The Forgotten Secret to Growing Your Business And Creating Die-Hard Customers With Jonathan Goodman

Transcription

I’ve got another great treat for you today. It’s my good buddy Jonathan Goodman who’s actually, it’s amazing how many health and fitness professional live within a five or 10 minutes drive off my house. It’s phenomenal. And we’re very, very blessed to have this proximity to people like him and Vince Del Monte, Eric Wong, and a lot of other good friends who are doing great things in this space.

Jon is a great person and a unique and big thinker. That’s why I’m excited about our interview today because the way Jon thinks is very different from what you’ve heard on this podcast. He’s a deep thinker, he’s like a renaissance man, he really enjoys the craft, the art of building a business, the art of doing things at a high level. And you’ll get a sense for that in this episode.

Our theme for this conversation, I mean, every conversation is very organic and does this thing, but our theme in this one is really about how do you love the crap out of your existing customers and clients to the point where you don’t even need more new clients, and still build an amazingly profitable business? And that’s the theme of what we’re gonna talk about.

We’ll obviously talk about a few other things, but I think it’s a  great conversation for you to start thinking about in your own business. And just in case you don’t know you who Jon Goodman is, let me give you a bit of background.

He’s the creator of the largest collaborative blog for personal trainers, which is called The Personal Trainer Development Center and it’s over at The PTDC.com,  He is also the  founder of the world’s first certification for online trainers called The Online Trainer Academy. He’s authored seven books including Ignite the Fire, Viralnomics and the central text book on online personal training. He’s been featured in Men’s Health, Forbes, Entrepreneur and many other magazines, and originally from Toronto he spends most of his time traveling abroad in the winter. We actually went to the same high school together. Although he was a couple of years younger, we didn’t really cross paths too much.

Jonathan is a great friend doing some amazing stuff in the online fitness space. And this is somebody you definitely want to pay attention to. So without any further ado, let’s bring Jon onto the show.

Jonathan Goodman, what’s up buddy? Welcome to the show.

Jonathan G.:                       Hey, it’s good to talk to you even though you’re like 15 minutes away from me.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Seriously, I know. We’re like literally next door neighbors. I mean, in terms of a big city, we are next door neighbors within a couple of minute drive which is pretty awesome. Dude what’s going on man? How has the summer been for you?

 

Jon’s lifestyle, travel, plans, and mindset around success

Jonathan G.:                       The summer has been great man. My son is 25 months now. So he’s old enough to be walking around and playing around. He loves the water, so we’re just enjoying every minute.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, that’s awesome. You guys live down by the lake in Toronto. You guys travel a lot in the winter time, give our listeners a bit of perspective of what your lifestyle looks like because it’s really interesting.

Jonathan G.:                       Yeah it is, and it’s fun, and it’s getting to be more interesting. My wife and I have traveled the last six winters. So, I’m a red blooded Canadian who hasn’t worn hockey skates in six years.

Yuri Elkaim:                         And travel, guys, not like they went on a week vacation. Maybe elaborate on that.

Jonathan G.:                       Right. Yeah, okay. So, we generally leave beginning of October and come back March or April. We skip the really bad months. And we  go and live in places like at least two months at a time, usually three to five. We’ve lived in Costa Rica twice, Thailand twice, we’ve been in Hawaii a few times, I lived in Uruguay, spent a bunch of time in Brazil.  I’m just scratching the surface, but we’ve had a lot of fun, we’ve had a lot of adventure.  I don’t even know if you know this Yuri, but all of next year we’re leaving in December, we’re going to be gone for an entire year.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Wow.

Jonathan G.:                       I always had this dream to spend three months in four different cities.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Cool.

Jonathan G.:                       So, we’re going to be in Sayulita – Mexico, each of these for about three months at a time, Sayulita – Mexico, Athens – Greece, Montenegro, Kotor – Montenegro, and Tel Aviv – Israel.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Those are some sick places.  That’s one of the things that we’ve wanted to do with our kids is take them out of school for a year, and do exactly that. We’re just trying to figure out how we want to do that in terms of home schooling or have a tutor with us. You know the old guy is still young enough to still be able to survive.

Jonathan G.:                       The little guy is still young enough. We thought about bringing an au pair with us for the whole time and we decided against it. What we’re going to do in most of the places is try to find a local nanny. Kelvin had a nanny in Dominican Republic and Costa Rica last year in both places and it was cool because they didn’t speak a lot of English.

So, not only did it force us to speak with Kelvin in Spanish, but I mean Kelvin responded to Spanish. How amazing is that to give to a young child growing up. Just that experience. So, we’re gonna try.

Yuri Elkaim:                         And they take it up so easily at that age.

