If you want to know how to get the budget click the button below. I will ask you for your email so I can spam you later, and then do that." You're having fun with them.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. None of this old stuff where one step is left out, or no click baiting, or any of that. It's here's this little problem you have. I'm going to fix your little problem. Not here's problem number 2.

Jason Swenk: Yeah. Exactly. If you're using click bait Facebook's going to destroy you, and all these other media companies are going to destroy you.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. I've seen that. They're setting all the stuff down.

Jason Swenk: Which I'm glad. Yeah.

Robert Plank: Yeah. It cleans it up for the rest of us. It's one of those little fads I guess but now it's time to actually help people. I like that you broke it down right there into, once again, steps, right? Step number 1 is the thing that you're going after with your passion, and it sounded like with your app photographing your food, that was something you were like, okay, that was cool but not really your passion, and then number 2, something where you have knowledge. You had this previous knowledge from doing all of the agency stuff. Number 3, where you can get a unique advantage, and the number 4, be helpful and educate people instead of just showing off.

Jason Swenk: Yeah. Exactly, and then the other thing too, and this is really important, especially when you start out, you're going to have one thing. If it's not right for someone don't force it. The reason why I've created so many things is because there's so many different stages people are at. If someone's stuck in their business the agency playbook's good for them. If someone's trying to generate leads, it's perfect like that. Make recommendations on what's actually right for them, not what you want to sell them. When you actually start coming at it with that, and you literally tell someone, "Hey. This program is not right for you if you're trying to get," one of my friends, Frank, is really good at this. He's like, "If you're get rich person this is not the right program for you, but if you're willing to put in the hard work this is an amazing program."

It's like try to push more people away in order to attract more.

Robert Plank: Nice. Along those lines a little bit, do you have any plans with all the products that you have for sale? Do you have any plans for a bundle, maybe with all or some, or do you think that the strategy of just making a pick and choose kind of thing, is that what you're going to continue to do?

Jason Swenk: Oh, yeah. I'm always putting stuff together. The thing is is as you create these programs you've got to create urgency. It doesn't matter what the price is. People don't make a decision on price alone. They make a decision on urgency, and let me prove that point. If I'm about to have a heart attack and I'm going into the surgery, am I going to ask how much it is to save my life? Hell no. Urgency.

It's the same thing about when you're selling your products. You have to educate them enough and show them the value, but then also create urgency so you can use this based on, hey, the price is going up, but then you're selling on price. I usually do it by having people jump on an early bird list. All my programs, when they get on my list, look like an auto launch. It's basically everybody does these Jeff Walker launches and they say, "Hey. I just revised the program. Jump on the program and you'll also get my generate leads program for free," or whatever it is.

What I have found is when you actually do that you're going to increase your conversion dramatically. You'll see the playbook advertised for a certain amount. If you get on my list and you interact with the campaign a certain way, then you may get an early bird offer which comes with everything. Everything's a test and every market is different, so you just got to test it out, and you got to figure out ... Selling my products is just a gateway for me, for them to gain my knowledge, but then come to my live events, or work with me one on one, or join the live event mastermind that we have traveling around the country. You just got to think about what's the end goal. Where do we want to position people? Where are we trying to funnel people to?

Robert Plank: You're playing the long game it sounds like.

Jason Swenk: Big time. I am so happy at what I'm doing, I don't see myself doing anything different to the day I die. I absolutely truly never had a cooler job in the world, not even close enough to this. I'm definitely in it for the long haul because I know I can outlast and outwork anybody out there.

Robert Plank: That sounds like a perfect place to be. As were starting to wind down this called do you have any, aside from all the stuff that you already have set up, do you have any cool upcoming project or idea, or something that you are currently working on?

Jason Swenk: One of the things I'll tell you, especially that can help you out, especially when you're building your campaigns, it's a framework that I've developed on the thank you page. A lot of people talked about there's no dead thank you page. I truly believe in that but what I do on the thank you page is different from everybody else, and it's called progressive profiling thank you pages.

A lot of times when people get on your list, and you're just happy someone's on your list, and you treat them the same way, eventually you'll send them an email saying, "Hey, just tell me a little bit more about yourself so I can send you more relevant stuff." It's always like everybody else. I do the typical BS stuff and I get maybe like a 5 to 10% response rate on it, so literally there was 90% of my list that I didn't know who the hell they were or what I should be sending them.

What I started doing is immediately on the thank you page I'd asked him one question, and I'd say, "Tell me. Are you an agency owner, freelancer, entrepreneur, or agency employee?" Radio button. As soon as they do that I pass them to one other page. I'd ask them to save their revenue. Are you 300,000 and below, 500 to a million, a million and above, and so on.

Then based on their answers I would show them the appropriate thank you page for the offer because I'm not going to offer a marketing professional my proposal template. They could care less about that, and then also, they're not going to go into certain campaigns that I have. If they're under 300,000 in revenue they're not going to be able to get on the phone with me, so I'm not going to offer them my blueprint session, or they're not going to be able to jump to my live events until they're over 500,000. If they're a marketing professional I'm not going to push them into an agency campaign, so now I can deliver a lot more effective content, and the cool thing, you're probably thinking would be like, well what was your response rate of people going all the way through? 94%. It blew me away.

Robert Plank: Geez.

Jason Swenk: By doing that, and I started doing that maybe 8 months ago, my revenues gone up by 75%. My open rate and engagement on email has gone up, it used to be like, the open rate was the typical BS 20%, maybe 4% will click through. Now it's close to 50% open rate and I think the click through, or the clicks, is like 20% or something like that. Something sick, because now I'm serving more relevant content to that audience, and then a lot of people actually put in the survey with the lead magnet or the opt in. That's going to hurt your conversion because you are asking more. Do it after.

No one does this other than my clients and they're just crushing it from it.

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool and an easy way to get people to segment themselves a little bit, but like you said, if they opt in first they don't fill out a big long, page long survey as part of opting in, so if they don't want to fill that out they don't have to. You don't lose them but just over time you get them to slowly fill that in, that's pretty cool.

Jason Swenk: Yeah, and when I was measuring this over the month, I use confusion soft, I mean Infusionsoft, so their thank you pages were not responsive. That was 94%, and most of my opt-ins come from a mobile device, so that was 94% on a non responsive landing page. Now they're all responsive so if I measure it again it's probably almost at 98% I would think.

Robert Plank: Nice. That's pretty powerful stuff. I liked everything that you had to share with us today, not only just your story, but also the little tidbits of advice anyone can pick up and use right away. Can you tell everyone where they can find out all about you, what you do, and what you have coming out?

Jason Swenk: Yeah. Just go to JasonSwenk.com/wahoo and I have something special for you. It's links to all the shows and some cool special things for you.

Robert Plank: Awesome. I can't wait to check that link out for myself. Thanks for being on the show on everything Jason and have a good one.[/showhide]

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123: Setup Websites, Get Clients, and Create Funnels That Convert for Any Business with Damir Butkovic

Damir Butkovic tells us the amazing story of how he brought in 4 new recurring clients in 14 days just by sending a simple four sentence email to 20 prospects. He is an implementer for small business, quickly creating websites with WordPress, email marketing campaigns with Aweber and ActiveCampaign, payment solutions with PayPal and Stripe, as well as landing pages using ClickFunnels.

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Damir Butkovic is talking to us today about internet marketing strategy and he's the creator of the magic calendar partnership program. He publishes daily marketing tips on his website at DamirButkovic.com.au and his clients have included clients from start-ups on a minimal budgets to consulting high end fashion realtors. Damir, glad to have you on the show. Welcome to the podcast.

Damir Butkovic: Thank you. I'm glad to be here and of course thank you for the opportunity.

Robert Plank: Awesome. I think we're going to talk about a lot of fun stuff, have a good old time on the show. Could you tell us what it is that you do and what makes you special and different than everyone else out there?

Damir Butkovic: I realized kind of some years ago that I have this rare ability which I thought it's kind of a downfall. I have kind of, call it an analytical mind but what I can see when I talk to someone like the big picture, you know like people say oh I want to, I don't know sell stuff online, so I can see what they want, but I can also see all the moving parts and that's the part where people get confused so I can see, you know, I don't know from Facebook or I don't know website or landing page, or whatever, I can see all those parts which is usually, I can put them together and it makes sense to me. How to connect it all together while most people are too analytical they can't see, we call it, the big idea or they have the idea and they don't know how, it doesn't really exist and it's very complex for them.

For me it's just normal and logical and this is why I love internet marketing of course, is, you know, already it's a lot of moving parts. I say they're not hard but there is a lot of little things. If you go on, for example, and create a Facebook ad, you've got to worry about targeting, you've got to worry about headline, about copy, got to worry about images, and it can be I don't know 20 percent text and the image so little things like that, not hard, for some other people, for them it's already a problem so I can see that part in the targeting and there is PR blasts and partners and SEO and all these things so I can see it all together, put it all together and obviously make it work.

Basically from that part I can see the whole strategy and I can implement the strategy. A lot of people I guess have seen that. They see the strategy and their good at it but they don't even know how to implement it so I kind of have the tech background. I'm not the best quality in tech but I'm very good at it so I'll even know the best tools, which tools to use, to make it all work, or the budget or the easiest, I call it the easiest, and the simplest way so I kind of combine two things together so I would say that's the rare thing that a lot of guys and gals don't really have.

Robert Plank: Cool. I like that way of thinking and that's kind of the way that I think as well where it's frustrating to see, kind of like you said, a lot of people they'll have a lot of ideas or they'll be really philosophical about the marketing but it's one thing to say well you should have some Facebook ads, you should have a high converting landing page, and I'm thinking okay it's great that you said that but wouldn't it be more helpful if you showed it to me. Wouldn't it be helpful if you broke down the pieces and why things are in a certain way. Wouldn't it be more helpful to see someone go from scratch to creating something that's fully working and how it's all the pieces put together? Would you say, Damir, do you have any products or software or are you only a service provider?

Damir Butkovic: In terms of products I have my couple of products that I've done. One is called magic counter partnership program, where I actually teach people about online marketing. Actually give a free funnel with it which of course you've got to go in and do your own branding, put your own copy, but funnel is done. That's one product. I must say like that one a lot because it's kind of from A to Z. Everything's done for them, you know research marketing, copy, funnel tech part, and I do basic stuff on Facebook.

I have that program and the latest one I have is called how to get consulting clients in 14 days or less by sending out one call e-mail and that came out purely from experience. I was in a situation where I had no consulting clients and I need to get them fast and there was no advertising budget so I went, got educated, and I figured out one simple e-mail that you can send out and got a lot of response and I still have those consulting clients that I got. The best part is I learned the strategy from people who actually make millions of dollars. I have that.

I have these two things online but I do provide a service where we do websites, funnels, and all that stuff for other people online but I think maybe you were asking do I have something proprietary, unique software or something like that. No I don't. We actually like to use other people's knowledge. Like for example we would use the tools that are simple to use but done by other people simply because I don't think it's worth it to do my own thing because there are teams, for example, that's support let's say a webber, and there's a whole team that have the support there and their really good at it. So I use a tool that has really good 24-hour, whatever, support, and then plug it into whatever I'm doing so not everything depends on me. It shouldn't. When I'm not around any of my clients can get support. It's one of the things I don't like to do, well we don't like to do, me and my partner, that everything depends on us then I don't have a life.

Robert Plank: Right.

Damir Butkovic: If we depend on others. For example a lot of, call it web designers out there, they'll do the website and they'll complicate the whole thing while we would do it on the WordPress and say look if you want to change the date, change the date, it's not a big problem or whatever, put a blog post. While a lot people will put in a contract oh it's all coded and now you have to pay me $170 just to change your date and all that. That's exactly the thing that we don't do.

We'll actually use simple tools because obviously we share. If you like. That's not a problem. To make it work and that basically 99 percent of people, even without technology, can quickly learn and do themselves or outsource because even if they don't want to learn because of millions of other people know, for example, how to use WordPress, it's easy to outsource. It's not a big problem. You don't need a senior web developer, coder, which are hard to get and expensive. It's very easy to hire someone for a few bucks an hour to maintain your site, for example. If they have WordPress, it's not that hard to do little updates and all that.

I hope that answers your question.

Robert Plank: Yeah, Yeah it does. What you're saying is that a lot of other people who either set up websites or maintain websites or do these things like for traffic to help other businesses, a lot of other people will, maybe, complicate the process either on accident or on purpose and the client will end up getting locked into something that maybe is not as good as a webber or is not as good as WordPress and what you do is, you instead just make it simple. You just say well there's already this infrastructure in place, I'm not going to use some weird otter responder, I'm not going to build my own otter responder, I'll just use the one that I know works.

Damir Butkovic: Yeah. You said it perfectly. For example, we have a client, my partner, let's say my client, she was locked into a deal where her domain reseller was buying her domain and charging her $200 a year for her domain name and we took it off and said basically it should cost you $10, so we transferred the domain name, right? I don't want to, for example, I consider myself a marketer, so yes please call me for strategy for funnels, for making complex stuff simple. For example, I don't see a value in putting people in such a contract and resell them something that's cheap and make money there and then they call me for minuscule things, that's not my thing and I've learned that a lot of people in this business, that I don't like, just simply overcharge clients for the things that shouldn't be overcharged.

I would say, for example, to anyone who's building a website, build it on WordPress, use active campaign as in e-mail marketing, which is I think by far the best out right now and most affordable for what it can do or a Webber, or I don't care, use Mail Chimp, use anything you like, right? Use the services that are already easy. Use a PayPal or Stripe for your payments. Use clip funnels for landing pages and funnels and whatever. Use the systems that are already there. They're all free or very cheap and very easy to use and everyone's happy. That's what my advice would always be. Use something that's already been built and has much better support. As I said, this is not my core business. I'll support them, that's why I don't like to complicate.

Also, we figure out where we fit in this business. We are not the cheapest, but we are also not the agency, right? We don't do websites that need to be coded from scratch and they cost $35,000 or something and they are very complex. I don't want that. You depend too much on the client or to bare a headache. We fit just in between where we can charge $1,000 to $5,000 or maybe $10,000 but still use all those systems and they are very simple. I would say whatever you're doing, simplified because you don't want to be spending time, losing time, while you can be making money. You don't want to be spending time on minuscule things like let's change an image and God knows what and then that takes two days just to contact your webmaster or something. I'd say take something simple you can do or a lot of other people can do for you.

Robert Plank: I like that and I like that way of thinking. Like you said, it's almost like you found the gap in the marketplace, right? A lot of people are priced too low where you're like I don't know why we'd price that low because it wouldn't be worth my while and other people are priced so high, which you said gets kind of scary or becomes very hands on if it's almost a full-time job or a team of programmers trying to make all this stuff, so you're just kind of somewhere in the middle where you use all these tools and you have somewhat of a machine where you can just kind of really quickly set up a site, like you said, plug them into the active campaign, plug them into Stripe, you just kind of have your process and I guess there's a little bit of thinking but not so much where you have to go back and forth with the client for a year or something.

Damir Butkovic: Exactly. Our, for example, we have a lot of clients now in fashion industry and we always offer two choices. We say look we'll build the whole thing for you, build a system, we can teach you how to maintain it or we can do it for you. That said. That's exactly how I want it. You know what I'm saying? I really don't want them to be calling me for little things, you know what I'm saying?

Robert Plank: Oh yeah.

Damir Butkovic: So, I'll simplify the whole thing and make it easy. It's just based on the end of day, the logic conduit, do it we'll find you someone and I'll help you with that. I'll find you the right person to maintain the system. That's how we like to do it. I think it's easy, well for us, it's easy of course. Not for everyone. As I said, I'm not that techy for some techy people other stuff is probably easier and things like that.

For example, I had a client who said I'll actually use infusion soft or should I use active campaign? I said, I had infusion soft for three years and it's called confusion soft for a reason. It's a great system but I said you'll need a person 24/7 to work on it. People who know how to use it are very expensive and the whole system is actually complex. It's not user friendly, like I lost my mind with it and it was either myself, really good with tech, and then move to active campaign and it's the best decision I've done recently. I'm saying, so why complicate. If you don't have to complicate that's always my rule.

Robert Plank: Right. I mean, if one effective campaign gets you a website online or gets the system that your client wants in place and infusion soft my have more features but it's such a mess that you can't even get a site in that same amount of time then what's the point? I'd rather have the one that gets the site in place, right?

Damir Butkovic: Yeah. At the end of the day most clients, if you look at it, and I believe you know that they just want actually their newsletter to go out. Infuse of these, for example, an awesome system, you can have a whole bunch of clients and complex funnels and sales people and all that, it's really great. You don't do it justice if you just send out a newsletter and it costs a lot of money. So I said well go with active campaign, it's much easier to do anything with it and it's much easier to maintain it, like it actually teach whoever you want real quickly, how to do that. Again, why spend money?

Active campaign so far, to be quite honest, I don't know what's happening. I think someone from infusion soft went to active campaign or that's their other thing because they have a lot of similar functions but much simpler. Things like tagging, right? What you can do right now, what we do for our clients, you can put a piece of code on the website and then that code it does a thing called side track, so anyone from, let's say Robert from your list, goes to your site, then the system will tell you hey this person was on product A 10 times and it will slap a tag, very interested, right?

You can go to system everyday or every week, or once a month and say hey who's very interested in this product and then call them up and say hey I've seen you've been interested in this how can I help you make the decision? Or you can actually automate a campaign automatically to go and ask them that. Or, for example, we can send out an e-mail, a newsletter call it, so called newsletter and put your product there and put the piece of content which it says get it at 20 percent discount for the next 48 hours and it's called a conditional content. It will only be shown to people who have very interested tag. It's a perfect automation that you can set up and you don't really have to think. All that, for example, I don't know if it was a little bit too complex or not, but all that you can do with the active campaign, which of course you can do in infusion soft, but it's much easier to do it in active campaign and it costs you like I don't know $9 a month or $50 if you have extra advanced features there.

For very little money you can automate so much of your marketing and it's easy to use, it's really easy to comprehend, which I haven't found yet, e-mail marketing provider that have it. Actually they do, but they don't slap tags, they do the go themes and whatever. I found it a little bit more complex to use.

Robert Plank: You're saying that this tool use active campaign it has all, or maybe most, of the features that you want but it's also simple enough where you can actually get it done?

Damir Butkovic: Yes. Yes. Very simple. Where a lot of people, just to tell you and your peeps, why infusion soft was really popular was this tag, right? If people click on a link you get a tag, clicked on a link, or you do whatever action, you get a tag, right? So when you go to your item, 8,000 people you know at least you click whatever tag you want and you can filter the people and then you can do with them whatever you want. That's exactly what active campaign does, right? Active campaign even has leads corning, meaning if you send out four newsletters out, you can give I don't know anyone that clicks on the link a score of either a 10. Anyone who scores a 40 will be considered as your fan, anyone who's your fan you can send them specific special offers and you know they'll buy your stuff.

Instead of inventing the offers and sending people out to 8,000 people and pray to God that someone will buy, with this you'll filter out and maybe get 150 super warm people and you know they'll be warm because the system just told you where you can send a better campaign out. That's why, for example, well me personally, I love the system active campaign because of little things like that. They're kind of little but they're mega and I can talk about some results but when it comes to, I can give you a real example, when it comes to fashion sites or any retail store online if you have let's say 200 products, when you set up a system which is not that hard if you can wrap your head around it then the system will automatically start to do all these up-sells which will result in a lot more sales because it's sending all these special offers to people that are hot. That's why I love it and it's simple enough to setup.

Robert Plank: That's cool. I like little things like that where it's like it's one of those things where before they found you, I mean, there were probably a lot of things missing in their business, right? Like, maybe they probably weren't doing e-mail marketing at all but now because of what you set up and what you connect for them, now they can send out e-mails but not just blind e-mails to the whole list but super targeted things because you use the right tool for the job it sounds like.

Damir Butkovic: Yeah. Like one client we have and I always say to my friend, he's a marketer also, I said yo these guys are not segmenting the list, and then the list and then he's like that's why they have you. They wouldn't need you. Anyway, it took me like four months. They would send the same e-mail to people on a newsletter list and buyers and I was like guys you can't, I mean you can do that, but I said you got to separate buyers. For example, if you look at open rates with buyers are 30, 35 percent. With non-buyers it's like 20, not bad but hey a lot more.

Anyway, so I was begging them, basically guys segment the list, segment the list, segment the list. Just to put it in perspective, before we started working, their good month would be I don't know $3,000, right? Then obviously they start to work with us then it went to $16,000, $18,000, $20,000, then last month was $30,000. Now, first 12 days they made $30,000, right? Just to give you some perspective from where they started to where they are now.

Anyway, point being is when they did one segmentation to just say hello guys, are you still with us on the list? We were kind of like reactivating people who are not that active. They saw, with one e-mail, $3,400. So with one e-mail they made $3,400 in one day that usually they do in a month. To make only because they segmented the list. I'm like guys do this every week.

Robert Plank: Right but now that you showed them the result, now that you showed them the little boost from doing it one time, now their going to repeat it because you showed them the way to do it. You didn't just talk some theory, you actually proved it.

Damir Butkovic: Yeah, exactly and you know how it is with clients is that it's mumble jumble for them and they don't believe it and some things take time but yeah, exactly, you said now it's easier. When you show someone the money everyone is listening like yeah yeah no problems. Now every suggestion I say is like yeah no problems, no problems, whatever, we'll do it.

Robert Plank: Right. If you say this is an extra $3,400 everyone understand more money. They might not understand segmenting or deliverability but more money, everyone in the world understands that.

Damir Butkovic: Yeah, of course, and there is, I don't know if you do any Facebook ads or any ads you'll have your dashboard and you can actually see the money you put in and get back out.

Let's scale this thing. Obviously you're in profits and the other thing where I teach obviously is like do not care about first sales, like 7 out of 10 people, and that's research done by Shoppingfly, right, and their a billion dollar company, so I take this advise seriously. 7 out of 10 people will buy again when they buy with you so I always say make a first sale, do not worry even if you lost money because 7 out of 10 of them will buy again and that's free money because their only a list. You'll spend no money to market to them. Just send them e-mails on a regular basis. Keep the relationship going. If we are breaking even and making a profit in start, that's great, of course awesome, but I'm more worried keeping contact because that's your real money.

It actually happened with this client. I said you'll get a critical mass and you'll start to sell more, which actually it happened in the last five months, it did happen.

Robert Plank: So, playing the long game, right?

Damir Butkovic: Yeah. Like you I guess, you constantly learn marketing and you probably got educated but you know the heavy weights, they can tell you any results they want but it didn't happen overnight. Maybe their latest campaign happened overnight but it's slowly scaling up because you want to be careful. If you put $20 you earn $40, then you put $40 you earn $80, and it takes time to get to the whatever, a million or I don't know how much they make, it doesn't really matter. There is no overnight call it. I mean, yes there are some campaigns that made really a lot of money real quickly but let's say in the normal world you want to take it slower.

Robert Plank: Right. Along those lines, I don't want to keep you too long.

Damir Butkovic: Oh, that's all right.

Robert Plank: Along the lines of starting a business from zero, I understand, and you mentioned this pretty early on in our discussion but you mentioned that in order to get your coaching clients or to get a bunch of coaching clients in a short amount of time, you send out this four-sentence e-mail to get all your coaching clients. Can you tell us about that?

Damir Butkovic: Yeah. I'll tell you the back story so you get how it all happened. I moved to Bali recently, well a year ago, and then things were well and I hired a guy and he said oh I'll do your campaign for whatever websites and all that, don't worry, I'll do it legit and I was like great I can pay him and all that. I said I'll do my stuff and that was a mistake because I came here three months after, I found myself no clients, he did nothing and what not so I was like okay great, how do I get new clients? I went and listened to some people. I listened to Dan Meredith and then he also mentioned the book from Chet Holmes, it's called the ultimate sales machine and he said what I do, he said I send out, of course you pick who you want to work with, right?

Let's say I want to work with John from I don't know veterinarian or some from whatever, you profile the person, you learn a little bit about them, and you send them something like this. It's a very simple e-mail, right, you said hey, hi John, I was poking around your website so I thought I'd drop you a line and then you put in some kind of a flattery or a compliment. You said I really love your site or I really love what you do, hey I've seen you've been to Hong Kong, I've been there too, something, find some commonality, and then I would actually see hey me and my partner, we specialize in online marketing and developing strategy that builds our clients brand awareness and helps them to sell more stuff online. Very simple, I call this non pitch. Keep it simple. I didn't say hey we specialize in strategy and brought our clients $37,000 while in less than $3,000, no, very simple introduction. Then I said this is the takeaway and I'll tell you why it works, the strategy. Then I say if you'll need anything in this particular niche please give me a shout out, I'll be happy to help. Cheers, Damir.

That's what I would send out. Actually, that's what I did send out and I got four paying clients in two weeks and $5,000 in my bank account. Not a lot of money but that was easily scalable but we had other stuff so I was like we can't have that many consulting clients but point being is it's just an e-mail, you don't need a website, you don't need a business card, you don't need to go out and talking, you don't need advertising budgets, you don't need funnels, you don't need world class call people, you don't need anything as long as you can deliver whatever you are selling.

Now, just to tell you this strategy, why it works, normal e-mail, which you probably get everyday, we all do, hey my name is Damir and I'm a marketer, online marketer, how about we do some work together and I'll do your campaign and let's do some business and make money, you know what I'm saying? You don't know me already, you're pitching to me, there's no connection, it sounds like bull shit. Sorry.

Robert Plank: That's okay.

Damir Butkovic: Yeah. It sounds too much. You want to do business, you don't really want to do business right now, so it's too pitchy I would say. With this e-mail it's literally, it's the opposite, it's like hey I was around, thought I'd introduce myself. You keep it cool and then you say a little bit of what you do and then you take it away. You said hey you tell me if you want help with it. I'm happy to help. Usually when people say hey let's meet, my name is Damir I help people make money online, let's meet next Tuesday, let's talk, let's go on skype, so I'm chasing them, right?

If we got back thousands of years we are actually used to chase food so naturally we will chase what's running away from us. With this e-mail then you say if you need something in this particular niche, it can be literally anything, please give me a shout out, I'll be happy to help. You move away so their human instinct will want to chase you. How can this? So this is what's happening in their mind, strike their ego, like I'm such a big business person and everyone pitches to me and who the hell is this guy, comes, introduces himself and just goes. It bothers them. How can he be so cool? Doesn't he know who I am, right? Then they realize this was actually so cool. This is the first person in a week that didn't really want anything from me or pitched anything to me, let's work. It was just a simple introduction and that's where you get, this is where you say hey why not or what do you got or let's have coffee or meet? Does this make sense?

Robert Plank: Yeah, it does. There's a lot of cool things about that strategy that you just mentioned and that technique there because first of all I like that ... Okay, how about this, you said you got four clients. How many e-mails did you send to get those four clients?

Damir Butkovic: I've sent around 20 e-mails.

Robert Plank: Even less than I thought. That's a pretty good close rate.

Damir Butkovic: Yeah.

Robert Plank: I was almost imaging that maybe he had to send 50, had to send 100, so wow, so only 20 e-mails and that probably took, what an hour, maybe two at the most?

Damir Butkovic: Two, three hours. I have no idea, I forgot.

Robert Plank: Cool, so not even an afternoon, but I what I like about what you mentioned about that is you didn't have to cold call, you didn't have to show up at their business, you just sent out one e-mail after another and what I like about that is, well first of all, aside from the fact that it was an e-mail, but you personalized it to the person, like in the stage where you kind of complimented them and stuff like that and found some common ground, and it didn't even take that long. You just customize one sentence out of the four sentences, just kind of making it where okay like I am writing this to this person, it's not just some spam e-mail going out to a hundred thousand people.

Then I liked also the part where you positioned it as I want to help you, right? You didn't say here's my site, here's where you can buy from me, here's all these packages, you just said where are you stuck and I want to help you so talk to me and then I'll customize what I can do for you. Lots of good stuff there and I'm blown away that it only took 20 e-mails to get those four clients. About that, how did you know who to contact? Did you just look up?

Damir Butkovic: I'll give you the full strategy. What I didn't do because I was such a lazy bum, before strategy would be that you actually follow back with actually letter, the same letter saying look I wrote you an e-mail a couple weeks ago and I don't know if you got it. People get very few letters these days so I didn't even do that. What I'm saying is for anyone who is listening this show, if you follow this strategy, send out the letter, you don't have full practice real quick, and also to mention I tried a couple niches and some niches didn't work out. Okay, I'm an internet marketing so you obviously can work with a lot of people but if it doesn't work out I found out two things. Ordination is not ready or good or I'm pitching too hard. If I don't get the response it's a pitch.

Just to give you an example, for example I was attacking speakers industry in Australia, what e-mail does, why I love it, even if people say no, they still replied, so I've sent out 10 e-mails and I got four responses no thanks we are good at it, which means I've started that relationship somehow. Anyway, remember that. So how it works, I would sit online and let's say you're a copywriter or whatever, pick a name, it doesn't really matter. Let's say you're a copywriter and you need copy writing clients so I would pick, again, some kind of a niche, let's say a copywriter in a weight loss nation, the easiest I could think of, then I would say who would be my ideal client? Who would I like to work for and always reach higher.

I always say if you think you're not good enough, give yourself that. Don't pitch to small business owners, mostly they won't have cash. Go higher, for someone you think they will never give you an answer, they probably will. I would find a company, or a person, or whatever online so I would check their website, I would check their Instagram, I would check their Facebook, and all I'm doing, LinkedIn, and all I'm doing there is two things. I'm looking for an e-mail.

Like if I would be checking you Robert, I would be looking where is an e-mail that it's not an info@ I don't know RobertPlank.com. I would look where is the e-mail of Robert@, you know what I'm saying? I would look to get an e-mail that's personalized if I can. The other thing I would look, what do I really love about them? What do I like? Where is that similarity that I can put in an e-mail that's genuine. You want to put something genuine otherwise it's just energetic, not good. So I would look just for two things and many times if you don't find an e-mail on a website, you go on Facebook, or some social media there will be that e-mail. Sometimes it won't be. Doesn't really matter, right, but if that happens I would even say attention to the business owner or attention to marketing manager, or something, you know? Please forward to person who can make decisions online and then I would just literally take that e-mail, save it perfectly, I would just change that complimentary sentence, and I would shoot off an e-mail. That's the only thing I would do.

If you're I don't know looking for clients, if you're business to business I would definitely attack LinkedIn and what not. I think there are even tools that will give you people's e-mails and what not. I didn't even go that deep into some tools and what not. I really took it easily with internet and everyone has one simple e-mail and it worked, and it still works. For example, I have a guy I know who, he's running Craigsbook ads, like automation, Facebook ads, I said bro you would kill it. If I were you I would just be doing that. I would go to companies, I would say hey man this is what I do, I run traffic through Facebook ads, you know if you need any help with it, which everyone basically does, give me a shout out, happy to help. I think people like that with some kind of services that you know you can do or whatever product, you can kill it real quick and it does matter.

Look, I did this Australian, Indonesia based, the guy I learned it from, he's in the UK. The guy he learned it from that's making gazillions of dollars, is in states. It doesn't really matter where you live. My English is shabby, as you can hear, I make grammar mistakes all the time, and it worked.

Robert Plank: Yes.

Damir Butkovic: You know, whatever you do, just follow the strategy and the strategy's simple. Give them a reason where sending an e-mail always get away with the sentence, I was poking around your website, or I was poking around your page, or I was poking your shop, it doesn't really matter, compliment them, introduce what you do, do not hard pitch, like man I help people sell more stuff online. I help people lose weight. Not I help people lose weight in 30 days and all that. No, no, no. I help people live healthy, something like that and then the take away's, if you need help with it please let me know, happy to help. Cheers, bye.

That's what I would do and that's what anyone can do is listening and I guarantee you you'll get some kind of a result. I say if you sent out 20 e-mails, you don't get the response, you're pitching too hard or the niche is not good, just move away to another niche. You don't have to send 50 e-mails, send 20. Tweak something. It's very easy. It's free, you know?

Robert Plank: Right.

Damir Butkovic: That's what I would do. Simple as that. You can literally in the next half an hour, an hour, if you follow that, you can send out some stuff and I would say you'll get the response, right? Then of course you've got to meet with people, whether it's in person or online, you got to sell them your stuff, obviously.

Robert Plank: Right.

Damir Butkovic: That's the selling part. This is the lead generation part. Yeah, that's how it works and anyone that's listening I urge you go and try it out. It works. I actually did not believe it when I heard. I said it can't be that simple. You got to put more. You got to put my USB and God was not, that's exactly what you don't put. Simple as that.

Robert Plank: That's pretty interesting. I like that not only does it work no matter who you are but it also works no matter where you are in the world and it works no matter what kind of service you provide. Like you said, it might be that you provide a certain service and it's not a good fit for some businesses but then change the kind of business that you're going at, right?

