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152: Convert with Webinars and Get Clients with Magnetic Messenger Alysa Rushton
Do you want to make more sales and money? Do you want a larger following, and most importantly, do you want an easier time growing your business? If so, Alysha Rushton from GetClientsWithSpeaking.com shares the seven steps to landing clients and sales from webinars:
1. Connect with your audience: intend to give quality information
2. Engage with your audience: open with a question or a quote
3. Tell your story: but avoid a lack of overstanding and avoid over-telling that story
4. Share content: teach people something, help solve a top-of-mind problem or little piece -- pull out one part of the offer and explain it, get them hungry but don't overfill, go deep but not wide
5. Amazing free gift: solve another problem or go deeper -- because you're here, it's free
6. Give offer: "another tip"
7. Wrap-up: the rest, Q&A, call to action -- information alone is not transformation, link to checkout page at the beginning and end
[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Alysa Rushton us the women's voice igniter and six figure coaching mentor. She's a master certified public speaking instructor and sales coach, who teaches heart-centered entrepreneurs how to craft, package and promote their authentic message and shine their light so they can magnetically attract their ideal clients. She's the founder and CEO of Magnetic Messengers Academy and the creator of popular programs like Get Clients with Speaking and Profitable Workshops that Rock.
Alysa's clients and students go on to do great things like publish books, speak on TED stages, become featured experts on the news and more. I can't to hear about how we can all jump on that train. How are things today Alysa?
Alysa Rushton: They're great, thank you Robert for that great introduction. I'm super happy to be here today.
Robert Plank: Cool. I'm glad that you made it. Can you tell us about this public speaking thing and what it is compared to the other ways of getting yourself out there, and what makes you special to talk about this kind of thing?
Alysa Rushton: Okay. Well, let me address the public speaking thing first. I think you sort of talked about makes me special, but I'll address that in a second. The first thing is is that public speaking's really fascinating in that today we live in this really online world and it's very fast paced and we're all in this online business game and we want to get clients. What's really amazing is that public speaking is such a brilliant way to help you get clients because no other way can you actually connect with people and really let them feel your energy and experience you and what it's like to not necessarily work with you, but what it's like to be with you. What I see happen a lot in today's online business world is that many people are putting out free gifts and this content and that content but when you show up either on a webinar or in a live event, it's really something remarkable and people are with you for a longer time. They really can get a sense of you and what makes you special, and therefore you can start to really attract in your ideal clients which believe is what makes a brilliant business.
Robert Plank: Awesome. When we're talking about public speaking, did I hear you right in that when you talk about public speaking, you're counting not just live events but also online webinars and things like that in that whole mix?
Alysa Rushton: Indeed I am, yeah.
Robert Plank: Cool. I'm glad that that's part of the topic here. I was just thinking as you were explaining that to... I don't know, maybe like seven, eight years ago when, I'm a computer programmer and I like to keep to myself and not talk to anyone, things like that. Then when good webinar is picking up and having all these online launches and these kind of things are picking up, I realized that I had to step it up and if I remained hiding in my little cubby hole, then I was going to get past over again and again. I would just have competitors outdo me over and over again unless I put myself out there and upped my confidence.
If you have anything to say along those lines? If someone's listening to this today and we're going to be talking about public speaking. If someone's listening and they're trying to just write themselves off and they're trying to say, "I can't do that, I can't be a public speaker." What do you have to say to someone like that?
Alysa Rushton: I love this question. Two things. The first thing is that some people, if you're an introvert and you're listening, you might feel like you could never get up on stage. That's one of the reasons why I actually love webinars for my clients who tend to be a little more introvert-y. They do great with online webinars because it takes away some of the scariness factor of being up in front of people in the public eye. Yet, you still get to connect with people on a really deep level, share your message and share an offer or share a way to work with you. For people who are maybe more introverted, that seems to be a really great way to get out there. Does that answer your question?
Robert Plank: Yeah. It does but it opens up some more questions which is always a good thing. Are you a people person, Alysa? Are you the kind of person who can socialize with anyone or are you that introverted type we talked about?
Alysa Rushton: Yeah, I'm a quintessential people person and I'm also a quintessential person who is totally fine to be on their own. I do well in both environments, and quite frankly, I need both environments in my life.
Robert Plank: Perfect, you can adapt to whatever situation comes in front of you. When you were just explaining that whole process, you were explaining a little bit about you run a webinar and you share some of your knowledge and you share some of your personality and you get people excited and you share an offer at the end. Can you walk us through a recent webinar or a case study, sort of like that, where you went through that process?
Alysa Rushton: Yeah. Let me say that this process is very similar for both speaking in a live environment and a webinar. The webinar is just a little bit different but basically it's a very similar formula. But the way, I have a formula for speaking in person if you go to getclientswithspeaking.com you can download my 7 Step Signature Talk Formula. I'm going to give you those seven steps here in just a second. What I want to tell you is it's not a lot different from actually doing a webinar, there's just a couple things you would do a little bit differently in a webinar.
Okay. You want to take them through the seven steps, does that sound good?
Robert Plank: Yeah, let's do it. Sounds great.
Alysa Rushton: Okay. The first thing is that you want to connect with your audience. Whether it's online or in person, you want to make connecting with your audience the very most important thing that you do. If you're not connected with your audience everything else is going to feel yucky. Robert, you asked me at the top of the show, what makes me different to teach this stuff? What makes me special and unique? Well, I'll tell you, I work in energy and the energy of the room, the energy of the audience is the utmost important to me. I think we've all been in that webinar or even that live talk where we could tell that the speaker really wasn't interested at all that we were there and we had a dollar sign above our head. We left and we felt like we needed to take a shower afterwards. Have you ever felt like that?
Robert Plank: Oh yeah. All the time.
Alysa Rushton: "Oh yeah. All the time." That is tough. We don't want people to feel like that and we don't want our audience to feel like that. Quite frankly, when your audience feels like that, they won't buy from you. They get turned off, they tune out. In a live audience it looks like people scratching their face and not looking down and they don't engage with you. In a webinar that looks like people hopping off the webinar. People can sense our intentions. The first thing is that we really do want to intend to connect with our audience and intend to give them some real quality information. That's the first step. Once you do that, then it's a very simple process.
Now, the next step in the process, and this is where people start to get tripped up by the way. Connecting with our audience, okay, we can do that. Then they start to get really tripped up in that we want to do that powerful opening. I recommend that people begin by engaging with their audience right away. What happens is, I see a lot of speakers will do this, they'll make it all about them instead of all about their audience. You just want to connect with your audience in a way that's all about your audience and not about you. You can do that by opening with a question or a quote. Or you can do some sort of story if you have more time, but you want to involve the audience right off the bat. Don't start talking about you and how fantastic you are and about all the education you've had and all the names and numbers behind your name. That just will bore and audience to tears and they'll check out right from the beginning.
Robert Plank: I've seen that. We've all seen that, right? Webinars or stage presentations where they take twenty, thirty minutes just to get to the meat of it as opposed to these webinars where they open with a question. It might even just be something simple that gets me to start thinking and as they're getting ramped up in that first five minutes, my brain is reacting in a way that's different that the usual webinars I'm used to when they have a question that makes me think as opposed to thirty minutes of them.
Alysa Rushton: Exactly. Then the next step is to tell your story and this is where I see people really go down in flames. They either fall into one of two camps. The first camp being they don't want to tell their story at all so they just don't, or they overtell their story. Both things are troublesome. The audience needs to understand and connect with who you are as a speaker whether it's online or whether it's in person. If you don't share with them who you are and why you're the person to be telling them this stuff, then it can be really tough.
If you over share and like you said, you drone on and one for thirty minutes, it's equally awful. People hate that I think even more than the under sharing. You want to share your story in a really good way, really juicy way, and I break this down in that 7 Step Signature Talk Formula handout that you can get by going to getclientswithspeaking.com.
The next step is sharing content. The content is really interesting. This is where I believe it's important to teach people something. They came to your webinar or they came to your talk because they had a problem and they felt like you could help them solve it. It's not realistic for the person or for you to think you can solve all of the audience's problems in a sixty or ninety minute talk, but you can help them solve a top of mind problem. Or you can help them solve a little piece of their problem. You want to deliver your content in a really valuable way. Again, I break this down for you in the 7 Step Signature Talk Formula because when we break our content down for our audience, they can start to digest it and it feels really good to them. I show you how to do it in a way that actually instead of getting them over full, gets them hungry for what you're going to give them.
Sometimes what I see happen with speakers is most speakers are over-teachers. They want to teach and teach and teach that audience. There are some speakers that are under-teachers and they actually don't give any real content. For the most part the people I tend to attract are over-teachers, they want to give a lot of value, but what happens it's like you want to sell your audience a Thanksgiving dinner and you bring them in and you feed them a Thanksgiving dinner. Then you say, "Can I sell you Thanksgiving dinner now?" They're like, "Oh my god, I'm so full, there's no way I can eat another bite." That's what you want to avoid in your talk. You want to give them a little bit of the dinner and get them hungry for the rest. Does that make sense?
Robert Plank: Yes. Sort of, I'm trying to think, how does someone know if I'm planning out my talk or I'm planning out how much meat to have in there. How do I know if I'm out of whack, if I'm over-teaching or under-teaching?
Alysa Rushton: Brilliant question, Robert. I love this question. What I teach is a system that you can always know if you're over-teaching or under-teaching. Normally what people do is they try to teach everything they know about the given topic in a ninety minute talk. What I teach you to do is pull out one thing, one content point, and go really deep with it. Let me give you an example of this from my own business and I think this will make a lot of sense when I share this example, okay?
Robert Plank: Okay.
Alysa Rushton: In Get Clients with Speaking, I have an online course, it's called Get Clients with Speaking and I literally teach how to create a profitable business with speaking. I teach you how to come up with your topic, how to create a signature offer, how to create a signature talk, how to be powerful on stage, how to get actually booked for speaking gigs both online and off, and if you are speaking offline how to fill the room. I teach a process about how to keep the money flowing with a follow up.
What most people would do is they would try to teach a little bit about their entire system in a sixty or ninety minute talk. That's where the mistakes start to happen. What you want to do is you first want to understand what your system is, what you're offering to people, and then you want to pull out one piece of that offer or one piece of your system, and just teach pretty deeply on that. For example, I have a talk that I give and it's all about creating your irresistible signature talk. I break it down and I show people exactly how easy it is to do. I give them a ton of tips and content, and I teach them that. I go deep but then there's still room for the other steps in my system. After that talk, they're like, "Oh my gosh, that was so yummy that I now want to buy your program because I know you're going to teach me so much more."
Robert Plank: What you're saying is to go deep instead of going wide.
Alysa Rushton: Go deep, not wide. Exactly.
Robert Plank: Heck yeah. Just to make sure I understand you. Let's say that you were presenting on a weight loss course or something. The wrong way to do it, the way that I guess a lot of people naturally want to make their talk is to say, "I teach weight loss and here's how you eat breakfast, lunch and dinner, and here's how you exercise and how you do your water, and you measure all your stuff." If someone was giving a talk they could just talk about here's how I lose weight with just the breakfast area, then they can unpack all that stuff. Is that right?
Alysa Rushton: Yeah. Or they could even just address a tiny portion of the food piece. "Here's what you would eat for breakfast, and lunch, and dinner," and pick three content points within that one heading. You're right, most people lost it when they start to teach on all of it. The eating and the exercise, the water, the weight training. It's just too much for people. They literally have to check out. If you go deep on one thing, people can see the value that you bring and it gets them hungry for the other stuff you have.
Robert Plank: That's awesome because it sounds like if they try to shallowly cover every part of their offer it's almost like I'm getting the Cliff Notes, then I feel like why should I then by from you if you kind of already explained the jist of it to me.
Alysa Rushton: Exactly and what I want to also tell you is that that is not being of service to your audience. If you give people just the Cliff Notes, what's missing typically is more information and also help and support to get to their goal. When people feel like they've been filled up and they know what they need to know, then they're off and running to the next thing without the help and support of you, your program. Most coaches and entrepreneurs that I work with are trying to sell a coaching program, or a master mind program or some sort of online course. When people feel that over filled feeling, then they actually don't get the transformation that they were looking for and their search continues. Whereas if you go deep with something and they end up purchasing with you, typically they'll get the transformation that they want. This process actually helps you be in absolute service of your audience.
Robert Plank: Awesome.
Alysa Rushton: Indeed.
Robert Plank: Those were the first four steps. We have three more to go is that right?
Alysa Rushton: We sure do.
Robert Plank: Heck yeah!
Alysa Rushton: Heck yeah! Step five and six go together in a talk and I like to do these in the body of the talk, not at the end if it's a live training. If it is a webinar I actually do these at the end. That's the difference here. What you then do, after you've given your content, you want to give the audience a really amazing free gift. The free gift serves a purpose so that you're solving another problem for them. Or maybe going a little bit deeper on helping them solve that problem.
As an example, when someone attends my talk and I teach them the 7 Step Signature Talk Formula, I actually give them a free gift which is this form that I use in a live environment that they can customize to get people on their list. It's a really juicy piece of content. You want to pick something as a free gift that is awesome. Not something that sucks. You want to pick something that you actually would charge for or something that you actually do charge for. It will have a lot of value. You want to set it up and you don't want it to say, "I'm giving you this free gift because it takes all the value out of what you're going to give them. You want to say, "I want to give you something that I normally charge $97 for. Go ahead and scratch off that $97 dollars." If you were in a live environment you would say that.
On the internet you wouldn't, you say, "I'm giving this to you today instead of $97 because you're here, I'm giving it to you for free." You want to build the value of your gift. Once you give them that gift, then you can give your offer. It depends on what your offer is. A beginning place to start would be to offer some sort of a strategy session if you're a coach, a more advanced offer would be to actually sell something from the stage. When you're giving your offer you just want to think of it as another tip. Again, there's a whole teaching that would take me about ninety minutes to teach you how to actually make an offer. It's an art. You want to combine a gift and an offer together so that people feel like your giving first and then once you make your offer, it feels really good to them because they feel like they've gotten a lot. They can see the value that you're bringing and they just know that they're going to get so much more when they take the next step with you.
Then finally, it's the wrap up. It's the delivering the rest of your content if there's any. It's getting to the Q and A, and it's calling them into action. We're in such an information society, we're in such an information overload, and what we tend to forget as human beings is that information alone does not cause transformation. If that were the case, everyone with access to YouTube would be a brilliant business marketer. Or they would be a brilliant multi-millionaire. That's not the case because information alone doesn't cause that transformation. We need accountability. We need support. We need information broken down for us in a really systematized way. That is where you and your services come in is that you can help people by calling them into action and taking that next step with you so that they can get that kind of transformation that they came to that talk. Either online or in person that they were looking for.
Robert Plank: Awesome. A lot of steps here. Let me make sure I have this right. Step one, connect with your audience. Step two, engage with them right away. Step three, tell your story. Step four, share some content. Step five, share an amazing free gift. Step six, give the offer. Then step seven wrap up any loose ends.
Alysa Rushton: Boom, you nailed it!
Robert Plank: One thing that has me a little bit concerned with running webinars and seeing the way a lot of other ones are done is that I've seen that sometimes the freebie or the Q and A gets in the way of the offer or the close. Have you ever seen something like this with webinar presenters?
Alysa Rushton: I certainly have. Definitely it needs to be done in a skillful way because if it's not skillful it definitely will interfere with people taking action. On a webinar, you want to do a couple things for yourself as a webinar host. I know we're kind of bouncing back and forth here between speaking live and webinars, but if you are running a webinar, one thing to remember is always on your screen you want to have, as you're making your offer, what your offer and a link to your checkout page. You want to keep that top of mind for people. You want to begin and end on that.
That's really where the intention is and try not to get sidetracked too much. It's okay to take Q and A and it's okay to do a free gift, but you don't want it to take the main stage. Does that answer your question?
Robert Plank: Yeah. Did you say that you have the link to the check out page at the beginning as well as at the end?
Alysa Rushton: I do it right away. Yeah, I do. I do it right away. By the way, the webinar system that I teach, for myself most of the students that I take through this end up having a really high webinar closing rate, about 18, some of them as high as 20%. Which are wonderful numbers. The first thing you want to do is share with people where to go and get them thinking about it. Start getting them tantalized. Then obviously end on that link as well. I put that link on every single page as I'm going through my offer so that it's always top of mind. You don't want to get into the place where people are on a particular slide with you and they don't know where to go. You need them always knowing that link.
Robert Plank: That makes sense. Is this a case of you begin and you share your offer and you teach all this different stuff and then you have the free gift. Then when it comes time to have the offer you're repeatedly mentioning that you're also that way I guess the free gift is something that you mentioned a few minutes in there, but the main attraction, there's no confusion, there's no mistake, is go to my checkout page and buy this thing. Is that right?
Alysa Rushton: Exactly. Indeed.
Robert Plank: Cool. As we're winding this down, do you have any advice for not necessarily the shyness that we're talking in the beginning that some people might have. As we were around maybe step two or three, I guess there's the pushiness of it. If you're too pushy, then it alienates people and it's too much about it. It's like the whole dollar sign floating over the head thing earlier. I guess if people aren't pushy enough, then there's not enough of a directness. Do you have any thoughts about that? How can someone get calibrated to not be too pushy but also not be too timid about it?
Alysa Rushton: I love this question. First off, I would take the word pushy out of their language altogether. Any time someone feels pushed against, they're going to resist. That's push. We can't bring pushy or not pushy energy to our talk at all. We have to remove that from our vocabulary and the energy we have to get into is being of service to our audience. When you are in service to your audience you align with sharing your message, sharing your story, sharing your content and your free gift and your offer, and all of that, in a way that feels really good to you and to your audience. You're going to align with the feeling of being in service. When people can genuinely tell that you want to be in service, there's not going to be any of that pushy energy around you. They're going to actually feel on a very energetic high level, that you want to be in service and that it doesn't really matter to you whether they sign up or whether they don't. That's always the energy that I bring to every talk that I give and I teach my clients to do it as well.
When you can do that, when you can let go of who buys what from you, and instead you can be energy of just being in service of your audience and know that you've done the work of designing your talk right, so that it does all the heavy lifting for you. You don't have to be pushy. you don't have to even think about what you're doing because you know that your talk is structured in such a way that it's going to naturally get the audience hungry to work with you and you can just show up and be in service.
Robert Plank: I like it. That's cool in that it works in two ways. You have the structure and you have the slides already set up, like you said you can rely on that a little bit and that helps with the confidence, and that helps with the am I on the right track, saying the right thing. Near the beginning of our talk here, you were talking about how you have a room in front of you and you take the temperature of the room. If you have people who are nodding off or on their laptop then that means things are on the wrong track. Or people are leaving a webinar, things are on the wrong track. It's like there's these two pieces to it. There's what you already had set up, the structure and your training is up, then there's the thinking on your feet component. Those people who are either bored or interested or excited are a good barometer of am I serving? Am I on the right track? Or am I boring them? As opposed to, am I energetic? Am in getting them where they need to go? Or is it a misalignment?
Alysa Rushton: Mm-hmm (affirmative). What I find consistently is that if your talk is structured well, you won't have that funky disconnect of your audience. You won't have that people checking out. If your talk's aligned really well, and you're on track with yourself, your audience will be totally tuned in. Your audience will be hanging on your every word. Your audience will be so excited about what you're sharing, that that's why I share this structure of these seven steps because once you get the structure down, there's so much less for you as a speaker to worry about. You can just show up, be yourself, be authentic and get people helped and get people signing up to work with you.
Robert Plank: Have some fun and make some money and have your audience have fun making money too, right?
Alysa Rushton: Indeed, yeah!
Robert Plank: As we're getting wound down here, in your travels and experiences and seeing good presenters, and bad presenters, is there a number one mistake? Is the mistake that people aren't aligned with their audience right or is there something even bigger where you just see this common problem over and over again?
Alysa Rushton: I'm sorry, I don't think I understood the question. Is there the biggest mistake that speakers make?
Robert Plank: Yeah. Is there a number one mistake, universal, throughout speakers?
Alysa Rushton: No, but if I could give you one mistake as a theme of today, the number one mistake when it comes to making an offer and being of service of your audience is over-teaching. It's that classic going wide instead of going deep. I call it show up and throw up. People hate that. You want to just avoid that mistake and really spend time on your content. Spend time making sure that you do teach somebody something, but that you don't overwhelm them so that they don't have to check out.
Robert Plank: All that makes perfect sense. This is making a lot of sense to me because that's usually my problem. My problem is I'll teach seven steps or I'll teach all these little bits and pieces and all these that I try to fit in. My thing years ago at the time was, "I'm going to take five hours worth of stuff and fit it into an hour," and then wonder why I'm running out of time, why I'm having to rush through things, wonder why people aren't buying. That's such a simple idea but I think that's one of those things that it creeps up again and again with live presentations and with webinars. Now that you've put it into words and put it into a concept, that's the thing that I'm going to be watching out for with my own presentations, is "Am in overwhelming them by going wide when I should have gone deep?"
Alysa Rushton: Yeah. Honestly, it's the number one reason why people don't buy from you. It's because they're totally overwhelmed and they can't even see themselves taking action on what you just taught them. Let alone benefiting from the next step with you. If you just teach them one little piece they can see that much more clearly. They can go, "Oh, okay, he's going to break this content down in a way that I can really digest this." Super important.
Robert Plank: It makes a lot of sense so if people are either new speakers or existing speakers and they're looking for you to provide that kind of insight to tweak what they have or what they have coming up so they don't alienate their audience. Where can they go to find out about that freebie we mentioned earlier as well as your websites and blogs and where they can buy from you and all that good stuff. Where are your websites at?