Jonathan G.:                      A nanny wherever we go. Even local day care, as in local programs and stuff like that just not to get him away from us, but it’s just new culture, new experience. So, I mean it’ll be fun. It’ll be a challenge. Yeah, he’ll be two years old.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s cool. That’s awesome. I mean, what I love about you as a person and this translates in the business is you do things that are a bit against the grain. You don’t really do the traditional stuff with how you’ve run your business. And you started off as a trainer, and very quickly over time realized that you wouldn’t be able to live the lifestyle you have now if you were still training clients in person, right?

Jonathan G.:                       Which I didn’t desire. I definitely knew that I wanted to have a family, and I definitely knew that training the way that I was training was fantastic when I was 23. But when I had a family, starting at 6:00 in the morning and finishing at 9:30 at night probably wasn’t going to lead to the most stable family life. I was wise enough in my young adolescent days to know that. But I had no idea that I liked traveling and living abroad so much that it wasn’t even anything I ever thought about.

 

Making more, going bigger, and recognizing how that impacts happiness

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah. That’s pretty cool. So, talk to us about what that initial transition looked like from offline to online, and what were some of the challenges either internally or externally that you had to overcome to get things going.

Jonathan G.:                       Sure. I like this question. It’s a good question Yuri. The biggest challenge for me is trying to combat the North American go bigger, go bigger, go bigger, go bigger mentality. And we live in a society where it feels like making more money is winning and it feels winning is the point. And I don’t think that winning is the point.

I don’t make as much money as I could, and I’m happy to say that. And it’s right for me and it might not be right for everybody, but I’ve hit this point where the business is sensational. We extract good relationships with our customers, we build things that I’m so unbelievably proud of. I take so much pride in the art of what we create. Down to the paper stock and the typography and the ink quality — I take immense pride in it,  and absolutely love it.

Like the debrief of going materials and our newsletter because we put out a print newsletter. So, going over the newsletter each month when it comes out and making it up and thinking about how we’re going to improve it moving forward. I love that. I truly deeply love that. And at the end of the day I’m having fun. And I’m making more than enough money. And our business is growing really, really nicely without paid ads, just through word of mouth. And I keep going back to this mindset that’s become so important to me which is just like as long as you’re having fun, as long as you’re doing things that are very purposeful, I think make as much money as you can. But the second that stuff stops, it’s too much.

Yuri Elkaim:                         For sure.

Jonathan G.:                       And I feel like a big burden in this ecosystem that we live in where you have to make more, you have to go bigger, you have to scale as much as you possibly can, as quickly as you possibly can. And we review men and women who do this.

You and I both know a lot of people who have gone vegan, and who have made a lot of money, who are absolutely positively miserable. And so, I think that’s the biggest, I wouldn’t even call it a mindset shift I think that was always how I thought, but I keep becoming more and more clear in that. I think because I have a little bit more success, and I have a little bit more success, and I have a little bit more success, I realize just what success truly means to me and the company, and the importance of keeping the vision of the company intact.

 

Protecting your reputation and caring for people

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah that’s awesome. We had Jeff Ruja on the show a couple of episodes ago we were talking about this whole idea of success versus fulfillment. Which is a huge epiphany that he had which is like he was miserable, he was doing well, and then he just got to a point where he was like, “Dude what I love most are people. And I’m gonna just do more things that are people-centric.” and he feels much more happy and fulfilled because of that.

So, I think it’s an important lesson because as you’ve said, money, success, winning are revered in our culture. I mean, if we look at especially when we look at prominent figures in the entrepreneurial space people like let’s say Grant Cardone or people of that nature where it’s all about kill, kill, kill in the sense of just go after the prey, hunt it down, close the sale, make the money. I get that, that’s gonna resonate with some people and that’s fine. But I think for everyone listening you really have to find your thing. What’s the most meaningful to you because there’s nothing worse than chasing a path or following a path that you feel terrible about at the end.

Jonathan G.:                       And it’s not, it has nothing to do with nice sounding buzz words like how it’s centered. Like those types of superficial terms really don’t mean anything. It’s great language to market with if you’re selling to other people, but like as you alluded to there are certainly folks out there who should be pushing as much as they possibly can. And shouldn’t be making as much as they possibly can. Now, I would argue that the whole mentality of kill, kill, kill and I haven’t studied Grant Cardone, so I don’t know really much about him, but the idea of there’s always gonna be another customer.

So, sell hard today and if somebody doesn’t take action that’s their fault. There’s more people, there’s 8,000,000,000 people in the world. That’s right for some but I would argue that, that’s a really poor long-term plan for no other reason then, you can’t hide today. There are closed groups communities review organizations that exist that you don’t even know exist, that if you do a good enough job on a big enough scale will talk about you and you have zero control over it. The only thing that you can do is protect your reputation at all costs.