Damir Butkovic: Exactly. Look, it's really good I must say for people who are offering services, it's really good business to business. Where I got questions hey but I'm like I don't know a health coach, how do I do it? If I would be a health coach I would not be targeting, let's say you Robert, directly because it's just simply too many people. I would be targeting people who ... If I was targeting you I would be targeting you to say hey I've seen, I know you're an entrepreneur, I can see entrepreneurial, you probably have a group of people that are working hard and I'm a health coach or whatever, I'm happy to help, happy to share some tips, how to work from home and still stay healthy and not drink gallons of coffee and eating McDonald's or whatever, so if you need any help with that, please let me know, I'd be happy to help.

What I'm doing there I would target leaders in their own niches or industries because they have my group of people, right? Don't get stuck. What I'm trying to say oh I'm doing one to one or whatever, yeah target those people, like target entrepreneurs or someone who has a group of people you want. It works both ways. Business to business or I would say one to one, you just have to not go after each person individually, you go after someone who has a group of those people.

Robert Plank: Right. So they can plug into their network.

Damir Butkovic: Exactly.

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool and I like all the stuff that you've shared with us so far today. I would like to send people your way and if they like what they heard about all of your adventures and your thinking and your advise, where can people go to find out all about Damir and all about the things you do and your websites and all that good stuff?

Damir Butkovic: Yeah. Very simple. I'll spell out my name. I have a Facebook page. I wasn't there for awhile but you can contact me through Facebook or I have a website. Website is DamirButkovic.com.au. It's simple to shoot me an e-mail or whatever. There's something that's not working. I was actually making it look better yesterday and then I made some mistakes, it doesn't look that good anymore. Anyway, you can contact me there or just search me on Facebook or like my page, something, anyway you want to connect and I'm happy to share, answer questions and things like that. It's all there basically.

Robert Plank: Awesome. Well I'm really glad that you were on the show today and I mean, heck I got a lot of really cool stuff out of that and I'm glad that you were able to share all of your stories and your adventures and all the little tid bits that have helped you to get to where you are now. Thanks so much for that.

Damir Butkovic: Thanks. Glad to help. Please use this. I went to one boot camp, paid $10,000 and the guy said on the end of it, Todd Brown, he's awesome. Awesome, brilliant, marketer, he said looks it's worthless if you don't apply it. So it's like great advice. Go and apply it and you'll see how awesome it is.[/showhide]

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120: Stress is Just Adaptation: The Impact of the Human Stress Response with Mary Wingo

Dr. Mary Wingo is here to talk about stress and her new book, The Impact of the Human Stress Response: The Biological Origins and Solutions to Human Stress. She answers the tough questions, and explains how to understand stress (adaptation to people or an environment). Dr. Mary discusses the major causes of stress, as well as how we can all live happier and more fulfilled lives with purpose.

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Today's guest is Dr. Mary Wingo. She's the author of the impact of the human stress response and in her book she talks about the root causes of stress and how to manage it effectively, why the stress response is essential for helping to adapt to one's environment, the fascinating biology of human stress, the 5 major causes of stress in modernized society, and how to protect your health. Learn how to avoid overloading one body's stress response.

Lots of cool stuff. Welcome to the show Mary.

Mary Wingo: Thank you. Thank you for having me Robert.

Robert Plank: I understand that you talk about stress and stuff like that.

Mary Wingo: Yes. Absolutely. That is what I'm about.

Robert Plank: Cool. I work from home. I don't know about you but I get stressed about stuff all the time and I think it might feel like as I'm getting older either the stress is more, or maybe I'm just more aware of it. What's the answer? Is stress of thing that we need to manage, or minimize, or ignore, or can we direct it into something good? What's the answer to this whole stress problem?

Mary Wingo: First off is understanding the actual definition of stress Robert. The definition of stress, and it took a very long time to actually come up with a workable definition, but the definition is this. It's the rate of adjustment that you undergo in order to adapt to whatever an environment that you happen to find yourself in. The key is here, is that there's 2 aspects. There's 2 sides of stress. There's the actual, since we're talking about people, the human being, and the second component is the environment. It can actually be a matter of personal will or it can actually be something that's out of your reach, and that's a problem with the environment, and you just have to alter or change your environment.

Robert Plank: Okay. For example, if someone transitions from a day job to being a full-time entrepreneur, or they had a big life change or something like that. That is, I guess what stress is, so if someone goes through that stress and overcomes it versus the stress kind of hangs around or gets worse, what's happening there versus someone who's actually dealing with it?

Mary Wingo: Okay. You've touched on a really important point. Yes. Ultimately organisms, you are only supposed to be subjected to stress periodically, sporadically, but the way that modernized society is structured, a lot of us have, not necessarily horrible life-threatening stressors, it's not like a bear is chasing us every second of the day, but for most of us these nagging somewhat smaller stress, well there are some large stresses too, but that just go on day after day after day, and it's relentless.

Stress mechanisms are just that. They are how we adapt. They are our adaptive mechanisms. It's not just the adrenaline. It's not just cortisol. It is a whole cascade of physical responses. The key is to be able to do what you can call to try to resolve the stress and not keep a nagging, incessant exposure day after day after day to it because when that happens that is when we get stress related mental illness and physical disease. In fact it's an exploding phenomenon in our society.

Robert Plank: Could you walk us through an example or a case study of someone who you dealt with who had just a really bad problem with stress and you changed their ways and it fixed it up a little bit?

Mary Wingo: Oh, I can use myself.

Robert Plank: Perfect.

Mary Wingo: I'll use myself because ultimately, when I was researching, this was decades in the making. This isn't a book that I just came up with. This is something that I have cultivated over 20 years and because there's really not a lot of hardcore really good stuff out there I had to practice on myself a little and see how that worked just for me, and see if this was in relation to human beings in general.

For me it was all about simplicity. It was following probably the greatest American philosopher of our time, Henry David Thoreau, who was the guy who actually coined simplicity, or simple living., literally eliminating details and complications from one's life one, by one, by one, by one, by one. Ultimately, out of trial and error I found myself, especially when I left the US because I realized that my country, my culture, was causing me a lot of stress personally. I'm a very sensitive person. A lot of thinking nerdy types are.

I couldn't have finished this book living in the US, in the environment in the US. I had to get to a less stressful environment and that's here in Ecuador. Basically it was like another person wrote it. It just literally flowed out.

Robert Plank: Why Ecuador? Was this the kind of situation where, I'm just kind of wondering, you're from the US. You were in Texas. You're saying that moving to Ecuador was a result of your stress, you just didn't like the environment here and the environment there was better?

Mary Wingo: Yes. This is like 10, 12 years ago. I knew as a scientist back then that the structure of our environment was killing a lot of people early, and causing a lot of disability, taking a lot of breadwinners from families, causing a lot of family impoverishment. I saw this and I couldn't really put my finger on it. Like I said, this is been many, many years in the cultivation of this meta-analytic concept, but I realized that my country, for my particular sensitive constitution, was very, very toxic for me. I realized that it was stunting my growth.

10, 12 years ago I had ultimately made the decision to leave. I didn't know how or where but I had basically changed my life up to facilitate an easy transition. When a friend of mine retired down here, she's an older lady, about 3 years ago, I asked if I could come visit her over Christmas and I stayed for a month, and I realized that it was a very, very different place and I packed up, left Texas, came back 3 months later.

Robert Plank: Cool. It sounds like an exciting adventure. You have this book and I understand that you have a way of defining the type of stress. I guess there are 5 major causes of stress you say?

Mary Wingo: Yes. Absolutely. When you're talking about stress for yourself, you had mentioned that as you get older you felt like you were experiencing more and more stress. Basically our modernized society, and you don't see this to near the extent here in Ecuador, and this is where I was able to really formulate and crystalize some of my concepts, but there are 5 major causes of stress that come from living in a westernized society.

Number 1, and this is probably what affects you and your listeners a lot, it is simply complexity. Let me elaborate. It's undue pressure and taxation on our executive mental functioning, on our frontal lobes, on our ability to plan. It's called working memory and it's our frontal lobes, which is the part of the brain behind your forehead and your eyeballs, it's the newest part of our cortex, and it's very fragile, but it is our primary stress response organ believe it or not. How that's so is that it allows us to plan,strategize, and attenuate and eliminate stressors and our environment. It also allows us to alter our environment.

For instance, if we are cold and we have a cold stressor, we're in freezing temperatures, we don't sit there and freeze. We've created clothing. We've created fires. We've created elaborate shelters, stuff that other animals, to an extent, are limited in doing. With that, it's a very, very precious resource we have as people but unfortunately as we subject ourselves to increased levels of stressor over long periods of time, so high cortisol levels, a different set of receptors get activated in our frontal lobes, and basically it starts to shut everything down.

This is why stress, when we subject ourselves to stress, it's very, very bad for our emotional and mental regulation, our problem-solving ability. It's very important to take very good care of our cognitive resources because this is how all mental illness starts. This is how it all begins, when our frontal lobes start crapping out.

Robert Plank: In this case would this be like if, for example, if I'm so overwhelmed with putting out all the fires, have so many things going on, spread so thin that I can't even think, is that with this is describing?

Mary Wingo: Yes, and we Americans especially wear this type of overburden as a badge of honor, and honestly the thing is, ultimately what happens, and if you just want to look at it from an economic standpoint, this type of habit, which of course I was a typical overachiever, I got my PhD very young so I know all this, it ultimately costs you more. It's ultimately going to put a huge financial strain, well, other types of strains as well, on you, as well as on your health. This is not a good way to approach problem solving and adaptation.

Robert Plank: What is the good way? Is there a way to have my cake and eat it too? Is there a way to be a productivity machine, be an over achiever, but still be relaxed and not be overwhelmed all the time?

Mary Wingo: Let me tell you what has worked for me. Again, this is all extremely new developments that a plethora of stress researchers, scientists, investigators, social scientists, have come up collectively over the last 50, 60 years, but really over the last maybe, 5 or 10 years. For me, what works is if you're going to be an over achiever, if you're going to consume yourself with an activity like I do, like you do, of high-performance, you've got to treat yourself as an athlete preparing for the Olympics or a marathon.

Ultimately sports, we exercise stress on the body, and this has been very, very well studied and looked at. If you want to maintain high performance you've got to simplify other parts of your life, so you've got to watch what you eat like an athlete would. You've got to watch your sleeping. If you've got various toxic relationships you've got to do whatever you can to attenuate this.

The book that I wrote is basically, it's a meta-analysis of around 100 years of work. When I wrote this I knew it was going to take a big chunk out of me. I knew it was going to be a pound of flesh, so to speak, so yes, I had to be very, very immaculate in my habits in my other parts of my life in order to subsidize the adaptation of the very big demanding part.

Does that sound clear?

Robert Plank: Yeah. It does, and I like the whole analogy of the athlete and the marathon. I haven't been able to run for a few months because I broke my ankle a few months ago, but every morning I'd wake up and I'd go for a run, and I was almost like looking forward to it. I think back to, I only played sports for a few years as a kid but it was always the next game that we were leading up to and practicing for an stuff, it was this stressful event coming up, but it was good stress. There was always that element of nervousness and anticipation, but it was the good kind and not the dread kind, not like something that I was like, "Oh no. Only 4 days left, only 3 days left." It was almost like Christmas morning coming up. It was like it's a few days away, I wish it was right now.

Mary Wingo: Actually surprising, and this is something that I don't know, kind of flies in the face of what we've all been told about stress for the last 20, 30 years, is that stress is just adaptation. It's just a mechanism, just like breathing is a mechanism, or heart rate is a mechanism. It is a set of mechanisms that help us adapt, period. The difference is that often times good stressors are, like I said before, limited in scope. They're not chronic. It's not a grinding activity that you do all the time. It is sporadic so yes, okay, you're looking forward to getting a real good workout this Saturday, and you look forward to it, and it's good, and it ends. You're able to read the benefits of adaptation hopefully without the wear and tear of overuse from your mind and from the rest of your physiology.

Robert Plank: Would you say the secret is to do these things in short bursts? It's not like we're working out all day long. It's not a constant thing. It's like I'm looking forward to this little thing, now it comes up, now it's over, and then, I guess, the next event or the next milestone, I guess is what you're saying.

Mary Wingo: Yes, and like I said before, for me it was writing basically the benchmark book of medicine and physiology. That's ultimately what this book is. For me, it was again, treating it like a marathon, treating it like you're an elite athlete and really doing immaculate self-care, self-care that an athlete would do, and then just doing it periodically. With that you develop adaptation. You become stronger. It's like a muscle.

Robert Plank: Are you seeing a universal way that this is going wrong, or are you seeing a mistake that just everyone you come across who doesn't have your techniques, is there just a big mistake everyone's making as far as dealing with stress?

Mary Wingo: Yes, and we haven't gone over the other 4. I'm not sure if we have time in this episode. I might have to come back again.

Robert Plank: Might have to. You may come back one time per item, 5 times coming back.

Mary Wingo: Yes. Okay. This is the reason I ended up writing the book. I actually quit science 10 years ago. I mean I was still an academic. I fully kept up with every single major development, and this is a huge field. There's probably at minimum 100,000 refereed papers that have been published over the last 50, 75 years. This is a very, very well studied topic but it's not well understood.

I actually didn't want to write it but the way things are getting in our society, in westernized society, modernized society in general, with how we are in this point in history and basically are watching many, many folks in our culture die premature deaths, become disabled from preventable stress related diseases, become bankrupt from dealing with stress related diseases, nobody else was doing this and I figured, "God, is no one else going to, fine. Okay. I'll just do it."

That's what sort of propelled me to do this but yes, people don't have the vocabulary and with these 5 major causes of stress in modernized society, what it is, I wanted to nail down in a very easy to understand way that almost anybody in the world can understand. You don't have to have formal education. You don't have to be a medical professional. You don't even have to be all that's literate to be able to understand what stress actually is, and then when you understand what it is, and what the major classifications of stress that kill people, and make people sick and bankrupt people are, then you can actually make an itemized list and pick out, just like you would a food diary or a money spending diary if you're on a budget, and then just one by one pluck them out, just pick them out. That's the only way to do it. That's the only way to do it.

Robert Plank: What you're saying is instead of trying to conquer this huge giant problem of stress you instead break down the problem and then attack the little pieces that are left.

Mary Wingo: Yes, and for the average person living in modernized society this might be several hundred items. It might take several weeks. If you're really serious about this you might need to have help from your close family and friends because you may not even be fully aware of what you're doing.

Robert Plank: Interesting.

Mary Wingo: Yeah.

Robert Plank: We're starting to wind down. We're starting to run out of time but I want to make sure that we get the 5 major causes listed. I know that we don't have a lot of time to unpack them but I would feel bad if we left before you were able to explain all 5 of these really quick.

Mary Wingo: Okay. I'm going to try to run to these as fast as I can Robert.

Robert Plank: Awesome.

Mary Wingo: Okay, so number 1 is overloading our cognitive resources, overtaxing of working of memory. We already went over that one. Number 2 is living in an unequal society, the very, very strong correlation between living in a society that is unequal, and the proliferation of stress related diseases, especially in men. Again, where we have the .1% grabbing up all the resources and the rest of us are literally scrambling for breadcrumbs, in history this is basically the recipe for revolution. I mean this is just how human beings are put together socially.

Number 3 is loss of social capital, which that's social support. Actually since the industrial revolution our participation in social groups, whether it's religious, social, political, or just hanging out, family and friends, the actual time spent doing that has basically shriveled down to nothing, and because we are meant to be social creatures, and because when we deal in packs and herds, and in groups, we are less vulnerable individually to the ravages of society, so that's a very big one as well.

Changing gears a little bit, 4 is the derangement or loss of the human biome, which are all those little critters, little micro organisms of many, many different sorts that exist in our gut, on our skin, and in our orifices. What they do, they're actually extensions, functional extensions of our organ systems. They helped create vitamins. They function in cellular growth, in endocrine, in immune signaling, and they're implicated in many, many types of disease when these critters get deranged and they're not able to do their job. Basically you lose some of your functioning bodily systems when the biome gets deranged and a lot of us have this problem.

Then number 5, in general, is chemical stressors. 4 kind of segues into 5, so understand that a lot of just the chemicals that we have in our household, at our work, the processed food that we eat, the pharmaceuticals we take, a lot of these didn't exist 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago, so we don't have the metabolic machinery, especially in our liver, to be able to break these things down efficiently. What happens is we're exposed to it and we go into a stress response to try to deal with it. We have that and then the other part of the chemical stress aspect is actual exposure to pollution, to the air, soil, and water. That's a very, very potent stressor as well and results in many, many deaths.

Those are the major 5 and a lot of people don't think of these. They may think of reason 1 as stress, but reasons 2, 3, 4, and 5, a lot of people, they just don't know. They don't have the vocabulary, and so that's one thing I'm really trying to set out to do is be able to give people some real actionable vocabulary to work with.

Robert Plank: Dang. It sounds like there's all these different sources of stress that I had no idea that they were coming from. I like the idea of your book and the things you have to say in it so could you tell everyone about your book, what it is, where to get it, and any other websites where people can find out about you?

Mary Wingo: Absolutely. Your listeners can go to my website, MaryWingo.com. They can download some actionable steps for free with the training video to just get started. They don't have to buy anything, and then there's tons of free learning materials and information. My book is the first book, basically, I guess in modern history, that is a meta-analysis, it's an analysis of the biological, psychological, sociological, and political, and economic aspects regarding the human stress experience.

If people want to pick up a copy, and it's a very inexpensive book, I've priced it to where all most anybody in the world can afford this, so this isn't something that if someone doesn't have a lot that they're going to be cut off from. They can get lots of information from me. They can pick it up off my website, MaryWingo.com, or from Amazon.com.

Robert Plank: One more time, what is the title of the book so everyone knows to get it?

Mary Wingo: The Impact of the Human Stress Response.

Robert Plank: Awesome. This whole subject of stress, I think at least for me, it's one of those things where I forget it's there, and the times that I forget it's there, then I end up having problems. I think this is a really important subject. I think you have a lot of good things to say and I'm really glad that you came on the show today Mary.

Mary Wingo: Totally my pleasure. I look forward to talking to you again Robert.[/showhide]

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119: Get What You Want, Become a High Achiever and Overcome Procrastination with Dr. Chris Friesen

Dr. Chris Friesen, Ph.D from Friesen Performance, and author of the book, ACHIEVE: Find Out Who You Are, What You Really Want, And How To Make It Happen, tells us how to find our life's purpose with small changes and a number of easy techniques. He talks about the 5 minute rule to instantly overcome procrastination, the 10 minute rule to stop bad habits, the structure of your environment (great for finishing that "big" task you've been avoiding) and why it's so important to have your "why" (values, purpose, and mission).

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: I have a quick question for you. Are you unsure of your life's purpose? Are you afraid you're living below your true potential. Do you have trouble staying motivated and focused on your goals? If any of those sound like you or they could sound like you or they do sound like you at times, we have Dr. Chris Frieson. He's the author of the book Achieve: Find out who you are, what you really want, and how to make it happen. He's going to be talking to us about all kinds of cool and fun mindset stuff. How are things, today Dr. Chris?

Chris Friesen: They're very good. Thanks for having me on your show.

Robert Plank: Cool. I'm glad to have you here. Tell me about yourself and tell me about this book and what you do and about all the cool things you can do to help people here.

Chris Friesen: Sure, sure. I'm a psychologist. I'm trained as a clinical, forensic, and neuropsychological. These are fancy ways of saying trained to diagnose and assess people with emotional problems, criminal problems (of course that's forensic), and neuropsychological is brain problems like Azheimers, brain injury, stroke. That kind of thing. A lot of my work these days is really focused on what I call high achievers. These are just people a lot of them are athletes, professional. Some Olympic, but also entrepreneurs, writers, academics. People who just want to take their game, their life, to the next level.

I do work with people and long story short I wrote this book you just described which is the first part of the High Achievement handbook. There's going to be three actual books in the series. This one is really about exactly what you said, finding out who you are, what's really important to you, what you really want, and to make sure that what you do with your life on the day to day basis is actually the right thing for you. Then, how to make it happen on a day to day basis in terms of being productive, efficient, that kind of thing.

Robert Plank: That's cool. I think the people that we're making this show for are online entrepreneurs and I keep thinking back to when I had the day job mindset and now I have the entrepreneur mindset and it seems like, let me know your thoughts on this, but it feels like to me there's a lot of people who haven't quite woken up, yet. A lot of people are at their day job doing the nine to five kind of stuff and it seems like a lot of us have so many things holding us back, but we're not yet really awake.

I think that a few years ago when I made the jump from the day job lifestyle to the entrepreneur lifestyle I had to almost relearn everything and the big thing that all these things that have previously been holding me back, they were still there, but I didn't realize they were there and it seems almost like making the jump and quitting the day job and starting a business and taking bigger risks brought all these little things in hiding to light. Does that makes sense?

Chris Friesen: Yeah. For sure. When we have day jobs, and I'm actually just like you in a lot of ways. I worked in a hospital settings. I worked in a prison. That kind of thing. When I broke off and have been working on my own for about six years, now just completely on my own as a consultant I guess you would call it. It's just like an entrepreneur in the professional psychology coaching or sports psychology realm. When we're working for companies, their very structured. We have to be there at a particular time. We have very set duties to complete and tasks to do, but when we work for ourselves it's really us having to motivate ourselves, having to stay on task and to be efficient and productive.

As much as we often daydream when we're at our old jobs, when we were at our day jobs, about how great we could be if we worked on our own there's a whole bunch of challenges that come up because one of the main issues is self motivation. Also self doubt. There's anxiety over sometimes money comes in a lot. You get lots of work and sometimes you're not getting a lot of work so your income kind of goes up and down as well. There's a whole bunch of challenges associated with that and a whole bunch of things you can do as well to help yourself cope with those sorts of things.

Robert Plank: Like what?

Chris Friesen: One thing is... I'll give you one quick example of a strategy you can do. One thing that happens when you work from home, this has to do with everything. This has to do with the Olympic athletes I work with. This has to do with the... It doesn't matter. This applies across the board. Basically, when you have a hard time getting yourself to do something you know you should be doing, in other words you're procrastinating, you're getting up and you're looking at email and you're never really getting down to the project you wanted to work on. It's call the five minute rule. What you do is this.

You tell yourself, you make a deal. You say, "Listen. I'm going to do the activity or the project or whatever. I'm going to work on my website, whatever it may be for five minutes and then I'm going to decide if I really want to do it because we tend to have it backwards when it comes to writing. People who are writing books, for example. People who have to exercise. People who have to work on a project from home, for example. We often have these negative predictions about how annoying it's going to be when you actually start doing it, or that you have to be in the zone. You have to be in the right mindset to start working. It's actually the opposite.

You want to start doing something and then decide because our predictions of how difficult something is going to be are often way off base. The trick is simply this, you start the activity, put your timer on for five or ten minutes. Whatever you want to do. In the book I say five minutes. Then, you decide, "Is it as bad as I thought?" If it's anywhere near as bad as you thought, give yourself 100% permission to stop. The research shows that when you do this 98% of the time you basically continue and it's never as bad as you predicted. That's the hardest thing to do is to get started. That hump to get yourself to the desk to start working. That's one real quick example of one strategy you can do that will help you be more productive.

Robert Plank: I love that. What that reminds me of when my sister was in college, she would always procrastinate writing term papers. At one point I would see her sit at the computer and just start typing and open up a word document and she would literally just start typing anything, even like "I'm typing on the computer. I don't feel like writing my term paper, but I'm typing, typing, typing" and stream of consciousness out and then after about a minute or two, she would kind of get bored of it and start writing the actual term paper. Then minutes in, guess what? Now, she feels like doing it once she actually picked up that speed I guess.

Chris Friesen: Yes. That's exactly true. There's an interesting thing. There's something in my next book I might call it the ten minute rule, but it's the opposite problem when people have a hard time stopping themselves from doing things they know they shouldn't do. This could be like when I work with athletes trying to make weight for a sports competition. You have to stay to a strict diet. For example they'll see some sort of food that's off the list and they want to eat it. When there's something like that, what you do is you put your timer on for ten minutes. You don't indulge in the activity.

Wait five to ten minutes and then decide whether really need to eat that donut, or for example, you feel the urge to check your email and you say, "I'm going to put my timer on for ten minutes because I have this urge right now to check. I'm going to wait ten minutes to see if I really need to check email or check Facebook or something like that. These are very good strategies; there's research to back them up, that are really effective to helping you stay on task. In other words accomplish your actual goals because often we'll go at the end of the day and you'll feel like I didn't really do a lot of the things I thought I would do. I had the entire day to work and I was not as productive as I thought and strategies like this can be really helpful to keep you on track.

Robert Plank: I like a couple of things about that. I like that first of all it almost seems like you switched the usual behavior pattern. Usually the thing that I should be doing I keep putting off ten minutes, putting it off ten minutes. Things like that. Then, the thing that I shouldn't be doing, I end up just doing it on impulse, like a lot of these bad decisions. Eating the wrong thing or I'm just going to check my phone really quick. I'm just going to check my email really quick, but like you said if you waited ten minutes to do that bad thing, now you're properly configured, I guess.

Chris Friesen: Yeah. Yeah that's the biggest hurdle especially for people who work from home like writers and a lot of entrepreneurs, is just that productivity issue. A lot of it has to do with structuring our environment as well. There's examples of famous writers who basically disconnect their computer from the internet altogether or they may have a different computer in a different room, that the only thing they do actually work on their book. If you're doing an online business, you can't be disconnected from the internet, but having things open in your browser; having quick buttons for Facebook, Twitter, or your favorite newsfeed easily accessible is going to spell disaster when it comes to your productivity.

You want to actually have those things removed. Alerts on your smartphone or your tablets from social media or things that are not pertaining to work should be turned off. I know with myself the iPhone has a do not disturb function. I'm not sure if it's been there the whole time, but I only discovered it relatively recently. When I get down to work, for example I'm working on the second book of this series, I turn that thing off. If someone texts me, it'll still show the text, but it won't buzz. Even though it's on just vibrate because it doesn't matter if you can hear it or it's vibrating, it doesn't make any difference. If it vibrates, you're going to look over at it. We know from research that every time you get distracted from the task you're working on; let's say you're working on content of your website, you're productivity goes way down.

Any distractions whether it's your home phone ringing, your cell phone ringing, text alerts, anything popping up on your computer, they all distract you and as we all know, now there are just hundreds of possible things that will distract you. You've got to really get to know your phone and computer settings and turn all those alerts off. They are not helping you. They feel really good. In the brain, what happens, we have a dopamine response which makes you want to seek out rewards and basically you want to check it because it feels good. It feels like the right thing to do. That's why people have discovered that having these alerts and everything like that are really helpful for their products because it does distract you. It makes you think about their products and about Facebook or whatever it may be, but they're actually destroying your potential. They're actually holding you back. If people start to do these things, you're going to start to perform much closer to your real potential.

Robert Plank: It's so funny you bring that up about notifications and things like that because it's one of those things where at least with me it seems like it creeps in. With the phone, I for sure turn off the pop ups for email, but then sometimes I noticed everyday I'll just happen to have the Facebook tab left open and I think it might just be because I've slowly become addicted, not to drugs, but to Facebook. Is there a trick or a secret to that. I know that you mentioned a lot of people who work on their websites and things like that and I just noticed that it seems harmless until I see other people I know have a million tabs on or they can't even seem to hold a conversation or put together a complete sentence because halfway through the sentence, something else pops up. Is there a secret to just getting unaddicted to all the notifications or is it just a matter of having those rules and just sticking with it for a few days? What's the secret there?

Chris Friesen: Yeah, a couple of things. One thing is to control your environment. In other words use the do not disturb. Like you said you want to have rules. For example, I am going to be working from nine to noon, I'm making it up, and the rule is I am not checking my email. I am not checking Facebook. I'm putting the do not disturb on. You want to make it a rule. Once you make it a rule in your head, you're more likely to follow it. You want to have something pretty solid. It's not like, "I'm going to try not to look so much." That's not going to work. You have to get in touch, also with your values. What's your purpose? What's your mission? What's really important to you?

Is it really just to be entertained with Facebook and that kind of thing or is it to do the best work you can do? I'm not like a Luddite. I'm not suggesting you get rid of technology. I have all the gadgets and everything and I love it, but you want to control it because the reality is technology is now controlling us, but we need to control the technology. What we want to do is say, "Look. I love checking Facebook. I feel good. It's fun. It's interesting. I want to know what's going on," but use it as a reward. You say, "Actually, at noon I'm going to actually check Facebook, but I'm not allowed to check Facebook or any of these things until I've done a certain amount of work; one hour, two hours, three hours." You want to have that pretty solid as a rule in your mind.

It is definitely hurting our abilities. Lots of research how distractions hurt our ability to stay focused and be productive and how much we can achieve in a particular amount of time. There's some research. I'm forgetting all the details now, but basically just a quick little distraction takes you basically five minutes to get back to where you were in terms of the mindset or whatever you were working on. That on its own is just slowing you down. You're just wasting time. You can always check those things later. You want to control that. There's actually a strategy that can help you be better able to resist distractions.

It's actually mindfulness meditation. It sounds kind of strange. There's no religious connotations. This is really just a form of brain training. What you do is very simple. Between five and thirty minutes, so you start off low, per day. Five to thirty minutes per day you sit in a chair. Turn off all your gadgets. No distractions. You close your eyes and you focus all of your attention on your breathing. As soon as your mind wanders, "Oh. I've got to call Joe later today" or "This is so boring." You'll have these thoughts. You allow yourself to have these thoughts, but you do something called you diffuse from these thoughts. What you do is you say, "I'm having the thought that this is boring. I am not my thoughts. I have all kinds of thoughts." Then you return your attention back to your breathing. You don't control your breathing. You're just focusing on it.

For example, how it's a bit colder when it goes in your nose and a bit warmer when it comes out. How your stomach moves or your chest moves a little bit as you breathe. Your mind's going to constantly go all over the place, but there is FMRI research, which is a fancy imaging thing for your brain, research that shows the pre-frontal cortex (a part of the frontal lobe) actually thickens, measurably thickens after a few weeks of doing this and that part of the brain controls your ability to stay focused, to not get overwhelmed with negative emotions, and to stay on task and stay focused on whatever goal you're focusing on at the moment. That's an exercise you can do that'll improve your life in many different ways. There's a lot of research on that, now to help you be better able to resist distractions when you're trying to work. Those are a couple of examples. I have more, of course, but those are a couple of examples.

Robert Plank: Cool. I really like that. Out of all these things that there are to do to fix distractions, for example, like you said don't check email in the morning or do these things to train your brain to be better or do this mindful meditation. I keep thinking back to when I was a lot younger and I wrote a lot of that stuff off as hippie sort of stuff. Voodoo almost. Now, it's become... People who teach the self help or the mindset kind of stuff or from the little techniques that I do, it seems it's more scientifically accepted and even a lot of the examples that you gave there are not just made up stuff, but actually scientifically backed from studies and things like that.

What I like about the call so far and the things that you've shared with us so far is that there's lots of little exercises, so it seems like people who are only sort of off track or their whole time management or their whole life, their whole mindset is a disaster either way, they don't have to make any of these huge drastic changes if they don't want to. They can just apply some of your little exercises. So far what I like is you said that the five minute rule is great for procrastination. Instead of having to decide if you're in the moment or in the zone or whatever because you're not yet, just do it for five minutes and then after that five minute period decide if the thing that you imagined you were about to do if it was actually as bad as doing it and then the other thing.

The ten minute rule where if there's a bad habit you do that you shouldn't do then wait ten minutes and then decide when you actually are in a better mindset. It sounds like having a good structure for the things that you do is good. If you just have some sort of project you need to do where you're unplugged then have a special room or special computer or special area or something where you can just do it, and I liked also when you were talking about especially when people are just getting distracted in general, they're getting away from their purpose and their why and their mission and their values and stuff like that. So far lots of cool little helpful exercises that you can just plug in. Can we talk about something big and huge. Out of all the people you see that you're helping with your training and stuff, what do you see the number one mistake everyone's making that you can help them with?

Chris Friesen: If there is one tip or one thing that I've noticed and research supports this. There's one thing that differentiates the most successful people from the least successful people, whatever that means; in athletics, entrepreneurship, or whatever it is. The most successful people live their lives and make their day to day and moment to moment decisions based on their values, their purpose and goals, not based on their moods. Not based on their immediate circumstances. Not based on their energy levels. Obviously you can tell this is a summary statement of what we just talked about. That is the global thing. A lot of people get caught up in the moment with negative emotions and that kind of thing and they get thrown off. They start to live their lives in a reactionary mode as opposed to a proactive mode.

Once you figure out, and my book is all about figuring out your personality, your why, and your values. As you can tell I like to give tips and exercises that'll help people do this easily. Then, you basically plan your life around those things. One of the worst things people do is to make their to do list on the day of. The morning of they'll write down, "What have I got to do today?" You're actually better off making your to do list the night before. Of course, this is all informed. Your to do list is all informed by you're going to come up with your long term goals. In other words I call them retirement or old age goals, all the way down to your ten year goals, your five year goals, your one year goal. I have all these sheets in my book to fill these out.