Alysa Rushton: Well, I encourage everyone to go to getclientswithspeaking.com and download the 7 Step Signature Talk Formula. This is for the live environment, it's not for a webinar, but you can make a couple of quick tweaks and easily have an amazing webinar with this. If you want to connect with me further, my website is Magnetic Messengers Academy. I'm sure you can put a link some place for people, Magnetic Messengers Academy is my website. That'll get you connected with.
Robert Plank: Awesome. We'll put that in the show notes, and people are listening in their cars and things, then they can just write down magneticmessengersacademy.com and getclientswithspeaking.com.
Lots of good stuff today and thanks for stopping by the show and talking to us about public speaking, Alysa.
Alysa Rushton: Hey, you're welcome. It's a pleasure to be here Robert. Thank you so much.[/showhide]
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151: Offer, Promise, Platform, Big Idea: Create Proven Funnels that Convert with Marketing Medic Mike Caldwell
If you want to grow your business, the easiest way to do that (the low hanging fruit) is to increase your conversions. Mike Caldwell, the Marketing Medic, tell us how you're leaving money on the table with your business and what you should do to make more sales with your websites.
[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Can you tell us about what is it that you do on internet, how you got started, and with this funnel so specifically, what makes you stand out? What makes you different and special with funnels?
Mike Caldwell: I think the first question was how I got started, and I got started because I actually met Russell Brunson, the founder of ClickFunnels and DotCom Secrets, on a bouncy castle obstacle course in the Caribbean Sea. We became friends. I found out what he was doing. I'm an entrepreneur. I had some home-based businesses that I needed to promote more heavily online, and I ended up enrolling in one of his mastermind programs. I was able to learn directly from Russell Brunson, the master himself.
One of the first things we did is I live off-grid here at the place we call the Ark, and Russell built a funnel for me. It wasn't converting very well. I was responsible for the traffic. I was getting insane traffic coming into the funnel, but it wasn't really converting. Most funnels don't convert right out of the box. They require numerous iterations to make sure you have the offer right, the messaging right, so that it converts. Before we were able to do that, word got out that I was ridiculously good at driving traffic from Facebook. I was hired by a Bootcamp Gym to drive traffic for them. I was driving traffic. Again, the same thing happened. I drove traffic to their website, but it wasn't converting. They allowed me to rebuild their entire Bootcamp funnel for them, and our first month we spend 300 dollars in Facebook ads. We did 11,000 dollars in gross revenue.
Robert Plank: Awesome.
Mike Caldwell: From there, things snowballed. What I've always done is I always... I'm a paramedic. I was a paramedic and firefighter for 12 years. I was actually Canada's top paramedic for training. I was the area ambulance manager for the helicopter base in Ottawa, Canada. I had more skills than probably anyone else in the country, but what I learned is that it's the ABC's airway greeting circulation, the basics that save lives. I apply that same foundation to all my marketing campaigns, and I find that by sticking to the basics, that accounts for 80 percent of your traffic and sales.
Robert Plank: Would you say that... Was that the big reason why you were able to turn around that one client's funnel? Like you said, that... You said that, didn't Brunson build a funnel for you, and it first didn't convert? You had to go back to the basics, follow the steps, and see from the beginning what wasn't working?
Mike Caldwell: That's right, yeah. That's where I've come up with... I wish it was 3, but it's 4 things. 3 would follow my ABCs, but for a landing page funnel to work, I think you need 4 things. The first thing you need is an offer. What a lot of people don't understand is that they want to provide the offer that they want to give instead of the offer that their audience wants to receive. If you can do your research and know what the audience wants and create that for them, then you're going to be in a lot better shape than if you have some document that you prepared 4 years ago that you've never done anything with. "Hey, I'll just give this away for free, because I already have it." That doesn't have the value that's required to get somebody to take that next step into ascending into your funnel. The first thing you need is the offer, and that offer has to come with a promise. What pain does that offer promise to relieve?
The second thing is a promise. If I give you my email, then you're basically promising me that you're going to relieve me of some sort of pain. It's great for me to promise that to you, but there needs to be a platform that supports that promise. We can make promises out the yin-yang, but if there isn't the platform to support it, then you don't have the credibility necessary. I usually break the platform down into 3 things. It's usually different for each niche, but for most people it comes down to what does the client have to believe in me, what does the client have to believe in my product, and what does the client have to believe in themselves?
If we're talking about the weight-loss niche, for example, the client has to see that I'm fit myself, because they don't want to learn to lose weight from some fat guy. I have to show the credibility that 1) I'm a fit guy myself, and I practice what I preach. Then we need to show them my processed work. I'm fit, but I might be some sort of mutant guy that was born with a 6-pack. I have to prove that my platform works, and that's usually done through testimonials. If I have a dozen people saying that "I joined Mike, I followed his program, and I lost 12 pounds in my first week", then that gives a lot of credibility to my promise.
The third thing is what they have to believe in themselves. Most people have some... Again, in the weight-loss space, they're like, "Oh, well, you know. I'm big-boned. It won't work for me" or "I'm allergic to gluten, so it won't work for me." You have to address reasons why the people think that whatever you're selling won't work for them. Whatever product it is, there's always a reason why people will say, "Oh, it works for other people, but it won't work for me."
Right now we're up to: you need an offer, you need a promise, you need a platform, and then the fourth thing that is required is a big idea. That's your headline. The big idea is more than a headline. It is a headline, but it's something that incites curiosity and hopefully demonstrates your unique mechanism. Usually my headlines, or my big ideas, they're useful. It has value to the client. It's unique. Nobody else is offering it. It's ultra-specific. Sometimes I use this, and sometimes I don't. It depends on the market, but it might also incorporate a sense of urgency. It's 4 Us: useful, unique, ultra-specific, and urgency.
Robert Plank: You said that there are 3 things, or there are 4 things as far as your process?
Mike Caldwell: There's 4 things that I use whenever I build a funnel to any page, and that is: offer, promise, platform, and big idea. The big idea has four Us assigned to it. That is: useful, unique, ultra-specific, and urgent.
Robert Plank: Oh, okay, so promise was the second one there. Awesome. I like your way of thinking. Like you said, you used to be an EMT. You're all about the ABCs. It's one of those things where... I don't know. When I look at people making webpages, or I look at the webpage I'm making, it's so easy for me to get bogged down or overwhelmed, or when I deal with a copywriter, they make it a certain way. A copywriter slaves and spends all this time finding the perfect sentence or word. You mentioned a little bit there with the offer and the freebie, things like that, the things that you think are impressive and cool and useful are not necessary the things that those customers are going to find useful and things like that. Have you come across that, where someone wrote a webpage without a process but with a starving artist mentality, and it's set in stone, they refuse to change it? Have you ever dealt with stuff like that?
Mike Caldwell: Yeah, and for copy... There's two components to copy. People make decisions primarily based on emotion. "I want that." How many things in a day do we see that we want, but we don't get everything we want unless there's a rational backing for it. I want a '65 Ford Mustang, but I might not be in a financial position right now to purchase a car like that, especially given that I live on a gravel road. Any copy that you write has to address the emotional wants of the person, but then able to support that want with the logical reasoning for why they should move ahead with it.
Robert Plank: That's cool. If you see any page that's not converting or could be better, instead of eyeballing it and saying, "Well, maybe I'll just change some stuff", you can actually see some real, concrete reasons why maybe something's not quite landing. Have you ever come across with people building funnels, landing pages, and things like that where if they're stuck about what kind of decision to make, as opposed to going with some kind of best practices or advice, they say, "Well I'm just going to split test it. I don't know what my headline should be. I'm just going to split test it"? When I've seen people people talking about funnels, landing pages, in this way, the advice to split test it has seemed like a cop-out. Have you come across something like that before?
Mike Caldwell: Yeah, and that's why everything I do in this... So many of the things that I do in my marketing goes back to my firefighter paramedic stuff. Everything I did as a firefighter and as a paramedic had a standard operating procedure. When faced with this situation, this is is what we do in these steps. That's why my funnels have 4 steps to them: offer, promise, platform, big idea. My headlines, they're unique, they're useful, they're urgent, they're ultra-specific. I always go back to that stuff. I will split test 2 different- Split testing is awesome, because, like you say, what resonates for me won't resonate for everybody. Everything I split test has been based on principles that have been proven to work.
Robert Plank: You're not wasting your time on goofy stuff? You're actually... I guess what I'm trying to say is that based on everything that you've been saying so far about these copywriting principles and your checklist and things... You have a pretty good idea at what is going to sell. You can make a pretty decent stab at it. It might need some tweaking later, but you have a pretty good idea of have the headline be this font and this size and use that template. I guess what I'm asking is: Do you have some sort of a template that you use? I know you mentioned these different principles, but do you have a starting point for the funnels you create?
Mike Caldwell: Definitely. Like I say, it's those 4 things. I usually use Oswald font for my bold headlines, and I Railway for my copy within. That's based on knowledge that I've got from past funnel builders, from past website builders, from past copywriters. This is what's worked before. When you find a system that's working, I tend to stay with it. Everything I've talked about today, I didn't invent any of this stuff, because had I invented it then... I haven't been in the business that long to have proven it all out. Everything I'm talking about is stuff that I've got from people like Russell Brunson, from Todd Brown, from Todd Brown's team, from Dan Kennedy, Rick Sheffield. It's all these guys. It's a combination of what worked for them. We're talking dozens of years of experience in a system that ultimately works.
Robert Plank: Why reinvent the wheel? Go with what others have done before you, and build on that.
Mike Caldwell: A big mistake that a lot of people make is, again, going back to the emotion. Quite often, we think, "If we just pack all these features in... The more features we get, the more we overwhelm somebody that they're going to want to buy", but I don't care about the features. I care about the end result. If it only has 1 feature that's going to allow me to lose 12 pounds in a week, that's awesome. If you list me 50 different features, but I don't know I'm going to lose any weight after I go through all these features, then who cares?
Robert Plank: Right. It's a lot of beating on your own chest but nothing about what's in it for me. Have you noticed that lately, in the past maybe 5 years or so, that a lot of these webpages have had less text and less information on them?
Mike Caldwell: Yeah. Again, I've done a lot of work with Russell Brunson, and I'm in his camp. What I see happening a lot is people are cloning the gurus like Russell. What they don't understand is that someone like Russell... When you come to a landing page of his that has minimal text or minimal copy, that is not your first exposure to Russell. You've been following Russell for weeks, months, years. You've been getting all the emails from him. You know what he offers. You know what his past track record's been. When you get to one of his landing page that has minimal copy on it, that's because he knows that you've already spent dozens of hours in front of them.
What too many funnel and website builders are doing now is they're cloning one of Russell's minimized landing pages, and nobody's... Ted Schmidt launches a funnel and it has no copy on it, because he like, "Oh, that's what Russell did." Well yeah, but we all know who Russell is. We know what he provides. I've never heard of Ted Schmidt before. You've got to go back to that platform for the 3 biggest objections people are going to have for not wanting to buy from you. Russell has already dealt with those objections in the weeks he's been corresponding with you.
That's why I like to have that platform. I say it's what they have to believe in you, your product, and themselves. Those are the 3 biggest things, but I always go back to... If I walked up to you on the street, and I made you an offer, I don't care what offer it is, you're going to reject it. Right at the beginning, you're going to say "no". I want to know the top 3 reasons you're going to say "no" to what I'm offering you, and then I'm going to address that on that landing page. I remove the objections before you can ever bring them up.
Robert Plank: That's a cool way of going about it, in that you can basically get caught up, I guess, to where a Russell-level guru already has. You can get caught up, but you're also not writing 50 pages on a webpage, also.
Mike Caldwell: Right. You don't want to overwhelm the person. I want to do my research, and I want to know what your objections are going to be. Usually the objections are that... Looks like somebody else is on the call right here, but... Usually the objections... Sorry, I lost my track. Where was I? Usually the objections are money-based. "Oh, I can't afford it." What I like to do is before they say they can't afford it, I like to show them what the benefits are if they don't buy it.
Robert Plank: The takeaway selling.
Mike Caldwell: That's right. That's right.
Robert Plank: We've been mentioning for the past few minutes about different mistakes that you've seen on the landing pages that you come across or mistakes on landing pages- Woah, there's a shirtless guy in our Podcast- The mistakes that you've seen other funnel builders make. Is there one big, huge one?
Mike Caldwell: It's actually the one that we just mentioned. Well, it's 2 things. Somebody will say say, "Give me your email, and I'll give you my 3 secrets to financial freedom." They think that that's going to do it for them. There's so many problems with that. The first is you're going to give me your secrets to financial freedom? I have no idea how financially free you are. I have no idea how your system could apply to me. Do I have to make more money? Do I have to save more money? Do I have to start buying stocks? Are you wanting me to start flipping houses? I don't know what your product is. There's nothing unique about your offer. If I wanted to have financial, what if I type "how to have financial freedom" into Google? How many answers am I going to get to that on Google? Tens of thousands, so what separates you from anybody else? That person would need a unique mechanism so that I can't Google it.
That's the biggest thing. Most funnels I see, the only copy is above the fold. There's minimal stuff in there. There's no platform for why I should believe in you, your product, or how it could apply to me.
Robert Plank: It sounds like out of those 2 things it's have a better freebie to give away in general, and then make that freebie as sexy as that can be.
Mike Caldwell: Yeah. A freebie has to be... We're coveting our emails more and more every day. We're getting bogged down with all the spam that we're getting in our inboxes. Again, if you're giving 3 secrets to financial freedom, you have to intrigue me in some way that I believe that what you have works and that what you're offering I can't Google it and get for free. By free, I mean without giving my email on Google. The offer has to be really good.
Again, I like to go back to Russell all the time. One of the things that actually to me to sign up with Russell is when I got his free plus shipping book offer. I sent away for his 108 split tests for 7 dollars, 95 cents, and shipping. Then he sends me this 200-page, high-gloss, every-page book, and every page had killer content, killer value on it. Had I seen this book store I easily... I wouldn't have had any problems paying 50 bucks for a book like that. Russell gave it to me for the cost of shipping, and so, what that leads me to believe is that if he's going to give me that much value for free, how much value is he going to give me when I pay more?
What most people do is they come up with some kind of Word document that is basically worthless, that they spent 5 minutes researching, and they're trying to give that away in exchange for my email address. Even if they do trick me and get me to give them their email address, once I get this 1-page Word document with generic information, what are the odds of me ever buying anything from them down the road?
Robert Plank: Almost nothing.
Mike Caldwell: People got to give some thought to that offer. Like you said, how can they intriguing and sexy? Then once they get it, how can you make them say "wow"? When I got that book from Russell, I wasn't expecting it. I was like, "Wow. I can't believe I just got this book for the cost of shipping." That's a funnel has to work. That free offer, that's your first impression, and if you blow that first impression, you're done.
Robert Plank: Give them a huge wow when they get that thing for free?
Mike Caldwell: Exactly. Exactly.
Robert Plank: Speaking of ClickFunnels, I've known Russell for years and years, but I haven't been paying as close attention to him in the past few years. I know about ClickFunnels. I've seen a bunch of funnel pages. I've seen it demoed, but I don't have an account. In your words, what is ClickFunnels, exactly, and how is it different from all the other page builders out there?
Mike Caldwell: ClickFunnels is a page-building online software where... They just made it. They're all pretty much drag-and-drop now, but ClickFunnels has made it very intuitive for how to build the page. What they've done is they've... With a ClickFunnels account, you get all the integrations that you would have to usually use third-party providers for. I got rid of my AWeber account, my autoresponder, because now everything thing goes through ClickFunnels. They call them Action Funnels. The Action Funnels are better than what I had with AWeber before. Everything's segmented a lot better. I can move people around on my list. If you come to my page, you give me your email, then you'll get one sequence of email blasts from me, but if you buy 1 thing, then you'll get a different sequence. If you also go for my one-time offer, then you'll get a different sequence.
It's really easy to set that up within ClickFunnels. At the same time, they have all the eCommerce also integrated, so I don't need third-party providers for that. I can have my forms right on the page. You don't have to go to a separate PayPal page or to buy it or whatever, and then they've made it super easy- and this is where the true value comes in. If you decide to buy my TripWire for 7.95, I can include... It's called an order bomb. For 4 dollars more, I'll give you the checklist that supports the document. All you have to do is click this one little button, and that's added to your order. It's very painless for you, so you'll probably do it.
Then once you go to that page, ClickFunnels also makes it super easy to have a one-time offer. You've bought my document for 7.95. You went for the order bomb for 4 dollars. Now, I'm going to give you the one-time offer on the next page, but again, you just have to click the button, and it's added onto your cart. Again, completely painless for you. It makes the sales process so easy, and it defines what a funnel is.
Robert Plank: It sounds awesome, the way that you describe that, because if you can cancel your AWeber account, if you don't have to connect a PayPal button to a webpage. If it's all handled all in one place, and it's all drag-and-drop, that seems like that clears up a lot of that extra time that people would have otherwise been spending on all the technical stuff.
Mike Caldwell: Yeah. What's really cool is, like you said, you've been following Russell for awhile. Russell gives so much value away. Again, his upfront offers are so awesome. You can get most of his books for free plus shipping. You can get the DotCom Secrets, that's his playbook for making funnels. If you follow his playbook and incorporate that with ClickFunnels, then you're business is off to the races. The other thing I love about ClickFunnels so much is you don't get... WordPress sites are awesome. They're free, but if you're having problems building something on WordPress, what do you do? You're kind of screwed, aren't you?
Robert Plank: Yeah, you're on your own.
Mike Caldwell: You're on your own. There's forums you can go to and get a half of different bunch of answers from people who don't know anything more than you do, but with ClickFunnels, there's online chats. There's online support right there. You'll usually get an answer within 24 hours at the latest, and it's usually a lot quicker than that.
Robert Plank: Awesome. Not only do they do anything, but also they support it pretty well. Speaking of supporting this thing called ClickFunnels, is that right that what you do is you set up funnels for other people?
Mike Caldwell: Yes. Yes and no. I'm more of a... I definitely build funnels for people, but my strength is more in the whole strategy behind the funnel. I can build a funnel, but my strengths are more in building the business. The funnel is one component of it.
Robert Plank: In these last couple of minutes here, can you walk us through a quick case study of maybe a client you had, and they said, "We need x, y, z", and then you saved the day for them?
Mike Caldwell: Yeah, that happened last week. A potential client called me. I found out later that I was his fourth... I'm a certified ClickFunnels consultant. We have a page where people can go and contact us. I was the fourth person that he contacted on the page, and he was trying to sell some supplements. Supplements are great, but what people have to understand about supplements is they have generally small margins. It's more of a... taking into consideration all the advertising and everything you've done. Russell has a template where he was making 17,000 dollars a day on the supplement funnel. He promotes that, but when you have the opportunity to go to some of his inner circle meetings on that, he'll tell you that that funnel was making 17,000 a day, but it was on a 15,000 dollars a day ad spend. That funnel was between 10 to 15 percent profitable, which is good, but if you want to make a living from it, then you have to have the financial resources to back it with your advertisement, right?
Robert Plank: Right.
Mike Caldwell: Once I explained... I said, "I'd happily build a funnel for you, but another problem with supplements is Facebook isn't really that supplement-friendly. You can do it, but it's tricky. You have to really play within the rules of Facebook to promote supplements on Facebook." I explained that to him as well. Then, what we learned through talking is that he's a pastor with this huge following, and he wants to do more on the lines of life coaching. What he actually has in his arsenal is this amazing high-ticket offer. The call lasted close to an hour, but at the end of the call, he hired me. He told me that I was the fourth person that he talked to. Everybody else has talked talked about this structure, the funnel, and how they were going to put a green button here and a video there. What I did is I helped him walk through his business model where he could actually monetize and make money out the backend. Now we're building out a high-ticket webinar funnel for him, where he can sell his coaching services complete with a value ladder of up-sales and down-sales.
Robert Plank: Awesome. The reason why he chose you over someone else, and I guess what differentiated you from those 4 people, was that they were focused on the tactics. They were focused on the little minutia details, and you said, "Well, here's the big picture."
Mike Caldwell: That's it, yeah. He called me and said, "Can you build me a funnel?", and I said, "Yes, but just so you know, I'm really good at building funnels and strategy and all that, but it doesn't matter how good I am. Russell Brunson was 15 percent profitable, so that would be my goal: to be that good. I'm not as good as Russell Brunson, so we're probably looking at 8 to 10 percent profit. Aside from Russell, I'm one of the best there is." It was almost like saying I wouldn't hire me. I don't want your business. I want to build your business, and if I don't think I can build your business to the degree that you want it, then I don't want to work for you. I don't think you should want me to work for you either. Anyway, that's how I approached it. Like I said, at the end of the day, he ended up hiring me to build him his high-ticket webinar funnel.
Robert Plank: Awesome. That is a good goal to shoot for, and I think that's a good attitude that you're not just clocking in and getting paid x number of dollars for the hours. You're actually making something that's complete and that's going to help someone else's business. If someone wants to find out about you, Mike, and they want to hire or even see what you've been doing and talking about lately, where can they go to find out all that information?
Mike Caldwell: They want to go to marketingmedic.ca, and on that page, you'll see my lead magnet there. I'm giving away my 8-page checklist, so the exact same same checklist that I use when I build a funnel to make sure all my standard operating procedures, make sure I haven't missed anything. That's what I am giving away, and it is legitimately the same checklist that I use. There's an example of somebody who wants to build a funnel. If that's your goal, you're wanting to build a funnel, you find marketingmedic.ca, you come to my website, and you're like, "Wow, Mike's giving me the same checklist that he uses to build funnels, the same checklist that he used to turn 300 dollars in Facebook ads into 11,000 dollars in profit?" That's what I've giving away as my lead magnet. You can guess that my clickthrough rate's pretty high on that.
Robert Plank: Well yeah, because imagine that you actually practice what you preach, instead of saying, "Here are the top 3 conversion ideas". You're saying, "No, here's... I will start to finish. This is what I actually use. Now you can use it as well." Great stuff. Marketingmedic.ca, and thanks so much for being on the show today, Mike.