Yuri Elkaim:                         And then that goes back to what you said about putting stuff out that you love, that is like arts and not bending corners.

Jonathan G.:                       There are people who do exceptionally well, like we have this saying with our customer service team and the saying goes, “It might not be our fault, but it’s our problem” and because we do so much physical fulfillment, a lot of the time it’s not our fault. Stuff doesn’t arrive, or we ship to 80 counties. Stuff doesn’t arrive, poster service doesn’t deliver it, people get upset, it takes a while for things to get there if they do get there, we have to reship, we have to refund sometimes because we’ve just decided that there are some countries that we just fly or can’t get stuff into.

And we make it right. Even if it’s not our fault, we’ll make it right. We’ll go above and beyond and we have this whole formula that we follow for that. But I think that, that’s important, I mean, one person who might feel like they’ve been wronged by you, is a problem. And it’s a much bigger problem than it ever used to be especially when it’s becoming more and more difficult and expensive to acquire customers than it ever has been. And it’s continuing to get more difficult and expensive every day. Your only chance is to have an enthusiastic huge base of previous customers who love you, who shout off the roof tops how great you are.

Yuri Elkaim:                         So, how does somebody get there? Because there are people that are listening that are maybe on the, they’re right behind the years with the way things are going, they’re not sure if they’re gonna be selling products or coaching, maybe they’ve done so offline, maybe they want to do so online. And obviously there are listeners who are more advanced. So, I mean, you guys have really done some amazing stuff with your business, how does somebody go about following those types of footsteps?

 

Recognizing the little things that impact your customers the most

Jonathan G.:                       Well, whether it’s on a small scale and you have 5, 10, 15 customers or whether you have thousands I think that the same principles apply. It’s understanding that your existing customers are the most important people on your planer. And how can you A: maximize every touch point with that customer? When they sign up for you we were talking before about both of our friend Joey Coleman who wrote a book called Never Lose a Customer Again.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Guys read that book. It’ll change your business, for sure.

Jonathan G.:                       It’s brilliant and it doesn’t just talk about some of the stuff that I’m gonna talk about. We’re actually featured in the book for a couple of pages because of what we do, but I learned a lot from the book about understanding the customer journey after they purchase. What’s the first engagement that you have with a customer right after they’ve purchased? Usually it’s sending them an email with a receipt. So, that’s a touchpoint that you have to send. How can you not? How can you make that a remarkable experience? And you can.

All that that email needs to do is that email needs to basically confirm their purchase, introduce them to where to go if they need something ideally with the team, tell them what’s gonna happen next. You can also surprise and delight them with that email, you can also entertain them with that email. And we do, and I can send you an example of that if you want to post in the show notes, but we signed up our marketing newsletter that we put out. We had a 100 of responses when we first launched it to the initial email. How many responses have you gotten to an initial email welcoming somebody to your service?

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, for sure.

Jonathan G.:                       It’s incredible what you can do. If you’re selling digital stuff. If you’re in the service industry or anything like that then send post cards. It’s the easiest thing. My assistant has a job. I think I told this at your event last year Yuri. My assistant has a task, has a weekly task where she follows a host of our best customers, she has a Facebook account connected to them. So, on a smaller scale I mean, you’re just connected with your customers. And she sends me each week a list of five people to send a post card to, a link to their social media account or wherever they mentioned something that they’ve done, you know like they got a black belt or they opened up a gym or something like that, and their mailing address.

I sit down once a week on Friday afternoon, and I write a postcard to those five people from wherever I am in the world.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s awesome.

Jonathan G.:                       It’s a postcard, like your grandma used to send you. I go to tour stands and kiosks and buy post cards wherever I am. And if I am in Toronto I use custom stands. Because again every touchpoint matters. When was the last time you ever got a postcard with an interesting different stamp? Like my stamps have, I guess they can’t see me because this is on a podcast but my stamps are, I have people whose kids collect my stamps.

Yuri Elkaim:                         They’re good with stamp collection.

Jonathan G.:                      It’s completely ridiculous and stupid. It’s just like my face waving or a cartoon version of me, or me pointing at you something like that. Just idiotic and insane but it’s a couple extra pennies. It’s a disco push and it returns retirement money invested which is I think what we always want to look for in business.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah I think this is such a, this is a huge, huge thing for people to understand. And this is something that I’m 100% guilty of not doing to the fullest who extend in my health business. And I’ve always believed that because it’s such high volume, low price points. And then in terms of man power and doing all that stuff, but I really believe that we’ll be a lot further ahead if we did those little things. Even if someone bought a $10 eBook with Healthpreneur it’s very different. Because people are paying a lot more, we do things like every single touchpoint whether they enroll in one of our workshops or getting personal videos from me, thank you cards, all sorts of stuff. But it’s such a good, like one of the questions I used to ask myself is what would have to be true for our business to grow, let’s say, profitably if we never acquired a new lead or customer again?