You want to live your life based on trying to achieve those big goals. These are often, not necessarily making a million dollars, that could be a goal. It could also be a value based goal like being a good person. I want people to think I was a helpful, caring person and not a selfish person. There's a whole structure to do this in the book, but one thing you do is you make your to do list for tomorrow. First of all, you make a weekly thing. Every Sunday you think what is the goal for this week and you kind of figure out what can I focus on because you're going to have a better idea of what's happening in the week. On Tuesday I have a doctors appointment or I have to call my web designer on Wednesday.

You have those sort of things on your schedule. You have them planned in. They can't really be moved. You plan around that the stuff that actually... Steven Covey in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People talks about this. He calls them quadrant two activities. These are activities or things you need to do that are not urgent, but they're very important. For example, exercising is not urgent, but it's important. It's going to make you better at what you do. It's going to make you smarter. It's going to actually increase blood flow to the brain and all sorts of good things. It improves mood.

Let's say working on a new product that maybe you have an existing product that needs to be cared for, but the new product is not urgent, necessarily, but it is important. You've got to fit those not urgent, but important tasks into the week. Then, for example you don't make a to do list the morning of. You make it the night before. After you've done all of your work and you're about to close down for the day, you basically go and make your to do list for tomorrow and you use that to guide you. What happens is if you make a to do list in the morning after you've checked email all sorts of stuff is going to come and distract you from all sorts of emails that seem urgent, but they're not really important. Other things that are just going to pop up.

You want to have a little bit of perspective by making the to do list the night before. The feeling, there's a neurological response, there's a closure feeling when you check off things on your to do list. It makes you feel actually competent and productive. That helps you keep going because you feel like you've accomplished things. In my book I have a section called Is the To Do List Dead? I say it's not dead. It's actually really important. You want to still have to do lists. Having your global why always in perspective; knowing what you're bigger, longer term goals are and reviewing them regularly.

It's going to help you keep on track with what's important to you, what you should be working on, and not get distracted by the minutiae of the world. We've never had this problem to this extent in human history with like we said earlier, from text to people call you. Anyone can contact anyone at any point. We get hundreds of emails a day, now. It's complete distraction and it's making people unbelievable unproductive and not feeling fulfilled because they don't feel in control. Your life is being dictated by everyone else it seems.

Robert Plank: Right. It sounds like from everything you have to say it's nothing super crazy; nothing super ridiculous. It sounds like a new slant on a lot of things that people know they should be doing, but it maybe haven't been doing, but because you have all these tips and exercises it takes this thing that people know they should have a to do list. They should make better decisions as opposed to just making things impulsively. It's cool that everything you've talked to us about, today is that it's just a new slant on things that should work a certain way, but now because you have these little tidbits, now they're actually working the way they should. You're mentioning your book and there's some cool exercises and things like that in your Achieve Book. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Chris Friesen: Yeah. A lot of the stuff I've talked about is in the book. Pretty much everything except the ten minute rule. That's going to go in the next book. I kind of discovered this after the fact; after I wrote the first book. It should have gone in the first book. Another thing that the book really focuses on that makes it different from a lot of other self help books is getting to know your personality. I have a big affinity to personality because my undergrad thesis, my masters thesis, my PhD thesis were all based about normal personality, what it predicts and that kind of thing. Long story short, personality psychologists from around the world have basically determined that there are five global personality dimensions that we all differ on and I can go through all of them, but I'll go through a key one that may be relevant to a lot of listeners.

They'll be familiar with this. One is extroversion versus introversion. We hear this. There's books about introversion. Unfortunately a lot of the books out there on introversion are actually mixing up a number of these global fiver personality dimensions into introversion which is not really in line with research. People who are extroverted are just like we think. They're more outgoing. They're more into exciting things. They're attracted to excitement. Let's see what else I can say about that. They tend to have higher levels of energy. They experience a lot more positive and enthusiastic emotions. People who are introverted tend to be a bit more reserved, a bit more serious. T

they're not as highly energetic. They're not too fond of focusing on a lot more excitement and stimulation. They like working alone or one one. Knowing where you fall on this dimension of extroversion versus introversion is very useful. For example, people who are introverted from a brain perspective, it really has to do with your tolerance for external stimulation. It's not just a social thing. People who are introverted, their brains are actually revving a little bit higher. EEG studies show this. Their brains are revving a little bit faster. It's not anxiety. It's just their brains rev faster. What this means is they hit their red line a bit more quickly than an extrovert who's brains are revving a lot slower.

What this means is when you have external stimulation and you're introverted, you're going to only be able to tolerate so much stimulation whether it's social, whether it's being in Las Vegas. It could be sounds or music. It could be working in an open concept office environment with all the noise and distractions. Think of like a newsroom environment. People who are introverted are going to get overstimulated very quickly and if you know that about yourself, what it means is you can still handle those, but you can only do it in short spurts and you have to have recovery times where you're alone or you're relaxing and are not being stimulated. People who are extroverted are they opposite.

They actually feed of all that stimulation and they feel really abnormal, which manifests in being bored when they're working alone. They need to seek out lots of stimulation whether it's social or otherwise. A lot of people work from home. It doesn't mean everyone who works from home is introverted. If you tend to be on the higher side of what I described, in other words you're extroverted, you're going to just have to make sure that you seek out experiences that are exciting or socially stimulating whether it's you do some hardcore rock climbing after work or during your lunch hour or you spend times with friends and talk to people and do that.

You have to think of this as a need and if you don't get that extroverted needs met, you're going to actually feel uncomfortable, unfulfilled, unhappy. Vice versa, if you're really introverted, working from home is usually ideal and you realize that you're going to need... If you have to do stuff where you have to meet lots of people and do lots of meeting, you're going to get really exhausted really quickly and knowing that about yourself is going to be helpful to be able to predict what you can handle and how to perform at your peak.

Robert Plank: That's kind of interesting because as opposed to just the natural tendency of people is to think in this situation I act this way or I tend to be more like this, but it sounds like once they figure out where do they actually fall in these tests and things like that, then they can actually make logic based decisions. They can say, "I need an exciting break. I need to go rock climbing, " or "I'm fine being in this environment." It's almost kind of spooky. It's almost like pulling under the hood and figuring out what type of engine you have or something.

Chris Friesen: Yeah. When I talk about these, this is the very first section I talk about when it comes to achieving your main goals for you. You've really got to know yourself. This is the hardware. Your personality is your hardware. Fifty percent, so 5-0 percent is genetically inherited. It's inherited from obviously your parents and the other 50% due to your environment or experiences you've had in life. More so in early life and the first twenty years of your life and less so as an adult. Your personality can still change. Something to keep in mind is you don't want to label yourself too much and say, "Well, I'm an introvert. I can't do those sorts of things," or "I'm an extrovert. I can't work alone or do those sorts of things."

The research doesn't really support that. It's really about how much you can handle of each of those things. People who are naturally, biologically introverted can still act extroverted and they still can have lots of good social skills. It's just that they can only handle it for certain amounts of time before they just feel over stimulated and it's just not fun. We do live in an extrovertedly biased world where extroverts are considered to be the ideal personality. The part where you fall on that personality dimension is supposed to be ideal, but of course the introvert books out there, which are not perfectly accurate unfortunately, but I do agree with the idea that introverts do have a lot to offer, but just knowing where you stand you can help predict where you're going to succeed and where you're going to potentially fail.

A lot of people learn this through work. They'll be like, "I worked in a library and I loved it," or "I worked in sales at a Best Buy where I had to talk to customers all day and it was loud and I loved that or I hated that." Often these have to do with our brain's hardware in terms of introversion and extroversion. Just knowing that about yourself is really important, but don't take it as suggesting that you can't do the opposite. You can do the opposite like an introvert can act like an extrovert for example. It's just that you can do it only for a limited amount of time before you start to feel burnt out. You want to live your life congruent with your natural personality and you've got to know that about yourself to be able to perform at your peak, basically perform at your best and be as productive as you can and just be happy and satisfied with what you're doing.

Robert Plank: That's what we all want, right?

Chris Friesen: Yeah.

Robert Plank: I think that's a really good message and I like everything you have to say. Could you tell everyone one more time what the name of the book is, where they can get the book, and where they can find out anything else you have for sale or anything else more about you?

Chris Friesen: The book is on Amazon in paperback. It's on Kindle and it's on Audible as well. The Audible came out relatively recently and I've gotten lots of good feedback on that. I didn't narrate it myself. I got a professional narrator, voice actor guy who does Fox commercials. He's really great. His name's Chris A. Bell. The book is called Achieve. The subtitle is Find out who you are, what you really want, and how to make it happen. My website is FriesenPerformance.com. I have a newsletter and I give tips.

One of my podcasts for example, I send it out. I'm on Twitter, @friesonperform and I'm on Facebook. Look up Frieson Sport and Performance Psychology. I believe you can find my Facebook page. I post a lot of articles either written by myself or podcasts I've been on or a lot of articles on things like I've talked about. Tips for being more productive, to be more successful. Stuff about personality. Stuff about the brain that are really applicable, that have an applied message, not just hardcore research science. It's more about articles about how to maximize your potential. Those are the best ways to get in contact with me. Yeah.

Robert Plank: Awesome. You shared a lot of good tips and I like a lot of it and I think that I'm going to be using the five minute rule and the ten minute rule in my own life. Lots of good stuff. Thanks for being on the show, Chris.

Chris Friesen: Yeah. Thanks for having me.[/showhide]

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118: Focus Until You Succeed: Perseverance, Forward Motion, Relationships, and The Invisible Organization with Mitch Russo

Mitch Russo, former President of Chet Holmes, co-creator of Business Breakthroughs with Tony Robbins, and author of the book The Invisible Organization: How Ingenious CEOs Are Creating Thriving, Virtual Companies, talks with us about what mindsets, skills, and actions you must take to become an entrepreneur who perseveres and succeeds.

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Mitch Russo has worked with Chet Holmes. He worked with Tony Robbins. He has a new book called The Invisible Organization. Mitch, welcome to the show today.

Mitch Russo: Thank you, Robert. Great to be here.

Robert Plank: I'm glad to have you. Could you tell us about yourself and what it is that you do?

Mitch Russo: Sure. I'll give you a little bit of background first so you know who I am. I was born in Brooklyn, New York. I had a rock band up until the age of 17, and I probably learned more about business in my rock band than any other single thing as a kid. We booked gigs all over New York City. We probably were the highest paid bands under 18 years old in the entire state for a little while. Back in 1977, we were getting $500 a gig, which, in today's dollars, is actually ridiculous.

Robert Plank: Especially for an 18-year-old, yeah.

Mitch Russo: Exactly. We were so young, we weren't even able to drive our own van. We had to hire somebody to help us get to a gig because we were too young to drive, but I learned so much about marketing, about sales, about positioning, even about quality. It was really an incredible experience. Then I went on to... I moved to Massachusetts to take a job with a computer company, and I ended up in sales. I did a lot of cool stuff when I got to Massachusetts, but probably one of the most memorable things I did was I started a software company. I started it. Literally, as they say, it was a garage operation. I started it, literally, above my garage in the one room that nobody knew what to do with in my house.

My neighbor and I got together and we built a company out of an idea that I had, and that grew to 100 people, and we had moved the company 5 times over the course of the 9 years, until we eventually sold it for 8 figures to Sage Plc in the UK. Man, what an incredible experience that was. Again, there's no better way to learn than to make all of the mistakes that we made and have to fix them or die. It's correct your mistakes or die, so you've just got to step up and make it happen. There were nights that we would be looking at the payroll and thinking... My partner and I would look at each other and go, "You know, we don't have enough money in the account to cover payroll." The two of us go into our wallet, and we started making the rounds at cash machines and taking money off of our credit cards to make payroll. I mean, it was that bad at one point, but later, everything went right and we were able to finally make things happen.

You know the story of The Hero's Journey, Robert?

Robert Plank: Joseph Campbell.

Mitch Russo: Exactly. There were so many points in time when we were on the brink of failure, and we didn't quite know what to do, and then we just persevered. We just kept going, and then boom. It just happened, and it worked. That was a great experience, and I finished up with that. After I sold the company, I then went and worked for the people who bought us, Sage, and I ended up running the entire U.S. division for Sage, and I was actually completely done, at the age of 44, with millions of dollars in my pocket and theoretically able to retire if I wanted to, but I couldn't. I absolutely would be bored out of my mind, so I started investing in other people's startups. I started working with the venture capital community, and I started building a portfolio of companies that I invested in and friends that I made throughout the entire process.

That went on until I got a call from a buddy of mine, Chet Holmes. Now, Chet and I had been friends since my Timeslips days, and he said to me, "Mitch, I need some help. It's time for you to get back into the business game," and I said, "Hmm, okay. What do you need?" Next thing I know, I'm building a sales force for him, and over the course of 6 weeks, I tripled the sales force, and we were now doubling revenue. After about 3 months, he said, "Look, I've got to have you as my president," and so I said, "Okay," and I joined the company. Within 90 days of becoming president of Chet's company, we began negotiation with Tony Robbins.

This was an ongoing process. We were on a late-night phone call every week for 4 or 5 months planning what the company was going to look like, planning how we were going to roll out into the marketplace, planning exactly what we were going to sell, and then going through a legal agreement and negotiating all the points of a legal agreement, until, finally, everything came to a head in Las Vegas in November of 2008. That was the Ultimate Business Mastery Success Event, The UBMS, and that's where we recorded over 50 hours of content, packaged it up, and that single event ended up generating over $20 million in revenue by selling the packaged videos with workbooks and coaching.

That was quite an experience, and we were growing at quite a pace. I mean, we had started at a relatively... just about as a startup, but we were generating over $25 million a year at the point when Chet, my partner in the business, got sick. Unfortunately, he passed away several months later. When Chet died, the family, of course, didn't know what to do. They thought maybe they should just sell the company. Really, I didn't fit there any longer. I mean, my friend was gone. I asked Tony what he thought, and Tony told me to do what I needed to do, which is what I would have expected of Tony, and so I decided to leave. The first thing I did when I left the company is I called a couple of friends and said, "Hey. I just want to let you know I'm going to be leaving BBI, and I'm going to be on my own. I just want you to know where I am. If you have anything interesting you want to talk to me about or want to show me or get me involved in, let me know."

I called Jay Abraham, and Jay and I had known each other for many years. We worked together on several projects together. I said to Jay, I said, "Jay, I just want to let you know I'm out of here," and he said to me, "Mitch, you cannot let what you know go to waste. You have to find a way to take what you know, and you've got to teach it to others." Tony used to say the same thing to me all the time. I said, "Okay. All right, Jay, I'm going to do something. I don't know what I'm going to do yet, but I'm going to do something," and that became the beginning of me writing my book, The Invisible Organization.

Robert Plank: Cool. I mean, lots of stuff to get from where you were to where you are now, and I'm hearing a lot of repeat lessons. There was the perseverance part of it, like when you and your business partner went to all of the ATM machines just to get to that point, get to the breakthrough point. There is the forward motion, where you could have quit, and you kept going. Then what I'm hearing a lot of, too, were all these relationships you built, like Tony Robbins and Chet Holmes and Jay Abraham, where it started a long time ago, but then, after a while, kind of paid off. With all of that, is there a big secret to all this? Do you have a big secret from having all these successes? Is there something, aside from those 3 things, that's just been responsible for getting you where you are?

Mitch Russo: You know, I wish I had something super profound to tell you, but it's very simple. You never actually fail until you stop doing what you're doing. Until you give up, you never actually fail. In my life, the lesson that I've learned is that it's best to focus on something until you succeed, and I generally don't stop until I do. Does that help?

Robert Plank: Yeah, and it's like... What is that quote? There's something, words like, "If it's not working, change your methods, not the goal," or something like that.

Mitch Russo: Yeah. Yeah, we ended up pivoting time after time, but we never lost sight of what the end goal was, and we never stopped pursing it. No matter what, I never do, because there's just... I mean, unless the world changes in such a dramatic way, and it never does. Business is business. People still have the same motivation everyday, and that's why your products are always out there doing so well, because people want to be in business.

Now, when I work with private clients, I see that in their eyes. I see that when I work with them. I hear it in their voice. They're discouraged, and they want to stop, and I don't let that happen with my clients. We push through, and we make it so that they end up getting what they want, because success comes not in a flash and not by luck. It comes from a lot of hard work, and you know this from your own experience. It takes a long time to be successful, but it looks easy. You can look at me now and go, "Oh, wow. Look at all the stuff he did," but it's taken me a long time to get here, and you know that.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. It only takes 20 years to become an overnight success. Is there a trick or is there a secret to knowing the difference between, like you said, having to push forward versus an idea that just won't work? If a company invented cell phones at the wrong period in time, it just wouldn't work, no matter how good of an idea. If someone had invented tablets at the wrong time, no matter what, it wouldn't have worked. How do you know the difference between you're just kind of hitting your head against the wall and this thing that's never going to happen versus you just need to get through the rough patch? How do you know the difference?

Mitch Russo: Okay. I have a story about an entrepreneur who went through this. I have a friend who, at a young age, achieved notoriety because he invented a cable drive mechanism for bicycles, and he was featured on news programs all over the country. This cable system was quite innovative. It didn't require gears and sprockets. All he did was use friction and a special shape of a hub, and he was able to create this very simple power transport system using cables. He went to try and market it to bicycle companies, and nobody wanted it. The bicycle companies, at first, thought it was a cool idea, but they realized that it would really make no impact to the end product. Sure, it might be cable-driven instead of gear-driven, but it didn't seem to change the end result of riding a bike.

Continued to do this, and he didn't stop. Finally, he said, "Well, they don't want it. Maybe I'll just start my own company, and maybe I'll just build a bicycle company," so he went and he spent all of his life savings and poured it into building this company. He built a manufacturing plant, and he sold like 60 bicycles total and shut the company down. He never recovered from that. Here's the way I look at it, I think, at some point, when the market tells you distinctly, "No. This is not good," then you don't necessarily have to give up, but you do have to at least pivot. You do have to find another way.

Here's a pivot he could have tried. He could have tried to figure out where else his patented cable drive system could have an application in another industry, but he never did this. He just accepted the fact, then he just persevered to death, if you will. It's hard to know, but you've got to get feedback from the market, and you've got to keep trying things, and that's when you finally know, "Hey. If it's not going to work, you just keep trying it and trying something else."

Robert Plank: I like that way of thinking, and especially how there was a little piece in there, near the beginning of that story, how it didn't catch on because, even though it was a really cool invention, it didn't actually help anyone, right? If only that invention had made it where you could ride the bike twice as fast, or it cost way less, or something like that, that would have been an improvement in someone's experience of using a bike, but it seems like it was on the right track, but not quite there, I guess, right?

Mitch Russo: Yeah, it was a solution looking for a problem. It was cool, and it was innovative and clever, but to build a life around a solution without solving a problem is just going to lead you down that path. By the way, lots of people start that way and ended up that way, but they don't get to the point of realizing, "Hey. You know something? I've created something of which there is no need for in the marketplace." There are some people who create stuff that's too advanced for the current marketplace. If you would have invented the internet in 1985, no one would have gotten it. There wasn't the systems in place to support it. Yeah, it might have been a great idea, but the time of it was completely wrong.

Robert Plank: I like that. I like that way of thinking. Yeah, the things going through my head when you mention that are stuff like Twitter, where it's super goofy, took a while to catch on, and so we pushed through a while and saw people were using it. I think Twitter, in fact, only kind of caught on because they started hooking it up with all the mobile apps and stuff like that. If cell phones had taken a little longer to develop, maybe Twitter wouldn't have caught on. On the other hand, you had to push through those tough years to actually give it a chance and see if people were using it, but if 5 more years had gone on, if 10 more years had gone on, and it was just not picking up, then I guess that's time to quit then.

Mitch Russo: Sure. Let's talk about Twitter just for a second because I think it's educational, at least, to take a look and... Now, Twitter is considered kind of a failure, when it comes to the market, because it doesn't really have... I mean, it's not Facebook, so anything that's not Facebook is kind of a failure. The problem with Twitter is that it just hasn't been adding a lot of new users. It hasn't been getting a lot more usage. What is the problem with Twitter? Well, the problem with Twitter is that they haven't found their pivot yet. They will. They're not giving up. I mean, they might be sold before they can, but they need to find their pivot.

Now, I wrote the CEO of Twitter and I said, "Here is what I think you should do. I think you should stream live events, and I think because people love to interact with each other during live events, why don't you stream concerts? Why don't you let people tweet throughout the entire process of watching that concert streaming through your network, and let them pay $1 for that, or something?" Of course, I never got a response from my suggestion, but that's the kind of pivots that you've got to keep thinking about when things are failing.

Robert Plank: Even recently, they've kind of tied into Periscope. They're definitely trying new things and seeing what will catch on.

Mitch Russo: Right, exactly.

Robert Plank: Even like you mentioned to me, I put out a WordPress plugin, and that's the same kind of thought process. I'll put out a backup plugin and membership plugin, stuff like that, and I'll put it out as, first of all, a thing that I need and a thing that other people need, but mostly just something that I need that does not exist. That way, even if it's a failure, I still get something out of it, but then also, I'll see these projects through the number of years they have to go through, but I'm not just putting all my eggs in one basket. I have this plugin and that plugin because I know that there's things I need, and people might end up picking them up, and they'll get traction, and then I can go back later and connect the dots and say, "Okay. Now I can combine all these things, and now you get this plugin. You're going to want these other plugins, or you get them all in a package together."

I think there's just something to that. When we're mentioning all these examples, there's something to just having these experiments, I guess is what we're talking about, these experiments, and just see what people use, how people use them, and then, like you said, get to the point where maybe you pivot, and then there's the real money from there.

Mitch Russo: Well, exactly. The other thing that you're doing is you're building a portfolio of products. One product... and I'm just going to use just make-believe numbers. If one product generates $10,000 or $20,000 a year and you say, "Well, that's fine. I mean, it was worth doing it, even if it's not a retirement fortune. We can generate another one, and then another one," and before you know it, you have 6 products generating $20K a year, and then maybe the seventh one will be a bit hit, you see? You never stop because something isn't working, but you find a way to pivot within that, and that simply means if that doesn't work, something like it will work. What was the brilliance of that first idea? What problem were you trying to solve that you found the solution to? Who else has that problem?

When we first created Timeslips, it was a popup time-tracking tool that we thought, "Oh, everybody's going to need this. Everybody needs to keep track of time." Like idiots, we advertised in PC Magazine and spent an entire... All of our savings for marketing went into 2 ads in PC Magazine, and we got 6 orders for $100 an order. I mean, clearly, not everybody needed it, but here was the cool thing about that. I was able to take the 500 bingo leads... which I don't know if you've ever heard that term before.

Robert Plank: No.

Mitch Russo: You know the cards that used to sit inside of magazines where you could circle the number of the ads that you were interested in? Have you ever seen those before?

Robert Plank: I think a long time ago, but yeah.

Mitch Russo: Right. What they would do is people would read the magazine, and instead of sending away for information from everyone, they would take it, and they would just circle the number of the ad. Most of those leads were worthless, but I got 500 of those leads, and I called every single one on the phone. I said, "Why did you circle that ad? What interested you about the product?" I found out that a third of the people who had circled my ad were lawyers. I said, "Hmm, lawyers seem to be attracted to this. Maybe I should market directly to lawyers."

That's how my product eventually took off. I found my market. I didn't know what it was at first. I thought it was everybody, which, clearly, I was inexperienced, but that's what I thought, but then I finally honed in on what would eventually become my true target market. Over the course of 18 months, I went from being completely unknown to being the number 1 selling product for lawyers, when it came to keeping track of their time.

Robert Plank: That's really cool. In that case, it was almost like the market found you.

Mitch Russo: Well, you might say that, but we uncovered a need. We had a cool solution to a problem, but we didn't quite know who needed the solution. We knew it was a problem that people had. We didn't know exactly who needed it. Even though I say it was a mistake to have run that ad in PC Magazine, if I hadn't have done it, I would have never found my true calling, my true market. Sometimes you do need... Screwing up is what gets you to learn how you get onto the right path.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. It's almost like if you're too lucky or if everything you do works out right away, it's almost a bad thing because the one time that something goes wrong, you're not going to know how to react. It's almost like, as entrepreneurs, we kind of have to get toughened up or something.

Mitch Russo: That's right. Since we're on this topic, I want to lead this into what I'm doing now, because I think it's important.

Robert Plank: Okay.

Mitch Russo: One of the things that happened to me at Timeslips Corporation is that we sold a lot of software, and we used to give away 30 days of free support with every copy of the software we sold. What ended up happening is that when we first got into the retail stores, our products sold like crazy. Now, our phone lines for support were getting overwhelmed, and I was struggling to keep up, in terms of hiring enough tech support people, of building the internal systems to make sure that those calls can get answered. With all of that, now I had customers, clients, who were asking for individual attention where we had to visit their office. I mean, when you deal with lawyers, sometimes you've got to go overboard in support because, you know, you don't want to get sued, and they're certainly litigious, as you know.

In this one situation, I had a woman who was the vice president of the technology division of the California Bar Association, and she was having a problem with my software. I said, "Geez, I've got to get out there somehow," so I did something unexpected. I called another client who happened to live in the area and I said, "Would you do me a favor and run over to this office and see if you could help this woman? She's having some difficulty," and she said, "Oh, yeah, sure. I'd love to," and I knew she was an expert at our software. I said, "Well, whatever it is, don't worry. I'll take care of you," and she goes, "Oh, no, no. For you, Mitch, it's a favor. I'd be happy to."

She goes over there, and I'm like on pins and needles now. I don't know if I did the right thing. Maybe that could explode in my face, but about 4 hours later, she called me back and she said, "Oh, yeah. She's all set, and I've got to tell you, something super happened to me." I said, "What was it?" She said, "She gave me a $100 bill." All of a sudden, the light bulb went off in my head, and then she said to me, "By the way, if anybody else you know needs help, let me know, because I'm happy to help them." Then I realized, "Well, maybe I could build a network of people that I could send to other people's offices as consultants and get them to help my clients. Maybe these people calling themselves certified consultants would be interested in even building a profession around supporting my software." That's how I designed and built the Timeslips Certified Consultant Network.

Now, the reason I disconnected to our earlier conversation is because I totally screwed it up. I did it simply by selling a test, and if you pass the test, you were certified, but at that point, I had about 60 of these people running around wreaking havoc with my clients. I had to actually call every client that had a problem with one of my certified consultants and figure out how to make them happy while literally shutting down the entire program and then reengineering it from scratch to make sure that the mistakes I uncovered would never happen again. When I did that, and it took me like 5 or 6 months to do it, and I relaunched the program, it was an incredible success, and it grew to 350 people paying us every year to be our third largest sales channel, to support all of our customers. My tech support dropped by 20%. My sales went up by $1 million, and the program generated another $1 million for me that same year.

That's-

Robert Plank: Freaking amazing.

Mitch Russo: Isn't that amazing? By the way, and the reason I say it is that's what I do now for clients. I build what I call power tribes for my clients, which are mobilizing their best clients as certified coaches, or certified consultants, and with that, we were able to generate 6 and 7 figures almost out of thin air.

Robert Plank: That's cool, and let's talk about that. Let's talk about what it is that you're doing now and this whole new idea you have about The Invisible Organization.

Mitch Russo: Sure. Well, like I said, it started from having solved the problem on my own. I wrote about it on my blog post, and someone came to me and said, "Would you do this for me?" I said, "Sure. I'd be happy to," and I didn't even really remember... I mean, I remembered having done it, of course, and I remembered all the stuff that went wrong and all the mistakes I made, but we didn't have the internet back then, so I literally was flying blind on this, but we did it together, my client and I. Amazingly, it worked perfectly. I mean, they were blown away. We launched that program from absolutely nothing. 10 weeks later, we launched that program, and it immediately generated 6 figures on their first launch. Now we're redoing the launch every quarter, and it's going to be generating between $300,000 and $500,000 per launch, and we're going to be now doing this ad infinitum every single quarter.

The way I do this is it's very much a "done with you/done for you" program. It's like I'm a business consultant, and I work with my clients side-by-side, and together we craft all the tools required to get people certified. I have a lot of the tools that I give my clients in advance. One of the things I do, and this is the most fun of the whole process, is we design a new business model around their company as to how they will use these multiple streams of income and generate them from their certified consultants, and more importantly, how the certified consultants will generate income from the services that we provide.

Unlike standard certification where you buy a certificate... like a digital marketer's program. Are you familiar with them?

Robert Plank: Yeah, a little bit.

Mitch Russo: Yeah. What happens is if you qualify, you can buy a program to become certified in one of their disciplines. The only thing you need to qualify is a credit card. I mean, anybody can become, quote-unquote, certified. Well, with my clients, we don't do that. We only work with people we already know have an intimate working knowledge of the fields, of the fields of business, and their product. At that point, we do very intensive training. We bring them to 100% competency through the guidance of building these courses that I had learned how to do.

I built Tony Robbins' virtual training environment with Tony. He taught me so much about what it takes to build a virtual training environment. We build those now for our clients, and these are amazing, because once someone goes through the program, they totally know what they're doing, and then we put them into an apprenticeship to make sure that they can totally do what they just learned, and then we work out a way so that they can make money right out of the gate. When they're making money, they will renew next year, they will attend our programs, and that's how we build multiple reoccurring streams of revenue.

Robert Plank: That's cool, and I think what I've been hearing a lot from you, Mitch, as far as the stories that you're telling, is that there's a lot of the little details and little bit of course correction, right? As opposed to just saying, like you said... Some people offer their certification, and it's like when you send in to buy a doctorate for like $500 or something.

Mitch Russo: Yeah.

Robert Plank: It's like, "Okay. Here's the money." "Thanks, you're certified," and that would be great for just a little one-off sale, but then that's not a real long-term business. It sounds like, with everything you do, you make sure that you understand... When someone buys from you, there's a clear reason why they're buying from you, what they're going to get from you, and then what that will lead to afterwards, so now they get certified, go through the apprenticeship to make sure that they're 100% there, but then now they have their own kind of business. I think that's pretty cool.

Mitch Russo: Yeah. If you think of everything as a progression... and by the way, you do a great job of this. I really love the way you guys do this, but you've got to think of business as, "Okay. Well, you could sell somebody something, and you can make some money, but what will they need next, and where should they go next, if they're successful with the last thing you sold them?" As long as you keep that in mind as you begin this path of product creation and of leading people through how to create something of value that you know how to do, then you're going to be successful, and you can have a sustained income from helping others all the time. That's how I see it.

Robert Plank: What will they need next? That's pretty good advice, just in general.

Mitch Russo: Exactly, exactly. In my case, when I enter a business contract with a client, I don't just sell them some consulting services, "Pay me some money, and I'll talk to you or work with you for 3 months until your program launches." When you sign a contract with me, we are together for a minimum of 3 years, and the reason I want it to be long-term is because there is going to be a series of changes as your tribe grows and develops. There will be problems and questions that come up that I know I can answer for you, that if I left you alone, you might choose the wrong path and destroy what we've just spent so much time and money to build.

My goal is to guide my clients to the point so that this isn't just a little itty-bitty 7-figure program at the end of 3 years. It's generating $3 to $5 million consistently year after year, and it does, so-

My end goal here is not to build a one-shot sale. It's to build lifetime relationships with everyone I come in contact with.

Robert Plank: Cool. Along those lines of what you were just mentioning about how some of these companies, they're at a certain point, and then as they mature or their size changes, they have a different set of needs. I understand that you have a book called The Invisible Organization, which is all about getting companies to go virtual. Is that right?

Mitch Russo: Yes. Yes, and the book that I wrote is really... At the time I wrote it, I poured everything that I learned about building Tony Robbins' and Chet Holmes' business breakthroughs. As a virtual company, we had 300 people attached to the company, and I ran the whole thing from my spare bedroom, and I traveled all over the world. I'm an award winning photographer as well, so I would sneak away, and I'd be in Iceland or Jordan or Morocco or any of the places that I do travel to all over the world, and I could still run the company from a laptop, which is just so thrilling to me, but not just a little solo company. I'm talking about a full-blown $25 million in sales a year company with 300 people.

Robert Plank: Crazy. How is it done from just you in your spare bedroom?

Mitch Russo: Well, first of all, like anything else, it takes some planning. I work with my maps. I love my mapping, and so I tend to do a bit of overplanning every single thing that I do. When I work with a client, the first thing I do is I start building mind maps of the entire business model and process that shows every step of the way, what's supposed to happen, and what should happen if what we expect doesn't happen. We're prepared with contingency plans across the board.

When you start with good plans and great thinking, the next thing you need are good people to execute. I surround myself with the best people that I can, and that's one of the great secrets of building a virtual organization, because I know other really smart people who want the same lifestyle as I do, who want great money, who want to be able to work from home or from wherever they tend to be. My VP of sales spent 2 months a year in Hawaii and ran the entire sales division and didn't miss a beat, because we were a virtual organization. She showed up for her sales meetings everyday, did her training everyday. Nothing was lost by the process.