Mike Caldwell: Thanks for having me, Robert.[/showhide]
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150: Launch High-Ticket Offers, Attract Recurring Clients, Scale Your Revenue to Six-Figures And Beyond with Johnson Emmanuel
Stop listening to everyone and just choose three mentors! That's what Johnson Emmanuel from Clients Attraction has to say about internet marketing and success. Johnson changes businesses in three ways: optimize for revenue, optimize for freedom/lifestyle, and increase impact. Johnson shares his initial successes online, his role models, and the various ways he increases conversions in funnels such as decreasing cart abandonment or increasing follow-ups.
Resources
- High Ticket Client Attraction Blueprint (Podcast Guest)
- Emmanuel Johnson coaching (Skyrocket Your Revenue)
- Nick Unsworth: Life on Fire (Website)
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149: Make a Business Out of Podcasting with Steve Lubetkin
Steve Lubetkin is a baby boomer who's reinvented himself through blogs, Twitter, podcasting, audio/video recording, and documentary videos. You too can succeed in podcasting if you avoid talking too much "inside baseball", if you use checklists AND if you become a podcast producer instead of focusing solely on your own podcast.
- The Business of Podcasting: Steve and Donna's book
- Being the Media
- Trafalgar Communcations (Donna Papacosta's website)
[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Steve Lubetkin is the managing partner of Lubetkin Media Companies, LLC and he is widely recognized as a seasoned technology futurist. The Philadelphia Business Journal has named him as one of their social media stars for his work in podcasting. He's using technology for decades. He has included an email address on his business cards since 1988. We're going to talk about a lot of fun stuff, a lot of cool podcasting stuff, how are things today Steve?
Steve Lubetkin: Real good Robert, thanks for having me on the podcast.
Robert Plank: I'm glad to have you on, so can you tell us about who you are, what you do and what makes you stand out, what makes you different?
Steve Lubetkin: Sure, I like to tell people I am a baby boomer who has reinvented himself. The economic crisis of the last decade are making that necessary for a lot of people and it happened to me about 12 years ago when I exited a 30 year corporate career doing public relations for large companies, and needed to find out what the next chapter was going to be. The likelihood of going back into a corporate job at that point was kind of small, so what I decided to do was to reinvent myself. The initial thought I had was to continue doing what I was doing which was providing public relations advice to senior corporate executives and that was a very, very competitive market so I decided to look for something a little bit less competitive where I would have a unique specialty.
Because before I went into corporate PR I was a radio journalist and production engineer, I looked back at my radio roots and this was right about the time in 2004, 2005 when what we now call social media but back then called new media was coming up over the horizon and it was mostly blogs and a little bit of Twitter and podcasting. My wife pointed out podcasting to me because she heard a radio show about it, and I started listening to what people were producing and I realized immediately that producing radio shows for corporate clients could be a really good way for them to tell their story effectively in kind of a radio format.
The problem is most of the people who were doing podcasts at the time were doing a pretty amateur job of it, and I recognized immediately that the tool could be used if the skillset of the person producing the podcast was at a more professional level. Because I had the radio background and had worked in news I sort of felt that I had the right tools and just needed to reeducate myself about recording and editing digitally because I grew up in the 1970s and 80s when most of the tools we used were analog. We recorded on magnetic recording tape, we edited by using a razor blade against that magnetic recording tape and you can't do that today, or you can but there's not too many people working that way. It's much more efficient to work digitally.
Robert Plank: No more Scotch taped splice all those things together.
Steve Lubetkin: No exactly, and that's exactly how it was done. I set myself up to learn how to do that and once I learned how to do that I started putting myself out as a podcast producer and we began to get some clients for that. Over the years the business has morphed several times. We do a lot of audio podcasting but we also have expanded into video. We do a lot of video podcasting and documentary style video, elevator pitch style videos and things like that.
What really focused me on the podcasting piece was that it's portable and people can listen to it wherever they are, they don't have to be glued to a screen like they do with a video. A couple years ago Donna Papacosta who's a podcaster in Toronto who had a similar experience to mine in leaving the corporate world and making podcasting a part of the services she offers to her clients. She contacted me and said I've got this idea for a book and I think we should write it together because we both do kind of the same thing, and that's when we put together The Business of Podcasting, How to Take Your Podcasting Passion From the Personal to the Professional.
The difference I think between our book and other books about podcasting is we're not a how-to podcast book. We have a little bit of that information in there but there's so much information about how to plug in microphones and how to use different software for recording. We didn't think that was going to be terribly valuable. What we thought would be valuable to people is an explanation of how to make a business out of podcasting because both of us had seen way too many books and advice pieces on blogs about how to make money in podcasting that focused solely on creating an audience for your own personal interest and then selling advertising in a podcast. For most podcasters that's not a business model that works very effectively. The audiences for most podcasts are very small and the advertising industry is still using the traditional CPM or cost per thousand model for pricing what they will pay for advertising.
For most podcasters you're going to do an awful lot of extra work to find a commercial sponsor and get very little return for it financially. What we found is you can get a return, there are many, many companies out there and organizations that need podcasts produced for them but they don't want to have the podcaster be a full-time employee. The book is about setting up a business, all of the things you need to know as a podcaster for doing it for money. Some of the things that podcasters don't think about encountering, if they're only thinking about doing a podcast that's like hey, my radio show and my topic for my audience.
Robert Plank: If I'm understanding you correctly you're saying that a lot of these people who do podcasters, the ones that maybe create their own podcasts and try to make money from that that's not a good solution, a better solution is to find someone who has a larger audience and produce the podcasts for them, is that what you're saying?
Steve Lubetkin: It's not really about finding a larger audience Robert. What it's about is producing high quality content for organizations that need the content and may not be looking for that huge viral fantasy audience of millions of people. You have to remember that most of the podcasts that get great visibility are, even though they're distributed as podcasts over the internet using RSSF feeds and that's part of the definition of what is a podcast. Those programs are being produced by professional broadcasters in multi-million dollar studios. Anyone who thinks that Adam Corolla was recording in his basement, or that Marc Maron who interviewed President Obama is seriously recording all by himself in a garage that's the legend they create about the podcast.
The reality is they have a lot of professional help, engineers and writers and editors, and they have the backing of a large media organization to help them promote it. For most individuals who start a podcast it's going to be very rare, it's going to be like the unicorn we always talk about. If they think they can become world famous and get thousands and thousands of downloads. Most podcasts don't reach those levels, and so for a business podcast they're not really looking to reach those levels, it's not important.
For example, in the book I talk about one of my clients which is a global insurance reinsurance company and they provide insurance for very, very complex business risks. They're not an auto, home, life and health insurer in the traditional sense that people think of insurers. They're insuring businesses against environmental liability, they're insuring them for workman's compensation, they're insuring them against kidnapping and extortion for example which are risks that most of us don't think about but businesses have to. They're not really looking for reaching 20 million people with that podcast, there may be only 3,000 people in the country who need that information, and if they reach those 3,000 people that's a home run for them.
It's more about building a business where you can produce podcasts that have the broadcast quality that's necessary for corporations that are only comfortable with things that sound very professionally produced. If you listen to a lot of podcasts people have trouble controlling the volume levels, they have trouble understanding compression and equalization and producing audio that sounds like national public radio, that's really kind of the gold standard, that's where I measure my podcast production capabilities against is does it sound as close as we can possibly get to a NPR broadcast? Structuring it that way and learning how to produce audio that way is what we encourage people to do. If you're a podcaster as a hobby you've probably already accumulated some of the equipment you need. You might have a mixer, you might have a pocket digital audio recorder because the prices have come down dramatically on those and most of those are great broadcast quality recorders. You probably have access to some software on your computer that you can use to do the editing. You might have some music that you can incorporate and we talk about using royalty free or pod safe music rather than trying to use copyrighted music.
Once you have all those things and you have only your own hobby podcast you may have a very small audience and not much revenue. If you have the skills you can learn how to do this for other people and produce a revenue producing business from podcasting without the constant struggle of trying to prove an audience to advertisers who want to pay you very little for the advertising time.
Robert Plank: That makes a lot of sense, so as opposed to someone spending four or five hours to record a couple of episodes and do whatever they needed to do with traffic, they can just spend those four or five hours producing and recording and adding the music and getting all the levels right and all that stuff for a podcast for someone else's business. Get paid a flat fee of some kind and then now the pressure's off, now they don't have to worry about listeners or traffic or any of that, they just get paid by these existing businesses to run their podcasts, is that right?
Steve Lubetkin: That's exactly right, that's exactly what we're suggesting and it's been a good business model for both Donna and I for the last 12 years for each of us. We work with a number of different clients and the nice thing about that is you get to work with people who have very different interests from your own, you get to work with people in corporate environments or professional organizations like I've done some podcasts for trade associations in various industries. We've done some work for non-profit organizations, we've done work that educates people about different household pests, we've done some very interested topics so you're not wedded to oh what am I going to talk about this week on my podcast? When you take away that pressure and then add into it the bonus that someone is paying you for your podcast production expertise rather than paying you because you're very clever and witty. There are some very clever and witty podcasters out there and I don't mean to demean their efforts, but the nature of the business is such that that is probably a less likely route to profitability than hiring yourself out to produce podcasts for other people.
Robert Plank: Right, and I mean if you're making the hobby podcast anyway and you're buying the equipment anyway and you're getting all the bugs worked out as far as the way your equipment connects together and as far as your process on how to get the levels right and how to do editing and all those different skills, it's almost like someone can use their hobby podcast to build up these skills and then those skills can pay off once they use these skills for some other client.
Steve Lubetkin: That's exactly right and one of the reasons that I thought this was such a great idea when Donna approached me is that I've had cases, it hasn't happened often, but it has happened where I found myself with clients needing me to record podcasts on location at two different places on the same day. You don't want to say no to people who want to pay you for podcasting, but it was extremely difficult for me to find another podcaster in my network of people I know who do podcasts who had sufficient amount of equipment and the flexibility to go out and actually cover a recording for me.
That made me realize here's an opportunity that I thought podcasters are really missing is get yourself the gear that you need to record on location, make sure you have some wireless microphones that you can use, make sure that you have a good mixer and a good digital recorder that you can fit in a briefcase. All of those things make you much more attractive as a potential vendor to people so that you can be used for this kind of work.
Robert Plank: Speaking of the gear and all that I know that you said a few minutes ago that in your book The Business of Podcasting you kind of skipped over a lot of the technical how-to kind of stuff and it's less about how to run a podcast as opposed to strategy and the thinking and stuff like that, is that right? Do you mostly skip over the techy stuff in this book?
Steve Lubetkin: We don't skip over it completely, we do talk a little bit about it. We talk about mainly the importance of getting good sound and we talk about things like there's an awful lot of talk, for example, on the podcasting circuit if you will in the podcasting pages and groups on Facebook or LinkedIn for example. A lot of talk about different types of microphones that have USB connectors that they plug in to their computers and you learn through painful experience that even though it's very cool to do things in a computerized way that it doesn't always work out when you're doing something that's of critical importance. I've had experiences and so has Donna where we tried to use the computer based recording system to record a podcast project and right in the middle of this critical recording with a senior executive who's time is very valuable, that's the time when Microsoft Windows decides it's time to install updates and your recording crashes.
We advocate on one level, we advocate for people to have dedicated recording devices that are not dependent on using the computer. I see conversations all the time where people say I'm going on a trip and I want to record some podcast interviews while I'm on the trip and I'm going to use my iPhone for it, what do you recommend? The first recommendation I make is don't use your phone for that because my experience using the phone is whenever I try to record something that I think is important using the recorder built into the phone it drains the battery too quickly and so now the phone is useless as a phone and it's useless because the recording crashed. I always carry a portable recording device that's separate from the phone and the computer and then you can do your interviews and you can talk as long as you want because space is cheap now, digital SD cards have a 32 gig card in my Tascam portable recorder and it's good for 45 or 50 hours or wave or MP3 time.
We like to encourage people to get the right equipment. We have in the book and you can download this for free from the books website, we have a checklist of what are the key pieces of equipment a podcaster should keep in a go bag that's either by the door or in the car all the time. When you want to do interviews on location you can do them and the website for the book is TheBusinessOfPodcasting.com and if you go there and look at the bonus items we have a checklist and pdf that's extracted right from the book and you can download that and see how many items on the checklist you have.
Robert Plank: That's awesome and I'm glad that you have that in the book and that's why I was asking that question is just that every time I look into getting better audio equipment, or every time I look into getting some decent podcast recording stuff, or I think about getting a whisper room, or something like that, every time I go down that rabbit hole I end up being more confused then when I started. I end up going down this whole path of someone says like you said, get the USB microphone, someone says no get the normal thing, get this mixing board and then even if you do have a handle on that it turns out there's a better solution for this other scenario, or even if you have that some other model comes out. I'm glad that it's condensed down to the checklist and I'm glad that it sounds like you're getting people across the technical hurdle and to get their recorder, get their go bag, get through that part as quickly as possible that way they can get to the fun stuff which is booking clients, doing the process, is that right?
Steve Lubetkin: Exactly sure, that's exactly right.
Robert Plank: As far as podcasting in general and as far as people who are looking to produce podcasts what common widespread mistake are you seeing all these people making?
Steve Lubetkin: There's no one widespread mistake other than I guess, and this was the thing that got me to focus on podcasting in the very beginning 12 years ago and that is too much inside baseball. There's too much in the podcasting field too much self-referential conversations. There are podcasts about podcasting and with all due respect to this podcast that I want to promote the book and everything but I'm interested in the quality of the work, I'm interested in producing high quality audio but the content needs to be less about what microphone I'm using or what recorder I'm using or how I'm editing it and much more focused on who I'm speaking with, what their subject matter expertise is. It reminded me of when I was in college radio back in the 70s and people who were new to radio got into the studio and it was very cool to them and they wanted to talk about the microphone they were using and the headphones they were wearing.
The audience frankly isn't interested in that, the audience wants to hear what it is that you're an expert in, what are you passionate about and to the extent that you can talk about the subject rather than about the tools you're using to get to the subject. It's a lot like the mainstream media conversations today about which celebrity said what on Twitter, you would laugh at them if they said that the celebrity made the comment in a telephone conversation. It's not news that somebody uses the telephone and in the same way it shouldn't be news that someone said it on a podcast or that they said it on Twitter or Facebook, its a media channel, they just said it. Let's get past the tool and focus on the content.
Robert Plank: That makes a lot of sense. Get past the tool itself and then focus more on what the tool itself can do and I come across that a lot in you see a lot of these bloggers blogging about blogging, or you see a lot of WordPress geeks or website geeks just talking about their setup or about how fast their site loads, about all these plugins that they have. I'm looking at that thinking well that's great, that's a great little thing to brag about but what is that actually getting you, how is that converting into money? Another thing that I'm hearing from this conversation we're having is that a lot of people, maybe they're overlooking or they're missing out on the skills that they have.
The subject we're talking about today is that people have these hobby podcasts where they invested a lot of money, they honed their skills and maybe they're kind of in starving artist mode right now, maybe they need some kind of a way to pay the bills and it sounds like this business of podcasting thing is a great path for some people to take. Either if they're I guess looking to generate some money waiting for their dream to pay off or even just using these tools in a more practical sense to help more people as opposed to making a podcast that no one's listening to.
Steve Lubetkin: Yes, I mean I think it's sort of like the same dilemma that faces the airlines. When the plane is ready to leave at 2:00 every empty seat on that plane is a missed revenue opportunity. For a podcaster if you've invested a lot of money in really cool equipment because you have this dream of being a famous podcaster and you have a topic and you have a following. I don't mean to suggest that there aren't podcasters out there who have really, really cracker jack audio skills, many of them better than mine and producing high quality podcasts for their own account, but when they leave the studio after they've recorded their podcast their equipment is not earning for them. I have this expression I use with people that my recorder is not earning if the record button isn't pressed?
Robert Plank: Nice.
Steve Lubetkin: The same is true for all of this stuff. If you can use the gear at a time when you're not using it for your own passion and for your own dream if you will, you've got a way to make some money and we would think people would want to look at it that way.
Robert Plank: Especially if it's high paying and it's a fun thing that people are willing to do anyway, which it does sound like fun if they enjoy podcasting anyway how much more fun would it be to actually work on a real podcast with some real speakers in it and to have some more fun with the behind the scenes stuff. It sounds like there's a lot of little untapped resources there, and so could you tell us Steve about where people can find the book and where they can find out about you and any other websites that you might have?
Steve Lubetkin: Absolutely, so the book itself is available for the Amazon Kindle, so you can go to Amazon.com and look up The Business of Podcasting and you'll find the book. It's also available on Amazon as a trade paperback and we've got a really nice paperback edition that you can purchase there. You can get more information about the book and hear other interviews and podcasts that Donna and I have done with other folks at TheBusinessOfPodcasting.com. If you want to learn about me you can go to BeingTheMedia.com and if you want to learn about Donna you can go to trafcom.com which is the website for her firm Trafalgar Communications which is based in Toronto, Canada.
We appreciate any interest that people have and we hope that we can help people become professional podcasters and make a lot of money.
Robert Plank: Awesome, that's what it's all about. I appreciate you coming by the show Steve and I appreciate your message and I like everything you had to say, so that's for sharing what you had to share with us today.
Steve Lubetkin: Thanks very much Robert, it's been a real pleasure.[/showhide]
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148: You Deserve the Best In Life: Get More Pleasure, Joy, and Creative Flow with Self-Improvement Guide and Multi-Orgasmic Living Expert Antonia Hall
Thoughts are information-carrying energy and Antonia Hall gives us the tools to use those thoughts to achieve balance, inner peace, find the joy zone, and even enjoy creative juiciness in every area of our businesses and everyday lives. You deserve the best in life! Antonia tells us how to use visualization to understand what you want and where your goals are, breath work for daily consistency and inner peace, and to treat yourself right to have enough downtime to reset.
- Antonia Hall: Official Website
- The Ultimate Guide to a Multi-Orgasmic Life by Antonia Hall
- Antonia on Twitter
[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Today's guest is Antonia Hall. She's a renowned, award wining author, self-improvement guide and multi-orgasmic living expert. Her teachings offer ways to bring more pleasure, joy, creative flow and meaning into one's life in and out of the bedroom. This interview can go all kinds of different directions. How are things today, Antonia?
Antonia Hall: Things are wonderful. How about yourself?
Robert Plank: Super fantastic. Looking forward to the cool weekend but also had a great week. Could you tell us about who you are and what you do and what makes you different and special?
Antonia Hall: I am an entrepreneur myself. I run a communications business and I am an award winning, best selling author.
Robert Plank: Awesome. About what?
Antonia Hall: Well, my book is the "Ultimate Guide to the a Multi-Orgasmic Life" and it's how to bring that joyful, creative juiciness that is there for the taking into every area of your life.
Robert Plank: How do you do that?
Antonia Hall: Well, you know, because your focused on entrepreneurs and it's wonderful. When you are an entrepreneur, it's ... hopefully, you're living your dream. You're doing what you love, you get to create for yourself, which is amazing. It also requires wearing a lot of hats and that can keep you super busy, so there are a lot of techniques in my book that help with balancing and mindset. Mindset and visualization are critical tools to use.
Robert Plank: I agree with that and I think, I don't know, I didn't realize how important the mindset stuff was, especially in working from home and setting your own goals and motivating yourself. I didn't realize how important that was until maybe a few years ago. I just thought that it was either built in or I just had to wait until the productivity and the flow state and all the kind of stuff would click. Could you tell us about that mindset stuff and what's important specifically for happiness and for flow state and all that kind of cool stuff?
Antonia Hall: Yeah, absolutely. For me, I find it so intriguing the physics behind it is that physicists have told us that the universe is comprised of a unifying substance of which we're all apart. The Eastern philosophy has told us that for thousands and thousands of years. That's important because thoughts are information carrying energy. David Bohm's hologram concept all tells us that every part of that whole is within each piece of us. We are apart of that and that means that if we can see ourselves as the co-creators that we are, you'll see how what you're thinking and what you believe to be true is mirrored in your everyday life.
Robert Plank: In what kind of way?
Antonia Hall: You've got to look at what's going right. There are a lot of things that can get thrown at you when you're an entrepreneur. Seeing those challenges as opportunities for growth will completely shift everything and put you back in the place of power.
Robert Plank: Can you give me an example of that? Either with maybe your self or someone else where maybe you or they were stuck in a certain kind of way of thinking or certain kind of state or just couldn't crack a problem, and then you used some of these tools to get them to where it needs to go?
Antonia Hall: Absolutely. If you have a mindset that tells you that life is going to be full of challenges, you're more apt to create challenges in your life. If you have the mindset that says even the little bumps in the road are just opportunities for growth, then you can shift the way that you see and perceive, everything is perception, the way that things come into your life. You can see it and say oh, hey. This is an opportunity for me to learn how I'm relating with people, for example. We can come into contact with people that have a negative attitude and that brings us down. Is that someone that we want to be doing business with?
Robert Plank: Okay. That makes sense. Is this the kind of thing that you've been using in your own life? Is this something that you use day to day?
Antonia Hall: Absolutely. It's so important to look at your own mindset and to use visualization tools. Top athletes paid experts to take them through visualization. Business managers have people use visualization tools because they work. Being able to see your end goal and stepping into it is a really, really good tool to have.
Robert Plank: Can you walk me through an example of this visualization thing?
Antonia Hall: Sure. If you know where you're going, you're more apt to be able to get there. Being able to everyday just spend a couple of minutes seeing your end goal, everything is created from the inside and it's reflected on the outside. That's our thinking and the way that we communicate with people. If we constantly are telling people oh, this isn't working, this isn't working, guess what? It's not going to be likely to work out. Being able to shift that is going to empower you to create what you want and knowing where you want to go is an important part of that.