So, it’s almost like you have a force field or a bubble around your business. Like what would have to happen? How do you, and it’s just like that constraining question force you to think about things like these. Like how do we better love our clients? How do we better serve them? How do we help them get better results? And I think so many people are and maybe this is just a human instinct is we’re so much more focused on what’s next? Who’s the next customer? Who’s the next sale? Instead of okay let’s appreciate what we have and appreciate the shit out of that person.

Jonathan G.:                       I think that’s part of it Yuri. I just wanted to say how much I love that question with the bubble analogy and if we need to get another customer how could our business grow? I love that question. I’m gonna go for a walk and think about that a little bit today.

Yuri Elkaim:                         There you go.

Jonathan G.:                       You blew my mind on this podcast. I think the other part of it is, the other part of that idea is we put, we’re just over-rational beings. We put entirely too much emphasis on things that can be measured and too little on things that can’t. And yes I understand that long term customer value can be measured but be honest with yourself how many people listening in here have ever measure that or have any way to ever measure that?

So, what you’re doing is, what you’re doing when you’re taking care of existent customers is A: You should be in a good person, B: You’re having fun and isn’t that what business is really about? Like once you reach a certain level of success it’s like fun and fulfillment. Which some people would argue with me on but that’s fine they’re but the right customers for me anyway.

And at the end of the day what really matters are the things that can’t be measured. And I am very careful with what I measure, and I don’t measure much. Because I truly don’t believe it matters, but if you were to break down the number, I mean, you talked about your health business. So, if I send five postcards out to people every single week. Let’s say not over the holidays that’s 250 postcards a year, that’s a 1000 postcards every four years. That’s a 1000 people that I’ve now made a very impactful personal connection with that no other business in the world has ever done for that person.

And that’s scalable, you talked about sending videos. So, I track hashtags that have to do with my name and my product and anytime anybody posts anything, pictures of a book, purchase my book, or anything like that, I not only like the picture but I go into that account, I follow that person and I’ll send them a video on Instagram saying thank you.

This is what I do when I’m walking to my office for 10 minutes in the morning. Those are the little things and those are the gloriously unsexy, unscalable, manual things that grow a business overtime.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, and as you said it’s the things that you can’t measure that matter the most. And that’s the dilemma is everyone is focused on ROI, which is fine, but at the end of the day it’s relationships, it’s love, it’s happiness, it’s all that stuff that is most meaningful to humans. And I think this conversation is so valuable because I think for the listeners it’s really like being able to step back and understand okay yeah you have to make money in your business. At the same time though how do we make money?

Jonathan G.:                       That’s but a tool.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, exactly.

Jonathan G.:                       That is nothing but a tool to make more impact to create more things, to improve and create more transformations for other people. And the marginal value of a dollar continues to decrease every day. You need to use that money, you need to make that money work for you.

Yuri Elkaim:                         And I think it’s a mindset shift too because there might be people listening, “Oh this is a great idea, and I’ll get to that when right after I’ve achieved a certain level.” But I think part of the objective here is to get people to think about this from day one. Even if they just have one client or one customer. Because it’s like the famous saying of like if you can’t save 10% of a dollar you’re not gonna be able to save 10% of $10,000,000. Right? It’s the habit of being able to start that from day one. And I think guys if you’re listening to this, obviously you are, what Jon is talking about is super, super valuable and impactful. Just think about any businesses that you’ve ever done business with, how often you’ve been blown away by that experience

I don’t know about you Jon but for me it’s been very rare. I’ll give you a prime example.

 

Being genuine – or not

Jonathan G.:                       I was in a room, it was an event that I was speaking at and I was listening to one of the other speakers and they put up their, they said some things to the audience. And they were like, “How many people here have ever gotten a hand-written card from any company they’ve ever done business with?”

One person put up their hand, and they were my customer. And there was over 200 people in the room. It’s just stuff that’s not done. And the other piece of it is when it’s done, and I see people like bragging about this in entrepreneurial groups like, “Yeah, I sent everybody a postcard. There’s this awesome service that you can write and scan in your handwriting and it makes a font with your handwriting. And then they’ll print it on the postcard for you and mail it out to your customers.” I’m like if you’re gonna be genuine, be genuine. If you’re not, don’t.