In fact, Stanford University did a study, a landmark study, called Does Working from Home Work, and in that study, it showed that 13% productivity increases across the board were possible for people who would be working from home. If you interview these people, whether they're low-end telephone sales people or high-end executives, what we really find out is that they're even more productive working from home than working at a company. They save hours driving a car, burning gasoline, and wearing out an automobile, and they save frustration, that like-sucking commute that most people hate. You don't have that commute. I certainly don't. Why should half the world have to get into a car every morning and battle traffic in rain and sleet and snow and have accidents and spend money on gas and eat out for lunches that are unhealthy when you could have a life building a virtual company? That's what the book is about.

Robert Plank: That's cool. Yeah, in this day and age, with the Wi-Fi and the internet being so fast, there's no reason for anyone to deal with that commute. My mother used to wake up at 4:00 in the morning everyday just to get on the road by 5:00 or 6:00, just to drive 2 sometimes 3, 4 hours in traffic just to start the day at 8:00 or 9:00, once she got to work. I mean, ridiculous. Yeah, just to save that amount of time everyday, that's the dream, and especially that particular person that you mentioned, living in Hawaii. I mean, that's the life right there, right? You have your passion. You do what you love. You do the work stuff. You earn the money, but you're also living on the beach everyday. It's pretty cool.

Mitch Russo: Exactly. By the way, without disclosing names or numbers, that person made over $500,000 that particular year that they were in Hawaii. Their productivity actually went up. They were happier people, and they did a better job. Let's take it down to the base level. Next time you get on the phone to make an airline reservation, I know that you don't get on the phone a lot, you do it over the web, but if you ever call Southwest Airlines or JetBlue, ask the person on the other end of the phone how they like working from home, because their entire call center is home-based.

Robert Plank: Nice.

Mitch Russo: Thousands and thousands of people that could have been dragged into the city to sit in a miserable call center everyday are now working from home where they could eat the food that they like, walk the dog when they will like. One woman I interviewed got rid of a second car. They didn't need it anymore, and now she's there to make dinner for her husband, and then after dinner, she goes back into the den and gets on the phone with customers and helps them with reservations. She loved it.

Robert Plank: That's cool. It sounds like all these people who are working virtually, they don't have to give up anything. If anything, they're gaining something, and that's always the thing you always think, "Oh, if they're working from home, they must not be motivated," or, "They must be getting paid less," but it seems like why would you pay someone less? If you're a company and you're paying someone to work from home, why would you pay them less if you're saving money on their office space, on their parking spot, on all that stuff? It sounds like it's win-win for everybody.

This book is for people who want to transform their company into a virtual company, or who is this for exactly?

Mitch Russo: That is exactly who it's for. If you go to InvisibleOrganization.com, it's the book site, and it will say exactly who it's for. It's for CEOs who are running companies and who understand that saving money on things like real estate insurance, heat, air conditioning, telephone lines, internet service contracts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. If you're a CEO and you want to save that money, buy this book and see exactly how it's done.

Robert Plank: Cool. Well, I like the idea for that book. I think that's a pretty good message. Are there any other websites where people should go, other than InvisibleOrganization.com, to find out more about you, Mitch?

Mitch Russo: Yeah. Actually, the main website for me is simply mitchrusso.com. All my stuff is there. All my other training programs and business stuff is there.

Robert Plank: MitchRusso.com and InvisibleOrganization.com. Man, we talked about all kinds of cool stuff. It was such a pleasure having you on. Thanks for being here.

Mitch Russo: My pleasure, Robert.[/showhide]

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117: Find Your Balance, Motivation, Mission, and Get a Greater Taste of Success with Damon Nailer

Damon "DaRil" Nailer, New Orleans native and author of "A Greater Taste of Success" talks mindset, passion, consistency, balance, and consistency. His message will help anyone who's looking for that combination of finding something you're good at, something you're passionate about, an activity or service where others receive satisfaction, and something you can do for free. Check it out right now!

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: I am super excited to introduce to you today, Mr. Damon Nailer, he serves as an author, motivational speaker, talk show host, music producer, songwriter, recording artist, and business owner. Lots of cool stuff, how are things in your neck of the woods Damon?

Damon Nailer: Everything is going well Robert I can't complain, just enduring some hot weather but besides that everything is dandy, I can't complain.

Robert Plank: I see you're in Louisiana, we have some hot weather here in California but I prefer the hot.

Damon Nailer: Well here it is extremely hot we have been having triple digit temperatures so its been pretty hot but like you said you prefer the hot out there but here, with the humidity, its just awful sometimes.

Robert Plank: It just kills you, so all the more reason to stay inside and make some money. Tell me about yourself, tell me what it is that you do, and how you got started and your story and all of that.

Damon Nailer: Well I do so much but most importantly I'm a music producer, a speaker, and an author and a business owner. I own a janitorial service and I do that as well. But I've just released an inspirational E-Book entitled "A Greater Taste of Success" and it's the second addition in my inspirational books. The first one was "The Great Taste of Success" and so this is the second edition. I've also just released a non-fictional book, that's actually a book about Revelation in the bible and we kind of talk about that, analyze and interpret and teach the content found in that book. I'm also a speaker so I do different motivational speeches, I do seminars, I do workshops, ministry opportunities for us to talk in religious institutions. I just speak in a variety of settings and like I said last but not least; I also own a janitorial service. We clean different buildings here in my city and so I just do all of those things.

Robert Plank: It sounds like a lot of fun, but how do you keep all of that straight? How do you do the authoring and the speaking and janitorial stuff and then the motivation and the music? How do you do all of that?

Damon Nailer: I always tell people to balance it out, I just consider myself part time in all of those things besides being a father, husband, and christian, those things are full time. But everything else is part time, and I I'm able to juggle my schedule and make the time to do it. I know with the writing and with the music, I basically do it as I'm inspired, as the inspiration comes and I'm able to write down a lot of information and i basically keep everything as I do my research and as I'm feeling inspired. Then when its time to create a project or do a book, I've already complied all the information and that's why it makes it easier for me to do different projects and to put together different books because I'm always studying, always compiling information, always being inspired and I just gather everything, and when its time we just put it all together. That's basically how I do it, just being part time with everything, and whatever it slowing the most, that's the direction I go in.

Robert Plank: That's cool and would you say that just the fact that you have so many things happening at once and you kind of have to go at a super fast pace or else you fall behind. Would you say that, that helps your creative process a lot?

Damon Nailer: Yes it does, it does because I experience so much on a day to day basis. I'm constantly meeting people and connecting with a variety of people, such as yourself, with a variety of great people. I love it, I just love the fact that its spontaneous, you never know, its unpredictable. It goes from day to day its exciting and its an interesting journey, and as a result I love it, its so flexible, and you never know what's going to happen, and I love it.

Robert Plank: I like it too and that's an awesome way of looking at it, just any day, that anything could happen, depending on what strikes, right?

Damon Nailer: Yes, exactly.

Robert Plank: Cool so, about your motivation and your mindset and everything, a lot of people talk about those kinds of subjects, what makes you special in that area?

Damon Nailer: What makes me special is my variety of experiences and also I'm a former educator and I have an advantage there because one of the things that they taught us in college, in preparing us to become teachers is that; you have to motivate your students and in each lesson you have to literally create what was called a motivation. That's what would lead an inspire the students to get them prepared and opened to learning and because of my experience in a variety of settings, I know how to motivate, I've had to motivate myself in each of the settings, and basically one advantage I have as well is that I started each of the things that I'm doing. I didn't just buy from someone else or walk into something that someone else started, I had to start it and when you are the trend setting and the originator; you have to be motivated and because I'm motivated, its easy for me to inspire and motivate others because I'm already motivated.

One thing that I've realized that a lot of people did not is that motivation is internal and if its already in you, all you have to do is release it and with me having that understanding, its just a pleasant gift and its consistent and I just love motivating and inspiring people and because of my various experiences I'm able to do it and I believe I have that edge and that advantage, opposed to many others.

Robert Plank: I like that, so what you're saying is; if you're completely lacking in the motivation, it cannot be taught but most of us have it within us, it just needs to be unlocked.

Damon Nailer: Yes, we all have it within us and that's what I try to help people to understand; the key to finding your motivation is actually finding your passion. You say " well how do I find my passion?" You find your purpose. Once you find that, then you will automatically be motivated and that is what has happened to me, I've discovered what I call my " Diamond to give things" and I actually teach a workshop to help people find their diamond or their gift or gifts, if they have more than one, they're multi talented, multi faceted. Once you find that, and you tap into that, you begin to operate in it, then motivation is just automatic. For instance, if you look at athletes, you look at recording artists or whomever, once they find that that is their gift, it doesn't take a whole lot of motivation.

Can you imagine it doesn't take LeBron James much motivation to go play basketball, it doesn't take the recording artist, Katy Perry, it doesn't take much motivation to go into the studio and record. Why? It is because they have found their passion, they have found what they were created and purposed to do, and with it automatically comes that energy and inspiration and that desire and passion to do it.

Robert Plank: I like it, it just flows.

Damon Nailer: Yes, it does, it really does. I mean it becomes first nature, I know that other people say that is is second nature but for me its first nature. Especially doing this, I love to do this, I could do this all day and just knowing I'm on a talk show and I'm talking to someone, I'm sharing and inspiring people, that in itself motivates me. I could have all kinds of things going on in my life and I have had all sorts of things going on in my life, but you give me the opportunity to share and inspire and educate people, all of those things are pushed to the back burner and people's inspiration and motivation becomes the priority and I'm able to do it.

Robert Plank: I love it, so you're saying that we all have, that thing and that its different for every person, but we all have that thing that not only were we born to do it but we probably do it for free.

Damon Nailer: Exactly, you're just leading right into some great things, my philosophy is that; all men are created with a skill and a mission to fulfill. What I do with my gift seminar or gift workshop, I'm just going to give some examples here, some free information, its really powerful though. I have four questions that I tell people that "if you can ask yourself four things then you can find something that fits each of these categories, then you will find your diamond and gift". The first question is "What are you good at doing?" You have to be brutally honest, you have to be objective, the more objective you are, the more accurate you'll be at finding your gift. The second question is "What are you passionate about doing?" Some people are passionate about things, but they're not really good at them. For instance, American Idol, that's a prime example. A lot of those people are passionate about singing, but they're not good at it, somebody has deceived them and didn't want to hurt their feelings and so here we are; passionate but not skilled.

The third question is "What do you do that affects others" or "What do you do that others receive satisfaction and fulfillment as you do it?" That deals with effectiveness. The last question is "What can you do for free and still receive full satisfaction from it? What can you do as a volunteer and still receive full satisfaction?" If you can find something that fits all four of those categories, then you will find your diamond and gift, because I've done some other things that I haven't mentioned, but in most cases, I couldn't do the volunteerism as far as doing it for free, and then I lacked the passion for it, somewhere along the line. As a result I had to get rid of those things out of my life, and now I'm only really doing the things that fit those four categories, and that's what you want to do. Once you find that, I'm telling you, you will be automatically motivated.

Robert Plank: I like it, so what you're good at, what you're passionate about, something where others receive satisfaction, and then something that you would do for free. I like how that last little bit at the end you said that you can always go back and reassess, I think that helps so much because I think that a lot of us will look at two out of the four or three out of the four and say "All right well, I'm good at this I enjoy doing that, people get value from it, I'm just going to go and start off in this direction" Then sometimes five or ten years later we end up way down a path and we just ended up compromising one thing after another, maybe it was for family reasons or for money reasons, we end up in a place that we don't want to go. The way that I like that you laid that out is; even if you think that maybe you've gotten off track, or maybe you need to course correct, you can just run it through those four questions and get the instant answer.

Damon Nailer: That's it, now what happens sometimes, I'm glad you mentioned that, sometimes for income you may have to start something or create something possibly where you can employ others to do it and just be able to have the income to invest in your passion and if you're not able to start something where you can employ others and you have to employ yourself, then I always say "Just pursue your passion to some capacity. You may have to do it as supplemental income or you might have to do it as volunteering, as long as you are making enough income to sustain yourself, to sustain your family and to sustain whatever it is that you're trying to do." My thing is that I always like to inspire and emphasize to people to pursue their passion in some capacity, if you just have to do it for thirty minutes, a week or a few hours a week, just do it to some capacity because its therapeutic. It literally helps you with what you're going through in life, its just that gift that keeps on giving and that's why we're created.

We have to just find that and in some kind of way use it, because in blessing others, it also is going to bless you.

Robert Plank: I like that, even if you only have three minutes to do it, just a little bit of that everyday, its so simple but so powerful.

Damon Nailer: Yes, I mean that little bit of time, it makes the difference because Robert, what would happen is that so many people on a day to day basis is that they're going and putting in eight, ten, twelve, or sometimes even sixteen hours in a career and even in gifts that they have but its not their diamond and gift things and so because of it they're not fulfilled still. There's something inside of them, tugging at them, pulling at them, to go into another direction, but like you stated earlier because of their financial situation they bite the bullet, they suck it up and they go put in those grievous and long and boring hours just to make the money at the cost of their passion. That's what I'm saying, find some kind of way to pursue that passion and it will help you to get through with your normal job.

That is what would happen to me when I was teaching, like I said that was one of my gift things, but at the end I began to lose that passion and what kept me stimulated and kept me with the ability to endure it until I was able to leave it was the fact that I was still pursuing my passion, which at that time was the music. I was still recording and doing music while I was teaching and that's what really helped is that I stayed motivated and I stayed positive because I was able to pursue my passion to some capacity.

Robert Plank: I mean lets talk about that, lets talk a little bit about your teaching days when you had to balance the teaching part of it and then the musical side, does this all come naturally to you, like did you have all this multitasking and such, did you have it all figured out, or were there some obstacles you had to overcome to get to this point?

Damon Nailer: Well I think the multi tasking actually came automatically with me being multi faceted, some kind of guide just helped me to figure it out and be able to prioritize and multi task effectively but no it really wasn't a big strain. A big strain as I was saying earlier, is I'm inspired, I just write and I just started to produce the music and it kind of made me work ahead and so at those times I would just find some kind of time to devote to the music and it really wasn't too bad. It wasn't hard, I even taught year around several times, I did summer school as well as the regular school sessions and so still in all I made the time to dedicate myself to the music and I was able to sacrifice, sometimes it might mean sacrificing sleep, sometimes it might mean sacrificing some fun things and whatever it takes to pursue that passion to some capacity.

I just tried to encourage people to do so but yes it wasn't really that hard, it wasn't a contradictory where it was going into another direction and spreading me thin, I was able to do both effectively and even now with the additional titles, I'm able to do it all effectively.

Robert Plank: I like that, you made the time to make it happen and I mean I'm sure you hear that cheesy stuff all the time about how "everyone only has twenty four hours in a day" or "if you need something done ask a busy person" and I have friends where that's happened over and over again where they were spread too thin and they couldn't get a lot done but as soon as their life got busy, they had an unexpected child or they got laid off from their job. Some big dramatic event kind of forced them to be this kind of person that they always could have been but because maybe their life was kind of safe or kind of cushioned, there were no real stakes, they didn't have a reason to excel and once these things happened, which a lot of people would have looked at as a bad thing, they would say "oh my gosh I have this new kid, I have all these expenses, all this time is locked up." But I think that all of us entrepreneurs see all that adversity as kind of fuel to do better.

Damon Nailer: Yes and that's what actually happens, sometimes to push a person out of that nest like the eagle does its eaglets, that's what has to happen. As you said its something traumatic, something dramatic that really pushes you because to be an entrepreneur it takes faith and you have to walk and believe in something that sometimes has not yet materialized and you have to go in that direction believing that, that is going to happen. Sometimes, as you were saying, because people are stuck in a rut and just that comfort zone, that predictability knowing that "okay I get paid here, I get paid this much every month or every two weeks" however often they're paid, and its a security but once that is upset or is shifted or is compromised, all of a sudden now you have to make moves.

You have to do things that you wouldn't normally do, now you're literally flowing on adrenaline and adrenaline really gives you superhuman strength and that's what happens to some people but there are others who it doesn't take just all the opposition and they're able to launch out and do it, I guess people consider that risky, but at the same time those people have the fate where their back is not up against the wall but they're just going to step out and do it anyway. Either way it goes, as long as it gets done.

Robert Plank: Whatever gets you there right?

Damon Nailer: That's it.

Robert Plank: Well cool so as we're winding down today's call, do you see a number one mistake or a common repeat thing that people are making over and over when it comes to any area of improving their lives, what's the mistake that keeps creeping up over and over again?

Damon Nailer: I think its consistency, I would say that is the greatest issue, the greatest stumbling block, the greatest hindrance, is consistency. Many people are great at starting, but they don't get the ability or the mindset of being able to consistently do it on a day to day or weekly or monthly basis and that's really what makes the difference between the average, the good, and the great. You have to be able to do it consistently, you have to be able to do it on a whim and just all the time and that's where people fall off. Many people start businesses, they continue for a year or a few years, but to be consistent in what you're doing, that's very important and I believe that is the greatest obstacle to some people. It comes with the motivation again, being able to motivate yourself on a day to day, month to month, weekly basis, to do what you need to do and that's what it boils down to, being consistent.

Robert Plank: I like it, be a finisher not a dabbler.

Damon Nailer: Yes, that's it.

Robert Plank: Well cool, I don't want to keep you too long Damon, and I like everything you've had to say here and I mean I'm looking at your website, looking at all you have here; your Cds, and your books. Where should people go to find out more about you and what it is that you do?

Damon Nailer: They can go to daril.org that's my most comprehensive site and it has all of my information concerning the books, them music, my speaking engagements, the web seminars. Its all there, www.daril.org.

Robert Plank: And could you restate one more time the name of that new book that just came out of yours?

Damon Nailer: "The Greater Taste of Success" and that's available at my website daril.org and then the other one is Revelation; write and reveal, that's available on Amazon and Barns and Nobles and any major book sites there.

Robert Plank: Awesome, everywhere on the internet. Well cool I really appreciate having you here, I like your message, I liked all the knowledge bombs that you dropped so I'm really glad you came here, I think everyone should check out Daril.org and get all your books because you're an awesome guy.

Damon Nailer: Thanks so much Robert, you're an awesome guy and we appreciate what you're doing, really having a platform to help entrepreneurs and help aspiring entrepreneurs and so keep on keeping on and we just appreciate the opportunity thank you so much.[/showhide]

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116: Profitable Popularity: Be Interesting, Build Popularity and Use Social Media to Make Money with Rachna Jain

Dr. Rachna Jain from Profitable Popularity talks to us about social media marketing, traffic, and results. She's noticed that many online business owners simply use social media to "chase a number" instead of making their efforts profitable. She talks about her M6 model, how to get noticed, and shares with us lots of helpful mini-breakthroughs and tips on how to overcome common issues you might be facing with your marketing.

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Our guest today is Dr. Rachna Jain. She's the founder and owner of Profitable Popularity. She's the industry leader in helping people gain exposure online and teaching them to monetize that popularity. It sounds like lots of cool stuff. I'm super excited. Welcome to the show.

Rachna Jain: Oh thank you so much. I'm glad to be here.

Robert Plank: We were just talking before the show that we've both spoken at the same event and I know that you've used Backup Creator and Webinar Crusher. That's all about me, but I'm more curious about you and what you do. Where's your website and what is it that you do that makes you different and special?

Rachna Jain: Yes, my website is profitablepopularity.com. Really that website and my whole business model grew out of the idea that a lot of people were building these huge followings in social media or trying to, but they didn't actually have a business model that they could make money from or be profitable. My whole goal is to really help people to become more well-known, but also to help them become more profitable and build a sustainable business at the same time. I tend to work with people who you consider to be thought leaders or visionary entrepreneurs, people who have a message and a purpose, and they are needing some help creating the business structures to be able to build an online business and gain attention and be able to make money from it.

Robert Plank: I like that, and I think that what I see a lot happen with a lot of these people with social media is they either get too far down the rabbit hole or it ends up taking up all kinds of time, or they end up doing all these little tasks that seem like they're just a waste just to get a number appearing. Wasn't there like a service a few years where you could get your Twitter score or something like that?

Rachna Jain: Yeah, there absolutely were and they still are services like Cloud and Empire Cred. They're always ranking you on on how much engagement you could get, and you get points for it. I don't know if you can redeem the points for anything, but yeah-

Robert Plank: It feels good.

Rachna Jain: Exactly, it feels good. I think that there's still a lot of focus. I think people have the false assumption that just because they're very visible, they'll automatically become very profitable. That is a mistake. I've had people come to me and they say things like, "Well I want to have 10,000 Facebook fans." I'll say, "Okay, so what are you going to do with 10,000 Facebook fans?" They really have no idea. They really are pursuing the number more than actually what the meaning of that could be for their business. I think that there's still a lot of desire to be seen and recognized and lauded and applauded and all those things without people really understanding that that's not all it takes to build a business.

Robert Plank: What do they have to do? How do they get from being the person who chases the number to someone whose social media activity actually pays off?

Rachna Jain: Absolutely. I use a model that I've developed. It's called the M6 model. It really relies on the idea of having an understanding of a very specific market, building a very strong message, and then building a business model that can support getting that message out. There's more steps to it, but those are the first three steps. I've been working online since 1998 and social media didn't even exist then. When social media began to become a force that it is today, you begin to see a lot of people using social media as a way to talk to everyone at the same time. What I began to observe about 2008 and that's continuing even today is this concept of microfragmentation where people are selecting into smaller and smaller groups. At first, we were all excited that we could even find each other online. Now, you find that the groups are becoming more and more targeted and more and more specific. Our messaging has to change too where we're not really looking to talk to everyone; we're looking to talk to just one person in a very specific group.

There's a lot of work that has to be done around that because again, people get seduced or they get swayed by the idea that because they can talk to 10,000 people at once that they really ought to try to do that. That tends to be the least effective way.

Robert Plank: I've seen along with you the way that the social media stuff has evolved. Maybe you can clear up what's the right way to go about it as far as talking to everyone or talking to a few, or maybe there's a right way or maybe everyone has their own unique way. When you mentioned the things that you're mentioning, I'm thinking about Old Spice or Dollar Shaving Club. A lot of people, it seems like they want to replicate that. They want to repeat the magic. Then on the other extreme of that what I've noticed a lot of is, I can't remember if it was Coca-Cola or Head & Shoulders but there's been some companies and I've seen them do things like, for example, on Facebook they'll post the same message but in different languages and target it to each of their audiences. They'll post the English message and then post it in Spanish but only to the Spanish-speaking crowd. I thought that was interesting segmentation.

Rachna Jain: Ot absolutely really is interesting. The thing about it though, for a big brand like Coke or any of the large brands, they do it as a way of constantly raising awareness. My guess is they don't need to tie it to income-earned or result obtained as tightly as us small business owners do. I really think that when you're looking to build an audience online, I think that the idea is to really be as targeted as you can, as specific as possible. You want to definitely talk about what is interesting to that group or those people. If you're building it on your personal profile, you obviously want to also be a real person. You don't just want to be constantly talking about work all the time, but you want to share about what's important to you. I think that the key in really getting noticed at this point, and examples you gave about Dollar Shave Club and all the people like that, they're really really good at telling stories and they're really good at telling stories that interrupt and gather attention.

Anyone can build a powerful story out of their life and business if they know how. Being able to interrupt attention and stop the mindless Facebook scrolling by grabbing someone's attention and being able to tell a good story that's compelling. I think that that sort of skillset is within the reach of entrepreneurs of all sizes.

Robert Plank: That's cool. By you breaking it down even in just those two terms, have a story and have an interrupt. That way, it can help people make sense of the things that they're seeing on social media that are getting them to pay attention and then figuring out a way to replicate it for themselves. Could you walk us through a little bit about that? Could just tell us about maybe a client you've had or something like that where their social media just maybe wasn't very effective and then you went in and added in their own story and their own pattern interrupt to make it better?

Rachna Jain: I work a lot with people who are coming onto the internet from professional services. I have a background in psychology so it's not surprising that I get a lot of psychologists and therapists who want to work with me and they're looking to build an online following for some of their clinical expertise, but they're looking to bring it to a larger audience. They're a perfect example. They come online and they talk about a lot of things in very jargon-y ways, things that only other therapists would actually know or understand. There's one client that I'm actually working with now who is seeking to develop an online training course and some coaching. We're still working out what she's going to offer, but what she's really looking to is she's really looking to help women have more self-esteem. The way that she had began talking about it online, doing Facebook Live videos for example, is she was just starting with, "Hi, I'm a therapist and I've worked with women. Are you very depressed? Do you have any confidence?" She would go on and on about without even finding a way to engage people originally.

Then as we began to look at her videos, and we're still working on some of the messaging in her story, but we began to talk about, "You starting off with an introduction about yourself is not what's going to grab people. What's going to grab people is something that is like a feeling that you've taken a slice or a cut out of their daily life. It would be something like, 'Oh, did you look in the mirror this morning and absolutely hate how you looked? Did you get sick of feeling that way, or are you sick of feeling that way?' Then being able to go into some story about how she can help." Really direct language, something that really lets you put yourself in the conversation that your potential client is already having, and being able to build a story about that and how you can help.

Robert Plank: There's some cool things in there. Aside from just posting the content you post with the intent of solving a problem, the whole thing of stopping them and asking a question. That seems like an easy way to uncover that interrupting question without having to spend all day or all month trying to figure out, "Are you ___________ almost? Do you hate your appearance in the mirror? Are you tired? Are you stressed out?" It seems like just right there alone saying, "Are you ____________?" just seems like an easy way to create some social content.

Rachna Jain: I think it absolutely does. Of course there's different things you can do like in Facebook Live versus an ad on Facebook. You just have to be aware of what your message is and the content is based on the mechanism that you're using to get people to watch or take action. I think asking a question is a really good interrupt. I think also using surprise or things that people don't think go together, something like, "What I learned about sleep from staying up all night," or, "What I learned about being a good mother even though I don't have kids." Just things that people would feel interested in like, "Wow, what does somebody who doesn't have kids know about being a mother?" Or, "What can you learn about sleep from not sleeping?" Anything that creates some interest or some intrigue I think is another really easy way, and a good way to do it is to take opposites and say, "If I tie these two opposites together, do I come up with anything that's worth talking about?"

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool. It just gets that curiosity going. As you were explaining, something that I think I've noticed just in the last couple of months ago and I'm not sure if it was always there or not, but it seems like what I've noticed very recently is that a lot of people are posting on Twitter and they're posting on Facebook with the intent of impressing their peers not their customers. You mentioned doctors and psychologists. A lot of people like you said, they'll mention the jargon or they'll mention their credentials. I look at it and I'm not really sure why some of these things are being posted. Are you seeing that? Maybe like psychologists might be posting things to impress other psychologists as opposed to actually help people?

Rachna Jain: I think it's actually less conscious than that. I think what everyone's trying to do when they do that is they're trying to build credibility which is actually a very positive and useful thing. I think it's just the difference between the way that you get credibility in the offline world has historically been "Where did you go to school?" "What kind of education do you have? "What kind of job do you have?" "How much money do you make?" "What kind of car do you drive?" All those kinds of things that are status symbols or could be credibility symbols. I think online for all of us, it's just our picture and whatever we say about ourselves. Nobody necessarily is going to see the car that you drive or where you live or anything like that. I think that people use some of those same mechanisms that they would use offline. They try to bring them online, and the challenge becomes exactly what you raised. People feel like, "Well why is relevant or why do I care?" I really care more about your information than I care that you graduated in x, y, z, year with this degree.

Robert Plank: The question is, "Why do I care?" I like that because one thing that I've been thinking about when I try my own social media or I have a couple coaching clients who are starting to get into this kind of stuff, one thing that comes to mind is one of our favorite people is a doctor. Being a doctor, there's that paradox there where like you said, if he gets too much about the credentials then he's out of touch in the Ivory Tower but then he sometimes tries to do some kind of aggressive marketing. This doctor has a procedure where it involves taking the blood and reinjecting it and stuff like that, so he branded himself as the Vampire Doctor but then he gets to the point where it's almost like a little too shady. It's this doctor who's doing important stuff. Is the answer just to put it through the filter of "why do I care?", or do you have any other insights about that? Like how to avoid either being too out of touch or too much like the convenience store or the shady back alley?

Rachna Jain: Exactly. I think that in that case, what you're really looking at is you're looking for subtle ways to credentialize yourself. You obviously can say that, "I'm a doctor of such-and-such," or, "I've studied here." You don't need to spend 20 minutes talking about that, but then I think through the course of your presentation, the way that you present yourself speaks volumes about who you are and how you are. Then I think any time you can use real life examples, like you asked me at the beginning if I could talk about a client. I'm not sure if that's exactly what you meant, but it was a way to credentialize me also because just the fact that I have clients who pay me makes me more of an expert. If I were a physician and I was going to talk about what I did, I'd really focus a lot more on the outcomes and the benefits. If I were doing this blood reinjection thing, I might shy away from that a little bit and save that for a little bit later in the process. I definitely would credentialize myself.

This is something that these celebrities use, this is something that the top athletes use. It's the same mechanism that helps so-and-so place in the Olympics or anything like that. Any time you can credentialize yourself, you can use these subtle ways of saying "other people trust me and you should too," like social proof. Any time you can tie it to some kind of news story or current event, it gives people a hook that they can tap into and they can immediately understand, and they're more likely to pay attention because that's something that's equally relevant going on.

Robert Plank: I like the real world case study stuff anyway because that's more interesting as opposed to just talking about some abstract concepts. Hooking me into a story is a lot more fun for me.

Rachna Jain: Yeah, absolutely. Stories are our oldest form of oral communication. There's a long history that we're all oriented to pay attention to stories.

Robert Plank: Oh yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me, and that resonates a lot with me too. As we're winding this down in the last five minutes or so of this, aside from everything that we've covered already what's the number one mistake you're seeing people making on social media? Like you see all kinds of people going wrong with this.

Rachna Jain: I think again, that sense of gathering people who are just numbers rather than interested fans or followers. I think talking too much about themselves, using their social media as a broadcast platform rather than a dialoguing or connecting platform. I think that as a business, you also just want to be really careful at how you present yourself around topics that are really charged. This whole election thing that's going on, there's people who are feeling the need to express their distinct opinions politically one way or the other and it's causing them some challenges within their community. It's not that they shouldn't have their opinions, but I use Facebook as a hybrid. I use it for social and for business, so I'm always aware of how what I say personally is going to have impact on my brand or my business also.

I think that there's times where people who run business, they forget that people are paying attention to everything and whatever you say or do as an individual person, it does have impact on how people perceive your brand. To have an awareness of that, like if you're just using it for social interaction that's completely fine but if you're thinking it's going to become a platform by which you build your business brand and make contacts and get clients and things like that as well, you just need to be aware of how some of your personal opinions may be taken. In the normal course of my work, I never talk to be about their politics. It wouldn't be something that I would lead with on social media either, for example.

Robert Plank: It seems like especially with the political stuff, it's easy to get attention that way but maybe it's the wrong kind of attention.

Rachna Jain: Yeah, and you just have to think. I'm certain that there's clients that I have and we have different political views, but it's not relevant to the work we do so it never comes up. I would hate that I have a really good relationship with a client of mine, they see something that I posted on Facebook that they disagree with, and it creates a rupture in our working relationship just because I was so passionate about something. I'm not saying that's right for everyone. I'm just saying that that's how I navigate the line for myself.

Robert Plank: Yeah, that gets kind of scary because every now and then, there's always some celebrity like Gilbert Godfrey or someone who just says one little remark and then loses all kinds of business and clients.

Rachna Jain: Absolutely, and loses all kinds of credibility. It's like one small action, people lose big endorsements, they lose status, they lose all kinds of things. It's just something that I think that is important to consider if you're planning to use a social media for business.

Robert Plank: Double-edged sword sounds like.

Rachna Jain: Yeah, I think so.

Robert Plank: Cool. As we're winding this down, social media stuff's always changing. Do you have a really cool, cutting edge strategy or tool or website that you're using to do all this social marketing?

Rachna Jain: Actually, I really do things the old-fashioned way because I'm really about strategy and not tools. The tools come and go, but if you really are clear on what your strategy is you can find the tools to make that happen. One thing though I think is a really big deal that most people want to pay attention to right now is the huge rise in visual marketing. Even if you have blog posts, find ways to turn them into images and memes and infographics. I've been actually recently just putting a lot of stuff up on Slideshare again. Really looking at ways to turn your message into multiple formats and get it in front of people who can consume it easily. Look at how you can turn written content into visuals and be able to put them on Instagram and Pinterest and Slideshare, and a bunch of other sites like that.

Robert Plank: As opposed to just that boring old text.

Rachna Jain: Correct, as opposed to just that.

Robert Plank: With the Twitter stuff, I've been having fun with Giphy with the animated GIFs but maybe a little too much fun.

Rachna Jain: Exactly. Again, moderation in all things but yes, things like Giphy also can work really really well.

Robert Plank: It gets attention. If most people are not using that attention-getting tool, then I'm fine using it.

Rachna Jain: Absolutely.

Robert Plank: I like everything you have to say and I like your message, and you had lots of really good advice. Could you tell everyone where to go and find you and your blog and your coaching and your books and all that good stuff?