Robert Plank: Okay. Say that my goal is to double my income or to maintain the same income with half the time or something like that. What would I do, specifically, as far as this visualization thing. Is it a daily thing every time I wake up in the morning? Is it multiple times a day? Do I have to create a dream board or a vision board? What do I do?
Antonia Hall: All of that is helpful. I would at least spend a couple of times a day going into your own mind and seeing yourself already there. What does that look like? What does that feel like? See yourself already in that accomplished goal.
Robert Plank: Then what?
Antonia Hall: Then take actions and know that you're going to get there. Know that the road may not look like what you think it should look like to get there but trust that you will get there. You got to have that success mindset within yourself.
Robert Plank: That makes sense. Is that the only tool? Is that the main tool? Is that one of many tools?
Antonia Hall: One of many tools.
Robert Plank: Okay.
Antonia Hall: I would recommend getting in touch with Breathwork. Breathwork is one of the most powerful underused tools because we think the body's breathing for me. I don't need to think about breathing, it's happening. If you're stressed out, some really slow, deep breaths will help bring that balance back and balance, especially when your entrepreneur, is really, really crucial. You've got to be able to stay in your point of power which is always in the present moment. Anchoring yourself in with breath ... it seems so simple, right? It's actually incredibly powerful.
If you are totally wiped out and you've hit that lull in the afternoon, using short, quick breaths in and out through the nose will actually energize you in a minute. Bam.
Robert Plank: If I'm hearing this right, as far as this breath work kind of stuff goes. If I want to ... if I breathe like the real fast nose breaths, that's to get me to alert, get me energized. What does the deep breaths give me? Does that calm me down or what is that?
Antonia Hall: Calms you down. You know how when you're all stressed out and people say take a few deep breaths?
Robert Plank: Oh yeah.
Antonia Hall: It works. If you're not in that chaos state of being tripped out, oh my God, all this stuff is happening right now. If you just stop and take a few deep breaths and say okay, this is what's happening. How can I deal with it? You're going to be able to deal with it much better.
Robert Plank: How do I, if I have these tools and things like that with the visualization and the breath work, how do I know if I can be at my best. I think that, I don't know, if I'm too relaxed or I'm too happy or I'm too chilled out then I won't be worked up enough to actually be productive but knock out the things that I need to knock out but then I feel like if I'm too productive for too long or too intense, then I get really unhappy and that hurts me over time. Have you come across something like that? Do you have a solution for that kind of problem?
Antonia Hall: What you're describing is really an important question we all ask ourselves when we're running a business. Those two energy's, the masculine and the feminine energy ... that masculine, out in the world, make it happen, do it, do it, do it and that feminine I'm happy, I'm relaxed, I'm trusting, I'm receptive. Being able to balance the two, of using that feminine wisdom and intuition place and the out in the world place of masculine energy is when you can blend the two, that's when you're going to be at your best.
Robert Plank: How do you blend those two things?
Antonia Hall: You have to continually come into balance with yourself and check in with yourself. Where is my mindset? Where is my body? What am I thinking and feeling right now? Is this of service to my end goal? Back to that visualization point, right?
Robert Plank: Right?
Antonia Hall: Knowing what you want and where you want to go and then asking yourself am I on that path or am I letting myself get tripped up over things.
Robert Plank: What do I do if I'm not on track? What do I do if I'm not where I want to be?
Antonia Hall: Right. Then you have to reset yourself and ask what's going on with the mental state? What am I believing? Where am I getting myself tripped up? This doesn't feel in balance. Where am I not trusting the process? It's so important to be able to trust yourself and the process, because you're not the boss. You're the ... right? That's part of entrepreneurship. It's now up to you.
Being able to trust yourself to get you there and trusting the process. Are you doing the best that you can? Are you working towards goals and then are you allowing for? That's that feminine energy again. It can't be all the masculine go go go. There has to be that balance of okay, I've put a lot out there and I'm going to trust that it comes back to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?
Robert Plank: Yeah. I think so. Just retaking inventory and reassessing, I guess.
Antonia Hall: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Robert Plank: Is there any kind of big secret or is it just a matter of using these tools and repeating this and doing the important things every day?
Antonia Hall: I think that it is ... the more tools you have in the tool chest, the more you're going to be able to live to your greatest potential. Then remembering to rely on them. We get so busy and in that accomplishment type space. Am I getting there? Am I getting there? That can throw you off balance if you're not giving yourself the self-care. Stopping and treating yourself right, because boy, when you're running a business, you can get so caught up in the doing, the do do do do, that you're not taking care of yourself and then you're really not going to have the long haul of getting to that end goal.
Robert Plank: That makes sense and when you mentioned that, it made me think to 10-15 years ago, when I was in college and I would have the college lifestyle. I would stay up all night, overnight and I would do homework assignments at the last minute. I thought I was having fun just flying by the seat of my pants but doing that and doing the business stuff, it really caught up to me after awhile. It was the weirdest thing because I always thought that if I just wanted to be productive or I wanted to power through some project, I could just put in 20 hours straight or put in over night straight.
I noticed that might of worked maybe when I was 20, but then now that I'm in my 30's, I've noticed that every time I try to do that, I might be able to do that all nighter or might be able to put in 12 hours at a time but then the next several days are just dead days, are just days where I'm just totally burned out and I have to almost work for 2 or 3 days afterwards just to get back on track. Then I calculate, if only I had put in 2 hours, 4 hours a day times x number of days, then I would've gotten to my goal or I would've finished what I needed to finish and it would have been more careful. It would have been more attention to detail and I wouldn't have felt like I had to go through this huge ordeal of pushing myself to hard, having to recover and then having to get back.
Antonia Hall: Exactly. It's so important to stay in balance with yourself and just stop and say alright, I've done everything I can for now and I need to go back to taking care of myself.
Robert Plank: Have you ... is this the kind of thing you work with entrepreneurs? Is that right?
Antonia Hall: I tend to work with visionaries and entrepreneurs, yes.
Robert Plank: With those people that you work with, what common problem are you seeing that they all have? What's the number one problem?
Antonia Hall: It's usually the lack of self-care. It's usually not stopping to do things that bring pleasure into your life. The reason that my book is based on, "The Ultimate Guide to a Multi-Orgasmic Life" on our sexuality is sexuality is one of the most potent energies that we can tap into. It's not just the one on one sexual or by yourself. It's tapping into pleasure through all of your senses. When you are able to go back to finding pleasure in the way that it feels when you're laying in a hot bath or when your in the shower. Instead of being caught up in how did that meeting go yesterday or oh my God, I have this meeting coming up and I hope, you know, whatever you're letting your mind trick go. Coming back to that present moment of taking care of yourself, of feeling the water on your skin and just being present with that is so powerful. Then, learning to bring your own energy up through your body, will charge and invigorate you because sexual energy is creative and it's juicy and the more you're moving it through your body, the more energy you'll have.
Robert Plank: That makes sense, especially like you mentioned there ... at the end of a long day and I'm having a bath, I need to kind of forget or put aside or just shrug off the baggage of the day. Those kinds of things help me to unwind, reset and reflect ... just kind of turn off all the outside crap.
Antonia Hall: Self-care. It is so underrate and it will ... the more that you give that to yourself. That moment of relaxation, like you just said. The moment of really being present with I'm eating this food and you're tasting it and you're there in that moment with it, the more you feel taken care of and the more energy you'll have to give to your projects in getting to those end goals.
Robert Plank: That makes a lot of sense and as I'm hearing you explain this, it's almost like the ... I might make myself blush or something here, but it's almost like if you're in a sexual moment, again if it's with someone else or with yourself, there's that really important factor or just being there and not being somewhere else and not letting whatever outside stuff or whatever stuff that's running in the back of your head distract you from the current situation in the same way that if I'm at the computer or I'm doing something that needs doing. Writing, programming, messing with a webpage, something like that, it's almost like there's that same quality that's required there of just having that 100% focus, be in the moment, not let the other stuff distract you. At least, that's how I feel.
Antonia Hall: Yes, Robert. That's so, so important and it will keep you in your point of power and the more that you stay balanced in that moment and just okay, this is what I need to do right now and trusting that it unfolds right, because mindset, again, is so important, the more that you're going to be able to get through things and find that it moves through faster and with greater ease.
Robert Plank: At first glance, when we first started talking today, it almost sounded like spiritual, almost hippie kind of stuff, but the more you talk about it, the more it makes sense. The more I'm hearing that it's this really important thing that a lot of people need to either do or discover for the first time or be reminded of. I just keep thinking back to all the times when I thought that things were okay or I thought that things were in balance. I thought that things were handled and so many times if things were just out of whack, I would think things would be okay in the moment but then I might have a whole week of just zero productivity or just feel really sad or feel really run down because of the lack of that self-care and the lack of fixing problems before they became problems
Antonia Hall: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Robert Plank: Can you tell us about this book? You mentioned it a couple times. You have this Multi-Orgasmic book. Ca you tell us ... it's different from our usual topics, but that's perfectly okay. Can you tell us what this book's about and what led you to create it.
Antonia Hall: I was living in Los Angeles and it's very crazy place to live. I was stressed out from all the traffic and that hurried energy around me all the time. I started trying to find tools to help me find balance and my inner peace because I knew that I was better if I was coming from that place. The more I started using these tools and learning about new ones, I was like how do people not know this? This is amazing. It's transformative. When I went back to Grad school, they said what do you want to study and I said I want to help people make peace with their sexuality and these tools around are inherent sexuality because it's a part of nature of which we're all apart, and give people these tools so that they can find that balance and joy and boy, it really puts you in the zone. I think we've, hopefully, all had experiences where we've gotten in touch with our sexuality and then we just feel so in the zone the next day. We're happy and we're in the zone and we're creative and we're juicy. That's there for the taking all the time. That's how I came up with the "Ultimate Guide to a Multi-Orgasmic Life."
Robert Plank: Awesome. You have the book and then do you do any other kind of stuff as far as the business you've built? Do you do coaching and stuff like that?
Antonia Hall: I do sometimes do coaching. I just turned the book into an audio book so you can have me read the book to you, if you're commuting or something like that. It's very accessible. It's just a couple of pages and then an exercise, a couple pages, an exercise. It'll give you tools that the more you implement, the more it will empower you and help you get through this as a better version of you.
Robert Plank: Awesome. I know that's what I want and so, about some of the tools that you mentioned so far and that you mentioned in this talk, there's that visualization thing, there's the breath work stuff, the self-care. Is there any one last tool you want to throw there in to the mix so people have different tools or are those 3 things enough for now?
Antonia Hall: I think just remember that you deserve the best in life and you're creating it as you go along, so stay in your power and trust yourself and take care of yourself so that you can be at your best.
Robert Plank: Awesome. That's a good message and I think that as we were talking, what I was trying to think of is there have been times when I've been way to stressed out at home and then I go on vacation to Hawaii or to the beach and get really relaxed but then not want to go back or have a hard time getting back into the flow state. What you've described here is that maybe the problem was instead of letting things go get super bad so that we need a vacation or a break or a reset, to use these tools to have the balance and to manage things so that we can have everyday be one of those days that has not only the happiness but the flow state and the productivity as well. That complete fulfillment. Is that right?
Antonia Hall: Yes. That is absolutely right.
Robert Plank: Awesome. Glad to hear it and I like these tools that you shared with us. Could you tell us where people can find your book, find your audio book and find the websites that you create so they can find out more about you/
Antonia Hall: "The Ultimate Guide to a Multi-Orgasmic Life" at AntoniaHall.com.
Robert Plank: Perfect. Short and to the point and gets you there. AntoniaHall.com. Thanks for stopping by the show, Antonia ...
Antonia Hall: Thank you.
Robert Plank: ... and for telling us about not just how to ... I guess the multi-orgasmic component is for people to go and get your book but as far as the simple stuff to get back on that track to have a more self aware life, visualization, breath work, self-care and the book is "The Ultimate Guide to a Multi-Orgasmic Life." AntoniaHall.com and thanks Antonia for stopping by the show.
Antonia Hall: Thank you, Robert.[/showhide]
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147: You Are Not Your Past: Use the Debox Method to Remove Self-Doubt, Anxiety, Shame and More with Mindset Expert Jay Roberts
If you want to change your results, then you'll need to either change your actions, or the way you THINK about those results, if not both! Jay Roberts, creator of the DeBox Method, has a new way to deal with struggles, knee-jerk reactions and those daily emotional reactions such as doubt, fear, anger, etc. Each of those potential problems are "boxes" that can be dealt with by leaning into that discomfort, staying with it, and stay with it until the box is empty. Feel the fear, use the fear, then move on with comfort.
- Debox Revolution Website
- Debox Revolution on Facebook
- Debox Revolution: THe Book
- Debox Revolution on Kickstarter
[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Our very special guest today is Jay Roberts. Jay's the founder of this thing called Deboxing. It's a revolutionary self-help method that will free your mind from trauma, anxiety and emotional hangups and stress, leaving you free to live your life, have inner peace and be the real, more confident, happier you. I'm down for all of those things. Those things all sound awesome. How are things today, Jay?
Jay Roberts: They're really good, Robert, thank you. Thanks for having me on.
Robert Plank: I'm glad you're here. Could you tell everyone who you are and what makes you different and special?
Jay Roberts: Wow, yes. Us English, normally not very good at sort of tooting our horn so to speak.
Robert Plank: You're all about the self-aggrandizing, right? Self-deprecation.
Jay Roberts: That's kind of our way isn't it, the Brits. We tend to hide behind screens a little more. My name is Jay Roberts. I am 44, currently as we're recording this. I'm married. I've got two children. A son who's nine and a daughter who is seven. I've kind of ended up in this field not by design actually, but I was in the home business field for a long time. The fact that you're kind of talking to home business owners resonates with me because I've done a lot of that stuff. Really, over the years, have ... I always kind of fell short. I was kind of pushing. I had some mini-successes, but kind of always fell short, like invisible shackles holding me back. It was that that lead me to kind of stumble upon this natural ability that we all have that's kind of changed everything for me in a short space of time.
Robert Plank: What natural ability is that?
Jay Roberts: We all have a natural ability to psychologically self-heal. An ability to remove the root cause of our emotional struggle. Let's face it, as home business entrepreneurs trying to make a go of it, the self-doubt, the naysayers, the peer group, the wife or the husband don't quite believe what you believe. There's always those elements of doubt where you just keep on doing yourself, almost like you're proving everybody right.
I think in the end when you're looking to try and to make a go of something, make a success, of course, we talk about mindset. The moment I used to hear mindset, I used to switch off. I don't know how you feel about like the term mindset. What do you feel about the term?
Robert Plank: It was something for where, I don't know, like five or ten years at least I would always hear about this mindset thing. I'd think, "Oh great, that's like Tony Robin stuff or there's going to be some guy shouting at me or telling me to jump up and down." As soon as I started listening to some of it a little bit, I didn't go crazy, I just kind of used it like every couple of weeks. If I felt like I was kind of in a little bit of a slump or could use a boost, it was crazy. I think that what I had to do was get to the point where I could accept all the ... almost like the borderline hokey stuff, the foofy-doofy stuff. Once I was able to kind of take that in, then it's something where I go back to that, not everyday, but every few weeks if I need either a boost or to get back to being a happy person I guess.
Jay Roberts: I think the problem is a lot of it ... like I call it woo-woo fluffy stuff. A lot of in this kind of law of attraction, thoughts become things. This whole genre that's kind of swept the home business, the network marketing or multilevel marketing, whatever you call it, the entire industry has become consumed by a lot of this mindset stuff that really for most people doesn't really make any difference. They end up feeling more frustrated. Of course, positive thinking. Research now proves that it actually does more harm than good for most people.
Robert Plank: Why is that?
Jay Roberts: Because you've got a conscious mind and an unconscious mind. The unconscious is where everything is stored, your past events, all the things that have affected you are stored in the unconscious. If those things are too big, you can't just positively talk over the top of them and expect it to take. It just doesn't work, so people are using affirmations, and then it's not really making them feel any better. There kind of this dialogue with themselves is, "Well, what's wrong with me? Why aren't I feeling any better? Why is this working for other people and it's not working for me?"
The truth of it is that most people are going out with an overly positive persona, and it isn't really working for them. They're just kind of pretending that it is and pushing through. The research now just shows that more people go backwards than they do go forwards when they're using positive affirmations because their unconscious baggage just doesn't believe what you're saying to it.
Robert Plank: It's like they have the anchoring wrong or whatever? They have the affirmations as maybe at first to kind of put a band-aid on the problem.
Jay Roberts: If you take a look at it, what I've learned is that we all experience lots of things. We're all born with a core box. Brené Brown did a fantastic TED Talk on vulnerability and another one on shame. What she did after eight years of research, she discovered everyone feels that same shame, feeling that they're not good enough and not worthy. We're all ordinary people are born with a core box if you will that says, "I'm not good enough. I'm not worthy." You're experiences, events, comments from parents, comments from peer group, losses on the sports fields, all of these things, these events, these negative events that support the core box delusion of not being good enough. Now they embed in your unconscious brain and they stay there. They continue to play you.
Over time, these things mount up and mount up. In the end, your belief in yourself just gets worse and worse. You keep trying to push through it, but you can't because these unconscious baggage boxes, they're going to stay there until you actually find out how you get rid of them. You can't just write over the top of them.
Robert Plank: Could you explain the box concept and how that works?
Jay Roberts: For me, I always found it difficult with a lot of personal development and therapy. I've had hundreds of therapy sessions over the years, couples and individual. Spent thousands of thousands of pounds. The thing that struck me was that nothing really seemed very easy to understand. It was very complicated. Psychologists used a lot of long terms. I found myself getting confused. In the end, you know what? I just wanted it simple.
What I wanted is I feel this way, I want to feel that way. How do I get there quickly and easily? I came up with the term of boxes. I wrote it down two years ago, the summer of two years ago on a single sheet of paper. Just what it felt like when I was letting go because I'd already begun letting go of these boxes. I was writing down what it felt like and how I visualized it. The visual for me was that my brain, my unconscious brain was made up of corridors, cupboards, and in each cupboard were boxes. In the boxes were stored past events that were continuing to affect my life.
You could find it ... Imagine walking down a corridor and you go into a cupboard. There's boxes there associated with insecure about your girlfriend or boyfriend, and then it's a way of actually releasing that emotion in those boxes. You then are free of the reactions that are linked to it. Boxes was just a way to make something more tangible and easier to understand, mainly for myself because I'm quite simple to be fair.
Robert Plank: I like simple. Nothing wrong at all with simple. Would you say that ... You have these boxes, and they're different issues to get rid of. Would you say that having all these things arranged in boxes helps you to have more focus. You could just solve just one of the boxes, solve just one of the problems, as opposed to trying to fix your whole entire self? Is that the advantage to it?
Jay Roberts: Yeah, you just kind of ... Once you kind of get the front end, I can cover that in a second, but your emotional reactions. This was the kicker, the bit that really like I worked really hard to find, the everyday way that we can just identify when we've got a box being triggered. What happened was that from experimenting on myself, and then sharing it with lots of other people is your daily emotional reactions ... A negative emotional reaction is linked to your boxes. Psychologists actually go as far to say that up to 90% or more of your emotional reactions are linked to your past.
I don't have a number. I don't know how they could necessarily quantify up to 90%. I just know that either a large portion or all of my reactions that were negative were linked to the boxes. That was kind of my direct line to get straight into them. You can go in now and literally ... Let's say you have a conversation with a friend on the phone. That friend says something to you. It annoys you. They kind of put you down, and it makes you feel a little bit anxious, a little bit annoyed at what they've said. Most people just kind of brush that off or have an argument or whatever, but what you can do now is just stop and say, "Hang on a minute. There's an emotional reaction. That's a box."
It's like you have this dialogue with yourself, so your consciously saying to your unconscious brain, "Okay, that's a box. Bring it on through." That acknowledgment that it is a box, it's kind of like letting the unconscious area of your brain say, "Okay, could you bring this up for me?" All of a sudden, it starts to come through for you, and then you get an opportunity to create a trigger release, which we can talk about in a second. Actually, then you can let go of the box or boxes that are associated to that reaction. When you've done that, you go back. If that friend does the same thing to you again the following week, you'll find that you won't be affected by it at all. You've removed the root cause of your reaction.
Robert Plank: Interesting, and I like that a lot because we were talking a few minutes ago about the mindset stuff. A lot of it is not very concrete, even like a lot of the law of attraction stuff. It's either not concrete or it's this so ... You've got to figure out all these terms and this whole kind of system. I like that, like you said, this whole box thing, it's simple. It's something where I can actually see like, "Okay, before I made this change, before I fixed this problem, I reacted in X way. After I ran through this process, now I reacted in Y way." That's kind of like I think with all this mindset stuff, there's like the intangible, the nebulous stuff, but then when it actually gets down to, here the couple of tools, now it's couple of tools. That's something that really helps me because now that's something that I could use over and over again, as opposed to just having some kind of vague idea there.
Jay Roberts: Exactly, and I think that's one of the other things is that it just makes something more tangible because you've got a reaction on one day. You've deployed Debox protocol, and follow that process. You create the emotional release, and then your system kind of reboots almost it feels like. You look where have my reaction changed? You suddenly see, "Wow, that actually worked. That actually got rid of that. I'm no longer feeling anxious about that particular thing or that particular even or what that person said to me."
Robert Plank: I like that. It's almost kind of like if you feel a certain way or you do certain things, it's tough to attack that problem because you have nothing to attack. As opposed to like if you said, "Okay, I feel a certain way. Now I'm diagnosed with this," then you say, "Now I know the thing that I have. Now I can attack it." Obviously, it's not the same thing. We're not talking about like a medical diagnosis, but that whole idea of there's actually a name for this thing. There's actually a pattern that I can identify of the way that I'm acting.
I know that I for sure have this. I'll have something random to me happen in a day, and it'll make me think back to like some random time when I was like ten years old, five years old when something happen. I end up kind of like having that resentment or whatever you describe. It's cool that now that I can kind of label it in a box. Now that's a thing that I can kind of attack.