There are so many reasons why that makes you look worse than not doing anything at all. Pretending like you’re doing something personal for somebody, but obviously not is so much worse than not doing anything.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I actually just got an email yesterday from somebody who I would know well. I was actually on their podcast maybe about a year ago and we’d kept in touch. He sends me an email and she’s like, “I love what you’re doing with The Ultimate Health Podcast.” I’m like, “That’s not my podcast. That’s another person’s show.” That’s an example of little things like the details matter.

Jonathan G.:                       They’re not even emailing you right?

Yuri Elkaim:                         Totally. Exactly. That relationship now has been somewhat severed because of that lack of attention.

Jonathan G.:                       Well, that’s it. It’s a lack of attention but it’s almost like I get what you’re doing, you’re trying to play the game.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, exactly.

Jonathan G.:                       You’re trying to play the game of being genuine and building in a real relationship with me but you’re doing it in such an obviously fake way that now you’re just trying to climb a ladder. And I don’t want to be one of the realms on that ladder.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Totally. I mean, there’s a restaurant in Toronto I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Marcelo’s really good Italian restaurant opposite St. Claire and Deferen. . We used to go, so before kids, so BK, Amy and I used to go to it like once a week. It was amazing. Really good Italian food and we’d always get tiramisu for dessert and we’d been there like every single week. I don’t even know dozens upon dozens of times.

Never once did they say, “You know what? Tonight dessert’s on us.” And it’s not that we’re expecting that, but those are like little things that don’t cost the business pretty much any money, but that little gesture will have turned us into raving fans for life. And since then we really haven’t gone back to that restaurants for seven or eight years.

Jonathan G.:                       Well how funny would it be if you walked into the restaurant and they saw you and before taking your order they walked out with a thing of tiramisu with the menus.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Exactly, right?

Jonathan G.:                       And they gave it to you before you even had your soup.

Yuri Elkaim:                         We got this, this is so much fun in business because it just allows you to be creative.

 

Business plans, future endeavors, and Jon’s café plans

Jonathan G.:                       Listen, I’ll tell you a secret. I’ve never told anybody this before but when we get back from our trip, one of the things that Alison and I will probably do is buy a building downtown and open up a café that turns into a private restaurant at night. So, no other reason than I’m so fascinated with customer service, and I think that the model the bubble tea/coffee shop model is good. I think somebody who understands the basics of real customer service and pricing strategy can freaking knock it out of the park. And it’s just like you have these things, I mean, bubble tea blows my mind because you’re charging like 8 bucks for freaking tea like. The mock-up on that stuff is insane and when you have a mock-up on something like that it’s the same as coffee, right?

The mock-up is crazy. When you have a mock-up like that the things that you can do for your customers the space that that gives you is really quite interesting. And it’s not just the mock-up, it’s understand that when somebody is paying a premium price for a drink like that, they’re not a price sensitive consumer, which opens up so many more opportunities for automatic billings, getting them signed up for subscription type programs for your café to ensure they’re coming back, ended-proof cashflow. For up sales add on to cross sales.

Yuri Elkaim:                         For social events with existing like all sorts of stuff.

Jonathan G.:                       Become a member of a coffee club and you get access to all special phone to table restaurant that only has four table once a week where we bring in a chef. It’s not open to the public.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Exclusivity.

Jonathan G.:                       The only way that can get in here is if you’re a member of our monthly club.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, it’s great.

Jonathan G.:                       Like you can just, there’s so much that you can do. So, anywhere you talked about a restaurant that brought that up for me like I want not a restaurant but café check in for no other reason than, I don’t need to make money with it. And it would just be such an interesting playground to try out all of these things that I see working so well online that I can only imagine would work many, many folds stronger.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Be it like it’s a big social experiment.

Jonathan G.:                       Yeah.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, that’s awesome. I was at, we went to the VIP theaters last night, at Cineplex. I don’t know if you’ve ever been.

Jonathan G.:                       What? I didn’t get it.

Yuri Elkaim:                         So, I haven’t been to VIP for 20 years and the first time I went I was like, “Meh.” We went to see Mission Impossible.  What’s that?

Jonathan G.:                       You went to the Eglinton one?

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah.

Jonathan G.:                       Yeah, I’ve been there. Yeah, yeah, okay.

Yuri Elkaim:                         So we went to see Mission Impossible last night and I’m like you know what? We walk into the theater and there’s no one there, but it’s late, it’s chilled, there’s like a bar/restaurant, the popcorn area is like no line up and then we get into the theater and it’s like big cushiony leather seats, people are coming up and taking your orders. If you wanted to order wine or food, not popcorn but legitimate menu items. And I’m thinking to myself, “This was two extra dollars per ticket for a better experience.”

I mean, they could have marked that up $20 extra dollars per ticket and I’m sure some people would have paid for that. But it’s just like as you said like there’s always gonna be people who want that level of care and attention.