Rachna Jain: Sure. You can visit me online at my website which is ProfitablePopularity.com.

Robert Plank: Awesome. Nice and simple, gets you there. Profitable Popularity, and then it looks like everything is available from there. Awesome. ProfitablePopularity.com. Dr. Rachna Jain, I'm super glad that you came here and you shared a lot of stuff. The number one thing I like about what you shared with us is just that you didn't say, "Okay, it all relies on this one super fancy tool that's cutting edge, just came out." It's just the strategy and just little things that you notice. For example, if the trend now is visual marketing and images, instead of relying on some fancy-schmancy tool to do it just do it yourself and model what's working.

Rachna Jain: Yes.

Robert Plank: Thanks for being on the show and sharing your insights on social media. It was a pleasure having you.

Rachna Jain: Thanks so much, Robert.[/showhide]

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115: Unlock the Gates to Unlimited Success By Finding the Right Business Coach with Kory Livingstone

Accomplished pianist, composer, songwriter, and entrepreneur Kory Livingstone, author of the book Quiet Determination drops by and tells us what separates good business coaches from bad coaches, as well as what you should look for in a good coach.

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: My guest today is Kory Livingstone. He's going to be talking to us about finding the right business coach and he seems like a pretty cool guy. He plays piano, does vocals, has a party band, The Fabulous Mercurys, so I can't wait to hear what cool business knowledge he plans on dropping. Welcome to the show, Kory.

Kory Livingstone: Thank you for having me, nice to be here.

Robert Plank: I'm glad to have you here. I really like when people put some or a lot of their personality into the things they have to say as opposed to just people saying I'm a business coach, I'm a turnaround coach and they don't really have much to say. I really like how the things that you have to say you've mixed them and combined them with your musician and the other business stuff you have to say as well.

Kory Livingstone: Yeah, my core is a musician, but don't be fooled, oh, he's only a musician. My book which is Quiet Determination: Unlocking the Gates to Unlimited Success is based on the lessons that I learned while studying music. In order to be successful in music there's a mindset, there's things you have to do in order to be successful in music. Successful in music, successful in life is the theme of the book. These are the lessons that I learned while I was studying music and I apply them to everything I do in life. It's like a hammer. You can use a hammer to hammer in this type of nail, that type of nail, a screwdriver for this, that, all these things. These are the tools that are used in different situations. Whether you're building a house or a swimming pool or a garage or a wall or an addition, they all use the same hammer, the same tool.

Just because you're a musician it doesn't mean the tools you use to be successful to become a musician are not applicable to tools you have to use to be a successful lawyer, a doctor, a mechanic, a maintenance man, it doesn't matter. You have to have certain tools or I should say a mindset to be successful in life, period. What I have discovered when I wrote my book all these tools... Actually, it's a mindset and you've got to have a certain mindset to be successful. Coaching you have to have a mindset to be coached, to be coachable.

All the big businesses, all the big businesses right around the world they work on developing the talent within their own ranks either through seminars, conferences, take a course. This is coaching. It may come across as a seminar, whatever word you want to use, but the bottom-line is that it's coaching. They're trying to promote within their ranks, so they can really do... Everybody has talent. It's potential. Some of us use some of our talent, some of us use a lot of our talent, some of us use very little of our potential talent. It's there, so it's just

a matter of getting it out of you and that's what a coach does.

Robert Plank: That's cool. It seems like there's a lot of parallels and a lot of lessons that you learn from this area of being a musician that you now apply it in other areas is what you're saying.

Kory Livingstone: Exactly, just as I had a music teacher, but really a music coach. Athletes, professional athletes have coaches. That's where a lot of people go wrong and think oh, gee, I'm not an athlete, so how can I have a coach, I don't need a coach. No, coaching goes right across, right across all walks of life, financial, even leadership. There's certain... Coaching is just an amalgamation of a whole bunch of different things; consulting, psychology, leadership, management, training, counseling. Now you don't have... This sounds like gee, in order to be a coach I should be a psychologist or something like that. No. Yes, psychologists are coaches, but you don't have to be a certified psychologist to be a good coach.

Just look at any professional sports team. None of those coaches are what you would say qualified psychiatrists. They have grown up in the game, they've worked in the game, they know how to communicate with other people. They know how to get the best out of you that they can provided that you're coachable. You probably heard that particularly in professional sports. You've heard the phrase oh, so and so's not coachable. He's come in here, he thinks he knows it all. You know what the coach does? He lets so and so ride the bench for a game or two. This is a team sport, we're doing it my way, not your way and if you don't want to learn our system I don't care how... Great, you became number one draft choice and all that stuff, but you're not fitting in, you're going to ride the pine for awhile and then you'll gradually ...

Robert Plank: Put him in his place, take him down a peg or two.

Kory Livingstone: Yeah, down a peg or two. If you're not coachable... You're good, but you're only probably half as good as you're going to be by the time you hit your peak of your career. Young guys come in what 19, 20. They're still wet behind the ears. They've got 5 years of learning to do before they even start getting much better than they are. The time they become veterans... That's why they're veterans because they've been there for awhile and they know their stuff.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah, and all that reminds me, when I was a kid I played baseball for about three years and then I was in school band for about five years. Year to year if we had a good music instructor that made a huge difference. That wasn't all the difference, but if we had an instructor who just half-assed it and didn't really take things too seriously then that would tank that whole music group for the whole year. If we had someone who knew how to challenge us and who knew how to manage us and who to arrange who where and knew how to get those

diamonds in the rough to come out that made a huge difference.

The other thing that that reminds me of is that on one extreme there were the other kids who the music talent came naturally. The other extreme a lot of them just didn't even care and didn't even try. I think most of us including me were in the middle where we weren't naturally gifted musicians. Just because we put aside, for example, an hour a day to practice because the music coach knew what areas to focus on that helped us all. I see a lot of parallels to what you're saying. Some people just don't try or some people come in with the attitude that they know everything, they've got the whole world figured out. That hurts them as well, so there's the two pieces of it. There's the instructor side, the coach side, and then there's whatever it is that they unlock within you.

Kory Livingstone: Exactly, and you bring up that about having the proper music instructor. There's two types. There's the kind of coach who will say do this, do that, practice page one, practice page two, page three, so on and so forth. They don't really take the time to go in and look at what your strengths are and what they are not and help you develop what your strengths are.

They've got to sit down, look at your strengths, look at your weaknesses and say let's look at... This is what you probably found with a good band teacher. They probably took the time to try and get to know you to see what your strengths were and what your weaknesses... Let's work on this, Robert. I think you should probably try working on that. You're doing this fine. It's just that little bit of communication because you have to connect with people. I'm sure you saw from the people who you've learned from, you learn more so from the people who made or at least tried to make a personal connection with you.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah, instead of just giving you the same old cookie cutter, boring stuff everyone else does. What you're saying is as it relates to either being a business coach or getting a business coach that if you can find that coach who instead of just giving you the same steps they give to 10 other coaching clients they actually look at your business. They look at what you've done and haven't done and look at your strengths and weaknesses and from all that figure out the best course of action for you to take.

Kory Livingstone: Yeah, a good coach will ask you a lot of questions which again may surprise many of your listeners. I'm supposed to be getting information, aren't I? He's just asking me questions. Yeah, no, he's asking you questions for a purpose because in the end you really have the answers. They're all within you. If you need to find out a certain formula, let's say whatever it is. Obviously, he couldn't... You don't know what the formula is. Let's just say... I'm going to be very, very simple. I need to formulate how to make this certain type of glue let's say. Now the coach just may happen to have that formula. Oh, yeah, I work in glue, I can give you that. That may just be a certain thing or you may ask where I can I find this type of person. The coach may know, but it'd be better for you and even if the coach doesn't have to he'll say where do you think we could go to find this formula for glue, so he's again asking ...

It's all about accountability. You as the coachee must be 110% accountable which means yes, the coach will guide you. Okay, I think you can find that information on this glue recipe on the Internet. Have a look on there and see if you can find it, it should be there. Or they might say I have a contact, you can phone this guy and he might give you some information, but that's going to be a very small portion, 1 or 2%. The job of a coach is to guide you, to ask questions, to find out where you're going, so you'll by answering these questions you will give yourself your own answers. That's what a coach is going to do.

People are surprised that they... You may not have the answers in your own head, but you will know where to go to find the answers. The coach will show you or guide you where to go to find the answers. When all is said and done and you and your coach finally part ways you will have all these abilities. You'll have this awareness of how to solve particular problems, so that's the basic concept or the basic structure of good coaching.

Basically, a coach needs to find out as much as they can about the client in order to coach them, asking questions. They have to maintain communication. They should build a rapport that they really are interested in you. They will help you clarify your own statements maybe about your goal. By this time next year I want to be rich, that's your goal. A coach will ask what do you mean by rich? Lots of money in the bank. What's lots of money in the bank? Give me a figure, $10,000, $1 million. They help you take away these generalities that a lot of people have and get you specific, specific goals. A year from now I'm going to have $1 million in the bank, so that's clarifying that goal and then you go a little bit further.

Each question that the coach asks it helps the coach understand what your real problem is because you may think you have a problem which we're going to call problem A, but after asking a lot of questions the coach will make it clear to you that it's not problem A you have, it's problem B, just giving it another name. It's problem B and C. Problem A, what you think is a problem number A that is not a problem. Because of the questions he's asked he's been able to clarify more.

Then a coach will help you understand exactly what you're doing much better

and encourage you to think much deeper than what you're going because most people when they go to a coach they have a general idea or I would like, I want to, but they haven't got it down in black and white. It's not down in writing. The biggest thing that a coach will do is keep you focused on what you're doing. A coach will again ask you questions that came out of leftfield. A good coach will get a feel where you're going and where your weaknesses, where your strengths are, but he'll ask questions just out of leftfield. It all pertained to what you're doing, of course. You may have an answer for it and you may not. If you do that's great, if you don't there's another area where you have to explore.

The bottom-line of a coach, he keeps you accountable, you are accountable for your success. The coach is going to guide you. It's not going to be done for you. I don't know about you, but, Robert, I've gone to many seminars because we're always learning. It could be... Let's say I've gone to a seminar about giving speech... I'll say keynote speaking, but how to deliver a great keynote speech. They take you... They'll tell you about this and they tell you you have to do this. Let's say there's 25 steps to do a keynote speech and they tell you exactly what they are. Oh, yeah, I can do that, I can do that, I can do that, I can do that. You feel confident in your ability, but what they end up with is this. It's going to take you... This is how they try and scare you. Yeah, it'll take probably you 6 or 7 months to get it done just how we laid it out.

On the other hand, you can get it done for you for a big amount of money. It'll be done in 2 or 3 weeks and there you are, there's your keynote speech. What accountability have you done? You've taken no accountability for that speech. Do you know that speech? No, you're going to memorize it. Do you understand that speech? No, because someone else has written it for you and you've memorized it. Are you living that speech? No, you're just reciting that speech.

Bottom-line, you've taken no accountability and you may or may not believe half the things that are in that talk because it was done for you. Even though it follows the 25 points, but had you taken the time and been accountable and gone through each of the 25 points and built it up you would know exactly what you are talking about. That's what a coach does. You have to do this. A coach is not going to sit down and say here's the template. There you go, off you go. You are still not accountable. This is why a lot of people who have failed dreams... That's why there's a lot of people with failed dreams because they've tried to take the easy way out.

Robert Plank: I like that analogy a lot because it's like you said, there's all kinds of similarities you could connect to, to music, or in business, or in school, or anything. What you're describing there, the wrong way for coaches to go about it is almost like having you memorize just the facts and figures or just how to read music or just know how to hit the right notes and play the right times and things like that. There's no personalization, there's no repetition, there's no course correcting, stuff like that.

Kory Livingstone: Exactly, exactly. You have no skin in the game, no skin in the game whatsoever. Well ...

Robert Plank: Go ahead.

Kory Livingstone: No, go ahead, sorry.

Robert Plank: I was just going to say that makes me think about different mentors I had. I think about one of the favorite mentors I had, I came to him and like you described, I had a lot of big areas where I'm stuck, where I just didn't know what I didn't know, or I didn't know what strategy, or I didn't know if I should keep doing something or stop doing something. There were the little areas I was stuck where he could answer it in a minute or he could answer it by saying go look for this term. I think about when I first got a coach he told me to do just only a handful of things. He told me, for example, to raise my prices. That's one of those things where on my own I never would have knew to do that. It might have even taken me 10 years of just learning new things, doing some trial and error before I came to the person who had the big picture and looked at my business from the outside and just shortcut those 10 years for me.

Kory Livingstone: Yeah, yeah, that's really valuable. As adults see coaches... Adults learn different from children. Adult education... As adults we need to know why, why are we learning this? As kids you go to school and they tell you what you're going to learn. You're going to learn this, this, this, and this. I don't know about you, but the further I got along in school, in high school, I started asking myself what the hell do I need to study Latin for or what do I need to study this for. I want to be this, I want to be this. How does that relate to that? Now it may relate and it may not relate, but no one told me the reason for it. No one told me the reason.

As far as I could see it made no sense, so as an adult you have to know... When a coach is coaching you they'll explain or you'll ask... The coach had realized that you'll need to know why I'm doing this. A coach may say you need a business plan for the next... You need a business plan for the next year. You have to know this, you have to plan out every week, what you're going to do every single week and you may say... They will tell you so that you will not waste your time every day saying what will I do today. Your plan will be there, so it's already been planned. Today it says I must do this, therefore, you've not wasted a lot of time thinking about what can I do because you've already spent that time and you thought about it and it's right there, so you can get right to work and start getting results right away.

That's one example. Now also adults want to learn... They don't want to memorize. We've done our memorizing, we want to do. Task-orientated, give me a task to do. As your coach today I'm telling you to go out and find all of the suppliers that you can for this type of thing or this is what I want you to do. Whatever it happens to be, this is what I want you to do. That's a task. I don't want you to memorize where all of the people live that may be your target market. I don't want you to memorize where they live. I want you to go out and actually make a list, just make it a task. You have to do something. Now as adults... That's why we call ourselves adults because we make our own decisions, don't we?

Robert Plank: Yes.

Kory Livingstone: We like to plan. We don't want somebody telling us what to do. Do this, do that, like bossing. We want to be involved. Let's work on what I have to do, let's be involved, so the coach will get you involved in making decisions. That's why a good coach will not say do this, do that, do the other. Let's say what about you doing this, or have you tried looking at that, or what do you think of this, give me your opinion about this. The coach is guiding you, but expecting you... See this is where the coach is not giving you the answers and guiding you. I like this one here, this looks very good. Good, let's settle on that. The coach has guided you and you've made the decision, you've made the final decision. When we go to school as kids the teacher says do this, do that. You ask why and they say shut up and do it. Because I said, right. This is all part of the adult personality.

Now also another thing about adults when you're coaching them they have to be like I mentioned before coachable which means they're ready, interested in learning. If you're looking for a coach and you're a know it all don't waste your money. Keep going on like you're going and the results you had yesterday or the results you have today will be the results you have tomorrow which usually results again in a failed dream.

Adults also, they like to... This goes back to memorization. They don't want to learn, they want to solve problems. Things that keep us... We have a coach to solve a problem, we have a problem we need solved, so again that's a result. We'd rather solve... That's what we're paid for. Whatever job you do you are paid to solve problems. I'm an accountant, my job is to make sure that the money is accounted for. The boss says I need someone to account for the money. I'm a dentist, there's something wrong with my tooth, solve my problem. I'm a lawyer, I have a problem with... I need somebody sued. I'm a musician. Somebody feels stress, we try and make them feel happy with our music. Every job, the basis of every job is solving a problem and that's what adults like to do. Again ...

Robert Plank: I like that, so that way you're not just overloading someone with a bunch of facts and figures or overloading with the possibilities of all the things that they could do. You're not doing a bunch of stuff for them. Like you said you're the guide, but I think that that just now really hit home with me pretty hard that you're there to solve problems, the big problems, the small problems. Some problems need to be taken care of before the others, but I think that that right there is huge. You're not just there to learn or to teach something, you're knocking out those problems.

Kory Livingstone: You've got it. Garbage in, garbage out, regurgitate. Exactly right, hands on, roll up the sleeves, I got stuff to do. Yeah, you're so right. That's probably the most powerful thing a coach will do. Of course, again the coach is there if you go off track, pull you back on again.

Robert Plank: We're talking about all these things that bad coaches do and good coaches do. Can we relate that as we're winding this down to what it is you do and what makes you special and different?

Kory Livingstone: This is what... I love to direct people. You could call a coach... A coach is a teacher, but I try to change people's mindsets from what they do, what they normally do. My saying is how long are you going to keep doing what you're presently doing and putting off what you're really capable of doing. I like to draw people out and make them what they really can be, all that they can be. I like to look at their dreams because everybody has dreams and that's where I focus on, say tell me your dream and let's talk about your dream. Let's help make that dream... Let me help you make that dream a reality. That's what I drive at. It's great for a lot of young entrepreneurs because I wish I had someone like me in my corner when I was just starting out in business. It makes a lot of difference. It makes so much difference. I've experienced it one time in my life. That was in my music career. You probably don't know them, but they were called The Platters back in the ‘50s, Only You, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, things like that. They were ...

Robert Plank: I've heard Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, but I don't know that band exactly.

Kory Livingstone: They were a vocal group, four guys and one girl, The Platters. Look them up on the Internet, you'll see. One of them was called Ray Carroll and he moved up here to Canada for awhile and he had an agency here, a talent agency, and I met him. I went into his office and asked him if the agency can get me some work, blah, blah, blah. I was a young musician starting out. He hemmed and hawed and he said, okay... He took me out one night and we visited certain entertainment establishments around town. He showed me people... see people that he knew. We're going to go see this guy now and watch what he does. We're going to see this guy.

I learned so much, not about music, but about entertaining from him in a six-hour evening. It blew me away, the things that he pointed out, to see all these different people and what I should do, just that type of thing. He didn't say do this, do that. He just said you see this, you see that, you see that. Then your mind gets to working. I spent about 2 or 3 nights with him and the difference that made. I felt like a pro and I had only been in the business for about 10 months. I know that feeling and I want to pass that along to other people, so that's what I do. With my book, Quiet Determination: Unlocking the Gates to Unlimited Success, I share my mindset, I share the tools that I work with that have made me successful with other people. That's really what I'm all about.

Robert Plank: The way that you described that story it's almost like your friend, he had a lifetime of all these little insights and knowledge that took him however many decades to accumulate. Then he just distilled them down to a few... In any given situation, like you said he just pointed out things he was looking at, things that he was noticing and there's no amount of fact learning that can duplicate that.

Kory Livingstone: A hundred percent.

Robert Plank: Cool.

Kory Livingstone: A hundred percent, a hundred percent. I'll tell you a story, how I got to write this book, the title of this book, Quiet Determination. About 10 years ago I was getting ready for a concert and a venue. It was a do it yourself venue. You had to bring in all your own lights and equipment. All they rented to you was the space. The concert was a Saturday night and I went in there Saturday morning. I set up the PA, I set up the lights, up and down on the ladder hanging curtains and I had a piano coming in and tuned. I had to get refreshments ready to sell at halftime, the CD, all that stuff ready. I gave the concert, it was a great concert and so on and so forth. About 2 weeks later I get this letter in the mail. Actually it was on a post-it, 3 by 3 yellow post- it note and it said, "Dear Kory, I've admired your persistent, quiet determination and attention to details. It's more than talent. It's a mature determination. I could do well to apply the same to my life. May God bless all of your efforts." You know who it was from?

Robert Plank: Who?

Kory Livingstone: The maintenance man of the venue, the custodian.

Robert Plank: That's awesome.

Kory Livingstone: It blew me away, it blew me away. Do well to apply the same to my... How astute is this guy, how astute. I didn't realize that I was doing this. This is what I did normally. I didn't go up and do all this work and then say look at all the work I did. It was a matter of fact like breathing. I breathe in, I breathe out. I don't think about it. If you stop doing it you're not going to breathe any longer, but you don't even think about that. All these things that I had to do were natural to me and that's with a quiet determination. He gave it to me. This guy was... He was a custodian, but he was a genius.

Robert Plank: I like that because... There's a lot of little insights with that and I think that the big one and the big common thread I'm hearing from you today is that there's all these skills that you've developed as a musician or as someone who sets up these performances and things like that. There's some amount of... The work ethic is a little bit of it. The mastery is a little bit of it. Getting so good at something where it almost becomes unconscious is a little bit of it. There's all these little things combined. What's really cool about this that I keep hearing over and over here is that the skills that you develop in one area such as music or presenting or things like that they always bleed out. They always can be applied into other areas as well.

Kory Livingstone: You got it, exactly, exactly. That's exactly what it is.

Robert Plank: The book is Quiet Determination and where can people find that and buy it?

Kory Livingstone: They can get it at Amazon.com, of course. They can get a digital copy or a hardback copy. If they want an autographed copy they can contact me by email. It's very simple, Kory@KoryLivingstone.com and I'll arrange to get a hardcopy sent to them and I'll autograph it for them. Now for the listeners of your show I got a special gift for them. I'm just in the process of doing it now. I'm doing an audio version of the book.

If they write me when it gets done I'll send them a free copy on an mp3 of Quiet Determination. I'll send that to them free just for the listeners, a special gift for the listeners of your show. It'll be ready probably in 2 or 3 months, but write me anytime. I put you on the list. When it's ready I'll send it out. If anybody... My website, it's just like my name. KoryLivingstone.com. Just type that in and I'll come up. My website will come up, my email will come up. You'll get it somehow. Just type in my name in the Internet and I will come

up.

Robert Plank: Awesome.

Kory Livingstone: It'll be easy to remember.

Robert Plank: Cool, so KoryLivingstone.com and the book is Quiet Determination.

Kory Livingstone: Yes.

Robert Plank: Awesome, thanks so much for being on the show, friend.

Kory Livingstone: It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Robert. It's been great.[/showhide]

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113: Powerful Communication, Influence and Presence with Laurie Burton

Laurie Burton talks to us today about becoming a better speaker and having a better presence so that you overcome the fear of failure and aversion to risk, and instead, be captivating and charismatic in your delivery.

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Laurie Burton is an internationally recognized innovator and author who has helped thousands of people improve their ability to communicate effectively, thereby creating more success in business and in life. She is the author of Presenting You, and her techniques generate dramatic results in an amazingly short time, from one-on-one coaching, to seminars, and corporate groups, promoting the use of each individual's unique passion, energy, and animation. She encourages attendees to her workshops to be comfortable with themselves, creating more effective opportunities to lead, inspire, express, convince, and sell. That sounds like a great list. Welcome to the show, Laurie.

Laurie Burton: Oh my goodness, what a list!

Robert Plank: What a big promise to live up to!

Laurie Burton: Really!

Robert Plank: I'm really glad that you're here and that we're on the show. I'm really glad that we're on this topic because I'm sure you've come across people like this, but I'm not normally a very good speaker, communicator. I don't like dealing with people. I'd rather they just kind of leave me alone. Over time, I've realized that if I don't have these skills, I would be held back, so over time I've kind of forced myself- maybe not forced, but just kind of practiced and learned to be this better person, even though it doesn't come naturally. Does that make sense?

Laurie Burton: Oh, it's a perfect example of how so many people feel the same way, Robert. It's amazing, and that's what I'm here to do, is to encourage people and ask them to go out there and risk a little failure, but a lot of success. You've got to take chances in life.

Robert Plank: It makes a lot more sense to do it that way, and a lot more fun than just sitting at home wondering, "What if?" Right?

Laurie Burton: Yes! "What if," and being alone, shy and perhaps withdrawn, not a part of a group that you'd like to be a member of, being confident enough to speak for yourself, and stand up and say your name with confidence.

Robert Plank: Would you say that a lot of what you do, or the difference you make, is it mostly that confidence thing? What specifically separates you from everyone else out there who does something similar?

Laurie Burton: I talk a lot about you've got to have, number 1, energy. Where does our energetic core lie? How does it look? When we talk to people, when we present something, when we give a speech, where does that energy lie? Your energy speaks first before you've ever said a word. People are reading your energy level. That's what draws people in. That's really what is captivating. That's a part of charisma, so you've got to be aware of your energy and how it looks to others. We can practice it. I encourage folks to practice it in the mirror, this energy. Just look at that energy and freeze it. If it looks kind of boring and dull, bring it up and out and towards the mirror and hit that mirror with your energy. You know what I'm saying? It's so important.

Robert Plank: I kind of do. You're looking at yourself in the mirror. What exactly am I looking for? Is it like a posture?

Laurie Burton: Your whole body. Your whole body. It starts with your eyes. You can say your name. Say your name in the mirror. "Hi! I'm Laurie Burton!" Is there an energy that's projecting that out or is it, "Hi. I'm Laurie Burton." It's back. There is something I call the imaginary line. No matter where we are, even on a telephone conversation like we have now. I have to cross an imaginary line between you and me across the country, or I have to cross an imaginary line between my audience and myself. My job, as a speaker, is to project my energy out to that audience and keep them awake, keep them alive and energetic, and wanting to hear what I have to say.

Robert Plank: When someone does that, how do you keep the genuineness of it? How do you become this energetic person, but without coming across as fake?

Laurie Burton: You really have to practice your ability to project. I use an exercise called the "Yes" exercise. I have people do it in a small way, a medium way, and a big way, so that they get that feeling of saying, "Yes. Yes!" And then I can't say it on the phone. It's like somebody, your football team just made a touchdown, "YES!" People, the freak out a little because they're not used to expressing that big of emotion, but you've got to stretch that instrument. Your instrument is your body. We play this instrument every day with our face, our voice, our hands, everything. The body is a whole instrument. I like to think of it like that so that you've got to learn how to animate it. The meaning of the words have to be expressed through the emotions. If you say, "Hi! It's great to be here!" Not, "Hi, it's great to be here." You have to embody the meaning of the words.

Robert Plank: Who wants a sad stick-in-the-mud talking to them?

Laurie Burton: Right! Nowadays, have you ever noticed that people talk in question marks?

Robert Plank: Just really uncertain, right?

Laurie Burton: They'll say, "Hi, I'm Laurie Burton? I'm really glad to be here? I have some things I'd like to share with you?" Rather than, "Hi, I'm Laurie Burton. I'm so happy to be here." You hear the difference?

Robert Plank: Yeah, one is timid and the other is more assertive.

Laurie Burton: Yes, and owning who you are. Owning the ground you're standing on when you're presenting, owning saying your name, even if it's over the phone or at a presentation. It's taking that moment and making it your own. People are so afraid to take it over and own who they are and the ground they're standing on, and making that a part of them. It's what I call being comfortable in your own skin.

Robert Plank: Let's explore that. Tell me what I should do or say over the phone to experience this.

Laurie Burton: Your voice has a lot of energy in it.

Robert Plank: Yeah.

Laurie Burton: Yeah.

Robert Plank: That doesn't come naturally, but when I'm in speaker/phone/discussion mode, I'm like, "Okay." I turn that on.

Laurie Burton: Yeah, so do I.

Robert Plank: Cool, so we're alike there.

Laurie Burton: Yeah, you have to turn it on, turn it off. It becomes so a part of me, I can't speak for you, that it's the way I am when I'm out there, when I'm talking to people, when I'm in the spotlight so that it just goes on.

Robert Plank: What I'm asking is, you said you have your "Yes" exercise.

Laurie Burton: Yes.

Robert Plank: I'm fine doing it right now if you want.

Laurie Burton: Go ahead, please!

Robert Plank: Do you want me to do the small, medium, and big, and you want me to introduce myself, like say, "I'm Robert Plank," or something?

Laurie Burton: Yes!

Robert Plank: I start off saying it, when you say there's the small, is that just saying it normally?

Laurie Burton: Why don't you just do the yeses small, medium, and large?

Robert Plank: So I just say, "Yes," and that's it?

Laurie Burton: Let's start with your name though. Say your name and then say, "I'm going to do this 'Yes' exercise." Say your name and then say that. Then do the exercise.

Robert Plank: I say, "I'm Robert Plank," and then I say, "Yes," or what's the exact words?

Laurie Burton: Yeah, just say, "Yes. Yes! YE-" then the big one.

Robert Plank: Okay, so here's the small one. I'm Robert Plank. Yes. And then the medium. I'm Robert Plank. Yes! And the big one. I'm Robert Plank. YES! Is that kind of the idea?

Laurie Burton: Good. Good. How'd that feel? How did it feel?

Robert Plank: It felt like it let out some stress I think.

Laurie Burton: Yeah, it does that too but how did it feel in your body when you were doing it? Were you feeling embarrassed? Were you feeling really good about what you were doing?

Robert Plank: I felt maybe a little embarrassed, a little cheesy, and I had my hands in my fists and I was kind of pumping both fists. I didn't even realize it until I was doing it.

Laurie Burton: Yes! See, there's the secret. It's that there needs to be a connection in the words you speak and the gesture connected to it.

Robert Plank: You can't be some person slumped over in the chair talking super energetically. Something's not going to line up, I guess.

Laurie Burton: Right. It's what I call a split. Have you ever seen anybody talking in front of a group and their hands are in a fig leaf position. We all know what that is, I think, right?

Robert Plank: Yeah.

Laurie Burton: Protecting the important parts. That's the way people stand to just hold on, but it's not effective. They may be saying, "Hi everybody," but their hands are in front of their- in the fig leaf. "Hi everybody. It's nice to be here today." They're speaking pretty well, but their hands are in a fig leaf. That's a split between their neck and the rest of their body.

Robert Plank: I'm glad that you brought that up, the whole body language thing, because that was the kind of thing where I didn't think about it that much, even though- what do all the communications teachers say? Non-verbal communication is 90%, or something? I saw a picture of me a few years ago where I was on stage, and I was sitting at a panel. Everyone else sitting at the panel was almost like uptight, rigid, and nervous. I was leaned back, which I kind of liked. If you looked at the panel, I was the one relaxed person. What I didn't like, which I hadn't noticed until seeing a picture of myself, was I had both hands in my pockets. I looked it up later, and I guess subconsciously that means you're holding things back and not revealing enough, I guess.

Laurie Burton: It's like when we were kids, when we had a blankie that we held onto that made us feel good. Hands in our pockets are a way to hold on. Crossing your arms, the fig leaf with your hands, or behind, or any way that you hold on rather than just- Having your arms at your side is what I call neutral position. You work from there, but it feels terrible to people if they're so used, with the hands in their pocket. I have to train people to get used to that neutral position, and then you can move anywhere and gesture freely.

Robert Plank: It seems like we're starting to form kind of a cool, almost like a step-by-step process, right? It seems like at first people, maybe they're doing things that, or they're putting off things that are not good. It seems like the first step is to do your mirror exercise, your "Yes" exercise. Look at yourself in the mirror, see how you put yourself out there, see how you look and you feel. Then do that, you say your name and say, "Yes!" Small, medium, large. From there, you figure out the neutral position, right? You figure out where, if normally you have your hands or your arms in a weird kind of way, you just reset and get back to just the regular arms at your side thing.

Laurie Burton: Neutral, and then go from there. Yeah.

Robert Plank: Then, depending on what you want to express when you talk, now you figure out those new mannerisms, I guess.

Laurie Burton: The mannerisms, excuse me, are a result of the words you speak. You can't just say, "I'll gesture like this there," because it won't be connected to the words. If you say, I love-" both hands are in front of me right now. My fingers are out and I'm gesturing outward. I love- If you've ever seen great singers or performers, when they gesture, the words come through their fingers as they gesture out. That's the secret. There's a whole, it all connects.

Have you ever seen people that just gesture so much with their hands? They're constantly going, and they're not connected to anything. It's distracting. Lots of people do that.

Robert Plank: Oh yeah! All I remember, even 5 minutes later, is just the gesturing, none of what they actually said.

Laurie Burton: Right. Pacing is the leg version of the arms. They'll pace back and forth. Too much pacing. I want people to move, but I don't want them to pace. It's got to evolve. It comes from- the meaning comes out your mouth, through your eyes, and then your arms, your hands, and everything.

Robert Plank: I like that. It's one of those things where at first listen, it seems kind of hokey, but when I think back to when I was a kid and we would play baseball, and learn to hit a baseball. They'd always say, "Swing the bat, but don't just hit the ball and stop."

Laurie Burton: No.

Robert Plank: "Pull it all the way through and swing it through the ball." I never took Karate, but in Karate, you always hear, "Punch something, and punch through it," so kind of along those lines.

Laurie Burton: Perfect.

Robert Plank: You're talking about, yeah talk but then also move and not over-dramatically gesticulate randomly because you're nervous. Even though, when were talking or whatever, you and I are talking but we're also kind of moving around and gesturing, and that gets picked up back in the audio even though no one actually sees it.

Laurie Burton: Yes, it's a completion of the meaning, the things you're saying. It's an extension. Your arm is extended, and it keeps flowing into the audience, and then just goes, keeps going. It's like the sound of a bell. You can think of it that way. The bell rings, but it keeps going, and then it disappears.

Robert Plank: I like that. There's after effects.