You mention this trigger release thing. I hope it doesn't get too dirty, but what is this trigger release process?
Jay Roberts: The trigger is creating an emotional release. An emotional release for some may be crying. This has been an interesting one because of course for men especially, there's this kind of thing about men crying, but the good thing is that you can do this in a room on your own and no one needs to know. Actually, there's an art to crying. There's a way to do it that can bring about the removal of these emotional baggage boxes from the past. Brené Brown said in her talk, it's leaning into the discomfort instead of managing it and trying to positively override it. That's exactly true.
This is where it was counter intuitive. When I kind of stumbled upon it, it didn't make sense to me because everything I learned from being mentored by a psychotherapist for eight or ten years and all the sessions I had was that you kind of ... you didn't necessarily head into the big storms. By leaning into the discomfort, and then staying with the sobbing feeling, staying with it until it's completely emptied, what you're actually doing is getting rid of old trauma. That's one of the ways that you can create a trigger. Let me just ask you a question. Do you ever watch a movie and it moves you to tears, like you get a lump in your throat and watery eyes?
Robert Plank: Sure. Yes, sometimes, not often, but every now and then.
Jay Roberts: Here's the thing. If you're moved to tears by an event or something happening, this is where people need to lay down an preconceived ideas and just go with it, but tears, you being moved to tears, watery eyes, lump in the throat, that's boxes ready to come out. Movies has been amazing for me because I've been able to trigger so much baggage release by watching a movie that they movie me to tears. For anybody that remembers the '70s film, The Champ with Ricky Schroder and Jon Voight, that was one that just got me, father son stuff. Ended up being a fantastic trigger for me to get rid of quite of a lot of baggage that I was carrying around, feelings of inadequacy around my father when I was younger.
Robert Plank: You mention that, so like there's your father stuff. There's like you watch this sad movie and brings to light a box that you might have not otherwise known that was there. Is this the matter of kind of seeing what comes your way or is there like an inventory taking process where you figure out your boxes? Where do you start with all this?
Jay Roberts: The main thing is never try and figure it out on the front end. I've watched this so many times. The way that I can visualize it is our conscious mind, the thing that we do all our thinking with is like a pea, and the unconscious part of our brain where everything is stored, filed and hidden is like the galaxy. We can't figure out a galaxy issue with a pea brain. It's just not possible. I don't try and figure out what the issue is. To quote Bruce Lee, who's heavily influenced me and my life, it's kind of, "Don't think, feel." You follow the feeling. You don't think about what it could be. You're not trying to figure it out in the front. You just know you've been impacted. You know you've got an emotional reaction. You deploy box protocol. You follow the feeling. You look for the trigger to get the emotional release.
What often happens is as you're kind of having a bit of an emotional release, whether that be by sobbing or a bit of discomfort, it suddenly pops into your head exactly what it was about. Suddenly, it tells you on the way through. That's what that was. I found that when you try and figure it out in the front, you get caught in thinking, and you lose the speed and impact that you can actually get rid of this stuff with.
Robert Plank: When these boxes come in, is this just a matter of there's a box that you discover is there, you go through the process, you do the release. Is the box gone? Do some boxes take a while to go away? Is it end up being like a bunch of boxes? What happens there?
Jay Roberts: It could be one or two. It could be a whole stack of boxes. The main thing is is that when you've been moved into this emotional release, for most people, it does tend to be a little bit of either light crying or people can go into a real proper sob to let go. That's not the only way to release. I can talk about that in a second. The main thing is is that you stay with it. You stay with the feeling.
I think too many people kind of ... They may have a little bit of upset, and then they feel a bit better because they've released a little bit of the top pressure. They leave the cupboard and go on with their day. When actually, you want to stay with the thought. What created the upset? What created the trigger? You just give yourself half an hour, 40 minutes, an hour where you just sit with it and just let it keep coming through.
You'll find that each wave of emotion or each kind of reaction then it comes is kind of like one box. That's how I kind of found a way to count the boxes. If I had a little bit of discomfort and a few tears, then it stopped, that's one little box gone, but stay with the feeling. Stay with what triggered me. Keep thinking it over and over just laying on the bed, running it through my mind, and then I'd feel another one coming. There's a bit more emotion. It was kind of like they stack and rack sometimes. You get one release. It dies down for a few minutes, and then suddenly because you've stayed in the cupboard, up comes the next one. You just got to stay there until you feel it's all gone.
You do feel, suddenly, you kind of ... People talk about you feel like a weight's gone. That's what it feels like when you've got rid of the associated boxes to that particular event. It's like almost a breathe out and ... You feel a bit tired, but it's gone. You know you got it all because you will sleep like a baby that night. That's how you know you got all that cupboard out. If you have an anxious night's sleep, if you have a rough night's sleep, you didn't get it all. You need to revisit it.
Robert Plank: I keep hearing that from you that I guess the thing to keep in mind is to let it all happen. What it reminds me of is just like I think when I first got a cell phone, and I first got a smartphone in particular like an iPhone, I would just always be being interrupted constantly. I'd always be like, "Oh, phone's going off. Got to check a text. Got to send a text." For those few months, I didn't really feel much of anything in the way of emotions because I didn't have time to think. Every time that I started to have a thought about myself, something else would pop up to distract me. I think that what I've heard maybe five or ten times from you now is that you have to like keep going with that and keep letting it happen. Would you say that that's like a common problem that a lot of people they kind of just dip their toe in the water and they get a little bit of a result. They kind of back off and go into this safe, comfortable area?
Jay Roberts: Yeah, I think they do. I think also people like ladies, women more so than men, I think would admit to crying. They'll say they have a good cry and let it all out. They feel better for it. What it is is then they then leave the cupboard and don't stay with the feeling to actually get rid of the root of the issue. You've kind of got rid of the initial pressure, but not stayed with it.
I think it's people starting to get in-tune and understand their emotional reactions, and then starting to use your emotions in order to get rid of the root cause of the negative emotion. You reboot stronger. You're evolving inside. You're internal mechanisms are evolving and you're becoming freer with every cupboard that you remove. There's that popular phrase, "Fuel the fear and do it anyway." This kind of redefines that a little. It's like fuel the fear, use the fear, remove the fear, and then move on with comfort. I can give you a couple of examples of just that actually.
With phobias and things, they're passed on. If we have a fear of spiders or something, it's because we would've seen ... normally we've seen somebody that had a fear of spiders. They did it in front of us when we were younger, and suddenly, we adopted that fear.
Robert Plank: Makes sense.
Jay Roberts: I was in Spain. It would be the summer of 2014. No, 2015, sorry. There was a water slide. It was very high. It was a eight flights of stairs. It must've been a good 50, 60 foot up, big water slide. You come down on this kind of inflatable ring together, and then it kind of ... It's almost like a ... It goes up the other side like one sort of big kind of seesaw type of thing on this water slide. My son who was then seven said, "Should we go on that big slide, daddy?" My wife said to him, "You know Daddy's scared of heights. You'll have to go on your own."
I did. I had a massive fear of heights. I said, "Go on. You're going to go." He looked at me and he said, "No, I'm scared." I'm looking at my seven year old son and I'm right there. I'm like, he's going to take my fear because I've just put that in him. I've just put my box in my son. That would stay with him then. I'm like, "Right. Okay, no. I'm going to go." Natalie's asking, "Are you sure?" My wife said, "Are you sure?" I'm like, "No, no. I'm going to ..." If amplifying the sobbing releases the boxes, I wonder if amplifying my fear and my anxiety gets rid of the phobia.
We went. We got a couple of flights up the stairs. We're only sort of five or six foot off that ground. I'm holding my son's hand. I close my eyes. I imagine myself walking up to the top. I imagine myself leaning over the edge and looking down the 50 feet or whatever it was. I imagine myself hanging off of the end with one hand with just holding the bar. I'm pushing myself to the absolute extreme in my mind, but the anxiety I was feeling inside was exactly the same as it would've been if I was doing it. It's the great thing about visualizing is that it seems so real that the feeling is real.
I stayed with it. I just didn't try and calm myself down. I didn't try and, "I've got to manage." I just stayed with it. I let it just come through me and take me. All of a sudden, it started to die down. I felt a little pop like almost like it went from really amplified to like ... and then it dropped.
By the time I got to the top, bare in mind I've had this phobia since I was a little boy, it was about 50% less than it was at the start. We went down the water slide. We came around again, and I did exactly the same thing again. I felt, came through. I stayed with it, then it passed through, died down. Literally within 10 or 15 minutes and three goes on that water slide with my son, my phobia, by staying with the feeling and allowing it to come through me, I'd got rid of my fear of heights I've had for 37, 38 years. I got rid of it in 15 minutes. From that point on, I'd actually stopped that going into my son.
Robert Plank: It didn't just help you, but it helped your son too.
Jay Roberts: That's our responsibility as well. We're entrepreneurs, and we're trying to make a go of a business, a home business or whatever, but you're passing your stuff on unconsciously to your children. All of your unconscious behaviors, their unconscious is picking up on it, and they're taking it in. None of this, everyone's oblivious to it. It's no one's fault. It just is the way it is. The more you can kind of recognize this and get this connection with your two selves, your little conscious self and your huge unconscious self, and start to remove your emotional baggage boxes, then actually what happens is the great consequence of that is that you're not passing that stuff onto the people you love the most, your own children.
Robert Plank: That's some pretty powerful stuff. Could you tell us about ... I mean, we've been talking this whole time about this method, the Debox way and all of this kind of stuff. Could you tell us about how you've put this all into a book and about all that kind of stuff?
Jay Roberts: Yeah, sure. I mean, the book title, the book is called The Debox Revolution. I've got the book is just about finished. It's going to go for a release on October the 1st. I've got a coaching support form, so I can be there personally to help people get the idea and get them into this new level of emotional awareness, ultimately emotional self-reliance.
What I also wanted to do with the book is I wanted to kind of do good with it as well, and because Bruce Lee was a heavy influence to me, not just in the martial art, but in his philosophies, but his belief was ... He created his own fighting system that you should be able to win a fight really quickly. Be direct, no wasted energy, no fancy moves, just get the job done. Really, from a mindset personal development point of view, that's exactly what Deboxing is. It's that Bruce Lee. It's just win it quickly. Get the job done. Be direct.
I've actually partnered up with the Bruce Lee Foundation for book sales for the USA and the rest of the world. All of the book profits are going to be going to the Bruce Lee Foundation because they are dedicated to helping people become the best they can be and honestly express themselves. That's a perfect fit for me for somewhere to take the book profits.
Robert Plank: Could you tell everyone where to find that book and tell them about ... and if you have any other websites, all that good stuff?
Jay Roberts: You'll find everything now it's kind of come into one website. Literally, I've just finished, and I can take ... We're in beginning of September. I can take pre-orders for the book now. It's debox.co. That's debox like detox, so D-E-B-O-X, dot, C-O. You literally will find everything there. The book is there. I've got an online course with quizzes and everything coming within the next couple of weeks as well. The coaching forum is there. Actually, anybody can find anything out about me from that site.
Robert Plank: Debox.co, so thanks for coming by the show Jay. As we've said, I think we're both kind of on the same page about this. A lot of the mindset stuff like learning it, trying to go about and find out the old way of fixing your inner stuff kind of just for me and everyone else I know, it leads to this whole rabbit hole of confusion, just not really getting to the root of the problem as you say. I think that this Deboxing thing is a really cool life skill that everyone needs. The water slide example especially, that was super crazy. It all makes sense. I think that from what we've been hearing is just everyone is just afraid to let things play out and afraid to embrace the fear, embrace the anxiety, embrace the doubt, all that stuff, so this Deboxing thing, even though at first look it seems really simplistic, the more you get into it, it seems super powerful. Freaking awesome stuff. Debox Revolution, debox.co. Thanks for coming by the show Jay.
Jay Roberts: Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it. Thank you.[/showhide]
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146: My Testimonial Engine: Get More Reviews and Get Better Reviews for Any Online (or Offline) Business with Doren Aldana
Doren Aldana from My Testimonial Engine tells us about an easy to use tool that will help any business (online or offline) get more reviews from customers on strategic review sites such as Yelp, Google+, Facebook, and more. This tool also cleans up negative reviews and even prevents bad reviews from happening as much as possible. Doren unpacks the ways he transforms 20% of any businesses' database into rave reviews and referrals using what he calls the "magic wand letter."
[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Doren Aldana is the CEO and President of MortgageMarketingCoach.com and the Founder of My Testimonial Engine, the number one software for helping service-based local businesses collect and share client reviews on autopilot. As a result of his clients' extraordinary success, he has won the prestigious Best Industry Service Provider Award three years in a row. That's pretty cool. Welcome to the show, Doren.
Doren Aldana: Hey, thanks so much for having me man. Appreciate it.
Robert Plank: I'm glad you're hear. Could you tell us about what it is that you do and what makes you stand out, what makes you different and special?
Doren Aldana: Yeah man. I'm a father of four, the fab four. I'm a husband. I'm an entrepreneur. I've got a couple of businesses. One we provide marketing solutions to mortgage professionals at MortgageMarketingCoach.com. Another, which I think we'll be drilling down into deeper, is the Testimonial Engine. It's a software by service and we help business owners, generally service-based business owners, but business owners in general attract more five-star rave views from their happy clients and to get them on review sites like Google Plus, Yelp, Facebook. You name it, we cover it. That almost keeps me out of trouble between the two businesses.
Robert Plank: Nice. Just enough to stay busy.
Doren Aldana: That's right.
Robert Plank: With this Testimonial Engine, how does it work? What's it all about?
Doren Aldana: It's all about the big problem that a lot of business owners are either consciously aware of or subconsciously aware of. That is it's generally a pain in the ass to get reviews from their happy clients. It's cumbersome. It's time consuming. They might send out an email and rarely will they get a response. They might chase them around with phone calls or send out something in the mail asking them to send it back, postage paid. Generally speaking, it's really not an easy feat to get clients, customers to submit reviews. We make that easy, breezy, lemon squeezy by putting the whole thing on autopilot. Essentially it's as easy as uploading their name, email, phone number, etc. into our system and then just set it and forget it.
The system does all the heavy lifting for them. It asks them for the review. It asks them to copy and paste that review onto other review sites that they want to build a reputation on. It just makes it much more expedient for the business owner to get positive reviews and to get those reviews on review sites as well as share them on social media, like Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter so all their fans and followers are seeing all these awesome rave reviews from their happy clients in the news feed. Of course, that's just another way to build their brilliant brand and to position themselves as the only logical choice, building their business at the speed of trust. Does that answer you question, Robert?
Robert Plank: Yeah. It answers and it kind of gets me off on a whole cool, fun direction, which is you mention in there that okay, getting reviews and stuff like that for any business is kind of a hassle, kind of cumbersome, kind of time consuming. A lot of people don't do it. How does your system get this done when just normally emailing them doesn't work?
Doren Aldana: Generally speaking, when you just send out an email asking them to submit a review on Google or whatever platform you happen to be using, if it's a review site like Google or Yelp or any other review site, Facebook, if the client does not have an account for that platform, generally they're not going to submit a review because in order for them to submit a review, they're going to need an account. You're going to alienate a big chunk of your database, your clientele, if you're doing that because there's always going to be a certain chunk of your database that doesn't use that platform and doesn't have an account for that platform. Generally speaking, the people who have the highest net worth, the people that are a little more seasoned in life, they tend not to be as active on social media and have accounts for these sorts of things. It's going to dramatically suppress response if you're going for the jugular and asking for a review directly on these platforms, one by one, or directly to one in particular.
Rather than doing that, the Testimonial Engine makes it way easier for your clients to submit a review because they don't need an account. It's just as simple as sending them an email, saying hey, thanks so much for your visiting or thanks so much for choosing Acme International, whatever your company name is. We'd be delighted if you could take a brief moment to submit a review. Let us know how we did. It only takes like 30 seconds. It would mean the world to us. It's really simple in your request. You can do this by text message as well right to their mobile phone. When they click the link in either context, it's going to send them to a place that allows them to submit a review without needing an account. That allows you to get a higher response because everyone is a position to submit a review and that means more positive reviews for your company, more trust being built in terms of your reputation.
Then after the review is captured, Robert, that's where we want to ask them to post that review onto the strategic review sites that you and your company want to build strategically online. There are a ton of them up there, but generally speaking, it's the Google, the Facebook, the Yelps and those sorts of platforms that help more prospective clientele find out about you and positions you as the only logical choice. That's kind of the secret sauce to getting more reviews and milking them for all they're worth, is being able to get more reviews by not requiring an account, and then asking them to share the love and share the news by posting them on strategic review sites. Does that make sense?
Robert Plank: Yeah. Well it makes sense and I'm kind of trying to picture this. Am I getting this right in that it's almost like a two-step process? They get an email and you ask how did we do. They click the link. They fill in the survey, but they don't have any other way of going on to Yelp or Facebook or Google until after they've filled that in. Is that right?
Doren Aldana: Bingo. On the thank you page, if it's indeed, that's where we're going to ask them to copy and paste it onto Google or Facebook or Yelp or whatever it happens to be. Usually three or four options, not ten or twenty because a confused mind generally says no, but if it's a negative review, we don't want to ask them to do that because it's going to corrode and tarnish your reputation online. It's almost impossible to remove the blemish once it's added.
We have a slick little system where if it's a negative review, three stars or below, it sends them to a damage control page where we're empathizing with them, saying sorry things didn't go as planned, or sorry you had a bad experience. If you'd be so kind as to share what went wrong and how we can fix it, we'll rectify this as soon as possible. When they submit that review or that feedback, it's 100% quarantined. It's 100% confidential and private, so it acts like a firewall. That negativity doesn't spew onto the web and corrode your reputation for years to come. It's quarantined and that way, you can do damage control, be all over it like white on rice, and hopefully turn them around.
Studies show that seven out of ten consumers will do business with a business again if their complaint is resolved quickly. Speed is the name of the game and that's why our system notifies you instantaneously in real time when any feedback comes through, whether it's positive and/or negative, so that you can stay abreast as to what's going on with your business in real time and hopefully turn them around if there's any negativity or any complaints coming through. Does that make sense?
Robert Plank: Yeah. That's pretty cool, that last thing you mentioned there where they get notified for a good or bad review, because someone can go and make a quick phone call, send out a quick post card, something cool like that.
Doren Aldana: Yeah, exactly. It always feels great. You gotta know when you're getting loads and loads of positive reviews and positive feedback coming through in your inbox or on your mobile device. You know you're feeling great. It's affirmation, it's confirmation. You're glowing from ear to ear, grinning from ear to ear, knowing you're doing a great job because all this praise is coming through. That gives you a little more pep in your step, a little more sparkle in your eye, a little bit more sense of your own purpose and on point. You're making a difference.
If it's negative, then you feel good that at least you're being able to rectify quickly and it's not just happening under the ground in the invisible realm, brewing and eventually, in many cases, when you allow it to brew like that, it spews out onto the web and that's after the fact. You can't do anything to rectify it because it's already on these review sites. Once they get on there, it's virtually impossible to remove it. This is a really important piece of the puzzle that most people aren't aware of.
Robert Plank: The way that you were explaining that, as you were in the middle of explaining it, my first thought was like oh no, this is kind of shady, but then once you finish your thought, it actually made sense where if someone wants to leave a good review, four stars, five stars, great. Let them do that, but if they have three stars or below, you stop them and try to fix it. At first thought, I was thinking oh man, that's almost kind of shifty, but the more I think about it, it's like well, if someone leaves a bad review, they usually had a problem and they want something fixed. Like you said too, it's really tough to go back and try to hunt that person down, if they a one star Yelp review, to try to get them to fix it. All these review platforms, to my understanding, don't like you to bribe someone to leave a better review. It seems like this catches the problem before it becomes a problem.
Doren Aldana: Well exactly. If you're really committed to excellence, you obviously will do whatever it takes to turn the client around and turn them from unsatisfied to satisfied, or at least satiated to the point where they feel like you did the best job possible to turn the situation around. You'll do that regardless of what kind of incentive, monetary or otherwise, you get because that's just who you are. That's what you're committed to. That's how you show up, but to be able to have that buffer where you're not having to deal with all the negativity that's now irreversible and irrevocable is huge because now you're able to turn the people around.
You don't have to worry about all the crap they spewed onto the world wide web that people are reading for years to come. Even though you rectified it, they may not know about that because in many cases, they're not able to see that you rectified it. That's just how these review sites are set up. It's kind of locked in stone in many cases. It's a really important buffer that's mission critical if you want to manage your online reputation and maximize your perception in the eyes of prospective clients and customers. The beautiful thing is the whole thing runs on autopilot so you don't have to sweat it. You just focus on what you do best, meeting with clients, cashing checks, or whatever it happens to be, and you get the best to do all the rest. That's what I'm all about, is helping people focus on their brilliance instead of dealing with all the minutiae. You with me?
Robert Plank: Yeah. Get to the exciting stuff.
Doren Aldana: Exactly.
Robert Plank: Why did you make this? Was this a kind of situation where you didn't see anything like this existed? Or maybe did you try some alternatives or did you need it for yourself? How did this come to be?
Doren Aldana: As I mentioned earlier, I've been working with mortgage professionals for quite some time. I started out being a general life coach, and then started to study marketing because I realized if I don't learn this marketing thing, I'm going to have skinny kids. I started to become a piranha for information on marketing and really honing my skills as a marketer. Then a client did really well with me in the mortgage space and he said dude, you should share the love with other people in the mortgage space because they could really use your help. That was way back in 2004 and I've been growing and going ever since, just specialize as a mortgage marketing consultant and providing all kinds of done-for-you solutions inside of that business.