Jonathan G.:                       If you look into that whole model that they did. That’s actually been more or less a failure, The VIP cinemas. And it’s because it’s probably because they didn’t mock it up enough.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah totally.

Jonathan G.:                       They went from the stand point of wanting to take away business from restaurants. They were like, “well, people are coming to the movies on a night out, and they’re going for dinner first somewhere else. And then they’re going to a movie. Well, you can replace the dinner but you can’t replace the movie. So why don’t we bring the dinner in here and we’ll get that business in addition to the movie?” So, that’s what they did. They have a full restaurant and all that kind of stuff. The problem is, nobody wanted to replace the dinner. They wanted to have the two separate spots. They didn’t want to go to one place for everything. And so they read, it seems like Cineplex read the situation where they offer this premium service that’s VIP which is good. You go through separate doors, it’s really nice you have people greeting you, you have big cushioned chairs. They should have charged much more for the experience.

Yuri Elkaim:                         100%.

Jonathan G.:                       Versus just a couple of bucks more in the hopes that you would then go there for everything else.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, no I told Amie last end of my vision.

Jonathan G.:                       I would never have known that in building it, but that just shows you how powerful it is to have to charge for this special experiences and understand that the experience is what you’re charging for. That people will pay for. Put a velvet rope, a bouncer at the front of it. “Oh, let me see if you’re on, oh you’re on the list, ring a little bell outside.”

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, welcome. Good to see you again, Jon. What are you watching tonight?

Jonathan G.:                       Sure.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Like little things that these guys, and I think this is where Starbucks got it right. For regulars they got to know you by name, they’d greet you by your name, they know your drink, not everyone behind the bar is the same. But I think they got that pretty good in terms of the skill of their business. But there’s still so many opportunities there.

Jonathan G.:                       Like if you ask a customer what they want, they’ll all say that they want the best service at the lowest price. And then you watch how they act and people buy Starbucks coffee. It’s like, oh no we’re gonna give you mediocre coffee at the highest price, and you’re gonna line up at the door for it. So, clearly customers aren’t able to articulate what they actually want. I mean, we know this.

Yuri Elkaim:                         We didn’t know we wanted an iPod before it came out.

Jonathan G.:                       Sure.

 

Finding what people want before they know they want it

Yuri Elkaim:                         And that’s where entrepreneurs, that’s where the genius come in. If you look at as an entrepreneur, as a creative visionary you’re like, “Here’s a gap, an inexperience in the market place or whatever here’s an idea that I think would really meet people’s needs or it doesn’t,” but, because there’s two ways of looking at it. Some people say, “Get all the market research, find out what people want, give that to them.”

Which I think can work to a certain degree, but I think the real breakthrough is that when you can identify what people want the way that they can’t even express it themselves.

Jonathan G.:                       I think you need to really, really deeply understand your market. I’ll give you a prime example just here. I’ve done multiple bouts of a 100 plus phone calls with personal trainers, fitness coaches, nutrition coaches around the world. Well, I’ve spoken with many of them for 9 to 15 minutes basically I ask them what frustrates them about the industry? What are their goals?

In addition, we’ve done hundreds of thousands of data points, probably millions, at this point I don’t even know, we stopped counting, of surveys, of data point of observational data. And overwhelmingly we were told by fitness professional I just don’t want to post on social media, or like I’m overwhelmed. I feel like I should be posting on social media all this time but I can’t come up with stuff or I don’t have these ideas.

It was often stuff like that when it came down to marketing. And so the obvious solution to that would have been to do a done for you posting service. Here’s a batch of posts that you can copy and make your own and copy and paste and put them up. Here’s a VA service that will post on your behalf. That would have been the obvious solution there, but that’s not the problem. The problem isn’t social media. The problem is overwhelm, the problem is you have this huge batch of fitness and nutrition and holistic health professionals who deeply want to be marketing their business and know that they need to be doing something, but are overwhelmed with all of the things that they think that they should be doing. The internet has given us infinite content. And when there’s infiniteness, there’s no finality.

When there’s no finality, there’s no permission to take action. You’re never done. There’s always one more thing that you need to know. And so, because we spoke to so many people, because we have all this data, realized that that was the real problem. That there was this frustration bubbling under surface. That people were never given that permission to take action, and so they never would.

You and I both know that if somebody takes action even imperfect action, they’re probably gonna have results that they’re happy with. But is that permission to just do the damn thing, that’s needed. And so I took a step back and I created an analog newsletter called Fitness Marketing Monthly that we literally print and ship to your house. Now that’s crazy. And it’s unbelievably complicated to put together as a project. But the sale for this is not that this information and content is unique or you can’t find it anywhere else. Occasionally we get behind the curtain stuff, like the editor in chief of Men’s Health gives us the top headlines and changes to headlines that have ever performed for the entire company.