Laurie Burton: Yes. Yes. People never think of their personalities, after effects, and the way they speak, but it really is. People who are really good, they leave you with an impression, and that's the after the bell rings.

Robert Plank: That's cool. That's kind of trippy.

Laurie Burton: Yeah, it is.

Robert Plank: Let's talk about you for a few minutes. We're talking about all these cool things about how to speak better, how to overcome all the little trip-ups everyone goes across. What is it exactly that you do? Do you help anyone? Do you help speakers?

Laurie Burton: Anyone. Anyone. People say, "Let's figure out who this applies to." A lot of it has been corporate work, but there's also been individual days, or 2 days, with an individual working on the way they present themselves. A CEO of a company perhaps, or somebody who's going to be making a speech and wants to work on how they look up there. "Tell me how I'm doing," kind of thing. We go through a whole day of breaking down everything from head-to-toe. A lot of people are hung up on parts of their body that they're not happy with, so they walk out on that stage. Let's just say for instance, a woman who's overweight. She's worried about how they're going to see her heaviness, so that colors her speech. She doesn't have the ultimate freedom to express herself because she's worried about her weight.

I cover all the way down, from head to toe, asking people to look in the mirror and tell me what they love about their face, what they don't like. If they say, "I don't like it," I'll say, "Well, are you willing to get a nose job?" They'll say, "No," then the question is, "Then let's make friends with it. Can you make friends with it? We've got to make friends with our heaviness, our weight, or our noses, or whatever it is, in order to make that great presentation.

Robert Plank: Would you say that when you're helping these people out, is there a certain percentage of, if you broke down all the little things that there were to be fixed in the average person's speech and delivery, would you say that most of the things that need to be fixed, are they real things or is the majority just things they need to just get over and forget about, basically?

Laurie Burton: A combination of both.

Robert Plank: Would you say, is it equal or is one more than the other?

Laurie Burton: I think a lot of it is skill and the ability to really express yourself in a positive way, and one that impacts people, inspires people. That's the most important thing, for me.

Robert Plank: Okay. You'll just, on a case-by-case basis, look at what jumps out at you, look at the low-hanging fruit and just correct all the things that need correcting.

Laurie Burton: Go in and work on them, and then ultimately, I've got to check on their body and how they feel about it, gotta check there. Got to, yeah.

Robert Plank: Cool. I always think about my own way of talking and the way that I normally talk, or even the way I talked as a kid. I would always just talk like, "blablablah," like a mile a minute, so fast that I would slur my words, repeat things like "like" because I'm in California.

Laurie Burton: Oh, you are in California.

Robert Plank: Yeah.

Laurie Burton: I messed that up.

Robert Plank: It's sunny and hot over here.

Laurie Burton: Oh yes. I'm in California too.

Robert Plank: Oh cool. We're neighbors then, basically.

Laurie Burton: Yes. Where are you?

Robert Plank: I'm over by Stockton Modesto.

Laurie Burton: Oh okay.

Robert Plank: Are you southern-

Laurie Burton: I'm in LA. Yeah.

Robert Plank: Everyone's always in LA. We're close enough.

I would always talk so dang fast, and trip over my words, say half a sentence, then go over and rock it in another sentence. Every time I talk, I have to remember. I keep thinking to myself, "Twenty percent slower than I normally would." That way, because I know my weakness is to go too fast. I just say, "Okay, even though, coming out of my own mouth, it feels to me like I'm talking too slowly, but then when I hear that later on, it sounds about just right." It seems like from everything you've been saying, look at yourself in the mirror, how you look at how someone else speaks. It's almost like the way that you think things are going out, or the way that you think you're presenting to the world is totally different than what everyone else sees.

Laurie Burton: Oh my, good. Yes. Absolutely. Good point. That speaking very quickly is a way to get off the spot. If I had people who come out, they take center stage, and as they're walking onto the stage or they're making a presentation, they'll say, "Hi I'm Laurie Burton I'm really glad to be here it's great to be here what fun we're going to have." They walk off, that very important moment of introduction. What usually causes fits is I have them walk across the stage looking at the audience and not saying a thing.

Robert Plank: Nice.

Laurie Burton: By that time, the audience is going, "What's going on with that person? They're not- what?" They take center stage and then they say, "Hello. I'm Laurie Burton. It's great to be here." You already got that audience going, "Hmmm." You've got to have the energy, though, too.

Robert Plank: It sounds like there's the energy part of it, but then there's the ownership part of it. It's almost like people seem to think, or maybe it seems like if you have a lot of energy, that means that you're super fast and rushed, but you can have a lot of energy and still have a slow enough pace, I guess.

Laurie Burton: Absolutely. Absolutely. The pace has to do more with just who you are and how you go about it, but it's also a support mechanism for your speech and for getting people interested and holding their interest. You're going to lose your audience half of the time anyway because people's minds just do that. They wander off. Then they come back. It's a part of the business.

Robert Plank: Right, but it's up to you to-

Laurie Burton: Pull them back.

Robert Plank: Yeah, pull them back and be entertaining enough where you know you're going to lose them half the time and they come back, but if you're super boring you'll lose them the whole time.

Laurie Burton: Oh yes! We've all seen those, haven't we?

Robert Plank: Right.

Laurie Burton: Yep. The current program we're working on is called Personality Workout. How many people do you know that might need a personality workout, Robert?

Robert Plank: Most of them.

Laurie Burton: See? I love those answers. I know. I agree, a lot of people could use a personality workout. It involves digging in there and finding those positive parts of your personality and bringing them to the surface.

Robert Plank: Sounds scary and painful.

Laurie Burton: You're not going to get through it without going through some, dumping some bad habits and realizing, it takes some depth. It really does.

Robert Plank: I noticed that with me. I keep mentioning, I'm not the best speaker. It doesn't come naturally, but if I get to the point where I feel almost over-confident about my skills and things or I go too long without going back to the fundamentals, then I end up backsliding a little bit, back to the person I don't want to be. It's almost like, not only is there the breaking down and building up, but I noticed, at least with me, I have to keep on keeping the muscles strong, right?

Laurie Burton: Yes, absolutely. You're constantly checking in. You have to check in with yourself and with the audience. It could be just one-on-one, but the person you're speaking with is your audience. You're talking to your boss, you're talking to somebody you're dating, or whatever it is, it's your job to express yourself honestly, with animation, energy, truthfulness, love, and all those good things come through you. All those positive, wonderful qualities.

Robert Plank: A lot of stuff to think about, and normally we'd think, "Oh, it's just talking. It's the most natural thing," but there's all these things that we're giving off, or not giving off, that we just have to look at ourselves a little bit and we can fix them.

As we're winding down today's call, Laurie, could you share with us, what's the number one mistake you see people making, as far as their speaking, their stage-presence, their body language? What's the mistake you see over and over again?

Laurie Burton: They want to get off the spot. They don't want to be recognized. They don't want that. Attention causes tension.

Robert Plank: I like that.

Laurie Burton: I do too. Lots of people don't love being on the spot.

Robert Plank: What's the solution?

Laurie Burton: Owning it. Taking, saying, "Okay. This is how it feels. I'm going to acknowledge the tension." There's lots of things. That's a whole other program there. It's acknowledging the tension, coming to terms with it, and then looking in that mirror. You've got to own that and know that you deserve these things that you're doing for yourself, and confidently take them in and try them on, and see how they fit.

Robert Plank: I like that analogy. That's cool. Try different things on. I also like that exercise that you- I keep thinking back to that. Actually, like you said earlier about how you told someone to walk on stage and just say nothing, just look around, and not quite size them up but just that dreaded dead silence, just let it out.

Laurie Burton: People, they can't stand it. You know why? Because they don't deserve it. They feel like, "I'm taking up their time." But I, me, Laurie Burton, I deserve that, and I take that.

Robert Plank: I love it. That's awesome.

Laurie Burton: Yeah.

Robert Plank: Laurie, you shared a lot of really great stuff today. I like everything you have to say, not only good advice but lots of little cool exercises that anyone can try out on their own, at home or anything like that. If they're at the point where they say, "Okay, I like what Laurie had to say. I want to hire her as a coach. I want to check out her blog and her books." Where can they go and find out more about you?

Laurie Burton: They can go to LaurieBurtonTraining.com. I also have my book there. It's on Amazon as well. It's called Presenting You.

Robert Plank: Awesome. Presenting You, LaurieBurtonTraining.com. Hopefully, it will become a number one best seller, selling 10 billion copies.

Laurie Burton: Yes. From your lips to God's ears.

Robert Plank: Awesome. Cool. I appreciate you Laurie. I appreciate this subject that might be painful for a lot of people, or might seem too simplistic, but it seems like everyone needs to be a better speaker, and everyone needs to know how to correct these things that might just kind of creep up, or might just be these nervous tics. If they do, they can deliver their message better, get a lot of attention better, have a better life in every area.

Laurie Burton: Yes. Absolutely. I appreciate your taking part today too and trying out some exercises. Very nice.

Robert Plank: Yeah, why just learn when it's more fun to participate, right?

Laurie Burton: Yes, yes! Thank you.

Robert Plank: Thank you Laurie for being on the show. Have a great one.

Laurie Burton: Okay. Thank you. You too. Bye bye.[/showhide]

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112: Build an Online Presence and Connect with Your Ideal Customer with Ajay Prasad

Ajay Prasad from GMR Web Team and creator of RepuGen software tells us how business owners need to focus on their repeat customers AND how to differentiate to reach their ideal customer. He works with urgent care providers, dentists, local business and more to increase (and in some cases, save) their business with Yelp ratings, SEO, PPC, website updates, reputation, followup, and more.

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Ajay Prasad is formerly a marketer for a few Fortune 10 companies and he now owns GMR Web Team, GMR Transcription, and his brand new business, RepuGen. Ajay has focused his career on helping SMB's maximize revenue and reach through the internet. Ajay, I'm Robert. Nice to meet you.

Ajay Prasad: Very nice to meet you, Robert. I'm happy to be here.

Robert Plank: Awesome. I'm happy, too. What I want to know is, what is it that you do and how are you different from everyone else out there?

Ajay Prasad: What we do is essentially we help small- and medium-size businesses maximize their sales from the internet. A lot of the business is now coming from the internet, so that's what we do. We are different from your typical digital marketing agency is, number one, we are a full service agency. We have all the pieces in one place. We are not a one-trick pony. We are very strategy-focused. We judge yourself based on what kind of return we are bringing for our clients.

For our client, it doesn't take them to ... We don't do all these mumbo jumbo about ranking and where you are. We just look at it, say, "What kind of money you are making from the internet or how many views you are getting?" Then, we see if we can improve it. We come up with a plan, we tell them what the budget will be, and if they are struck with us, that means they are happy, they are getting a positive return on investment. We don't lose too many clients, which tells me we must be doing something right.

Robert Plank: That tells you you are providing good service, right?

Ajay Prasad: Yes.

Robert Plank: That's cool, and I like that because I don't work with a ton of small businesses. I work with a few, and what I always hear a lot is that, for example, I see that you guys work with dentists and urgent care doctors and things like that. What I hear from some of these doctors, the dentists especially and the chiropractors especially, is that they get these robocalls all day long from these kind of, like you said, the other one-trick pony kind of agencies. All they do is say, "Do you want to have a better Yelp review?" I'm thinking, okay, a Yelp review is nice but what about the rest of it? What about a website, social media, stuff like that?

Ajay Prasad: Yes. That is where we always tell them that one thing is not going to do anything for you. These days, now, to get business from the internet, of course you have to be found. You need to be found. Then, you need to have a really stellar reputation online, where the Yelp review comes in definitely, and the other things, and once you have these, then of course you have to be able to convert. That's what it takes for someone to contact you. After that, your service comes in. Really, most of the small businesses ... I always say that if the majority of business is coming from new customers, then you need to look inside and see what you are doing wrong, because the majority of customers should be getting really from referrals, especially for small businesses.

As you do a good job ... Everything needs to be a peace offering. You cannot just say, "I'll get you this. I'll get you that." Unless you look at all the pieces of business together, it will not work. Because my experience is with larger companies, where we always knew that the operations is as important as marketing, and finance is as important as operations and marketing. We become more of a consultant to our client, not just bring them customers.

In face, today I'm meeting with one of my clients where it looks like we are not getting the positive return on our investment in four months. That's the discussion we are going to have, is go over the numbers, really look at the metrics to see if it is making sense. One of the things that are not making sense for me is the value of sales.

Until we understand, until the company understands, what's the value of sales, how do you know if your marketing is effective or not? We get to that level. You cannot just take one piece and do it. You cannot say, don't do paid advertising. Everything has a place, and the reason people say, "You don't do it," is because they don't know generally speaking.

What we do is we say, "Given your business, what should be the right strategy for marketing?" We tell them. Of course, there are businesses where we say, "You know what? Social media is not very critical for you." Which is very rare nowadays, obviously. There are businesses we say, "Don't even worry about SEO, because it's so comparative, all the element keywords. It will take forever, so let's figure out how to do better advertising and get a positive return on investment for you."

Again, marketing has to be customized. Every business is very unique. That's what we always say. Our campaign needs to be consistent with the business.

Robert Plank: I like that. It seems like from what you just said is there's a couple of levels to it. You could say the worst, most basic level, would be, like you said, the one-trick ponies. All they want to do is just show, "Well, look, you can rank high for this keyword." The next step up is some kind of an agency that they do everything. It seems like the next level about that is that they do everything, but they look at what's already there, and they look at what's worth doing, and they look at the competition, and they say, "Even though we could do these ten or twenty things, maybe we'll just do five."

It sounds like the next level even above that, it sounds like where you're at, is you do all that, but also once the ball is rolling, then you'll course correct. You don't set up the website and then say, "Have fun," and walk away. You actually, like you said, "The leads aren't coming in," or, "There's not enough repeat customers," so now you go and fix things over time.

Ajay Prasad: Correct, correct. I've always said that web is no different from brick and mortar. It's not like you set up a store, and you put a sign in it and everything, and you are done. You have to keep on improving. You have to tweak the product that you are selling. You need to be trying different kinds of marketing campaigns to maximize it. This is no different. For example, we are a Google Premier Partner. All it means is, we have jumped through many hoops and Google recognizes us as experts in Google AdWords.

For all of our clients ... We manage over a million dollars right now for our clients' budget, and we are checking it three or four times a day to see, what's the trend, what's working. These are not the kind of thing that you set it up and you are done. You have to keep on looking. You have to keep on improving. That's all marketing.

When I was in corporate America, for big companies, it's not like we had a campaign, say TV advertising, and it was successful, so we said, okay, it's done. No, we just had to keep on doing the same advertising, right?

Robert Plank: Right. If it worked, why not repeat it or even try to make it better, right?

Ajay Prasad: Exactly. At some point, any advertising, you'll see that there is a life cycle. After some point, it starts to become less and less effective. Then you have to go and change it. Even the large corporations, like Coca-Cola and all, you will see that their team keeps on changing, right? That's what marketing is all about. If you see the business is declining, you have to make some changes to keep that momentum going.

Robert Plank: Yeah. Imagine if every year for the Superbowl you'd see the exact same commercials. That's no fun.

Ajay Prasad: That's exactly my point.

Robert Plank: Cool. Could you give me a good example of some business that you came across where they maybe had a lot of missed opportunities and then you went in and you worked your magic, and you made their business super awesome?

Ajay Prasad: Yes. Since you talked about Urgent Care ... By the way, we have many, many clients. A few very large companies are our client. When I am saying large, I am saying a couple of hundred million dollars. The largest one would probably be a couple of billion dollars. We have a lot of these small businesses that are struggling. Urgent care is a very good example. This urgent care center came to us for marketing. This was about a year and a half back.

Basically, they were very honest, and they said, "Listen. Our sales have been dropping, and now we earning a loss, and if in six months we can not turn it around, we have to close it." Their lease was running out so they said, "We are not going to renew the lease if we can't become profitable." We did analysis, and we could see that there were a lot of searches, that people are searching. That is true. Urgent care is one thing that you can even afford not to do digital marketing.

That's the first thing people do is go on the internet when they have a cut or an injury. They're looking for urgent care. We saw that there were a lot of searches for them. Of course, their website was outdated. They were not getting found there. Other thing that popped up was that their Yelp rating was 1.2. There were seven reviews. Just seven. The last one was one year old, but if you just went on their Yelp and you saw 1.2 rating.

My first question was, "Is this the correct number? If this is correct, I don't think I can do anything. I can get people to come to your website with my activity, but after that they will not come to you because who wants to go to a place where everyone is saying it's horrible?"

Robert Plank: Right.

Ajay Prasad: Of course, the owner got really upset with me. She was like, "What do you mean? We have been there for twenty-five years. We have all these loyal customers." I said, "Yeah. Someone who does not know you, how would they know?" What we did is, of course we redid the website. That was a simple thing. Because this is local marketing, it becomes really easy.

We started with some ... We did both a CO and some paid advertising, so quickly start getting people on their website. Then we instituted a program, ongoing program to improve their reputation. What happens, people do not medically write reviews just because they had a great experience. The people who had bad experience are more likely to write a review because they are pissed off.

We created a manual process, which later on I automated, which became RepuGen. We created a process for them where we printed a card and the front desk was to ask everyone when they are leaving, "How was your experience?" If they said, "Very good," or in their judgement, they were happy, then give them a card. Request them to write a review. Literally, fast forward three months, their review was 3.0.

They were already in black, the whole operation. Now one year down the road, their number of patient count has doubled. Half of the patient is now coming from internet, which was not even there before. They have a hundred plus reviews. Their average is over 4.0, because our process is such that if you are unhappy, then we just ask you, "What happened?" Then we say, "We will contact you," and someone contacts that if you are unhappy. If you are happy, then we ask you to write a review. As simple as that.

Now, one year later, they are super profitable. Obviously, they went and they renewed their lease for another ten years and it's a huge success story. This was a chain, so they had two other urgent care centers. They had similar problem. Not as bad as this one, so of course now we are doing all three of them and it's a very profitable operation. This gives you a very good example how literally in three months, a business which was contemplating closing turned around and became a very successful operation. Right now, that is probably one of the most profitable urgent care center in the city.

Robert Plank: Awesome. That's cool that in just a few months, it seems like before, they were probably working really hard and missing out on a lot of things, and now, just because you were able to plug in just a handful of strategies, now it turned the whole thing around.

Ajay Prasad: The interesting thing is, for example, putting this reputation development process, they also started to get feedback from the customer who were not happy, right? If the customer is not happy, they tell you what happened. When we automated the system, the RepuGen, that's what it does. Now that when people are not happy, you find out, so you also improve your operation. They learn a lot of thing from our system that they also made changed in their operation that made them even stronger.

Robert Plank: I like that. It's not just a matter of following up with the happy customers to balance out the bad reviews with some good ones, but it's also if you keep getting all the reviews saying that, like, "The place isn't clean enough," or "The secretary's mean," or something, or "They don't follow up enough," they can correct that.

Ajay Prasad: In fact, the funny thing is that there was that problem. They had to fire one of the front desk person because she was mean. In fact, everyone complained about, so they just simply went and changed that. That made a big difference in their happiness.

Robert Plank: That's cool, because that's one of those things that, just a few years ago, before all of this stuff, they might not have even known. It might've been for the past twenty years this was their problem. Right?

Ajay Prasad: Correct, correct, correct. The people were thrilled with their doctors. The front desk was the problem

Robert Plank: Such an easy thing to fix, right?

Ajay Prasad: Yeah. Exactly.

Robert Plank: Cool. I really like stuff like that. For example, I really like that, like when there's a house for sale near me, they almost all have a website, now, on the actual sign. It's usually 123MainStreet.com. It's what's printed right on the sign. Super easy to get to. It seems like the dentists seem to be the most savvy, I guess, with this kind of thing.

I really like ... When I was a kid what was cool about the dentist was they would have you write yourself a postcard for six months from now. You totally forget that you sent that, but six months later, a thing comes in the postcard, and you recognize your own handwriting, and I'm sure that was just part of the process to get customers back.

I like that now that there's all this technology, the dentist I go to now, what I do is I have my appointment. Again, from six months ago, I forget that there's an appointment coming up and then I think that a system sends me a text message, and that emails me, and even the email itself says either I can click a link to reschedule, I can click a link to say I agree with the appointment time, do not contact me again, or I can say I agree but also email me again the day before. I love that. I wish more businesses would do that.

Ajay Prasad: Yeah. Exactly right. Either, for attention you want to do that, and then of course, for every dentist, you have to have a stellar review online. Otherwise, again, if I see 1.2 rating not just on Yelp, but on other review sites, or you have Vitals, and all those medical-related site, and if I go there, and someone is saying, "And I went there and I came out with a bloody mouth," guess what? You are not going. It is so important to have a stellar review now to get new customers. Your typical process now is when people find you, they go and find about you before they contact you.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah, and that's so true about any kind of dentist or doctor kind of thing. The reviews are so huge because if there's a Wal-Mart, or a Target, or a Taco Bell nearby that has two stars, fine, I'll still go there, but if there's a doctor who's three stars, I don't trust that.

Ajay Prasad: Every local business. That's what I said. The chains is a different story, just like you said. Every local business needs to have a very stellar online reputation. There's no way around it. For medical professionals, it's even critical. I know some hospitals which has horrible ratings, so I don't even know how people go there.

Robert Plank: They have no choice. It's what's nearby, I guess, right?

Ajay Prasad: Yeah.

Robert Plank: I really like what that kind of leads us to, because always the fear, right? Everyone's fear is that if they have a mom and pop business or something with only ten employees, and then the big retail chain comes to town ... Maybe they own a deli or an Italian restaurant, and then Olive Garden come to town, or a Subway comes to town, everyone's always worried that the big franchise is going to push me out. It sounds like, with this online stuff, with the social media, with the reviews, the big chains don't really do that. This is how everyone can get ahead.

Ajay Prasad: Exactly. You are a hundred percent there. That's why I always say that regional marketing is so critical for small businesses. You can really have your customer loyalty and keep on making improvement, and not losing your existing customer, and then keep on adding new customers. It is totally irrelevant if you have competition.

I always tell my clients that, "Listen. The competition, worry about it but first thing you have to worry about is internity. If you are doing everything right, you can go against any company. I don't care how big they are." Again, it's the local and even individuals ... I work for a restaurant chain. One of my jobs was, I was VP of strategy for a big restaurant chain. It's a billion dollar corporation. I know that the customers have an affinity for local ... If they had their own preference, they would go to that local mom and pop restaurant instead of this chain. That's the first inclination. You can build your customer relationship.

When you go to a new place, then obviously review is how they will go. If I don't have a way to check review of a restaurant, then I will end up going to a chain because I know what to expect.

Robert Plank: Right. The chain is the default decision. If you can't decide, you just go to the chain.

I don't want to keep you too long and as we're winding this down, could you tell us as far as all the business that you helped and worked on, what's the number one mistake you see them all making?

Ajay Prasad: I think that the number one mistake that they all make is that they are way too focused on outside instead of looking inside. Every business needs to understand why they are in business, why they are different from their competition. Small businesses, generally speaking, don't do that, which is the biggest mistake. I have always said that if you are a small business, you need to know why.

If someone has been in business for twenty-five years, like this urgent care, it's easy, right? You can talk about how we have been serving the locality for twenty-five years. If you are an accountant, whatever you are, why? One of the things that will happen is, if you look internally, then you will start to focus on who your ideal customer is. Small business have a tendency to take any customer. I made that mistake, frankly, when I started my own business, is to go and, "I'll take any customer," then later on I was spending way too much time on the wrong customers.

Every small business has to figure out who their ideal customer is. Once you have that figured out, who your ideal customer is, then you start to focus on getting those customers, because that is the only way you will grow, you will keep customers. You need me to know who that is and very few businesses I run into have that.

The two biggest mistake that they tend to focus too much on, "Oh, so-and-so is doing this. So-and-so is doing that. Oh, they have this happen." I always say that what you do has going to be the biggest impact on your business rather than what happens outside.

Robert Plank: The other thing about that is it seems like that anyone who's in the business, if someone owns a restaurant or owns an urgent care, a lot of times it seems like they're too close to it and they need someone like you to look at their business from the outside, from a regular person's perspective, to figure out their weaknesses and figure out their strengths that they should be doing more of.

Ajay Prasad: Yeah. It's even just asking questions. I can tell you that many business owners, when I start asking them questions, it just makes them think, and like, "Wow, okay." That's the thing. The small businesses really are so busy surviving that they are always working on the business. They are in the business, not on the business. You need to take some time off so that you can work on the business so that you can see what you are doing right, what you are doing wrong, and make adjustments.

It is very hard, but getting an outside company like us, it's very automatic for us, right? We start asking, "Okay, how do you differentiate yourself? What is the problem?" Just like we did with urgent care. It never occurred to them that no one will, even if someone referred ... I told them that, "Listen. When people even refer and they say go to that urgent care, they are going to check you up on the internet. They see your review and they are not going to come.

It never even occurred to them that not having a plan to get ongoing reviews is hurting their business. That's the only thing. You have to be looking at what is working, what's not working. Like I said, if you had this internal focus, number one, to see where you can make improvement ... I always say, you will seldom make home-runs. All you have to do is hit regular singles and doubles and you will see that you are winning. Then, of course, every business should know who is their ideal customer. That will really help them focus their marketing.

Robert Plank: Two really good pieces of advice. Focus inside and then differentiate and get your ideal customer. I really like everything you had to say, and I want to send people your way. Can you let everyone know, Ajay, where can people find out more about you, and what it is you do, and maybe even hire you?

Ajay Prasad: Sure. There are two websites that they should check. My digital agency marketing website is GMRWebTeam.com. It's just like it sounds. GMR is Gloria Mary Rachel, and it's web as in website, and team is in football team that you have, dot com. That will give you an idea of our approach even to digital marketing. The other one that we have created, like a software service for generating ongoing reviews, which also helps you see what your customer, if there are any flaws, is called RepuGen.

This is a software that essentially automates the whole manual process that I had created for our businesses to generate more reviews and get the feedback. The reason I created software, frankly, was the execution level was so spotty. Some of my clients did an excellent job of manually doing it, some of them not so excellent, not very good. This software just takes the fright out of asking people how happy you are or getting any feedback. The system does everything, and now you can just contact customers who are unhappy to address their issue. These two sites, I will say that they should go and check me out.

Robert Plank: Awesome. The GMR Web Team looks like a great website, a great service, and the RepuGen looks like a great software as a service. I'm really glad that you came on the show, Ajay, and I'm really happy that you shared the things you did. I was really impressed. Learned a lot so thanks for coming on.[/showhide]

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111: Make the Right Business Decisions for Maximum Success with Donald Mazzella

Donald Mazzella, author of the upcoming book, "Recalculating: 97 Experts on Driving Small Business Growth" tells us how to make great decisions in business, whether it has to do with leadership, marketing, operations, human capital, or finance.

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Our guest today is Donald P. Mazella. Donald P. Mazella is a political and lifestyle expert who's been seen on MSNBC, Bloomberg, and in the Wall Street Journal. He is the COO of Information Strategies Inc, a company that helps business managers improve profits. He currently oversees a prints and internet publication network centered around Small Business Digest, with more than 3.2 million opt-in small business readers and healthcare industry stakeholders.

Cool. Donald, I'm Robert. Nice to meet you.

Donald Mazzella: Good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Robert Plank: No problem. Tell me about yourself. Tell me about what you do?

Donald Mazzella: Basically, right now we've just put together a book, 97 Experts on How to Grow a Small Business, which will appear in September. We're expanding. Small Business Digest has been around since 2000. It's had it's ups and downs. Right now it's in expansion mode. We've been helping small business managers, as you say, add profits. Ultimately, how you do that covers 3 main areas: You grow your business, you grow your profit line, or you sell your business. It ironic, in today's world a majority of small business owners above the age of 50 wil tell you all they want to do is get out. Exit strategies are now becoming very important.

Robert Plank: That's what you do, compared to everyone else? You're all about the exit strategy?

Donald Mazzella: We tell our audience in our stories. I should also say, most of our stories come from other entrepreneurs, or from stakeholders in the area. We've had Marcus Lemonis on the program, JD Powers, John Scully. We generally look for the people who've been successful and ask them how they've been successful, how they exited. We try to get them to provide 1 or 2 nuggets of information that our audience can use, whether it's on our radio program, whether it's in our newsletters, or in our e-zine, or now in the book. We just try to get them to talk to our audience because who knows better how to do things than people who have done it. Interestingly enough, sometimes we get someone who failed because sometimes you learn more from failure than you do from success.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. When things don't go the right way, and they have to readjust and change direction. Could you talk about an example from your book? One of these big failures that jumps out at you?

Donald Mazzella: Can I talk a success strategy because it happens to come to mind because everybody has a business card, but as one of our experts said, "You're business card should be one of your most effective marketing tools." She goes into detail. She actually has a test that's included in the book on what your business card can do, and how to do it. For instance, your name of your company. It should be immediately recognizable, or distinctive. If it can be both, it's great. That's one. Now to give you one about failure. 53% of all the people we've talked to over the years, we've kept a running tally, have told us the biggest single factore in failure is financing, not having enough financing. That's number 1. Ironically, number 2, and which is reason we labeled the book recalculation, is the fact that the industry was changing, they didn't realize it. I thought that was fairly interesting. Then the 3rd reason they said for failure was the fact they picked the wrong people. Those are the 3 major reasons for failure.

It's consistent throughout the book, and through the years we've been on the air. If you asked them, "What's the success?" They'll tell you, Number 1, they picked the right people. Number 2, they happened to have the right service or product at the right time. Number 3, which I found interesting, a lot of them said luck. They happened to do it right.

Robert Plank: Luck in terms of they put out enough things, they had enough projects going, that one thing ended up taking off, right?

Donald Mazzella: Yeah, correct. I always use the story ... Are you familiar that the man who created Xerox was going to Rochester in a snowstorm, and he got a taxi-driver. Since they were making slow progress he told him what he was doing. The taxi-driver said, "Well, my sister and I want to invest." They invested a then unheard of sum of $25,000.00. They became multi-millionaires, if not billionaires, because of that. What is that? Luck? Listening to the right person? I always use that story because I consider it luck when you hear something and act on it, or when you hit a situation and act on it.

Robert Plank: Decisiveness.

Donald Mazzella: Absolutely.

Robert Plank: Cool. I like books like that. I like stuff like the Chicken Soup kind of books, where you can just get different perspectives, or different ideas. I really like stuff, for example, they can grow rich or they've just taken all the sum total of every one of success and failures, and drew some conclusions that are the common threads, from all these people from different eras in time, different ages, different industries, all that good stuff.

Donald Mazzella: I hate to disagree with the host, but I disagree in one way. All of these books, that's one of the reasons why we wrote this book, they distill it down to simple procedures. I believe in small business, or any business, are made up of a series of decisions, no one of which alone can topple you. If you look at Kodak, on the big side, or for that matter, Yahoo. Yahoo had the world, and what happened? It sold the world for $4 billion. I think life and small business is a series of decisions, one leading into the other, one leading in to it. That's why if you read the Chicken Soup for the Soul books on happiness etc ... I happen to have read them all because I was involved in a court case involving Chicken Soup. It's a formula to it. At the end it's like a formula you had for tomato soup. It fills you for a while, but leaves you strangely unsatisfied.

Robert Plank: Okay. What you're saying is that these Chicken Soup kind of books, there's not really much behind it, but what you have in this recalculating book is everyone has their own story and you can draw your own conclusions, but there's some real lessons behind it, then?

Donald Mazzella: I wish I could have said it as succinctly as you did. I'm not denigrating these. These books, I wish I had a Chicken Soup franchise. You and I could retire easily on it. That's what I believe. I believe that small business leaders, or managers, face decisions every day, some large, some small. The worst part about it is they usually don't have anybody to talk to to help them make that decision. That's the difference. You can have an overall philosophy. If you're a gambler, sometimes gamblers all have a system. At some point you have to make a decision that's outside of these peramiters. That, to me, is what separates many successful small businesses. It's one of the questions I ask our people when I assign a story. I ask the reporter, have you asked what they consider the decision that made or break them? If they haven't asked them I have them go back. It's amazing, people say, "You know, I never thougth of it that way. Let me go and look at it." Then they say that, and say, "But, if I hadn't of made that decision I would have had to do that." We're meeting a little bit, but that's how I feel about it.

Robert Plank: You're saying it's like the butterfly effect in a lot of ways then, right? Like, some small decision that you had to make, and it's a good reason that you did make it so long ago, led to this whole path of all these other things.

Donald Mazzella: Absolutely. In the case of Kodak, what decisions they made? They were not going after the digital camera marketplace. I mean, that was a big decision. Kodak holds all of the patents on digital photography, or did, and then sold them off. Company up the street ... Just had an article cross my desk today: Where do you put your second store? Oftentime people think about the first store. They don't think as much about the second store. They say, "Gee, that's a good location, a lot of traffic, etc." Yes, but the demographics of the surrounding neighborhood are not. Those are the kind of decisions that once you're committed to that area, then you have to do a lot of other decisions in order to make it work. Maybe sometimes you can make it work. There are other times when no matter what you do you're ending up with a poor location. Am I making myself clear on that point?