Along the journey, this thing about testimonials just kept coming up. It was kind of the perennial topic that seemed to have relevance and mission-critical mass appeal for a lot of my clients. They were just thinking I need more testimonials but it's so dang hard to get them. We kept being confronted with the challenge of it. When I saw the opportunity to partner with my business partner and launch the Testimonial Engine, I was like man, this is just a hand-in-glove opportunity. I know that it's becoming more and more important with Google's algorithm now for local search becoming inextricably linked with the reviews, not just quality but also quantity, and being that I was working with people who are in the local space, mortgage professionals, it was just intuitively a yes for me. I knew this is the next big thing, so I pounced on it.
Robert Plank: Cool. What's awesome about this is that you built it for the, you started in the mortgage space and this works well in the mortgage space, but this works in any business. I guess if your business has zero customers, this doesn't apply, but if your business has one customer or more, then this is a useful tool.
Doren Aldana: Yeah. The other really slick thing is if you just want to get more reviews and have them on your website, not have to mess around trying to copy and paste them every time you get them or send them to your webmaster and go through the hassle of trying to get every single one of them manually transferred onto your website, you're going to love something like the Testimonial Engine because once you have your account set up and you get reviews, any positive reviews, which generally is four stars or above, will auto-feed right on your website. You just add a little bit of code on the site and it auto-feeds all your most recent positive reviews in real time right on your site. No extra headaches or hassle. It's just literally as I said before. Set if and forget it.
Robert Plank: That's pretty cool because that way, like you said, you don't have to hunt around five different sites to have all those reviews. You have it on a site where you can control it.
Doren Aldana: Bingo. You can also, any review you don't like, even if it shows up positive, if you just don't like how they wrote it or how they framed it, you can just go into your dashboard and press the suppress button. You can suppress it so it doesn't show up on your website. It's super easy to modify these too. The only thing you can't really suppress is when they hit your Google or your Yelp or those review sites because they control it. You don't control those review sites. They do, and that's why you need an account to submit a review on those sites. You get to control everything on the Testimonial Engine side, and that's why it's so important to make sure all the most positive stuff spills over onto the review sites so that you've only got glowing rave reviews that you're proud of on those platforms instead of stuff that tarnishes your reputation that you're not so proud of.
Robert Plank: Right. You said that you used this in the mortgage area. Can you tell us about someone's business you helped, either in the mortgage area or outside of mortgages, where they had a real problem with reviews, either bad ones or not getting enough, and then they used My Testimonial Engine to get a bunch more good reviews?
Doren Aldana: Absolutely. I got a hunting buddy here in Kamloops. I'm in BC, beautiful British Columbia, Canada. I'm in a very redneck town and one of the big things we love to do out here is hunt. I got a hunting buddy who has a spa. He's got 17 technicians working for him. He went from a franchise to being independent. Needless to say he had to start from scratch with his brand. He was virtually unfound on the web. He had zero presence whatsoever. We're starting him from scratch, from ground zero. I helped him set up his Yelp account and his Testimonial Engine account and his Google My Business account and all that good stuff. We uploaded his list of past clients. Then we did some ninja tactics to follow up with the people who weren't responding with some additional emails.
Within I think it was two months, he went from the bowels of cyberspace where no one could even find him, even if they wanted to, to being number one on Google for the three pack, which is fancy terminology for the top three listings in the local search where you have the flag on the map. I don't know if you've noticed that but they show up in threes in the top listing. He's number one in the three pack with more reviews than all of his competitors combined, plus he's also got his website because it's optimized with his positive reviews and his positive reviews are linked with those websites. His website is number one for organic search for his target keywords as well. We did all that within two months.
Robert Plank: Just by using that tool and by using some of those simple strategies?
Doren Aldana: Setting up the review sites, getting a whole whack of positive reviews on those review sites, and building up his digital presence with more reviews than any of his competitors. That was 98% of it right there.
Robert Plank: What are his competitors and what are a lot of people out there doing incorrectly with their reviews on their sites, aside from not using My Testimonial Engine?
Doren Aldana: This guy's competitors are like, the keywords are like Kamloops day spa, Kamloops manicure, pedicure, that kind of stuff. Frankly, his competitors for the most part just are clueless how important reviews are. Chances are they don't have a system. The keyword there is system, which stands for save yourself time, energy, and money. They don't have a system for getting reviews and getting maximum quantity and quality of reviews. That's really what the game changer was for my buddy, is we plugged him into the Testimonial Engine and he just roared past his competitors in short order and left them in the dust.
It wasn't really that he was any better, per se, although he would tell you, his unbiased opinion right? He would tell you he's better, but frankly, the game changer was not that he was necessarily any better. It was just that he knew how to take all that latent praise in his database and convert it into real, glowing rave reviews on the web. He didn't necessarily know how to do it. He just knew someone who did. That would be yours truly, and we did all the heavy lifting for him. It's about leveraging strengths. It's about leveraging technology. It's about leveraging his database and turning his database into a flood of rave reviews, and then positioning those in the right strategic places so that he can actually start getting more clients from it.
Robert Plank: Does your system have the ability for someone to dump in their whole database and is there a way for, for example, if you send out an email for someone to leave a review and they don't, does it have any kind of follow up?
Doren Aldana: Yeah. There's automated follow up if they don't respond. Then there's also the ability to send freestanding broadcast emails to people, either one-on-one or group via email using the Testimonial Engine. You could do additional follow ups beyond the automated. I think the automated just does two or three follow ups, depending on how you toggle it. You can send additional broadcast emails to the hard eggs to crack, you know the people who are just not responding for whatever reason. Then what was the other question you had? Sorry, you asked me two questions and one, and I forgot the other one.
Robert Plank: No sweat. The first question was can they import their whole database in there.
Doren Aldana: Right, yeah, yeah. For sure. They could do it onesies and twosies, so you can do them manually one at a time, or if you have a list, if you have a CRM and you're exporting from your CRM, you can just do a csv export. All we need is your client's name and email, or if you're using the SMS funnel and asking for reviews via test messaging, we'll also need your client's mobile phone number. Really easy to do. It's just a csv export from your CRM or your Excel spreadsheet. Then we import it to the system and then it just starts sending out the requests on autopilot.
Robert Plank: Awesome. As we're winding this down, something that always comes to mind, especially lately is how many, I'm always wondering how many business out there are already plugged in? How much competition is there? Off the top of your head, would you say that with the companies you deal with, what percentage even does something like this? What percentage even has some kind of review system in place, would you say?
Doren Aldana: That's a good question. I'm probably a little over-cynical because most of the people I talk to don't have jack in terms of a system, so I might be a little overly biased, but I would say, to be relatively as accurate as I possibly can and also conservative, I'd say probably about 5-10%, somewhere in that range.
Robert Plank: Dang, so one out of ten, one out of twenty.
Doren Aldana: Very, very few. Yeah.
Robert Plank: If any business just plugged into this, they would automatically be ahead of most other businesses out there as far as this kind of stuff.
Doren Aldana: Oh dude. This is a game changer, not just in terms of getting reviews, but also, we teach our clients how to convert at least 20% of their database into rave reviews, sometimes more, sometimes a whole lot more, but on average at least 20. If you got 100 people in your database, we got at least 20 glowing reviews for you within a matter of seven days or less with the Testimonial Engine, but we don't stop there.
Then we go one step further. Because I'm a marketing expert, I'm thinking to myself, how can we optimize the lifetime value of your clients so you're not just getting one transaction but multiple transactions. What we figured out is that the best people to send referrals, which by the way is the most profitable way to grow your business. It's five times less expensive, five times more profitable than getting clientele through paid advertising, studies show. You can get referrals from these people who are giving you positive reviews. Think about it. Who better to get referrals from than people who've raised their hand and sung your praises in the form of a rave review?
Robert Plank: Right.
Doren Aldana: There is no better, right? We now teach our clients how to strategically launch a dedicated referral attraction campaign to the rave reviewers, their happy clients who have given them four star or above. I developed this killer letter called the Magic Wand Letter. It goes out in the mail, snail mail, with a tangible toy magic wand enclosed, so your clients can't ignore it. They have to open it. Their curiosity gets the best of them. There's something lumpy. They gotta figure out what it is, right? They open up the mail. They open up the envelope. There's a toy magic wand in there and the headline says "I wish, I wish, poof, I could have more clients like you." I know it's cheesy as hell, but it works. It works really, really well. In fact, one of my clients sent out 50 of these letters and generated 18Gs in commissions from 50 letters, five-zero. It cost him $200, made him 18Gs. How's that for an ROI?
Robert Plank: Freaking amazing.
Doren Aldana: Yeah. It might be cheesy, but it'll put more cheese in your wallet. Would you like to be cool and broke? Or cheesy and rich? I don't know about you but I prefer the latter.
Robert Plank: Yeah. I'll take a little bit of a hit from my pride and my ego to get some money, for sure.
Doren Aldana: Absolutely.
Robert Plank: Great. This sounds amazing. The Magic Wand Letter and your Testimonial Engine sounds amazing. I understand that you have a free gift of some kind for us. Is that right?
Doren Aldana: I do, yeah. As we speak right now, I don't have the page ready. It'll be ready by the time this podcast hits the streets, but I've got a special domain that I've put together. It's for anyone listening, any of your peeps listening, Robert, who would like to get access to that Magic Wand Letter in a Word document so it's 100% customizable for your own respective business, as well as a bunch of tools and templates and checklists and swipe and deploy, proven and effective referral as well as review request letters and campaigns. It's all encapsulated inside of an awesome resource called the Ultimate Testimonial Toolkit. It's got a $97 value. I'm hooking your peeps up with this for free if they go to MyTestimonialEngine.com/robert. MyTestimonialEngine.com/robert, you just pop in your info, press submit, you're good to go. It'll be sent to your inbox within a matter of a few minutes.
Robert Plank: MyTestimonialEngine.com/robert. Is there any other web address you want to send people to? Or will just that one do it?
Doren Aldana: Yeah. If you want to learn more about the Testimonial Engine, you can go to MyTestimonialEngine.com. We have lots of information there, a blog, free demos, and a $1 trial. We've got a free course. There's lots of helpful stuff there.
Robert Plank: Awesome. MyTestimonialEngine.com and more importantly, MyTestimonialEngine.com/robert to get the Magic Wand Letter. Man, thanks for stopping by the show, Doren. This whole idea with the review stuff, it's such a simple idea, but it's something that a lot of people don't do. Within the idea, it has all these little clever twists which I really enjoy. I think that this is awesome strategy and I liked it, so thanks for stopping by and telling us all about it.
Doren Aldana: Hey, thank you. I love the work you're doing. You're doing a great job, so keep up the great work man.
Robert Plank: Cool, same to you.[/showhide]
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145: Establish Your Brand, Build the Right Team and Live the Lifestyle You Deserve with Paul Potratz
What does success mean for you and your team? Paul Potratz from PPADV.com shares the unique way he runs his business and sets up his company culture where he encourages his employees to make their own decisions and mistakes (including the interview process for that). He tells us how to build a quality brand, get back to basics, and provide a "Nordstrom" customer service instead of a "Macy's" one. Compete based on your brand, not on price!
[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Paul Potratz is the COO of Potratz, a firm in Schenectady, New York, I hope I said his name and the city right, that works with businesses in the US, Canada and Copenhagen on creating top funnel brand strategies, consumer engagement content on websites and social media, and sales training. Sounds like lots of good stuff. How are things today Paul?
Paul Potratz: Good. Good. How about you Robert?
Robert Plank: Super fantastic. I see you're in upstate New York. I was there about a year ago. I fell and broke my ankle in two places there, so I don't think I'll be going back.
Paul Potratz: That's not the norm here. I mean it's a bunch of Italian food and senior citizens.
Robert Plank: May I just had to go to your exact city, not just the general area maybe.
Paul Potratz: That's probably what it was, yeah.
Robert Plank: In your general area of Schenectady, New York and wherever else the world takes you, what would you say that it is that you do and what makes you different and special?
Paul Potratz: We work with business owners, but we work with business owners establishing a brand and getting new clients. That's kind of it in a nutshell. That's our ad agency portion. In the last few months I've started to expand out of that because the agency does well. What I mean by expanding is working with business owners or future business owners of how to get their business going.
Robert Plank: Okay. Do you have any cool stories ... Do you have any cool, interesting, almost like cutting edge things that you're doing to help these businesses recently?
Paul Potratz: Yeah. Matter of fact I do. I'm asked that question a lot, what's cool, what's new, what's cutting edge? We can definitely talk about dynamic retargeting and gmail ads. We have workshops here at our office a lot and what I've done is I'm like let's go back to the basics, because with all the new technology and everything we forget about the basics of how to answer to phone, how to actually proof our emails, how to send emails, how to build an email data base ... To kind of take all that back, because there's so many things swirling through my head, it's all about brand. I feel like that's what people are missing because of all the online ... The digital marketing pay-per-click, is they don't establish a brand, and if you don't establish a brand all you have is sell by price, die by price.
Robert Plank: What should be people be doing to establish that brand?
Paul Potratz: You've got to decide what is it that you ... What is your product, what is your service and how does it improve one's lives. You've got to decide how does it really help someone. The workshop I was in a few weeks ago ... I was in Virginia and I was trying to get the business owners to understand how does your product or service improve somebody's life. I gave them a little test or a task to do to come up, work together in groups, and they just couldn't get out of the sales pitch. That's what they wanted to do, is pitch their product and not talk about how their product or service was going to help somebody save time, save money, improve their life.
Robert Plank: They were lacking what's in it for me then?
Paul Potratz: Exactly. You've got to think selfish. You've got to turn yourself around and not only in that negative, but you've got think why does someone want to do business with you other than price. Most business owners, they want to automatically go to price, and if you sell by price you don't ... The only way you can go is go down.
Robert Plank: Right. Do you have a case study where that kind of thing happened just to kind of reinforce the point home? Do you have anyone that you came across where maybe they were trying to compete on price and you changed their ways and made them market better?
Paul Potratz: Yeah. Definitely. Even ourselves, we were growing and growing and growing as an agency and we do an interview process with a prospective client and then we said we want to compete against these other companies, so we kind of lost our way. This was about a year and a half ago. We started competing on price, but we're not scalable for that, for price, and I definitely seen the result after doing that for about eight months. Granted we added a lot of clients, but the clients we added didn't stay with us as long.
That's been something that we've been talking about for a number of years with all of our clients. For example, I've got a good friend of mine, he started out as a client and now he's a really good friend. His name is Ryan. Ryan is in the market, he's a car dealer, and I'll talk about that because automotive can be very relatable to everybody. When we first started working together he was completing on price. Now he doesn't compete on price and his cars are on the average of fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars more than competing dealers in the market, but he's outselling them.
Robert Plank: What are you having him do specifically to outsell his competitors there?
Paul Potratz: It's all about the experience. What I mean by the experience, I mean ... I really talk about like Macy's versus Nordstrom. I'm sure a lot of your listeners have been into those two stores. You go to Macy's and it's ... You just don't get that help. You don't get that experience and they drop everything in the bag ... For example, you go, you buy a tie ... I go, I buy a tie, I pay good money or a tie. They take the tie, they just drop it in the bag. They roll it in half and they drop it in the bag, that's Macy's. Nordstrom, they take that tie and they're like, let me help you find a shirt, let me help you find a suit, let me help you find a pocket square, let me help you find socks, and so on and so forth. Then when you purchase the tie they fold it, they put it a box, they put it in a bag, they take your credit card, they say thank you, they walk around the counter and they hand you the bag instead of just shoving it to you across the counter.
Ryan being a car dealer, his team has been trained instead of when you come on the lot, "Hey, can I help you? What are you looking for? How much are you going to put down," those type of things. Even in their phone process and how they talk and how they have the discussion and the things that they deliver ... You fill in a lead form on his website, it's not all about price. It's to find exactly is that vehicle right for you. It's a discussion and it's helping. It's really more of a consultation than just how quick can I sell this to you and get you out of here.
Robert Plank: It sounds like lots of I guess little touches. Were those something that you thought of on your own or did you go and research the other car dealers? How did you settle on these specific things that Ryan, the car dealer, should have been doing?
Paul Potratz: It's definitely a partnership. Ryan is a big believer in making sure that he has the right team, the interview process. If you don't have the right team you will never be able to do it. My own experience ... How do we like to be treated when we go to spend money? It was a wake-up call to me. Some years back I was in Paris, France with my wife at the store named Charvet. Charvet is where the Kennedys used to get their shirts. It's custom made shirts and it's a very popular store. That was part of my whole ... When we go to Paris I'm going to go to Charvet.
I remember going in, and this place is really a dump. It's three stories of a dump, but their shirts are all custom made. I remember I went in and I met the woman and I said, "I want to get some shirts done." We're on the second floor and she's trying the different shirts on. They have the test shirts. I'm like, "Okay, this is the one I like." She's like, "No, no, no, it doesn't fit." I was like, "Yeah, it fits," because I wanted this shirt, because after you get a little older you realize that the shoulders have got to fit just right. I had a shirt, it was a sixteen in the collar, and she said, "No, that's too tight. You need a sixteen and a half," but when you go up to the next size the shoulders get bigger.
I'm like, "No, no, no, I want a sixteen. I'm losing weight." She's like, "No. I won't sell it to you." I said, "What? What do you mean you won't sell it to me?" I went into this discussion and everything. She said, "No, I'm not a sales person. I'm a consultant. I would not let my shirt go out of this store looking like that on you." She was actually not going to complete the sale. It was just the whole experience and the process that she took me through, and I was like wow, there's something to this, because I went in to get maybe one or two shirts and I ended up leaving with like ten, because I was told I couldn't do it and the experience was different and it was fascinating, which made me really start to study what is the psychology of when we're purchasing.
We talk about the Nordstrom effect, something like high end purses and how people will buy a high end purse even though the quality is not any different, it's just the whole mystique, the prestigious factor of it all. You can do that in any product, any service, regardless of the competition you have.
Robert Plank: Is this something that everyone should be doing, looking to I guess class up the process and make it less of a sales transaction and more of a consultation?
Paul Potratz: I think so. Definitely. Even today, I mean you kind of think about it. All of us are walking around with smart phones now, and when we go to purchase something generally we do research. We do research. Even if we're going to go buy a three dollar and fifty cent air freshener that you plug in the wall, we still want to do the research on it. If everybody is going online to do research, shouldn't you start being a consultative seller instead of just trying to sell by price? Granted there's going to be those salespeople and those business owners out there, that's what they think a call to action is, it's price, and that's what they're going to focus on. But if you want to be able to have loyal clients, and I use the word clients instead of customers, because customers go to Walmart. Clients, you're a trusted authority. If you want to have those repeat clients over and over and you want to build word-of-mouth and you want to build your brand, you need to become a consultant regardless of the product or service your selling.
Robert Plank: I like that. I like that idea. Kind of along those lines of you building this stuff up and having the right team and having the right process, I understand that you took a little bit of a road trip lately. Is that right?
Paul Potratz: I'm constantly taking road trips, so I'm not sure which one you're referring to since I've had a lot of them.
Robert Plank: Tell me about something. Tell me is this ... You take these road trips all the time. Is this possible because you've built up this good team and kind of a machine that runs without you, or what's the secret to having the successful business, but also being able to take time off whenever you want?
Paul Potratz: Yeah. I've definitely taken a lot of road trips, personal and business wise. When I started the agency, I started it ... I should have called it Dude and His Dog Agency, because I started in the bedroom with my dog laying at my feet and I was doing it all. I was doing copywriting, media buying, video production, account management, sales and everything. It's definitely been over the years, because when I started in 2003, the interview process and trying to find the right team members, and we've had some failures, but that's part of growing, and we've had some tremendous success. The agency pretty much ... I won't say it runs itself, but I've got a team of individuals that are dedicated and they run with it and they treat it like it's their own business.
We've definitely set it up ... For example, we have unlimited paid time off. If somebody want's to take a month off, take a month off, as long as you're hitting your key performance and your key result areas, it doesn't make a difference. The company pretty much runs on peer pressure, which allows me one of the trips that I took where I went out west and I spent a few weeks out west on my dirt bike and didn't worry about it. That's part of it. Are you the type of business owner that's working in your business or working on your business? I try to work on the business, which has allowed me to start another company since then, and the agency is more or less my retirement egg I guess you can say.
Robert Plank: Cool. Was it just a matter of like ... How did you get from the 2003 era to now? Was it just a matter of the combination of this peer pressure thing and trying different people out? How did you get the whole team and all that figured out and how did you get it to become a thing where you didn't have to always watch over it and micromanage?
Paul Potratz: It's a culture. The different places I've worked over they years, I would work for the manager, not a leader, that would just do stupid things. He wouldn't let people make decisions. He wouldn't let people fail. He wouldn't let people succeed. You had to do it his way. I worked in corporate American for a number of years and everything about corporate America, I was like it just doesn't make any sense. I don't like it and I don't agree with it.
When I started the company and I started adding employees I said how do I let people make decisions, and it's the little things ... Granted, you can read all the stuff in books, but that's what happens so many times. A business owner will read something in a book or they'll listen to a podcast or they'll go hear a speaker talk, but they don't put those things in action and plan their day out and making sure that they're doing that. When one of my team members come into my door and they're like, "Paul, I got a question," I'm like, "Okay. Great. What's your question?"
I always make sure when they come with a question that they'll say, "This is what I think I should do and I think this is going to be the result," and I'm like, "Okay. Great. Go try it. See what happens." People aren't scared to fail, they're not scared to lose clients or whatever the recourse is going to be because they know I'm always going to be there to support them. It's just pushing, you make the decision, and it's definitely grown. Granted we've had some people that haven't made very wise decisions, but then there always has to ... I'm not going to say there has to be a consequence, but what did you learn from that?
That's really what our business is built on, coming to work and having fun, making somebody's day, doing what's right, and not worrying about the money, because the money will follow if you do a great job.