That’s pretty cool and that’s stuff that you can’t get anywhere else. But for the most part it’s not. And I’ll be the first to admit that, but what you get with this and what our sellers with this is in two to three hours a month we will send to your doorstep everything that you need to know so that you’re confident that you’re learning enough about marketing and business development that month.

We teach you how to go through it with two highlighters: Highlight for take action now, highlight for revisit later. And when you close the last page, and this is like an analog status bar, right? All of the pages on the right side of the book go to the left side and it’s a status bar. So, when you shut that last page you finished and it’s time to take action. So, that solves the problem. And this thing exploded out at the gate. And nobody knew that they wanted it. Nobody would have ever said that they want more information that they’d be willing to pay a premium for, delivered to their house in print. Nobody would have said that to us if we ever asked them.

We understood the market well enough.

Yuri Elkaim:                         And I think, I mean, if you understand the market and the current time in which we’re living, which is the digital age and the huge opportunity is sending physical stuff to people’s door steps because I love getting newsletters. I love reading physical stuff because it gives me a chance to step away from the internet. It gives me chance to sit down on a chair in a focused manner and I think there’s a perceived value that this is more important to pay attention to.

I think all of that combined is I think for everyone listening, not that you have to do a newsletter, but sending stuff to people in the mail is a big opportunity.

Jonathan G.:                       Yeah, I mean, think about your own experiences. It hit me like probably three years ago, it really. I’ve been thinking about doing something like this since 2013, but it really hit me about three years and I remember the point, it was, this is when I was on a whole bunch of people’s email-list and stuff like that. And I had a whole bunch of books that I really wanted to read. I had a whole bunch of eBooks on my computer that I was interested in. I was subscribed to a bunch of newsletters and people that I actually wanted to hear from who sent interesting information and other stuff that they write or links to stuff. And I really wanted to know these stuff.

I get home and there was this flyer from this company that I never heard of, that I don’t care about that arrived in my, it’s chuck. And I’m sitting there at the damn kitchen table and I’m flipping through this flyer. It completely usurped everything that I actually wanted to be going over. Everything that I wanted to know, everything that I wanted to be studying.

This flyer from this company, I don’t care about, about a topic that I don’t care about is what I was sitting there reading. It’s like man there something there.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, totally.

Jonathan G.:                       There’s something there.

Yuri Elkaim:                         It’s bigger. So, while on this thing what’s URL they can subscribe or check out the newsletter?

Jonathan G.:                       The newsletter well if you go to fitnessmarketingmonthly.com it will redirect you or the PTDC which is my website THE PTDC.

 

The Rapid Five

Yuri Elkaim:                         Cool, we’ll be sure to link up to that in the channels for you guys. Jon this has been awesome buddy. Always great insights from the renaissance man. Are rapid for the rapid five?

Jonathan G.:                       Yeah, but I’m never good with these because I always talk too much. I’ll try to be quick.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Okay. Whatever, it’s all good. It’s all good. All right, so here we go. Number one what is your biggest weakness?

Jonathan G.:                       My biggest weakness, wow, I think my biggest weakness is getting sucked into new projects too quickly. And the way that I offset that biggest weakness is surrounding myself with an incredible team to take an idea and run with it.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Nice, that’s awesome. What’s your biggest strength?

Jonathan G.:                       Coming up with new ideas.

Yuri Elkaim:                         True entrepreneur.

Jonathan G.:                       Do and do. Like personality test are hilarious. Every single one that I’ve ever taken and gotten assessed shows so clearly that I should be coming up with ideas and not managing anything ever.

Yuri Elkaim:                         So this is, I’ve actually recorded a solo podcast around this; ideas versus execution. And there’s are this whole discussion we can talk about forever, but I really believe that ideas are where the money is at. It’s not in the execution because you can have anyone or technology pretty much execute anything. So, if you have perfect execution the only thing that makes it better than what you currently have is a better idea.

So, ideas are infinite in terms of the impact they can create versus the impact the execution can create. Do you agree?

Jonathan G.:                       I think I’d like to have a much deeper conversation. I agree with some parts but I don’t agree with some parts though. I think that execution is what sets a lot of people apart. I think execution is hard, execution takes work. Ideas are sexy, ideals feel good, ideas are dreams and dreams are dopamine hits and we’re addicted to dreaming. And then the actual execution is the whole painful part where we have to actually map out the behaviors and do the day to day work.

No matter how much of an ideator you or I are, and I think we both very much are ideators, no matter how much you are as an ideator you still need to set up the processes for execution if you’re not doing it at the beginning.