Robert Plank: Yeah. Could you impact that a little bit? Could you tell me about in your book, someone's decision, one where no decision was the right decision, I guess you're saying?

Donald Mazzella: Oh, yeah. That's a really good question. The answer, in our book, we talk about how you make a decision, and not make a decision. I'm going to look at the list of contributors, got a hundred of them, see which one probably ... Oh. The one that comes to mind, they're talking about a lot of companies, over 50% of companies still do not use social media. As one of our contributors points out, "The decision not to do social media has ramifications far beyond." One example, if you're not using social media, if you're not signing up people for your newsletter, if you're not doing the thousand things that are required, the perception of your customer is going to change. The problem all of these big box stores, Talbots, everybody else is having ... Ironically, as you know, Walmart is now thinking of buying Jet.com because it recognized that not having a social presence that is respected, and used by the consumers, is hurting it's brick and mortor business. Walmart is doing what many big companies do. They're going out and buying the expertise. That's the case. As Bob Haymon points out, the one single non-decision that he has seen, that's really hurt, has been the smaller companies not embracing social media.

Robert Plank: With all this decisions, and especially things like that, like some old-school company or some huge company they might hear, "We should do this," or "We should do that." How do you sort that out from all the noise? How do you know if this thing that comes across you, and you think, okay, I need to have social media, how do you know if that's a real thing that you need to be going after? How do you know if that's something that you should just ignore, and focus on something more important?

Donald Mazzella: That's a good question. I wish I had a simplified answer. We divide the book into 5 parts: Leadership, Marketing, Operations, Technology, Human Capital, and Finance. In doing so, we did it because we found that the average small business owner uses a combination of them every day. Depending on the company, and depending on the individual, they go in various orders. There are some people who are technically trained that operations and technology is, they make the decisions based on that 1st, and then 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. Someone else, a marketer, does it in a reverse, marketing first and then the others. In order to make any decision you have to make the one column, a right column and left column, and decide after that ... Most people do it mentally, I don't know about you, but I do it. When they finally put it all together, they then look at it, and say, "Ah, this is my decision. This is why I'm going forward." In the end, it's usually based on the bias of the individual, which we talk about in the book.

Robert Plank: You have the book broken down into these 5 sections. Is what you're saying that someone could look at your book, and they could narrow down if they want to focus just on to marketing, or just on finance? They could narrow down which section. They could read one of these stories from one of these experts, and then if they decide that, "Okay, that's my weak spot. My weak spot is I need better marketing," then they could make a list of pros and cons, and decide if that is something that they should do or not.

Donald Mazzella: You said it better than me again. You're good at it. The answer is yes. Within that sales and marketing section there are how-to articles on how to do it. If you decide you want social media, for instance, there's 3 or 4 stories of contributions on social media from some of the top names. Operations, the intersting thing about operations is, as I'm sure you're aware, it's a lot easier to start a company today than it was 5 years ago. Most of the heavy lifting, you don't have to create a financial package, it's available. You don't have to create an inventory management system. You can all tie it into your e-commerce site, so that you have an instant inventory, instant distribution, etc. the world has changed radically. As someone said, I wish I'd said it, is, "All you have to do is come up with the idea and the product. The rest is available via technology." I really think that's the case.

Robert Plank: I think so too. It's a lot more civilized. Like you said, even 5, 10, years ago, if someone were to start a business, even just to have a cash register, a point of sale machine, would have been thousands of dollars. They would have had to get a merchant account, or get some custom coding. Now, there's the little paypal little doohickey. Now there's a stripe little thing that just plugs into any iPad. It seems a lot more civilized, and a lot more streamlined. A really exciting time. I really like your idea for this book just because you hear all these stories, even something that might not directly relate to someone's business. There's like Kodak, or Xerox. I can read some story. It's almost like I'm just reading it for entertainment, but then I might see some similarities, or some differences with like my business or their business. Just because my marketing, studying, student brain is turned off, and I'm just reading some other business story just for fun, I can pick up little nuggets just because, I don't know, I was in a better mode, if that makes sense?

Donald Mazzella: Absolutely. I agree.

Robert Plank: Cool. I don't want to keep you too long. As we're winding down this call, could you share with us what you see out of all these stories, out of all these business' successes and failures and decisions? Out of all this stuff, what would you say is the number 1 mistake you see everyone making these days?

Donald Mazzella: Poor choice in personnel.

Robert Plank: Cool. Poor choice in personnel. They're not sure, at all, where to begin. They're not sure, at all, where the problem is, where to correct that. You're saying that's the common weak spot for everybody?

Donald Mazzella: That, and obviously make sure you have enough financing. If you think you need 50,000, you probably need 100,000. If you need 5,000, you need 10,000. That is the thing. Be prepared to work hard. Many people think that owning a small business is easy. It's a 24 by 7 requirement. It's interesting, as you know, the sons and daughters of small business owners do not want to go into the business because they grew up knowing that their parents, and usually the 2, devoted more time to the business than to them. Though very interesting, there are more businesses available for sale today than at any time in the last 10 years. The main reason, people will tell you, "We have no one to give it to."

Robert Plank: Aw, man, it's sad, but also a big opportunity for the right people who want to pick up those businesses.

Donald Mazzella: Yes, but there's also opportunity. It's interesting, what we complain about immigrants, but immigrants are the ones that seem to want to take the chance more and more. Most Dunkin Donuts are Pakistani owned. A lot of dry cleaning stores are Greek owned here in New Jersey. It's really a funny thing how they ... Foreign born are wanting to take the chance that our own children don't seem to want to take.

Robert Plank: It's interesting how it's evolved that way, but if they're willing to fill that slot, then more power to them.

Donald Mazzella: Absolutely.

Robert Plank: Great. I really like the idea of your book. I really like the things that you have to say. Could you tell us where people can find that book, and maybe even anything else you have to offer?

Donald Mazzella: It will be available September 15th, on Barnes and Noble, and Amazon. Our publisher is BrickTowerPress.com. It will be available there. There's also a e-reader available. All of that will be available September 15th.

Robert Plank: The book is called Recalculating? Is that right?

Donald Mazzella: Recaculating, 97 Experts Driving Small Business Success.

Robert Plank: Awesome. September 15th, Recaculating, Donald Mazzella. I can't wait to read a copy for myself.

Donald Mazzella: I'm glad. I hope I peaked the audiences interest.

Robert Plank: Yep. I like everything you have to say, great insights. I can't wait. Recalculating, and I'll check it out as soon as it's out.

Donald Mazzella: Have a good day.[/showhide]

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110: Take Your Money Back By Removing the Fear and Greed with Joshua Belanger

Joshua Belanger from OptionSizzle tells us how to remove the fear and greed, overcome common financial obstacles and take control of your own money.

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Today's guest is Joshua Belanger. He was a once struggling professional wrestler delivering pizzas and is now recognized as one of the leading experts with trading options and alternative investment opportunities to generate passive income. That's a mouthful but I'm super glad to have you on the show Joshua.

Joshua Belanger: Yeah. You need to shorten that, but thanks. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to rock the mic for the next 20 minutes.

Robert Plank: Awesome. What is it that you do?

Joshua Belanger: Listening to that, and listening to it a few different times I think the way that I've shortened it down is that I help investors get over the 2 biggest obstacles I've seen over the last 12 years. What are those obstacles or hurdles? Fear and greed, so that's what I look to help them with.

Robert Plank: Isn't that the stereotypes, like the Gordon Gekko you're supposed to be? You're supposed to play to your strengths and stuff like that?

Joshua Belanger: Yeah. Right. No one's successful at being fearful or also greedy, so it's about keeping yourself in check. When it comes to the marketplace you can get both of those sides of it pretty good. That's not a real good way to explain it but, fear and greed is really what controls the marketplaces, but you can't provide proper expectations on being fearful and greedy. That's what I look to sum up for people to be able to help them become successful.

Robert Plank: You're saying that can take over if you don't manage it well?

Joshua Belanger: Yeah, that happens for most people. Why do most people lose money? It's because they are either too fearful and also are too greedy, meaning that they don't, if all the greedy side they're not getting out of positions because they think, "Man, if I would've just had Amazon and I bought that IPO in 1995 I would've been up 2000%." No. It doesn't work that way, and the same thing on the fearful side of it when the financial crisis is going on, and the S&P 500 is at 666 and you're like, "Oh well, the world's going to hell in a handbasket." You could think that way but at that point you've got to say, "Maybe I should buy some stuff here."

Robert Plank: That's like the weirdest thing because I haven't done stock trading in a couple years but when I did do it I was surprised at just how a number would take over, and then even I went through a stage where I would do some paper trading and be like, on certain days, say the price is this, and I played around with that, and the same psychological stuff like you're mentioning, like the fear and agreed, it still messed me up even though it wasn't real money, it was just numbers on even a piece of paper, but it's crazy how much, you have no idea how much all that dark stuff comes in until you're playing with your stock trading stuff.

Joshua Belanger: All that dark stuff is all the stuff in your head. You're looking at stuff and you're making your own interpretation but there's millions of dollars traded every day, back and forth, and not back-and-forth meaning one side to another, but there's a buy and sell. The wonderful thing about the marketplace is that there's no other opportunity out there like the financial markets, meaning that you don't like Apple, so you could take the other side of the trade by selling it. You could sell short, say "Hey, Apple's overvalued here." You can't do that in anything. You can't go to a piece of real estate and, "Hey dude. You just sold your house for how much money," and like a new buyer, "I'm going to short that house."

You can't go to Vegas with an edge and say, "Hey I want to take the other side of the trade." They'll take the other side of the trade, but with their edge, but you can't be Vegas. The only opportunity is in the financial markets with that, and that's the most, it's transparent, and it's at your fingertips, and it's a wonderful thing.

Robert Plank: But also kind of scary. I want to know about your story and this whole, because you can't just say, well, you used to be a wrestler and delivering pizzas, and now you're doing this. That's too good to pass up, right? I'm curious, how did you get from there to here?

Joshua Belanger: Oh man, that was a while ago. I started wrestling when I was 14, 15 years old and I stopped when I was just about 19 years old. In that time I didn't really know what I wanted to do, and I was working at a pizza place, and I went to school. I went to a junior college for a week and at that time I worked at this pizza place for a while. I had an opportunity to become a manager and the guy that I looked up to, and I worked for, Rod, he taught me a lot about business, and sitting in business 101 class I'm like, I already know this stuff and this is not my route.

Before then he had told me, and just in conversation he's like, "Man, if I wasn't doing this it'd be cool to be a stockbroker." That was my a-ha moment. My a-ha moment is because wow, man, stockbrokers. They probably make a ton of money.

Robert Plank: That sounds like a cool profession.

Joshua Belanger: It sounds like a cool profession so I watched movies like Boiler Room at that time, and I'm like, "Whoa. This is pretty awesome. Let me jump on this horse," and a couple doors down from where I worked at the pizza place there was an Edward Jones office and a guy named Russ. He ordered pizza pretty often. I went in there one day and I said, "Hey. 19 years old. I'd like to become a stockbroker," and he said, "Okay. Do you have a book of business?" "No." "Do you have a series 7?" "No." He knew I didn't have the stuff but he was like, hey, you know, and then he explained to me-

Robert Plank: Then he asked did you watch Boiler Room and that was like you're hired, right?

Joshua Belanger: He told me, he said to me, "These are the things you have to get to." I live in Chicago now but I grew up outside Chicago. I grew up on the Wisconsin Illinois state line so that's about a 45 minute car drive, and an hour and 20 minute train ride, so he said to me, "I used to work on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile exchange." There's a couple different exchanges in Chicago. That's one of them. That's a futures exchange, and that would be your best opportunity. You would be able to get your foot in the door and see where you want to go, and he was right, but he said to me, "I haven't worked there in a while. I don't know anybody, but that's my advice."

I'm like, "Okay, cool." That's all I needed so I went, like I said this was 13, 14 years ago, so I went online, we had the interwebs then. They were still starting out but I went on. I went to CME's website and I even, I didn't know much about it because I didn't realize until I was down there that there's a Chicago Board of Options Exchange, and the Chicago Board of Trade, so I'm only looking at the CME because that's what he told me, but I called every firm in there. I went through the directory 2 times, got an opportunity to interview, didn't get the job the first time. They called me back a few months later and they gave me a job as a runner, which only means I had my foot in the door, but I was making little money.

I joke that the janitor was actually more valuable than me because you're kind of like a grunt. As a runner you're a grunt, and a runner, only my job, in those days that is what's known as the open outcry system. You see all movies, like the Eddie Murphy movie where they're in the pit and their yelling, it looks like they're yelling but they're actually really trading. There's a art to it.

Robert Plank: With the yellow coats and stuff?

Joshua Belanger: Yeah. I forget the movie. I think it's trading money or something.

Robert Plank: Trading Places.

Joshua Belanger: Trading Places. Yeah. That movie, that's when things were really buzzing. When I got there it was buzzing but not as much is that, and also that's a movie, but that's a different story. A runner actually would go and have to fight through those crowds to get the tickets from the traders who are in the pit there, and usually some of them, if they're bigger, they had a clerk which was essentially an assistant. I would have to to fight through there, get in, get all these tickets from who I need to get tickets from, and the tickets are these trading cards because that's how they traded, and I recorded it, take those and within 15 minutes, because it all had happened, get them time stamped at the clearing firm. That's why I had to fight it.

They don't just let you in. They don't say, "Hey, Josh. Oh my God. You're the runner? You got to get the Bill over there? Come on through." No. They push you out of the way. They elbow you and they know that your new. They don't make it easy. You get in their way. They yell at you. It was a pretty fun experience. It was pretty fun.

Robert Plank: You had to earn your stuff, sounds like.

Joshua Belanger: Yeah. You have to break in. I loved the opportunity. I miss it. It was a unique experience. I would never trade it for anything.

Robert Plank: Cool. That's how you got your foot in the door. Obviously you don't do that now, so what is it that you do now?

Joshua Belanger: That's how I got my foot in the door and then from there I can summarize my whole background. It could take a while but I took different opportunities. I leveraged that and eventually I became a stockbroker, realized that's not what I wanted to do, and I was fortunate enough to have that experience of being on the floor to realize, "Man. I got my series 7 now. I thought I knew everything and here I've become a stockbroker. I'm making 600 calls a day. Man, and all I'm doing is just pitching product. Man, this is like a sales job."

When I would ask about, "Hey, this client asked me, or this person asked me about the market, what I thought about it." My senior broker would say to me, "Your opinion doesn't matter. Just go open accounts," and I'm like, "Wow." I would ask questions like, "Hey. What do you think of Martin?" He was like, "Kid. Just go open accounts. It doesn't matter." I'm like, "Wow. This is not as fun as I thought it was going to be."

I had different opportunities. I have a lot of experience in different aspects of the financial industry, but in 2008 I was working at a trade desk, and I really wanted to do something on my own. I was starting to manage money on the side and I also wanted to start the website because how I got gravitated towards, specifically options is what I teach, or what I primary focus in on, but to be honest with everyone and to help them understand, options are only a product. Stocks are a product. Options are a product. Features are a product. It's just understanding how to use them all at once, or how to use them to be successful.

Having just one product and saying all I want is just to, okay, for instance. All I want to do is eat chicken. Well, okay. What about steak, and what about this? You can enjoy all those things but why do you just have to have chicken?

Robert Plank: It gets old fast.

Joshua Belanger: It gets old fast. It's not the best example. If the first thing I could come up with. Anyways, they're all products and they all work together. In all actuality stocks are easier and that's why most people gravitate towards it. I work in different aspects of the financial industry and there's a lot of restrictions, and there's a lot of things I didn't like. I didn't like a lot of the regulations, the restrictions, and all I was supposed to do was to sell products and gather assets. I thought I could do more for people. I thought I could do more and provide more because that's all I asked. Every time I asked to do something more I was always shut down. No. You can't do that. No. You shouldn't do that. No.

Robert Plank: Right. Don't be creative. You're a machine. Keep making phone calls.

Joshua Belanger: Yeah. Don't be a machine. There is a stock called Rick's Cabaret. The ticker symbol, stock symbol's R-I-C-K. It's a strip club. I thought it'd be cool if I could pitch those in open clients. I'm like, "Hey man. This stock is relatively new. It's a strip club. You could own a strip club." That was just a unique story. Compliance department shut that down pretty quickly.

Robert Plank: Oh man, but now that you're on your own, now you're free to do all that, right?

Joshua Belanger: Yeah. I don't focus on stocks. Stocks are just a byproduct of the everyday, the typical investor like you and I, which are known as retail, I'm not a professional. I'm not on the professional side anymore. Retail investors, the most opportunity for them is using leveraged instruments like options, like futures, and to really use a lot less of their capital to make a lot more. The traditional approach to investing is to have 80 to 90% in stocks, and the rest of it in cash. Well, that doesn't work. Maybe 30 years ago whatever person said that and that was the outcome, yeah. People still rehash that information because the financial industry is all about taking your money and collecting fees. That's it.

There's zero edge with the access to technology, with the access to information, all those things that may have made others so-called market wizards successful is out the door. They're past. They're gone. The market's so much more efficient, so much more effective. The edge is gone for anybody. The playing field, what I mean by that, is as level as possible, and somebody like Robert, and me, and anybody can actually do better than professionals because we don't have those restrictions. It's just about learning your craft, or actually wanting to do it as well.

Robert Plank: It reminds me of, we keep mentioning all these 80s and 90s movies and stuff, and it reminds me of how when people used to go on an airplane and they would call a travel agent. Now you just use the computer. It sounds like that's a similar thing now, right? You used to call your stockbroker but now it makes more sense to learn a little bit, and then go online and do it yourself instead.

Joshua Belanger: Yeah. In those days you didn't have direct access to the marketplace so you had to go through a broker. There was a part of it too, you're like, "Oh, I've got a broker." You call him on your phone on the golf club, and yes, you feel important, and at that time there was different opportunities. Maybe a hedge fund manager did have access to certain information that the street didn't have, but that doesn't exist anymore.

The only way that these hedge fund managers, because they underperform, they underperform. Mutual funds underperform. 90% of them underperform every year. There collecting fees to give alpha but they underperform. The reason why is because the markets so efficient and there's no edge for them. You're in the hole right when they take their fees, and there are so many other types of hidden fees and everything else. It's a money machine.

There's a book called, it's an old book, it's from like the 1930s, but something about the yachts. I can't think of it, but anyways, brokers. Why do these hedge fund managers have the most money? They're not the smartest people. They don't even produce that much alpha, alpha meaning return, but they collect their fees. Fees paid out is a third of our GDP, the financial industry. It's just such a money generating system that's protected by these firms because that's their interest, is keeping your money in a 401(k) plan, keeping your money and an IRA, keeping your money away from you as far as you can so they can collect their little fees.

It might not sound like a lot but over a time frame for you, and also for them with millions of people, it becomes trillions of trillions of dollars every year that they look to do that, and they don't have to do anything.

Robert Plank: Sounds like a little corrupt system in a way. Along those-

Joshua Belanger: Yeah.

Robert Plank: Oh, go ahead.

Joshua Belanger: I don't want to say it's corrupt. It's naiveness. It's people who don't want to take control of their money. There's a little bit, it's tough. It's tough because they're not doing anything. They're doing what they're saying, and then there's some people that actually want to do good. It's just you have restrictions when it comes to the financial markets. You have restrictions with firms who don't want you to do this because the risk department. It's just easier to put people into products. It becomes accountability of you and your money, and you knowing what to do with it. That's a long discussion on its own, but it's not as plain cut of pointing the finger at them. The easiest way to stop it is to take your money back.

Robert Plank: That makes sense. If people want to invest in a strip club or whatever, the equivalent is that in the research they want to buy some options and whatever, they can make their own decision. They can have their own control.

Joshua Belanger: You can have your own control with your money and how you invested into the marketplace. The first step is like, okay Josh. I don't want to stop, the fees that you pay over 10, 20, or 10, 15, 20, 25 years, that 2% fee, that compounds. I could show you a graph to what we have. We're talking about thousands of dollars. On a $50,000 account we're talking about thousands of dollars, many of thousands of dollars, that you lose that could go into your pocket over that time frame. The first step is just taking your money back.

Now you don't have to go into options. You're wanting to get your blue belt in investing. This is like a little dojo. Investing's like a dojo. If you want your white belt and to do it yourself, and what I would refer that as is, if you want to learn just a little bit to be able to defend yourself and protect yourself, you go and you start taking classes. The first thing you could do taking your money back is, you take your money back, and you could put it into, it makes me cringe to say this Robert, it makes me cringe. You could put your money into a vanguard fund like the ET, are not ETF, but that's another way to do it, but of Vanguard, low-cost index fund with the S&P 500, and that would save you many of thousands of dollars a year just doing that, and you're just going to get the market return.

Because again, 90% of investors, or 90% of professionals, do not beat that index. If that's the case, why are you trying to bat, you have the 10% and you are able to get that 10% that are doing it, because you're not going to in and out of different mutual funds. Just let the market give you what it gives you and just ride that out.

Now if you want to take it to the next step and you want to start managing money more actively, then yeah, then you can start learning how to do that with options and things of that sort, and being more engaged, but the first step is just to do that.

Robert Plank: Cool. It sounds like there's, I don't want to keep you too long, but there's a lot of really cool steps people can take to basically get the power back, get the control back, don't let the fear and the greed take you over. Even if they don't know much at all just yet they can put it into a vanguard or an ETF, like an index fund or something, and then eventually work their way up to options. I want to talk a little bit about you have this program called OptionSIZZLE. Can you tell us what that's about?

Joshua Belanger: Yeah, optionSIZZLE's my website. That's what I started in the financials crisis, great time to do that, but that's when I started, and that was a whole medium of being able to teach people how to use options successfully. When I was in the financial industry and I was making my cold calls, I would talk about options, and I would try to use options, and compliance department would say nope, and also clients would say, man, options are to0, fill in the blank. I don't know much about options.

It started to become a recurring thing that, and even my own lack of success with the options in the beginning, because I lost $2000, which was my whole account at the time, on one trade, making mistakes people do normally starting out with options. Even though I had this series 7 license, which is a industry license which said I'm a professional, and I knew, and I could operate in the financial industry, it didn't teach me how to become successful at managing my own money or even using these instruments, so that's where I started to take it to the next level and really focus in on it, and get to where I'm at now of being in a place to use them and also help those that are looking to do the same.

Robert Plank: This optionSIZZLE, is it a blog? Is it a membership site? What is this exactly?

Joshua Belanger: That's the real estate. That's my domain. That's the area and when you go there you'll be enticed with a bunch of little articles, which are little daily emails that I send out. The whole point of that is to captivate you, to get in and start being engaged in. We have different products that I offer. I wrote this book called Fearless Investing With Options, and it really is the book that I wish I had when I first started, when I first started using options, or even studying for my series 7, because so many options books are just very vanilla. They don't even teach you a foundation to be successful. They give you insight but not anything that is actionable to be able to implement.

That's kind of the first process and I have other products in there as well that we offer to help that. It's almost I have a choose your own adventure approach, where somebody comes in and we provide something to them, and if they want to continue up with working with us, and we start on a low investment opportunity where they buy a book or report. If they want to continue on with the process then yeah, you get more information, which is more value, as you continue to go through the journey with us.

Robert Plank: They can try out and the more they get hooked, the more they can get.

Joshua Belanger: Yeah. I approach this as if you went to a karate class or a martial art class. You just don't get your black belt in one day. Everyone's ahead of you. You come in on day one, you're going to lose. There's nothing you can do. You may get lucky but you don't know anything, and you have to start at that, and you have to start working your way up. Now if you want to get that black belt, everyone's different. Maybe someone wants to get a green belt. Maybe someone wants to learn this one thing, which I would say that's not how you're going to become successful, but that's not my opportunity to tell them all you need is to learn that.

If you want to learn how to become a black belt I can certainly help you do that. If you want to learn that, then yeah, you have this, but that's where I let the things fall into place of where they, what they want, and how they want to approach it.

Robert Plank: I like that. I like that. From what it sounds like, your thought process behind, first of all your journey from point A to point B, and the way that you've explained the way that you trade and the way that you teach others, it sounds like, usually the 2 extremes of people who go through are either just try to flood you with all of the facts and figures, and then that's not helpful at all, right? It sounds like some of the textbooks that you read, and then the other extreme is someone saying, what you have to do it exactly this way.

I think what's cool about the way you've explained all this is maybe there's 4 or 5 different paths. Maybe there's a couple different places someone wants to end up and you give them the strategy to put different things together, and get to that specific place they want to get to.

Joshua Belanger: Yes. Some people just want trade ideas and it drives me up the wall because it's not just about the trade ideas, it's about the logic, but for so long, I know that you focus in on membership stuff, and I actually deviated from that. I had a membership. I had a recurring, and I deviated from it because I'm like, well, I want to teach people how to become masters, but not everyone wants to become a master.

Robert Plank: Some people just dabble, right?

Joshua Belanger: Some people just dabble, and it really took me to this experience where I was at this store, the grocery store, and they actually have a very nice wine collection, and they have really solid wine people there that really know, will supposedly they know, they could tell a hell of a story.

Robert Plank: They sound convincing.

Joshua Belanger: It's just not like any kind of wine place where you like, "Oh, is this good?" They'll tell you, like I bought this $100 bottle of wine. It was the most expensive bottle I've ever bought. I bought it because he told me about Giuseppe and his last harvest, and he told me the story, and I'm like "Okay. Giuseppe passed away on his last harvest and this is his bottle. Oh my God. I'm done."

Robert Plank: It was like he died as he was putting the cork in the last one.

Joshua Belanger: Almost. I'm like, man, I can just visualize Giuseppe on his rocking chair overlooking the harvest. This is his last harvest. I have the bottle and he's passed away. I'm like, how else would you want to go? I'm doing this for Giuseppe. Done. Let's do this, and then I get home and I had buyers remorse. I'm like, but it was one of the best bottles of wine I've ever had.

Anyways, but the guys there, they can tell you a good story. They can tell you about the regions and everything else. It really took me to this one time I went in, and my girlfriend Nicole, she's not crazy about the stories, but she was like, "Listen. We just got to go in because I have want to get wine. I don't want to hear stories. I just want to get a bottle of wine and let's go."

I went in on my own one-time and I was feeling the same way, so the guy that we knew, he was like, "Hey. How's it going?" I'm like, "Oh, I'm doing good," and I asked him, "Hey. I just need a bottle of wine under 15 bucks." He starts talking about all this, and it really took me to that point because I'm like, man. I just want the bottle of wine. I don't need to know everything about the bottle of wine, and it was my a-ha moment of maybe that's how other people feel. Maybe they just don't want to know everything that I know about options, the in-depth analysis, and the time involved. Maybe they just want to see, hey. Does this guy, if he has a couple good picks maybe I'll just follow him.

Now I look at it as giving them broccoli that's wrapped in bacon almost. I can still teach them how to trade options successfully with giving them picks. This was a little bit of a longer rant, but yeah. That's how people are. I'm still learning. I still, every day I'm learning. I might be further ahead. It doesn't make me better than anybody else. I know I have experience, which is what it is, but every day I'm still trying to get better. Every day I'm still getting after it, learning, all those things.

Just because you get to a black belt in a martial art doesn't mean your learning stops either. You continue to try to keep learning, and that's the same way with investing, and really just business and anything, life. It's just getting better every day.

Robert Plank: Yeah, you take too long of a break, get too comfortable, you backslide.

Joshua Belanger: That's where you start to cut corners.

Robert Plank: Yeah.

Joshua Belanger: That's where you lose your discipline.

Robert Plank: Scarier place to be. As we're winding down this call could you tell us, what's the big number one mistake you see people anywhere making their mistakes with their money, or with trading, or with anything in that category?

Joshua Belanger: Well, I think it's just proper expectations. When it comes to business, and just thinking about business and different things as well, it's just the expectations are not there. What I mean specifically is if you bought, I made the little joke about buying Amazon when it was, well, I don't know if I made the joke earlier. Some people think like, "Oh man. If I just would've bought Amazon's IPO when it came out in May," I think it was 1995, "and would've held it to this day, $5000 would be worth over $1 million."

That's one stock out of how many that's out there? It doesn't work that way, and there's no way that you would be able to hold that investment for that long. That doesn't work. Your fear and greed-

Robert Plank: The money would've burned a hole in your pocket. The 2008 crash would've done whatever, all that stuff, right?

Joshua Belanger: It's not smart as is. It's not smart. You've got to take your wins when you can. People talk about managing risk but they don't talk about the other side of managing risk, which is taking your wins, and taking that risk off the table. What I mean specifically, I had this business that I just sold. I started it 3 years ago, made some passive income. It was Amazon based. It was just a different type of investment. I'm threw some money at it, made some money, and for me I made money on it, I wanted to lock it up.

Could it keep going? Sure, but I rather take my money and find something else to put it in, and keep going. I don't care if I had the opportunity to buy Amazon stock. I would've never held it, and that's not how you can approach things and life, because that's an outlier. That's a rare event. That doesn't happen, and you can't approach it, so it's really about expectations and managing risk, and taking, when you manage risk it's not about the loss side. It's about the win side. It's about taking that win, and yeah, you hear about people who turned down Google's offer and look at them now.

Yeah, look at them, but there's not anyone else behind them. There's only one. You only hear about them because what about the other hundred or thousand people? They were lucky. They took the risk. That's big risk. Good for them, but when you're starting out your cushion for risk is very limited. Now when you get bigger, yeah. You can take on bigger risk and so forth, but it's just being able to quantify that risk and understanding it. With people in the marketplace, they put too much money at risk.

It's what we were talking about earlier with the traditional approach of 80% invested. When the market goes down, which it does, and will, those positions, they sell them at the worst case because they get margin called. With what we can do now, with being able to teach somebody like you or anybody, is that you can use 30% of your capital and still make those same returns, and have 70% in cash.

Why do you have cash? Well, because that's your lifeline. That's the only thing that you have. So what, you're not essentially making money on it, and you could make money, but you can't do that. You have to keep that in a safe place. You have to keep it because even if you're using 30%, when things happen, positions go against you, you have to be able to have that money to be able to buy yourself duration, buy yourself some time.

When things are great, things are great. When things are bad you have to be able to have something in the reserve tank to be able to buffer that, just to be able to buy yourself some duration. The same thing in business. I think it's the same thing in investing as well. A lot of people say trading, I say active. I don't do day trading. There's people who do day trading. That's fine for them. I've never been successful at it. I know very few people who have been successful. My approach isn't about day trading. My approach is about just being more active with your money and more engaged.

You don't have to change your computer every day and Johnny Mr. Market. You can be successful, make above average returns than the market provides, and you don't have to be chained to your computer.

Robert Plank: That's the dream because I know that that was a real problem with me, and I think that it comes full circle. Like at the beginning you said it comes back to fear and greed, and I think that I couldn't help but check that portfolio, check the numbers every couple of minutes, and it just emotionally messed me up. Especially if it dropped a tiny bit, I be like, "Oh my gosh. I got to panic sell," and if it jumped a bunch, I'm like "I got to buy some more," and then if I sold it and it kept going up I just, it was such a roller coaster. It sounds like you have-

Joshua Belanger: It's too many variables. That's why.

Robert Plank: Yeah, and it was just all on checks to.

Joshua Belanger: The way that I try to do that now, and we can do that with options, I read some of the information about yourself and how you like to create systems, that's the way that I now approach teaching people, to take those variables out of it, to manage risk before entry so you're stopping out. You didn't have an idea area of where things could go, proper expectations, so you're panicking, and you're selling at really the wrong time, and then also when it goes against you you're like, "Oh, man. Where do I sell it? Do I sell here or do I sell there?" Well, to create consistency you have to have consistency and a consistent plan, and to be able to execute that.

That's where a lot of people fail in investing because it's all variable, meaning that it's like calling audibles. Maybe I'll do it here. Maybe I'll do it there. Maybe I'll sell high. The market is random so to get consistent results you have to have a consistent approach and be able to execute on that. That's where I have started to really form into the fact of I'm going to help you become a machine, and I'm going to teach you exactly the things to be mechanical, to be systemized, and where you can use options to reduce your risk, create better returns, and have an approach that is going to help you take away that fear and greed.

Really the fear and greed is because you don't know what to do.

Robert Plank: That makes a lot of sense, especially planning your eggs ahead of time just sounds awesome, and also that the marketplace is random, and if you're also random, it's just a big mess. At least if the marketplace itself is random and you are somewhat structured, and ordered, and systematized, at least you can make sense, and you can get what you want out of it sounds like.

Joshua Belanger: Absolutely, and it's also eliminating opinions because no one knows. There's no such thing as a good stock picker. There's no such thing. Your probability of being right is 50% when you pick stocks. With options we can skew that probability of success even greater. There's a trade-off, which everything in life has a trade-off. You don't make as much money, but there's no such thing as unlimited profit potential. It's like a drug. It's like the crack of Wall Street. Going back to the Amazon thing, like oh I would've, no. There's no such thing as that.