Robert Plank: That's an awesome attitude. I like that idea of letting your people fail so that they'll learn the decision on their own. Did I hear that right, that when they come to you with a question they have to already kind of have somewhat of an answer packaged with that question? Was that right?
Paul Potratz: Yes. Exactly. Otherwise the company ... It won't ever grow on its own. If you've got to be a dictator and you're literally saying you have to do this, you have to do that, and people are scared to make decisions, how's your company going to grow? How is it going to scale? You're always going to have to be involved in the company, one of two reasons, either you didn't train your people or your people are scared to make decisions. Then if they're scared to make decisions or if you're not letting them make decisions, they're going to end up going somewhere else anyway, because if they're that type of personality and mentality that they want to be the decision maker, they're going to go somewhere where they can be that person.
Robert Plank: Right. Has this whole method of yours, has it ever failed really badly? Has it ever not worked?
Paul Potratz: Yeah. I have a belief, and I've proved it over and over and over again, that when people go to work, when they get up in the morning and they come to work, they don't come to fail. They come to succeed, but as a leader you've got to understand what is success for each individual? A lot of times we think we'll pay them more money. Money's nice, yeah, and they definitely want to make money and our team makes good money ... I mean we pay them more here in upstate New York than they can make in Boston or New York City, but it's not always money. There's so much more to it.
With that same mindset that people want to succeed and you've got to understand what is success for them, there's been a time or two or maybe a dozen times that I've given an individual too much leeway or let them I guess spread their wings too quick before they were ready and then they just kept on failing and failing and failing. Then they're like this isn't for me. It does take the right personality, which is great. Interviewing ... I don't have anything to do with interviewing here, and termination ... I have nothing to do with termination. That's a committee of the team. The committee decides who's going to be interviewed, who's hired and who's fired.
Robert Plank: Are you saying that if someone is on the team and they're kind of unpopular with everyone else they can get booted out?
Paul Potratz: Yes.
Robert Plank: Wow, that's crazy, but kind of interesting and kind of novel there too.
Paul Potratz: Think about it. We've had different people that would come in, whether it was a graphic designer or a video editor or somebody that just does new business presentations, if they're not doing their job, then that's more work for everybody else. If they're failing, then that's a reputation for the entire company. They're not pulling their weight and people are saying, "why am I not getting my bonus? Why didn't I get my quarterly bonus? Why didn't I get my year end bonus?" It's like, "You tell me. Why do you think you didn't get it? What happened? Did we have any issues?"
We had a direct mail that was done incorrectly. We had to send it again. That cost us fifteen thousand dollars. We had a Facebook campaign that was run incorrectly. That cost us eighteen thousand dollars, so I have them tell me why it's not happening. How did that happen? So-and-so did this and so-and-so did that. Okay, there you go.
Robert Plank: How did you figure all this out? Was this all trial and error or ... This all seems kind of weird, but in a good way. How did all this come about?
Paul Potratz: To be completely honest is I'm lazy. I hate doing paperwork. It's not my strength. I love the creative process and creative thought. If I'm lazy doing paperwork, I've got to find other people to do it. If I'm lazy doing finances, I've got to find other people to do it. I said why not empower the people here that really want to do it? That's where it really came. I guess that's a good explanation of what it is. There's things that I really like to do and things I don't like to do, and the things I don't like to do I definitely want to have other people doing that that enjoy it.
Robert Plank: I like that. It reminds me of the Bill Gates quote where he says something like if you want something done find a lazy person to do it because they'll find an easy and fast way to get it done.
Paul Potratz: Exactly. There you go.
Robert Plank: Cool. Can you tell me about these two businesses and what's happening with them and what's ... Tell us about them and where people can find out about them and all that good stuff.
Paul Potratz: Yeah. The agency name is Potratz. We're known as a digital agency, but my newest venture is my ... It's my website that's launching pretty quick, which is my first name and last name, Paul Potratz. There's a page that spins off of that that called The Growth Mindset. What I've done with The Growth Mindset ... Because when I started my company I really struggled. What bookkeeping system do I use? What do I need to have on my business cards? Do I need a slogan? Do I need a logo? What website do I use? All these questions. How do I hire new people? What should be a pay plan?
When you're starting a company, or even in business, people struggle with that. What I've done is I've gone all around the country and I'm on the lookout for smart entrepreneurs. I've said, "Why don't you join The Growth Mindset?" The Growth Mindset is a group of entrepreneurs. It's where we share bundles every week, so we have a new thing that comes out, it can be anything from how to use YouTube to market yourself or how to make sure that your financial statement is balanced correctly, whatever it might be. That's our newest thing that we're launching. It's coming out November 22nd and it's called The Growth Mindset. It's off of my website.
We do, like I said, bundles. Video is a part of it. We do webinars, so we have questions and answers, but it's for entrepreneurs who are wanting to grow their business. It's a membership website, but it's cheap. We're still figuring out the pricing, but it's going to be thirty and fifty dollars a month.
Robert Plank: Is that one at PaulPotratz.com?
Paul Potratz: Yeah, PaulPotratz.com.
Robert Plank: The website of your agency, is that PPADV.com?
Paul Potratz: That's it. Yep.
Robert Plank: Do you have any plans to make any kind of website that teaches people how to become a snappy dresser?
Paul Potratz: I put that out there and no one seemed like they were really interested in it. I don't know. I'll tell you what, I love putting ginghams and plaids and stripes together in different colors. It's just hard to find guys that are willing to wear that other than myself.
Robert Plank: Maybe you can keep all of the secrets to yourself then?
Paul Potratz: I'm more than happy to share everything I know, but it's just ... Then people are always like "Yeah, that looks good. That looks sharp. I just wouldn't be able to pull it off." I was like, "Yeah, you'd be able to pull it off. It's easy. Just throw some stuff together with some colors and some patterns and you're good."
Robert Plank: They just need more confidence.
Paul Potratz: Exactly. That's what it is. I think that's part of the branding thing. That was I point I wanted to make because I felt like so many people were dressing like me and I said I'm going to take it to another level.
Robert Plank: You might as well, right, if you're doing it anyway?
Paul Potratz: Yeah. Exactly. What the heck, why not?
Robert Plank: Cool. Along those lines, thanks for stopping by the show Paul. The websites are ppadv.com and paulpotratz.com. Thanks again for stopping by.
Paul Potratz: Thanks Robert. Have a great day.[/showhide]
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144: Mental Illness is An Asset: Create Predictable Income Using Checklists, Life Mission Statements, and Tribal Connections with Mike Veny
Mental health speaker and drummer Mike Veny from TransformingStigma.com and Unleash Your Groove, who was hospitalized three times, expelled from three schools, and attempted suicide by age 10, gives us simple exercises we can use to become more focused, free up aggression, and become the person we really are. Mike has battled depression, anxiety, and OCD -- and talks to us today about how he's using drum circles to empower people connect authentically with each other and form a mission statement in life. He also tells us how he uses operations manuals and checklists to keep his businesses running smoothly.
[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: Our guest today is Mike Veeny. Now, have you known someone who lives with mental health challenges or do you want to learn to better manage your own mental health challenges or even better, how do you really transform the stigma surrounding mental health? Well, our very important, special, VIP guest is going to take care of all that and more. How are things today Mike?
Mike Veny: I'm doing wonderful. How are you Robert?
Robert Plank: Better than ever. Just getting kicked back on this Monday morning. Ready to do some of the entrepreneurial life style stuff.
Mike Veny: Cool, and hello to your listeners out there.
Robert Plank: I'm super glad that they're listening and that you're here. Could you tell us about yourself, Mike, and what makes you different and special?
Mike Veny: What makes me different and special ...
Robert Plank: Oh yeah.
Mike Veny: I'm Mike! That's what makes me different and special. No, I am a mental health speaker and I'm also a drummer and I have a very unique business that really helps people who are struggling with mental health issues, a big topic in this country right now. At the same time, I work with corporate America with drumming to teach adults how to work better together in the workplace like me.
Robert Plank: Interesting. Cool, so I mean out of all the stuff you've listed, the drumming sounds like super crazy and out there, which is something I love, so can you tell us about that drumming stuff?
Mike Veny: Well, I started playing drums in the fifth grade and the reason I started drumming was because I heard it on Sesame Street and I always just liked the sounds of the drums and for some reason I was struggling with mental health issues and behavioral health issues. In fact, I was hospitalized three times in a psychiatric hospital and expelled from three schools for behavior problems and actually tried to take my own life at age ten. Drumming was the only thing that calmed me down and made me feel good. It worked better than the other medication they were giving me. I decided to become a professional drummer, not just because it is cool. I mean, it is pretty cool if you're a drummer, but also because it was my medication. I'm thirty-seven years old and it's still my medication that I use and what I love about it is, I'm able to share it with others.
I do a very advanced form of what we call drum circles, and a drum circle is typically when you have people in a circle drumming and jamming along to grooves, but I have created a lot of activities and games for adults to use with drumming to not only play great music, but to learn some lessons about working with each other.
Robert Plank: That's awesome. Did I hear that right that you don't medicate or anything like that? It's all just these drumming exercises?
Mike Veny: Yeah and when it comes to mental health, and for any of you listening out there, seek the guidance of a doctor whenever you have any kind of issue. I worked with my therapist and just basically came to the conclusion that I was going to try what we call alternative medication, which is exercise, meditation, good friends and music.
Robert Plank: Cool, so instead of maybe like the short cut way, which seems easy, but seems to have these other side effects, you kind of found your own way to make this thing work.
Mike Veny: Yeah, can I say something about that? That we, as a society, are short cut people sometimes. If we're single and we want to be in a relationship, we can just quickly download a certain app and just start swiping away at different profiles and I'm learning more and more that in order to move forward in your life, sometimes things involve real difficult work and you have to see certain things as a process, not a destination. Such as building your business or building your career.
Robert Plank: Let's talk about that because you took us up to about eight to ten or so and you discovered this drum circle thing and I mean obviously it's been a couple decades since that. How did you get from point A to point B I guess?
Mike Veny: Well, in my mind, I think ... my vision when I was sixteen was that I just wanted to play drums in a jazz club with drunk people in the audience. That's what I wanted to do. I told my parents that and I think they really were very concerned, but they still supported me. They understood and supported me. When I started drumming and playing professionally, I also started teaching privately and there was an organization that asked me to come in one day and work with a group of kids. Said, "Can you teach drums to a group of kids," and I said, "Okay, I'll see if I can figure it out," and I did that and it worked so well that they started asking me to work with adults. I thought, "This is weird."
Then, more companies started asking me and I realized that I had a problem on my hands that I could either surrender to or run away from and a lot of times ... What I've learned Robert, is that when we have opportunities in life, sometimes we can surrender to them or run away from them, but if you let your ego get caught up in, "This is how I want to look to the world," and don't allow yourself to surrender to opportunities, sometimes that can be a lost career changing thing in your life. I surrendered to it and next thing I know, I was booked doing interactive drumming events around New York state and now I'm doing it around the country. In fact, I'm going to be in Haiti in October doing it with a company, so I'm loving it.
Robert Plank: That's awesome and I know that we kind of have two sides of the coin to talk about today. There's the part of the business that you've built and then there's this message you have and these techniques you have for solving this problem. The thing I like about that and I guess the common thread I keep hearing from entrepreneur after entrepreneur is that they kind of have some kind of an idea of what they want to do and they kind of like do it and they put all their energy into it and then it leads to this next logical step, it leads to this next logical step, but it's one of those things where it's like you wouldn't of ... like you said, you wouldn't of come across the becoming a public speaker or teaching this drum circle stuff to adults if you hadn't first just tried it with kids. Even that wouldn't of happened if you hadn't first had this dream of being a drummer and stuff like that. Is that right?
Mike Veny: Yeah, absolutely and I love that you just said that because it's like literally you take you and me right now. We're doing this podcast interview. Next time in California, I might ask you to meet up for coffee, we go to a really cool coffee shop and discover that you and I both want to go into the coffee business and building a coffee business that's even bigger than Starbucks. That's just kind of how life works, but you and I would both have to surrender to that at some level if it were to happen. The other thing I want to bring up is the importance of mission statement in life. Mission statement is a thing that sometimes, when people are building businesses, they see that little spot in the business plan and struggle to find powerful words that can go in there.
A mission statement is so important to life and it's something that you discover with time. It's nothing you can go out and get tomorrow. I discovered that my mission life was to empower people to connect authentically. That's, if you hang out with me as a friend, that's when I work on the mental health stuff. I'm empowering people to connect with themselves and when I do the drumming, I'm empowering people to connect. It's actually really just one theme that I basically express in several different ways.
Robert Plank: Is there a reason why the drum circle stuff works? Or do you have a theory on that? Is it a matter of like people having a way to express themselves? Is it some kind of a outlet? Is it the group aspect, is it a focus, is it in the zone aspect? What do you think makes this drumming thing work?
Mike Veny: Well, it's everything you just said actually. My initial thought was, "It's 'cause drumming is just cool!" That's why it works, but no, it works for several reasons. One of the things that I'm learning is that people are tribal. We all are tribal people and even if you're listening to this right now and you are an introvert, we still have a need, at some deep level, to be part of a group. When I do a drumming event, every single person involved is part of that group and we all get to bond. The other thing that happens is when you have people in a circle, it really allows people to take off their mask, their social shell and just be themselves. If you think about kindergartners, how they sit in a circle and do things. They get to just kind of be themselves.
Even twelve step programs like alcoholics anonymous are very successful because people are sitting in a circle. It makes everyone an equal and it immediately allows everyone to feel good. The other thing is the pent up aggression that we all carry. I mean all of us have stress, different issues that we're walking around with and to be in a safe environment where you can just hit stuff and make noise and act like a fool is something that people just never get to do at all. That's some of the short answer as to why I believe the drum circles are successful.
Robert Plank: Even when you describe that, it almost sounds like kind of with the drumming, it's almost like going back to that kindergarten kind of age when things were simpler or you were happier and all the weight of being an adult didn't kind of weigh you down. You know what that reminds me of? You know what I always wanted to try was that thing where you pay five bucks and you get to have a bat and you get to beat the crap out of a car. It's almost like that kind of thing-
Mike Veny: Yep.
Robert Plank: ... But safer I guess, because you're using drums.
Mike Veny: Yes, no absolutely and that's the thing. Think about the world we live in. With all the news around violence. How many people are living with pent up aggression that they need to let out in a healthy way? That's why I think it's just important for all of us, whether it's drumming or something else to find healthy ways to let out your aggression, especially if you're an entrepreneur building a business. Because you know what? It's a lovely thing to be an entrepreneur, but really difficult to get your project off the ground. Really difficult.
Robert Plank: Let's talk about that. What are your thoughts about that? What have you found that ... out of all your years of entrepreneurship, what do you think people need to be doing differently? Not just as far as like their actions, but also as far as their inner game and their inner voice and all that stuff. What should people be doing differently as entrepreneurs as opposed to just employees?
Mike Veny: Wow, that's a great, great question and I'm going to try to answer this as quickly as I can out of respect for everyone's time. There's two things. Number one, talking to the people who are listening, who are just thinking about starting a business or in that beginning phase. One thing I always suggest to people starting out is to not spend much time talking about your idea, but executing your idea. Because a lot of times in today's entrepreneurship world, people really just get caught up in the idea of just going to business plan competitions and just talking about their idea to their friends, but very little time on action. Action is uncomfortable, action is difficult. Action makes you feel vulnerable, you actually have to go out and sell whatever it is that you are trying to make. I think it's really important to do that.
For those that are in business like myself, one thing I suggest that has really helped me increase my income, is the importance of writing down all of the processes in your business into an operations manual. This way, you can run a business from a checklist. My business is very easy for me to run because I just go to the checklist. My assistant goes to the checklist. Everyone on my team has a checklist. This way if I'm not around, there's a predictable way for this machine to run and so a lot of people never get to that point because they say it feels too corporate or it feels like they're in the regular job that they were trying to leave, but that actually is one of the reasons that a business like UPS is so successful, because all of the drivers have a checklist for different things that they have to do. That's why they are, I'm going to say, predictable for the most part with delivering what they deliver. It's very important for entrepreneurs to hear.
Robert Plank: Do you have a specific checklist you can kind of walk us through that you use in your business?
Mike Veny: Absolutely. One of my favorite checklists to use is my budgeting checklist. Each month I have to deliver a budget for the upcoming month. I have to do this on the twenty-fifth and if it's not done by the twenty-fifth, believe it or not, my assistant has a checklist item to email me and remind me, because we have to upload that into Quick books because there needs to be a budget before the first of the month for the following month. Part of that checklist and making a budget includes listing all the income that I project coming in, but doing that on the conservative side. Because a lot of times when we project income, we get all excited and like to put what we hope the income will be and one thing I've learned, as a business owner, is it's really important to yes, have goals, but also be realistic.
At the same time, with expenses, be very aggressive looking at worse case scenarios and this has allowed me to make the finances of the business actually very predictable for the most part, which is a very important goal that I achieved.
Robert Plank: Instead of flying by the seat of your pants, you actually are treating it like a real business, a real machine, not just something where you're playing around as a hobby.
Mike Veny: Absolutely, absolutely. You have to treat it like a real machine. You know what? If you don't, you're not going to make money from it. One of the things that I've learned the hard way, and maybe you've experienced this too with people that are just starting out. A lot of people start businesses because they want to get out of the corporate world. They don't like feeling controlled or held down or like they have to be under someone else.
When they get into business, they get really excited, but they eventually discover that the only way to grow their business is to actually become more corporate like in the sense that you have to run things with predictable systems and processes and policies. That's just very painful, so for a lot of you listening, what I'm saying might be very, very painful, but I promise you, for those of you that really make an attempt to develop these processes, you are going to see an immediate change in your income.
Robert Plank: I think that that was a pretty tough lesson to learn. For me, it took many, many years to have that realization and I think that a lot of us, or a lot of people who are employees, they want to just quit and have the freedom and they just want to wake up and stay in their pajamas all day, click the button and the money comes out of the computer and it's like, if only it worked that way right? If only there was a way to do that. We both kind of laugh about it, but I think at some point or another, we have kind of all secretly hoped that was true right?
Mike Veny: Absolutely, and one of the reasons for that, I believe, is television and what we see in the media about business. There's so many shows out on television about business and Shark Tank. A lot of times, we are creatures of what we see in society. We develop skewed perspectives about what business is. One thing I always tell people, if you want to see one of the most successful businesses in the country, go down to your local laundromat. It's one of the most successful businesses in the country, is a laundromat, but most people don't even think of that because it's like, "Oh, that's boring." A lot of times we get caught up more in the sexiness behind the idea and our idea versus just running a solid machine.
Robert Plank: That's pretty powerful because if you think about it, it's like which would you rather ... The whole point of having your own business is to make money, so which would you rather have? A really sexy idea that makes zero dollars or a boring idea that makes a good amount of money.
Mike Veny: Yeah, I'm going to take the boring idea.
Robert Plank: Yeah and there's so many stories like that of people who they had a really good idea in the back of their head and they went ahead and created the money making business first and then they were able to go ahead and do the dream. You look at your Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or something. They all kind of did the ... I don't necessarily want to say practical, but they did the, like you said, the unsexy path first and once they were able to get that running, then they could go and play around and have fun.
Mike Veny: Yes, no absolutely. Can I just actually circle back to the mental health thing for a moment?
Robert Plank: Let's do it.
Mike Veny: I still live with mental health issues. I struggle with depression, anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder. I actually struggle with it so painfully that my entire body is affected by it. Yesterday, I couldn't move practically because of the depression. I really wanted to move, but I just couldn't. I'm not being lazy, I exercise and all that stuff, but having the checklist in place made it so much easier to get certain things done when I was depressed. The beautiful thing about process is, is that if you're a person like me who struggles with mental health issues it actually makes it a lot easier to get your work done. Even if you're not in business for yourself and you're just working a regular job, creating processes for yourself is going to make your life easier.
Robert Plank: I love that and the whole thing about those checklists that I found is that as I'm creating them or if I do that, I feel like it's almost kind of a waste of time until those days when there's just so many things to do. Like my focus is so split or there's such a deadline where I have to get a bunch of stuff done. For those times when I'm in a rush, there's all those things that I intuitively think I could've handled, but I always end up missing steps or doing something in the wrong order. Or like you said, I think that's pretty cool that even if you can't show up or you don't show up on a certain day to get a certain thing finished, then someone else can just kind of pick up that checklist and do it for you.
Mike Veny: Exactly, exactly, and I agree with you so much too. Setting them up is a pain. I get stressed out setting up these checklists. It's like why am I wasting my time thinking through this? But when you have days where there's a lot of things going on, you will feel very grateful for this simple, ancient form of entrepreneurial technology. The checklist.
Robert Plank: Whoever invented it, I mean, they are centuries, thousands of years dead, but what a genius, whoever that person was.
Mike Veny: Yeah.
Robert Plank: Cool, so kind of along those lines of your business and checklists and stuff like that. Could you tell us about everything that you do from the ... I know that you do, you have like a podcast, you do speaking, you have some websites. Can you tell us about all that cool stuff you do?
Mike Veny: Sure, I have a podcast. It's called the Mike Veeny Show and it only has three episodes, but it's people like yourself that are inspiring me to get a little more disciplined in that. Actually, I need to revisit my process for that. Producing the podcast to make it a little smoother to fit my life. In addition, I write for a website called Health Central. I write a lot of mental health articles that are there to help people. I write for Corporate Wellness magazine and I also have two websites. One is called UnleashYourGroove.com. That is my interactive drumming website and the other for mental health is called TransformingStigma.com. I invite anyone to just reach out to me if they ever have any questions about any of this stuff.
Robert Plank: Awesome, they should definitely do that and I want to thank you Mike for coming by and telling us, in our little compressed window of time, first of all, how you were able to overcome this common and kind of scary and sometimes even life threatening problem. That was cool and also to tell us about just like your philosophy and this whole checklist thing and how you have the mission statement and operations manual. It was all very helpful so thanks for coming by and sharing all that stuff. One more time, just to make sure that everyone for sure 100% has it, where can they go, what website, to find out more about you? One more time.