If you're so scared that the market's going to go to zero or that this stock is going to go to zero, go bankrupt, then you can't have the other spectrum and think the same thing. Well, it could do that but I'm only going to buy stocks or options because I think that Apple's going to go to 200. There's actually expectations, that we could look at option pricing right now, that gives us an expectation of what the markets priced in. We're talking about billions of dollars that say that's not going to happen, or what the probability of that's going to happen, and we can quantify that. That's how we eliminate that opinion, how we eliminate the fear and the greed because we can provide the expectations, the predetermined outcomes, of okay. I knew that this had a 75% chance of winning, however there was a 25% chance that it wasn't going to win, but because I knew that that 25% chance was there, I already accounted for that loss because I knew that could happen.

It happened here but I know that I got that out of the way, and I'm going to keep going. Continue to be consistent because the odds, the numbers are, it's the same way how Vegas works. It's the same exact way.

Robert Plank: Better than going in 50-50, right? At least you somewhat hedged your bets.

Joshua Belanger: 50-50 bets are fine but you have to be consistent on when you take profits and manage risk as well, because you start to get variable data, and that kind of skew will really hurt you on doing that. A lot of people, they take a big loss and they go, because they didn't size correctly their position and they have a big loss, and they go, "Ah, man. I'm going to take a break." No. You got to keep going. You can't just take a break. You got to keep going because now you dramatically skew the numbers against you.

For some reason when it comes to investing we approach it like, oh my God. We don't know what to do, but everything else in life we take so much data, and we go by it, but in the marketplace it's like no. So-and-so knows more than I do. No, they don't. They don't know more than you because it's random.

Robert Plank: That makes sense to me. I really like everything that you shared with us today. I really like your message. Could you state for us one more time your website and your books, and anything that you want people to check out?

Joshua Belanger: Yeah. I don't have a strong call to action to several websites. You can only go to OptionSizzle.com, and that's where you'll be able to find more information about me, and if you're interested in, if you just want to take your money back, and we have a report on how you can do that. Take your money back and you have control over it, or if you want to take the next step, and you want to learn more about how you can make more money after you have that control.

It's a big step. A lot of people are very reluctant because they don't have the confidence in being able to do it themselves. There's still this fact of like, man. What happens if I do worse? That's the problem. People are so scared that they're going to do worse that they go, "Josh, I hear you. I know that I'm going to lose money or I'm getting ripped off, but I'd rather get ripped off this much then lose more by doing it myself."

Well, we could show you how to do that in a very simple process. I know it's a shrug of a shoulder, but that's how people really feel. There's a lot on the line. There's a lot of pressure on them, but we can go from there and you can visit OptionSizzle.com and you could see the book that I wrote, which can be a great introduction to learning how to be successful with options, and even for those who " know options" this is a good reeducation of maybe some techniques in a process that you didn't really know.

Robert Plank: That maybe they skipped over or something.

Joshua Belanger: Yeah. Correct.

Robert Plank: Cool, so optionSIZZLE. Everything is there. That's where the magic begins, where dreams happen. Josh, thanks for being on the show. I appreciated all of the witty banter and all the cool tangents you went on. We covered a lot of cool stuff. I'm really glad you're here, so OptionSizzle.com is the place to go.[/showhide]

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109: Flip Websites Using Amazon Associates and Amazon FBA with Jon Haver

Jon Haver from Authority Website Income and BrandBuilders and tell us how he flips website properties in his online portfolio, including the amazing story of how he bought a business for $50k and sold it for $350k just a few months later.

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Jon Haver has been building online businesses for the past 7 years and just recently left his day job to pursue online entrepreneurship full time. His current focus is turning Amazon Affiliate sites into FBA businesses and has generated a 500% ROI. I don't know about you guys but I'm super excited. How are things today, Jon?

Jon Haver: Things are great, it's a nice sunny day here and just looking out over some water at my [inaudible 00:00:42] office setup and it's fantastic.

Robert Plank: Just living the dream. Cool. I understand that you're going to be telling us today about affiliate sites and about Amazon FBA, so could you get us all caught up and tell us about what exactly is it that you do?

Jon Haver: Sure. I think like probably a lot of people I started out online just kind of as little bit of a hobby. Instead of playing computer games I was building a business, building up websites. Got more serious about it when my son was being born a few years ago and the model I picked at the time was building up authority sites, content-driven authority sites that make money by driving people to Amazon or other sites, but primarily Amazon Associates was my main passive income portfolio sort of income stream. One of the sites that I picked up -- like probably most people on the podcast had been hearing about -- FBA and how great it is. I, again, probably like most people, always had the struggle of chasing after too many shiny objects, so I always swore to myself that I wasn't going to jump into FBA until I had a competitive advantage. Then when I was looking through analyzing some of my sites in my affiliate portfolio, one of the sites I noticed was driving a lot of sales of a product that I was pretty sure was private labeled. I just flipped that model and said, "Instead of sending traffic to Amazon to a non-discreet product, I would send traffic to Amazon to a product that I was importing." I used an Amazon affiliate site to drive the growth of my FBA business that I started.

Robert Plank: I like a lot of what you just said there and a lot of your thought process as far as you look at the portfolio you have, you look at the competitive advantage you have because, I don't know about you but a lot of the people that I chit chat with and my peers and people like that, they'll build up a site -- like you said, like an authority site for example -- and they'll just kind of dabble a little bit and play around. They'll get a little bit of traction but it seems like, especially with stuff like Amazon and Amazon Associates and FBA and Kindle and pretty much any hot, high traffic marketplace, there's always the slap. I think what I see a lot of are people, after trying enough experiments they luck out into something good, but then they get slapped down a little bit and then they just completely give up. I really like what you just shared there how you had this site that was linking to some affiliate products and getting like 5%, 15%, and then you said, "Okay, well the traffic's going from A to B anyway so I might as well just cut out the middle man," so you get more money from the same traffic. Is that right?

Jon Haver: Exactly. With Amazon Associates, when the account's big enough you're getting 8%. My goal was to turn as many 8%'s into still make that 8% but also make -- whether it's 30% margin or 40% margin on my physical goods -- so turn as many 8%'s into 38%'s.

Robert Plank: Cool, so how comfortable are you with sharing some numbers or niches? How detailed do you want to go into this case study?

Jon Haver: Sure, I'm happy to share numbers. Because there was a sale I can't share much details about the ... I can share that it was kind of a fashion clothing product, so I can share that, but as far as the numbers, I share tons and tons of details about it at my website, authoritywebsiteincome, and happy to share all the numbers here. For my site, I started in September. I tried to come analyze it from a standpoint of if I was starting flat in September and just bought the site that I owned at fair market value, the website that I acquired plus then I went out and bought another website because I figured if one website was good in this space then two should be even better. It was a total investment including investing into the product of $50,000. Definitely not chump change. $50,000 investment I do an affiliate site plus physical goods, and then 8 months later I was able to sell that, plus the earnings, and generate a $350,000 cash into my bank account essentially between the prop for the months that it was operating, as well as the ticket price. That was a pretty sweet return, that sort of validating a model that I think is pretty interesting.

Robert Plank: That is cool. The numbers that you're sharing, it's like crazy real estate numbers almost. I'm really curious about that. I'm curious about how you located a site to buy for that amount and was that your budget? What kind of criteria were you looking for, because sometimes I'll look on, say like Flippa or something, and they'll have site for $100, $200, $500. Could you tell us about how you acquired that site in the first place?

Jon Haver: The site that I acquired in the first place was actually from the individual that I ended up partnering with on another business where he goes and actually builds these affiliate sites for other to people to buy. That's at Brand Builders. That site had come to me through my audience, but if I were to go out, as I have since then, to kind of try to rinse and repeat this model, the metrics that I'm looking at is I'd like a site that's doing about at least $2,000 a month of fairly focused sales on Amazon. $2,000 a month income of fairly focused sales, meaning if you have a general health site that's selling products, in a ton of different products, it's not going to have the focused energy that you need to be able to drive the sales of whatever product that you import. The high level metrics that I'm after are $2,000 plus a month in income, and then selling a lot of one specific product that we can definitely private label. If it's doing that then I'm pretty comfortable with moving forward.

Robert Plank: Would you say that's kind of your business model now is you find these sites where they're selling Amazon Affiliate links and you say, "Okay, my criteria, 2K a month at least, focused sales," and then do you also look for something in their library that you can convert into an FBA product?

Jon Haver: Yeah, that's exactly it. The focused sales of a product that I have a good chance of being able to convert. I'm still testing this model out. I've done it once successfully. The second time I went to do this the site had a substantial drop in earnings so it went down to 25% of the expected earnings. That really sucked. That's still a slow process on building that site up. I'm doing a similar model on some other sites, so is it my model? It's definitely a very big focus area for my business right now.

Robert Plank: That's really cool because I don't do any buying and selling of websites, but just from when you hear people talk about this kind of thing, they're always looking for the built-in weakness or the built-in untapped opportunity, so that's a pretty easy opportunity to spot there. I'm glad that you brought up -- I'm kind of glad -- one of the sites you bought kind of dropped in income, and that's something that I'm always kind of concerned about, just from casually looking at some of these sites for sale. They show these earnings but how do I know that they don't have some kind of outside traffic or they're just propping up the numbers in order to get a sale? Could you talk about that a little bit?

Jon Haver: Yeah. I wish I knew more. I fully trust the person that we bought the site from. It's one of these things where the earnings per visit -- the traffic has performed as expected -- it's just been the earnings per visitor has been substantially less than what had been planned. There were some challenges with link tracking at the start but we think we got all that sorted. It's unfortunately but it does seem to happen sometimes. I've so far been unsuccessful at really being able to pinpoint what the heck happened, what was the difference. The clicks seem to be the same, it's just the traffic is converting so much worse. Maybe it was a market shift that I just didn't detect and he was able to detect before he sold and that's why he sold. I wish I knew more right now. It's kind of one of those things. Ideally you don't have losers but if you're going to be investing in anything, some are going to be successes, some are not going to be as big a success.

Robert Plank: A little bit of a gamble. It's almost like you bought a house and then the next day or the next month they built a Walmart down the street and plummeted the value, right?

Jon Haver: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Robert Plank: Cool. You went and you found the site that had a couple of criteria that you wanted and you bought it for 50K and you went ahead and turned around and sold it for 350K, and then you have this new site that's a little bit more of a fixer upper. What are your plans moving forward as far this whole site flipping thing?

Jon Haver: I'm continuing to be in the market for Amazon Associate sites and continuing to look for opportunities to try and really build, especially now that I've been full time, really build my team to be as world class as possible in both the Amazon Associate sites -- I've got a lot of experience in that space -- and then continue to build up my skillset in the Amazon FBA space. I think that model gives me a lot of flexibility and robustness from potential Amazon slaps, in whatever form that takes, whether it's an associate company shut down or a seller account getting suspended. I think my ability to drive off Amazon traffic is a sort of a strong selling point for this model.

Robert Plank: Do you have any plans for any other ways to monetize aside from associates and FBA?

Jon Haver: Yep. With the traffic there's a few benefits to this strategy, but we're starting to send them through ... I'm still involved in the [OneWeb 00:11:22] business that we sold that still has a ton of traffic, and we're starting to send people through an email capture sequence to get them onto our email before we send them off to Amazon, and in exchange for that they get a small coupon which drives up our conversions once they do get to Amazon, while at the same time we're collecting up to a hundred email opt-ins a day. We're looking to monetize that audience with other offers.

Robert Plank: That's cool. Any retargeting, any social media stuff?

Jon Haver: There's certainly opportunity there, it was just prioritized low on the stuff that I was going after quickly. I think especially now that we're getting a bit more of a funnel set up there's a lot of opportunity to get our retargeting and some other paid traffic opportunities.

Robert Plank: Only so much time in the day, right?

Jon Haver: Yeah, exactly, especially with the kind of potential sale. My ideal of this whole business was pull the build it, sell it, repeat model off, and try and get this ... One of the challenges with an online business is there's such high profit margins in them the challenge is in the ability to reinvest at a predictable and similar rate of return. Pay traffic you can certainly do that, and that's not the world that I've unfortunately played in to some extent. That was the model that I'm trying to find, and with it being a sale I just hadn't pursued those opportunities yet.

Robert Plank: Okay, fair enough. If someone is looking to kind of replicate what it is that you're doing -- I know you mentioned that first site, you lucked into it because you had a contact -- if someone was looking to kind of follow in your footsteps and take a couple of steps to go from locate an undervalued online property and buy it and turn it around and sell it, what do they do? If they look at some kind of marketplace and they see, for example, like a fashion or clothing site, how do you differentiate all these things for sale with what they should grab?

Jon Haver: It's tricky. That's what I've been discovering to be the biggest hurdle of this model is the good websites that fit the model for sale. A great marketplace for sites like this is Empire Flippers. Flippa you got to be able to weed through a lot of crap there. FE International's great as well but usually a bit of a higher price point, so Empire Flippers for kind of a under 20K investment into a site. That's definitely the place I would say. FE International again, really good. As far as does it meet the right criteria, I talk a lot about that on my website where I try and provide exactly, "Here's what I did, here's what I look for, here's what I'm doing now." To kind of help your audience on what you're looking for, it's just a product that you can ... If there's a website that's focused on selling a specific product and that product is available to be sourced on Alibaba, then that's kind of the key.

Robert Plank: Okay. When you do your research do you keep a spreadsheet or do you just look around until something interests you?

Jon Haver: Look around until something interests me and then I definitely have, I'm a bit of a spreadsheet nut and I definitely have a ton of spreadsheets that I fire things into to determine the potential profit of that conversion.

Robert Plank: Eyeball it just to find something that captures the interest and then the spreadsheets for the deeper research.

Jon Haver: Yeah, definitely.

Robert Plank: How do you know when to cut something loose or should you cut something loose as opposed to keeping the profits going, and how did you decide, "Okay, I'm going to price this at $350,000?"

Jon Haver: The 350 was the monthly sales, the net profit plus the sale price. The marketplaces are reasonably well developed for determining what the multiple is. The reason that I decided to sell as quickly as I did -- even though if I had held it for another 6 months I would have been making the money plus increasing my own multiple -- was that I believed the steepest -- if you plotted the rate of return versus time -- with this business strategy that steepest rate of return is in the initial conversion to FBA. The dream scenario is that there's always deals that are coming that I can reinvest the money into and I'm keeping that money on the steepest part of the curve.

Robert Plank: Okay, so you're just rolling full steam ahead then?

Jon Haver: Yeah, that would be the ideal scenario. That was not quite what I view it that way because of the deal flow and sites don't always perform as we expect them to perform but I'm continuing to work through those bugs so that we are continuing to go full steam ahead.

Robert Plank: Awesome. A few years ago I heard about some guy and he kind of did something similar to what you're doing and it just blew me away in the thought process. I think it was some kind of situation where this person, I think he had bought a website that sold a WordPress theme and then he went and hired some employees to fix it up. Then it got to the point where he was trying to sell it for something like $50,000 or some kind of precise number and then people were trying to low ball him and trying to buy it for like 20 grand or 30 grand. He was super annoyed because there was this property that's worth X number of dollars, and even if someone tries to undercut him 10%, 20%, that's like if someone tries to buy your house for 20% below what it's worth. It's kind of like a cool, unexplored area that I really like where instead of starting this whole thing from scratch, and everyone teaches about Amazon or FBA or associates or whatever, "Use this page bill, use this software," and so you're just finding something that's already been built up and making it better.

Jon Haver: We're certainly starting because our biggest bottleneck right now is the deal flow on the front end. I come from building a website passive income portfolio background. We're building sites with intent of once they have enough traction of converting them to the FBA business. We're trying to do both to get those sites on the front end, both building and buying.

Robert Plank: Right, so that way it's all very scientific. As we're winding down this call, could you tell us what you see, like the number one mistake all these website buyers and sellers making?

Jon Haver: It's the same mistake across, whether it's Amazon FBA someone's committing themself to, whether it's building up an affiliate site or investing in a site, a lot of people that move into this space -- and I'm absolutely guilty of this when I started as well -- it's a combination of both moving too slow and not fully committing to being successful at the process. A lot of people, and myself included, it was like, "Oh, this is kind of cool," and kind of half commit to it and then don't really through, don't do everything that's needed to be successful. As a result of that they're not successful and then they say -- and myself included, I'm not throwing stones here -- say, "See, it didn't work. Told you." Versus somebody that really just commits that this is going to be successful no matter what and they set up the processes to be successful. Those are the ones -- whether it's FBA or building an affiliate site or buying websites, they seem to be the ones that make an online business successful.

Robert Plank: It's like that say, "Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right." I like that about your message and that kind of comes full circle because you were telling us at the beginning that you were kind of doing this and that and kind of taking your time, but then once your son was born then that really pushed you into action to do everything that needed to be done.

Jon Haver: Yeah, absolutely.

Robert Plank: Cool, I really like everything you have to say. You seem like a smart guy, you have a lot of great advice, I like your message. Could you tell everyone where they could find out more about you and sign up for your list and buy from you and all that good stuff?

Jon Haver: Sure, there's two main places to see me. My main site where I talk about all the different things that I have going on is at AuthorityWebsiteIncome.com, and then the second place is if you're interested in what I just talked about from buying an affiliate site and then building it, converting it into an FBA business. A lot of people were interested in what we were doing, and then I partnered with a guy that I ended up actually buying the site that I just talked about from the case study in, and we now build affiliate sites for four people, and that's at BrandBuilders.io.

Robert Plank: Awesome, so Jon Haver, Amazon FBA, lots of cool stuff. I'm super impressed, so everyone go check out that website right now and thanks for being on the show Jon.

Jon Haver: No problem, thank you. Thanks for having your podcast.[/showhide]

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108: How to Sell a Business the Smart Way with David Barnett

David Barnett, author of "How To Sell My Own Business" talks to us about the process and specific things he does to sell a business, so you can avoid the pitfalls of dealing with an inexperienced broker and also save yourself the typical 10-12 percent commission brokers usually take when you sell your business.

[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Today's guest is David Barnett. He's the author of How to Sell My Own Business, a Guide to Selling Your Own Business Privately and Not Pay a Broker's Commission. David, welcome to the show.

David Barnett: Thanks, Robert, for having me. It's great to be on with you today.

Robert Plank: I'm happy to be talking to you. How to sell your own business, how do you do it?

David Barnett: The book comes about because of my experience as a business broker. I spent 4 years working full time as a business broker helping people sell businesses and acting as an intermediary. I learned a lot along the way. 1 of the things, of course, that I learned is the majority of business owners would like to sell their business 1 day, but don't want to pay the huge fee associated with using a qualified business broker.

When I left that industry, for a couple of reasons, I started thinking about my time as a broker. I realized, "You know what? There's a market and an opportunity to help people do this themselves without using a broker, which is what the majority of business owners want to do anyway."

Robert Plank: That makes a lot of sense. Is it true? Somewhere I've heard some kind of statistic that 95% of the wealth is created by someone selling a business? Is that right?

David Barnett: I'm not sure about that, but I know that over 80% of businesses that change hands do so privately, without the use of a broker. People are out there doing these deals anyway. What I kept coming across, as a broker and then later just working as a consultant helping people buy and sell businesses on their own, is that there's a lot of bad advice out there and a lot of people out there who don't quite know what they're doing. 1 of the things that I used to say to people when I was a broker is, "Hey, I'm an expert. I can help you do this successfully." because it is a complex operation.

In my book, How to Sell My Own Business, I don't tell you everything you need to know to sell your own business. I tell you the process and I tell you what specific things that brokers normally do that the business owner does need professional advice to get done. You can get those things done on a fee-based service.

What most brokers do is they'll say, "Look, I'll sell your business for you and I'll package it up and present it to buyers and I'm going to charge you 10 or 12% of whatever we end up getting for you." You can get those expert tasks done sometimes for a couple thousand dollars each. If you're willing to pay as you go through the process and hire experts like you would hire a lawyer, or an accountant, you can end up at the end of the day pocketing all the proceeds of the sale and just having some expenses along the way as long as you know the process and you know how to get from start to finish.

Robert Plank: Instead of having someone do an all in 1 deal for you, you might have to do a little bit of hands on stuff yourself, a little bit of managing, but that way you just pay a flat fee instead of this percentage of what could be a huge amount of money.

David Barnett: Yeah. When I was a broker, I sold a couple million dollar businesses and had to present people with some commission invoices for, in 1 case, it was $98,000. That's a really big pill to swallow.

Robert Plank: Yeah, times 12%.

David Barnett: Yeah, my bill was $98,000. Why did I have to charge that kind of money when I was dealing with these people? It's quite simple. As a broker, I'm taking on all different listings. Not all of them will sell. All of them require my time. If I'm going to work full time and have 10 or 12 businesses that I'm trying to sell at any given time, over the course of the year, if I only sell 3 of them, I've got to charge those 3 sellers enough money to cover all of my time for my entire portfolio of companies.

Quite literally, what is happening, Robert, is the people who have good, profitable businesses that are what we would call "winners" have to actually subsidize the effort that goes into trying to sell losers.

Robert Plank: It almost sounds like you're being an actor. It's like do all these projects, not get paid, do all these basically auditions, or put in all this work and then 1 or 2 might pay off as a big payday. It sounds like what you prefer is to do things on a fee-based basis. That way you can have more of a predictable income.

David Barnett: From my own point of view, now that I'm no longer a broker, now that I am a fee-based service provider, what it means is that if I work with 6 different clients over the course of a month, at the end of the month, I'm issuing 6 different bills.

Each person is now just paying me for what I do for them. I'm not giving anybody any $100,000 invoices. I'm charging people a couple grand for the different things they might have me do. Let me give you an example. In my book, I explain why pricing is so important and the dangers of over-pricing, or under-pricing your business.

Many people will look at selling their business. They'll say, "Look, I'll put an asking price on it and if I can't get that amount, then eventually I'll come down." The danger with that strategy is that if you overprice a business, you will actually scare away what I call the reasonable buyers, the people that actually have an idea of what your business should be worth. If they see that you're asking double what it's worth, they're just going to assume that you're a nut.

They know that dealing with you is going to be a waste of their time. You're going to scare those people off. The people who actually have money, are financiable, have a good banking relationship, and a good credit score, who are qualified to run your business are going to be scared off. They think that you're unreasonable.

The people who won't be scared off, though, Robert, are the low-ballers, the guys who are going to offer half price on anything. What ends up happening is if you don't price the business right, you chase off those good characters, the people who might actually be legitimate buyers and you're left dealing with those other clowns who are going to try to get the lowest possible price. You don't know if they're going to be qualified at the bank. If you end up financing part of the transaction, you don't know if they're qualified to run the business, it's a bad story all around.

1 of the things that I do, for example, with my clients today is I do the evaluation and show them what their business will sell for based on what other similar businesses have sold for in their industries with the same sales level and cash flow so that they go into it with a realistic understanding of what the business is worth. Then I help them set the price. I also do what's called the packaging, which is to create the buyer facing documents so that they can make a creditable presentation to buyers when they come along.

That's another big mistake that a lot business owners make. They'll start sending out feelers within their network indicating that maybe they're interested in selling their business. They get someone in front of them who wants to buy. Then they're not ready to share their story. They don't have their financials prepared. They don't have a package of information to share.

They make this person wait, and wait, and wait. What ends up happening, like in any sales situation, is if you're not ready to act when the iron is hot, people cool off. That hot prospect then starts to look at other things. You lose their attention. There is a whole process here that people have to be prepared for before they meet that potential buyer.

Robert Plank: I like that and I like how it sounds like the advice you've given, the steps you take people through, it's a blend between you feeling out the company, and making judgement calls here and there. It sounds like a lot of it is backed by the data. It sounds like 1 possibility for someone is, like you said, go to that person that charges 10 or 12%, but that doesn't sound like a very good solution.

It sounds like the second possibility is for someone to try to do that themselves, but then it sounds like from the things you've listed there's all kinds of mine fields and all kinds of mistakes they could make. It sounds like you're the best blend of the 2 where you don't take this huge cut, but then you also do all the things that make sense that's in their best interest.

David Barnett: I'm obviously trying to position myself to be attractive to what I know is a big market, because I've got customers ever day. For some people, it's not for them. My book, though, is still for them. If you think, "This is a complex process. I think I'd like to hire a broker anyway." the first half of the book actually talks about why you would want to use a broker and how to identify a good one versus the people who are pretending to be business brokers.

There are a lot of intermediary types out there who will tell you that they can sell your business, but they don't actually know what they're doing. In my opinion, that's the worst possible place that you can end up being. I use all kinds of examples in my book of people that I've run across over my years in the business who thought that they were represented by a business broker who were actually dealing with someone that had no idea what they were doing.

There's an example in my book about a restaurant owner. The restaurant owner decided he wanted to sell. He hired a real estate agent to sell his restaurant. The real estate agent found 1 buyer after another. Nobody could seem to qualify for financing. The agent actually called me and asked me if I would help him send his buyers to the right place to get financing to buy this restaurant.

What I said to this agent was I said, "Look, you're asking me to give you my magic jelly beans basically. This is how I make my living." I said, "Mr. Real Estate Agent, why don't you send me your client and I'll do the deal and when the deal is done, I'll give you a referral fee." He absolutely refused. He said, "No, it's my deal, mine, mine, mine, mine. I want all my commission." I said, "Great. You go figure it out."

Here's the problem, Robert. Restaurants are a highly risky business category. Restaurants actually can't get financed anywhere. In almost every situation I've ever heard of if there's a restaurant that is a good, profitable business that has any amount of what we would call good will, there will be a certain amount of vendor financing involved.

A buyer will come along and they'll make a down payment and maybe they can borrow at the bank if there's some equipment there, or a building, or something like that. They'll never, ever be able to put the whole price together. The seller will always be required to do what we call "holding paper", or do some vendor financing.

Let's say that restaurant sold for a quarter of a million dollars. Maybe the buyer is able to put together half that money for closing day. The seller will receive payments maybe over 5, or 7 years. The problem with this situation is that neither the seller, nor the real estate agent knew that. They had probably met 3, or 4 perfectly reasonable, good, qualified buyers and they were ruining the deals for themselves because they didn't know what they were doing.

That's the kind of example that I point out when I say that, "If a business seller goes to the wrong kind of intermediary, it's the worst possible case. They'll actually end up saying, "No" to reasonable deals.

Robert Plank: It sounds like in cases like that where they might just take a deal out of desperation, or might be just that the process has been dragged on for so long, they'll just take anything it sounds like.

David Barnett: What usually ends up happening is this. Sellers reach a certain point of motivation where they decide they want to sell their business. Once that decision has been made, there's a clock that starts to run. The seller, now, they've made the decision, "I want to sell. I want it to be gone." The enthusiasm and the energy that used to be there to go into the business starts to wane.

When it starts to wane, the little things stop getting done. The polish comes off the business. You know what I'm saying? Eventually sales start to decline. With that, profitability starts to decline. If you don't sell the business quickly enough, the good will can start to erode. What happened in this particular case is something I've seen too many times. The owners actually closed the restaurant and ended up just trying to sell the building. They actually pulled the plug on all the value they had created over 20 years.

Any good will that existed in that business is now gone. The business no longer functions. Now they've got something that someone can finance, which is just simply a building. They're going to end up with less money in their pocket. It was because they hired the wrong kind of person.

Like I said, the first half of my book, I talk about how you identify a qualified business broker, what they should charge, what the fee structure should look like, the types of questions they should ask, how they should be coming about determining an asking price for your business. I've had a lot of feedback from people who said, "You know, I thought about doing it myself. I read your book and I realize I did want to use a broker and thanks to what I read in the book, I realized a couple people I met with probably would have been very dangerous for me to do business with."

Robert Plank: That's awesome. Yeah, it sounds to me like it's the kind of situation where it's like you take your car in to a mechanic. You don't have to know every little detail about your car, but maybe you should know a handful of things. That way you don't get ripped off.

David Barnett: Yeah. The most important thing you need to know is can I trust the mechanic.

Robert Plank: Yeah, and are they just totally screwing up, or do they know what they're talking about?

David Barnett: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Robert Plank: Cool. You listed a couple of things so far. Can we unpack a couple of mistakes you see? We could go at both ends of it. What are the mistakes you see people trying to sell their business making and the mistakes that maybe some of these brokers are making?

David Barnett: People who are trying to sell their business, the number 1 mistake that I see them making is that they don't actually understand what it is that they're selling. That may sound silly at first. Let me give you an example. Let's say you have a dry cleaning business. You operate out of a building that you own. You're not actually talking about a business anymore. You're talking about a 2 businesses. You're talking about a dry cleaning business and you're talking about a commercial real estate business.

Just because your business happens to be the tenant of your commercial real estate business, doesn't discount the fact that there's 2 different businesses.

What'll happen is people will say, "Well, I own a dry cleaning business and I want to sell it to someone." If they insist on keeping the real estate combined with that, what ends up happening is now you need a buyer with deeper pockets who not only can make a down payment on the dry cleaning business, but can also make a down payment on the commercial property. The more money a buyer needs to have, the fewer potential buyers there are.

You can imagine, Robert, that out there in the world of people trying to buy a business there are obviously a lot more people with 50 grand in the bank than there are with 200,000 in the bank. If we separate those 2 things. This is 1 of the exercises I used to do with my sellers. I would say, "Look, let's look at offering the dry cleaning business for sale and you offer the building as an option to them. You say you can buy the dry cleaning business and you can buy the building if you want, but if you don't want to, I'll lease it to you on a 10 year contract with a lease."

Now what we've done is we've made the business to be bought much smaller and more affordable. Now there are more potential buyers, which means we can sell it more quickly. Once we get that dry cleaning business sold and we have the lease in place, we can now sell the piece of property to anyone who wants to collect rent. It's a completely different market, Robert, to people who want to buy commercial property.

What happens a lot of the time is that the seller will realize, "Hey, it takes a lot less energy to be a landlord than it does to run a dry cleaning business, so maybe I'll just keep the building for a few more years and create a passive income for myself collecting rent." What happens in a lot of cases is these buyers, after they've run the dry cleaning business for a couple years on their own, and they've got their own financial statements prepared for the time that they've owned the business, they can now go to the banker and qualify for a mortgage to buy the building.

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool. Yeah, that a good strategy.

David Barnett: Yeah. That's what I mean when I say that sellers don't know what they have to sell. The dry cleaner is in the business of understanding the dry cleaning business. He's not in the business of understanding how to sell businesses. A lot of these opportunities get missed because people will go out and do it on their own without any advice at all. They'll think that they need to sell everything as 1 package when in fact they don't.

I've actually helped people divide up businesses that were mixed together. I had a client who had an excavating business, but he was also doing recovery and towing at the same time. He was able to maintain all of the equipment in the same garage that he had on his property. He was out in the country. It made sense for him to have these 2 lines of work. It was 2 different groups of clients. When it came time to selling, there were very few people who were looking for an excavating and recovery business.

We split that business in 2. We sold the recovery business to another operator who had their own operation about 30 miles away. They were trying to grow geographically. It made good sense for them to buy that. Once he was left with purely an excavating business, he was able to find someone who wanted to get into that industry. Yeah, those are some of the common things.

On my web site, there's a free download called 12 things to do before you consider selling your business where I cover the top 12 areas that I've always seen people make mistakes.

Robert Plank: Great. Where can people get that?

David Barnett: It's easy to remember. It's HowToSellMyOwnBusiness.com which is the name of the book, How to Sell My Own Business." If someone wants to buy a PDF copy of the book for immediate download, they can get it at that web site, HowToSellMyOwnBusiness.com. You can also buy the book on Amazon, either as a paperback, or for Kindle.

Robert Plank: That's all great stuff. What I really like about the things that you've unpacked here today, David, is that there seems to be a lot of really cool strategies that have come about just from your years of experience and just from seeing all the different case studies. What I like the best was that last little strategy about cutting up the business and selling the parts like what Mit Romney did where you don't have to get all the way out. Selling a business might just be you sell part of the business off now and then get back in in a different way later or completely get out years from now.

I really like everything that you had to say. I really like where you have your book. Just to remind the listeners 1 more time what's that URL just to make sure everyone has it?

David Barnett: Sure. HowToSellMyOwnBusiness.com.

Robert Plank: Awesome. Everyone should go there and get that free report and check out the blog and get your book. They should just check out everything you have to offer.

David Barnett: Yeah. People who are interested either in buying or selling businesses, if you go to that web site, you'll also see a link to my You Tube channel. There's about 200 videos now. Almost all of them are about either buying and selling small businesses, or local investing.

I've got a few other books out too, Robert, that I had mentioned to you before on local investing and on franchise issues. Anything to do with buying, selling, financing, planning business is my area of expertise.

Robert Plank: Cool. It sounds like a topic, an area where a lot of people, it seems like they think they know, or they think they can figure it out themselves, but I like all of the little bits and pieces and all the strategy where you've taken something complicated and made it simple and distilled it for the rest of us. Thanks a bunch, David, for being on the show. I really appreciate the advice you have to share.

David Barnett: Thanks, Robert, for having me on. It's been a whole lot of fun.

Robert Plank: Same here.[/showhide]

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