Mike Veny: I'm going to just send everyone to TransformingStigma.com. That's the mental health one because I think that's the more important one actually. Check out TransformingStigma.com.[/showhide]
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143: Success is An Inside Job: Create and Promote Your Itty Bitty Book with Suzy Prudden
Suzy Prudden from IttyBittyPublishing.com has been on Oprah and is responsible for many books becoming bestsellers. She tells us that your book is a business BUILDER, not a business card, and that you can create an "itty bitty" book in just 15 pages to market yourself.
[showhide type="transcript" more_text="Display Transcript" less_text="Hide Transcript"]Robert Plank: We're here with Suzy Prudden who is a legend. She is an internationally acclaimed speaker and seminar leader. A New York Times best selling author from before the internet. A fitness expert, a body and mind pioneer. Hypnotherapist, success coach, radio host, publisher. She's been on Oprah, Good Morning America, and the Today Show. It sounds like there's nothing she can't do. How are things today, Suzy?
Suzy Prudden: Robert, they are fabulous. They just keep getting better. The older I get the better they get.
Robert Plank: That's what I like to hear. Everyday is the best day of your life because every day is better than before, right?
Suzy Prudden: Yes. I had a friend of mine say to me one time we were are a party. I said to him "I'm having the best time ever." With annoyance, he said "You always say that." I looked at him and I said "Yeah, I do." Then he realized that it was the best time ever. It didn't mean that the other days weren't any good, it just meant that this was the best. If every day is a best day, you're having a best life.
Robert Plank: That sounds like an amazing message. Can you tell me- You sound like an interesting person- Can you tell me about yourself and what it is you do? And what makes you different? Besides the obvious. Where to begin?
Suzy Prudden: Do we have an hour? Do we have three hours? Basically, I started my career when I was 22 in 1965. What happened was, my mother told me I couldn't date the boy I was dating, so I ran away and married him. That was when I was 19 and then I had to support him because he went back to school. At 22, then I decided to have a baby. Nothing made any sense, you have to realize.
I started a fitness school because my mother was the nation's foremost fitness authority. I became extremely successful and I've written nine books on fitness, two books on body/mind. I've done television, I had my own show on NBC in New York as fitness reporter for the Today Show. Had an amazing career. In '81, I divorced him. In '83, I sold my business and I retired at the age of 40. Then I had to figure out what to do with my life, but I didn't know who I was so I became a workshop junkie. Then I started making up new thoughts, programs, and body/mind programs. I just kept making stuff up and it kept working. Then I became a hypnotherapist and a body/mind technologist.
Everything kept leading me forward to the place where I am now, which is taking all of my skills and helping entrepreneurs create seven figure businesses starting with writing a small book which we call Itty Bitty Books. Which started with when my sister took my name off of a book that we were writing. When I saw that my name wasn't there, it meant that I didn't have to write the book anymore, but I could have authors write books and that's what I'm doing now.
An author writes an Itty Bitty book, which is the 15 steps to whatever their expertise is. Then we help them create a business which will help them make between six and seven figures within three to five years. It's exciting.
Robert Plank: It sounds like it. That's a pretty crazy story. I love how one thing kind of lead to the next logical step as opposed to not necessarily drifting around, but one kind of thing ran its course then it transitioned you into whatever this next stage was.
Suzy Prudden: Then I forgot to mention that eight months after doing Oprah, I ended up homeless because I didn't pay attention to my money. I spent it all. I took ten months- I never lived in my car, but it was a very educational experience. I knew it would change my life and it did. This was in the '90s, 1990. It caused me to have a different viewpoint on life and the importance of paying attention, of being present. The secret tells everybody you can ... There's a genie out there, wish for something and it will come to you. Yes, that's true and only if you take action. If you sit back and wait for it, it's not going to happen.
I am an action oriented person. I get an idea and I act on it and that's why I'm successful.
Robert Plank: I like it.
Suzy Prudden: That's why my authors are successful. The authors that I have that take action and do what I tell them make a lot of money.
Robert Plank: Imagine that.
Suzy Prudden: Exactly.
Robert Plank: They realize that they are an expert in a certain area, but their skills might be limited. They go to you as the expert, listen to what an expert says to do, it works. Pretty simple.
Suzy Prudden: Very simple. I have three coaches. I spent the morning with one coach- I'm so excited about the stuff that I'm doing with this particular coach. I believe in coaches. When I lost everything, I didn't have a coach. I didn't have a team. I was kind of winging it. I was successful, but I wasn't strategically successful. It was hit or miss. Now I am strategically successful. I have a team. I have coaches. I have people who keep me on track, who support me. I'm going to tell you something funny. I actually have someone who comes in once or twice a month and cleans my desk because I hate to do that. I'm looking at my desk right now and it's piled high with books, and tapes, and files. She's coming tomorrow and we're going to spend the whole morning cleaning my desk because I will not do it.
A lot of entrepreneurs believe they have to do everything themselves and they don't. I don't clean my house, I have somebody clean it. I change the cat box because it's kind of awful if you don't, but I do have someone who cleans my house. I have someone who cleans my desk. I have someone who makes my appointments because I don't have time because I'm doing the appointments. I'm out there getting authors, I don't have time to then hound people to say "You gave me your card, do you want to talk to me?" I have someone else do it.
Entrepreneurs, it is extremely important that you delegate because if you don't, you can't run your business in a way that's going to garner you the kind of income that you want. You'll be working. If you are an entrepreneur and you do everything yourself, you really just created yourself a job that has more hours than if you worked for somebody else.
Robert Plank: You just end up overworked and burned out. How do you tell the ... How do you, first of all, get the right people on your team, and how do you know when to do something yourself and when to delegate it? Like you said that you know to somewhat delegate cleaning of the desk, but then something simple you know to clean the cat box. How do you figure out those two things? Who to have and which to do yourself?
Suzy Prudden: It's very simple how I figured it out. I won't clean my desk. I have not been able to clean my desk since my very first career, that was in 1965. I have not changed. I am not going to change, I'm 73 years old today- Day before yesterday, a few days ago.
Robert Plank: Happy birthday.
Suzy Prudden: I won't do it. Thank you. I won't do it. If you have something that you won't do and you keep waiting to do it, it's not going to get done so just pick someone to do it. When it comes to the cat box, I could wait for my housekeeper to come, but that could be one or two weeks because she doesn't come every day. She comes once every week or once every two weeks depending how much time I'm spending in my house and how messy I make it. If I wait two days to clean the cat box, it stinks and I don't like the smell so I clean it. It's that simple.
Robert Plank: Why make it more complicated than it has to be?
Suzy Prudden: I do my dishes too because I don't like leaving them in the sink. The night before my housekeeper comes, I don't do my dishes because she's going to do them the next morning. That's strategic. That's so simple, it's ridiculous. I also have someone who makes my calls. She just had surgery this week, so she can't make my calls. I'm finding time to make those calls because she can't. That's just common sense. You've got to bring in a lot of common sense to business. You have to pick up the phone. If you're in business you have to pick up the phone. You cannot not pick up the phone, the money's in the phone.
When I'm talking to people, I find out what they need and then I strategize with them to help them get it. And because I'm a hypnotherapist, if someone has a phone phobia, I just hypnotize them to stop it.
I have a wonderful new company which is able to help people get in front of people, it's called Itty Bitty Publishing. You can go online and take a look at it, www.ittybittypublishing.com, Itty Bitty Publishing. We take experts and help them write a 15 step book on whatever their expertise is. Then we have a business builder program, that we just started recently, to help them turn their itty bitty book into a business that will give them six or seven figures depending on where they are in the moment. Some people are not at six figures, so we help them get to six figures. Some people are already at six figures, so why not make multiple six figures? If you're at multiple six figures, why not then make a million? It's all doable. It's all strategic. You have to keep it simple, but you need help.
How do I choose the people to work? If they're good at their job, I keep them. If they're not, I let them go.
Robert Plank: Once again, super simple advice. Why make it anymore complicated than it has to be? I guess you have these people that you work with and you have somewhat of a period of time when you're just trying them out and seeing how well they do.
Suzy Prudden: Yeah. You really have to look at if it's a fit, it's a fit. If it's not, it's not. Usually it takes about three months to know for sure. Be very careful hiring friends, very careful. Don't hire family.
Robert Plank: Good advice.
Suzy Prudden: My business partner happens to be my sister, but I can't do what she does and she can't do what I do. It's a perfect combination.
Robert Plank: Your sister is a partner, not an employee of yours.
Suzy Prudden: Not an employee. She was an employee in my other company, I had to fire her. It's much easier for her to be a partner.
Robert Plank: I like the idea of this itty bitty book and this 15 steps. I'm looking at the site and there's 15 steps to weight loss, 15 steps to traveling, cool stuff like that. Could you walk us through a case study of one of these clients you had, one of the books you-
Suzy Prudden: I'll give you my favorite. I have two favorites right now. Anthony who wrote a book the Little Black Book of Sales. I met him at a conference last year when we were only a year old, our company is only a year old. We have over a hundred authors so far. I met Anthony at a conference, I talked about Itty Bitty at lunch. He said "Let me have an application." He signed up a lunch, I never saw him before, he got the concept, he wrote the book, and he said to us over and over it changed his life. His book- He signed the contract in March. His book came out in June of last year. He's probably close to half a million dollars. Because of it, he uses his book as ... He's a sales coach for the automotive industry for car dealerships. He goes into car dealerships, he'll give a presentation. They hire him for a year to help their salesmen. He's gotten contracts anywhere from $18,000 for the year to $54,000 for the year. They send him to Dubai this year to speak for two weeks. He's probably close to half a million dollars because he has an itty bitty book. It's positioned him as an expert in his field and creates him as an automatic authority. That's one favorite.
The other one is [Cat Bonback 00:14:05] who wrote the book on marijuana. This is one of my favorite stories. When I spoke to her last year, last summer. I think it was in August. I met her at a conference. When I called her and spoke to her, I said "What do you do?" And she said "Well, I'm a full blooded gypsy." I went "Okay." She said "I'm a disabled vet." I said "Okay." She said "I'm a spiritual coach." I said "Okay." "And I'm a marijuana dispenser." I said "Okay." She lives up in Washington state. I said "What do you want to write about?" She said "I don't know, spiritual coaching?" I said "Cat, what's the low hanging fruit?" She said "I don't know." I said "It's pot." She said "Really?" She told me later she was afraid to tell me that she was a marijuana dispenser, but she took a chance.
I said "Yes. How about you write the book, you're amazing marijuana book, 15 ways to use cannabis for healing?" She said "How did you do that?" I said "That's what I do. Your next book is going to be 15 ways to talk to your children about cannabis. Your next book is going to be how to use edibles correctly. You're going to create a coaching program and you're going to teach people how to teach people how to use cannabis so they use it wisely. Go find out if cannabis coach is available," it wasn't. I said "How about the cannabis coach," it was. I said "buy it." I said "Buy the cannabis, US cannabis coach, national cannabis coach, and cannabis coaching certification program." She did. Then she said "What about Mary Jane?" I said "I had forgotten Mary Jane was a term for marijuana." She said "I want to do Mary Jane parties. I want to do them like Tupperware parties where we sell cannabis paraphernalia at parties." I said "Go buy Mary Jane parties." She did.
She started teaching her cannabis coaching certification program this past March. She was in a conference recently where she sold 61 places in her cannabis coaching certification program. In one day they made $92,000. That's a nice day.
I just got off the phone with her this morning. She's going to be doing one in Los Angeles either late this year or early next year. I told her she had to raise the prices because my coach told me I had to raise my prices, so I told her she had to raise her prices. Instead of $1,500 to become a cannabis coach, it's now $2,500 to become a cannabis coach.
Now she will take this business and there will be 50 cannabis coaches who are doing Mary Jane parties. They have to be licensed through her, they have to be certified through her, she gets money. They do the parties, she hooks them up with all the vendors. The vendors make money, the coaches make money, and she makes override.
Robert Plank: That's crazy. Your model works in just about any niche it sounds like.
When I'm hearing about the Itty Bitty Book and the 15 steps, how big of a book are we talking about? 15 steps comes out to how many pages in this model?
Suzy Prudden: Every chapter is one page.
Robert Plank: Super short.
Suzy Prudden: It's an itty bitty book. Here's how to look at it. Dummies came out in the '80s and they were the quintessential what you need to know book, but they're 350 pages. You have to read a Dummies book with a yellow highlighter. Itty Bitty Books are the yellow highlights. What we've done is taken the information that people need and simplified it so succinctly that it takes 20 minutes to read an itty bitty book and you can mark the pages you need to reference. On page one of each chapter, it's the information. Page two of each chapter is a bullet point to more information that you can then send them your website, "To reach more about this go to here." Then you can have a white paper on your website or a workshop that you're doing. You're sending people from your Itty Bitty Book back and forth to your website, to your book, to your website, to your book. You're constantly creating streams of income from your Itty Bitty Book to your website, from your website to your webinar, to your seminars, to your products (whatever it is you're selling). Or you can send them to somebody else, or some other information, depending on what the information is that they need.
Yes, it's an Itty Bitty Book so you can handle it, but it's much bigger if you choose to go further. In other words, you don't have to weed through a lot of information to get to the piece you need. You get the piece you need and then if you want to expand on it, it has a link. If it's a digital it goes right to their thing. It's paperback, on Amazon then you have to put the information into your computer. All the Itty Bitty Books are on Amazon and they're on the digitals.
We've done nine best selling campaigns so far and we have nine best sellers so far. We have another best seller- A best seller campaign every month. Every Itty Bitty author has the opportunity to become a best selling author. It's so exciting, I get speechless with excitement because it's giving so many people an opportunity to do so much more with what they had in the past. Now they have a further reach. They're all of a sudden international because they have a book on Amazon. That can operate on a lead generator to their business. We also have a whole thing on our website where we have a directory for anyone around the world can sign up in our directory. We send them leads when people click on their information and put in their information that they want to talk to this person about whatever product or whatever service, like Anthony has sales. If someone wants to learn from Anthony, they can contact Anthony. Then we send Anthony the lead. It's very exciting.
Robert Plank: That's pretty cool. I'm looking at your directory right now and I'm looking at Anthony's listing and that kind of stuff. What I like about the way that you've laid it out is that these people that you come in contact with who have a really good idea, they can get the book done quickly while also excited about it. Maybe before they met you, they've been struggling. Maybe some of them have half a book made and they thought it had to be 300 pages.
Suzy Prudden: So many of them have been writing their books for the last eight years. This is what we do. When you say yes and you give us some money, because we are a pay to play house, we send you a how to write an Itty Bitty Book book. We send you an Itty Bitty Book and we send you the template. If you read the how to write the Itty Bitty Book and you write it the way we tell you to write it, and you use the template, we've had people write their books in two afternoons. We also send you an agreement at that time. Then we have a long conversation about the agreement so you have a legitimate publishing agreement where you own the copyrights, we own the publishing rights. It's your material, you can do what you want with it, you just can't do it in the Itty Bitty format. It opens the door for you to do more.
Then we also have on our site, you'll see there's a thing there that says "Tell your story." Let's say you have a story. You can write your story, you'll send it to us, we'll put it up. We'll send your link to your story and we won't charge you. We'll put it up on our website. We will send you the link to your story so you send your story now to everybody you know. You ask them "Please send my story to every-" Then you have them link back to you. It's a way for you to get your stuff out there, it's not an Itty Bitty it's like a page. People have stories they want to tell.
I have a wonderful story that I tell about ... I can't tell it now, it's too long. It's about an experience I had during the days where I didn't have my own home. It's a great story. It takes three minutes to tell on stage, it would take a page and a half to tell in a written. It's not nearly as compelling written as it is when I speak it. I could put that story up, send it to everybody. People go "What a great story, I think I'll send this out to my friends." Then they contact Suzy if you want to write a story. I've got an opportunity for a million people to write their stories on my website.
Robert Plank: Cool. Why make it anymore complicated than it has to be?
Suzy Prudden: It's not complicated, that's correct. Then I can send them to, if they want a website like my website, it's a phenomenal website. There's an opportunity for them to contact my web person and say "I want to talk to you about a website." She's amazing and not at all expensive. I would highly recommend speaking to her. She's totally amazing. I don't know how this happened, I honestly don't. It's like magic happened when my sister showed me that cover, and after my ego got up off the floor because she took my name off it, I saw it as a multi million dollar business. Now working with my coach who is in Myrtle Beach and I'm in California. I go there, not every day, not every week. We talk mostly on the phone. I probably go there like three times a year. My company is growing exponentially. I saw that that would happen when I was at a conference last May in Las Vegas. I went "Whoa, this is the company that's going to grow my business." And it is.
Robert Plank: I don't want to keep you for too long. As we're winding this down, could you tell us out of all the clients you deal with and the people you work with to make their Itty Bitty Book and to get their coaching programs set up and stuff like that- What's the big number one mistake you see all these people making over and over again?
Suzy Prudden: Not finishing their books.
Robert Plank: Pretty simple. You're saying that these people who maybe if they've tried publishing in the past, or if they've gone through all the run around and all that stuff. What they should do is instead of trying to make it complicated, get an Itty Bitty Book, hire you for coaching, and make one of these 15 page things that has all their knowledge compressed and simplified so that people who want to know about whatever topic. About websites, or about marijuana type of stuff, they don't have to read the 600 page manual. They just get the condensed cliff notes version.
Suzy Prudden: Get the condensed version that will give them more information if they want it. If you've got an idea- I don't take every idea. I will tell you ... I don't take every idea that comes to me because know that some ideas would not fit into this format. That it would not serve the person. I only want to work with people that I know that I can help them really expand their careers. I will work with people to massage it into something that will expand their careers, but if I see that this book would not do that, I won't take them as an author. That's doing them a favor.
Robert Plank: That's cool. I've noticed especially lately as books have had the ... Since books are now on Kindle and a lot of books have had these internet resources where they say on such and such page, if you want to know more about that go over to this website. I like that a lot more as a reader because now it's more of a choose my own adventure. Now I don't have to only go with one chapter, I can pick- I can get the whole big picture really quickly. On let's say Chapter four or page four, if I want to go and take that deeper, now I have the choice to but I'm not forced to.
Suzy Prudden: It's up to you. The other thing, I had an idea just a second ago. You very often hear people say your book is your business card. It is not. It is absolutely not your business card. Your book is your business builder. We tell our authors to have business cards that are ... Just a second, what's the word that I'm looking for ... They're like bookmarks. Your bookmark is your business card, your book is your business builder. I don't like it when people give me a book that I don't want. I am very respectful of books, so I don't throw it away. Now I have to find it a home because it's cluttering up mine. I don't want it. Give me a business card, don't give me a book. I'm clear about that because people have tried to ... Please don't give me your book. But it's a good book, I'm sure it is. Please don't give it to me. If I want it, I'll buy it.
Robert Plank: I like that mentality behind that where it seems almost like everyone has it backwards. The average person says "I'm Robert or I'm Suzy, I do this stuff. Let me make a book about that." What you're saying is it's better to have this book that solves a problem so people are actually looking to solve that problem, looking for that book. They get it, they solve the problem as opposed to just reading it for the heck of it.
Suzy Prudden: People won't read it. I've been to seminars where the author, the seminar person, has done what I have done in 2006. Which was buy 2000 of my book, now I have to sell 2000 books. You end up giving them away. I walk into a seminar and especially with compilation books, and I'll see on every seat is a book. That author doesn't know what to do with them so he gives them away thinking it gives him credibility. In my mind, and I'm a snob because I was a best seller before the internet, that's when you actually had to buy the book. You don't have to buy books anymore to be a best seller. You can do a campaign on Amazon, be a best seller. You don't have to sell a lot of books to do that. If you want to be a best seller on the New York Times now you hire a company, you pay them $135,000 and they'll make you a best seller. When I was a best seller, you had to go into the book store and buy the book. I'm a snob.
You want to use your book, as I've always said, as a business builder. You don't want to put it on every chair in your seminar because what if somebody doesn't want it. Now they have to do something with it.
Robert Plank: How bad would that look or how bad does that look if all the books laid on all the chairs, and after you give your talk and everyone's on break all the books are left in the chairs. That sounds like a disaster.
Suzy Prudden: It's a little embarrassing. There are places where speakers speak where the person who hired them to speak wants to give the books to their participants. That's a whole different thing. Then that speaker sells the books to the person who is putting on the talk. That person gives them as a gift. It's different than if you "Take my book. Take my book. Take my book.." I don't want to take your book. I know it's a good book, but I'm not interest in your topic. Don't give it to me. Give me your business card.
Robert Plank: There is a much better way. I really like your thinking Suzy. I like your business model and your structure, your template. Could you tell us about where people can find Itty Bitty Publishing along with any other websites you want to mention here?
Suzy Prudden: The best way to do it is go to IttyBittyPublishing.com and get all the information. For your listeners, if you want to send in your stories, send in the story. Robert, why don't you send us a story? We'll put it up.
Robert Plank: About what? What do you want?
Suzy Prudden: You. How did you start this? How did you start doing these interviews? What's the story behind your interviews? How has it helped your career? How has it helped other people's careers? You see what happens then is you send it out and other people want to contact you and be interviewed by you. Now your business grows.
Robert Plank: Simple but it sounds very effective.
Suzy Prudden: Very effective and then you'll be part of the Itty Bitty family.
Robert Plank: IttyBittyPublishing.com. Thanks for being on the show, Suzy. Thanks for sharing your unique but clever, and at the same time simple, insight on how everyone can get that book finished that might have been on their back for five or ten years. Then also some of these cool strategies for getting these books sold. Getting it all promoted. Thanks for stopping by.
Suzy Prudden: Thank you for the opportunity.[/showhide]
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