And that takes time and that can be unbelievably difficult. I think that’s why a lot of people with good ideas don’t ever really make much of them, it’s because they’re not able to set up that structure around them.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I think the whole conversation is predicated on the idea that your execution has to be in place already, because if you’re just daydreaming, it’s never gonna happen. But anyways maybe we’ll do a follow-up episode on this conversation.

Jonathan G.:                       I’ll just go for a walk along the water and talk about it.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Exactly, and we’ll just record it.

Jonathan G.:                       Okay, you’re the content guy, man. I just like talking with people.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Cool. All right. So question number three here, what’s one skill you’ve become dangerously good at in order to grow your business?

Jonathan G.:                       Writing.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, and he’s an amazing writer guys. Just I think just being a subscriber to the newsletter you’ll see that. And fourth.

Jonathan G.:                       I think writing is the number one most valuable transferable skill in business today.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, cool. Number four, what do you do first thing in the morning?

Jonathan G.:                       I look over to my wife, I ask her if she died overnight, and then if I smell poop, I clean it up.

Yuri Elkaim:                         If she died overnight?

Jonathan G.:                       Well, like this is the funny thing whenever anybody is talking about like your morning routine is that anytime any, anytime you ever hear about this spectacular morning routine it’s always by a single white male. And it’s just like, “I wake up and I sit up in bed and I meditate for five minutes to make sure my thoughts are clear. And then I write in the journal to get all the bad ideas out of my head and then I take out my next journal which is my gratitude journal, and I talk about what I’m grateful for the day. And then maybe I’ll get up and I’ll start mixing my matcha green tea, in the traditional way because it has to be purposeful, of course, you have to start your day with purpose. And every morning I make my bed, because you don’t know what you can’t control over the course of the day and if you make your bed then you’ve at least started your day with something you can control.”

It’s like no, I got a baby. I look over to my wife and I make sure that she’s alive, and how many times she had to be up in the night to look after the baby. And then there’s probably poop somewhere. Like that’s my morning. And that’s a realistic morning, and I think we need to put it into perspective and understand there’s nothing wrong with those absolutely ridiculous glorified morning routines but it just isn’t the reality for a lot of people. And it’s basically always single white men who are talking about them.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Well dude, I can say for me having a morning routine if I don’t get up before my kids when I, so my goal is to get up at 5:00 am every day. It’s for the last couple of weeks it’s been a shit show it hasn’t really happened. That’s more out of laziness on my own part than anything else.

Usually I find myself a better person when I have my morning time for myself where I get up, not that I do a 1,000 things but it might just be something like I have an hour to work on my most important stuff, I’ll do some basic movement stuff or whatever I have to do before that. And then I think when it comes to gratitude I think a lot of people I’m all for gratitude journaling it’s not, but sometimes gratitude is just like lying in bed looking at your wife and just feeling that, right? There’s nothing wrong with that.

Jonathan G.:                       We’re both good friends with Eugene Alex who created The five Minute Journal and really, I mean, I would say that they’re the ones who pushed forward the gratitude movement in entrepreneurs and more than anybody else. One thing that I got from Alex in training with them is gratitude walks. I mean yeah go for a walk and speak with your wife about what you’re grateful for.

I think that’s very important. I mean, Yuri like I joke in an ideal week I would do the same thing as you. I would wake up before them every single morning Monday to Friday. Monday Wednesday, Thursday I write for 30 minutes, Tuesday and Thursday I go for a work out. And then I’m back at about the same time that they wake up. And I do breakfast with them and stuff like that. That’s my ideal week.

How often that happens five days a week? I don’t know if it’s happened yet.

Yuri Elkaim:                         It’s all good.

Jonathan G.:                       But that’s definitely an ideal week.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah awesome. All right, man fifth and final question, it’s not even a question actually, it’s just basic complete this statement. So, I know I’m being successful when …

Jonathan G.:                       When I’m energized out to finish over the course of my day.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Awesome.

Jonathan G.:                       And that comes down primarily to preparation. When I find that I’m sitting there and I’ve got a cloudy brain and I’m low energy, it’s not for lack of things to do, it’s not for lack of interesting things to do, it’s a lack of preparation of my work, and prioritization of what I should be doing in that moment. My schedule now start to finish of the week every 30 minutes is scheduled. And it’s not necessarily scheduled with calls or meeting or something like that it’s these 30 minutes I’m gonna be working on this project, and I do it. Two, three nights before that day and I’ll map out two days, three days, and when I’m doing that mapping out process, I’ll take an hour at night one night after my kid goes to bed, and I’ll arrange all of my notes for all of the different blocks of time.

What that does is a few things; one I can sit down and get right to it. I don’t need to sit down and spend 10 minutes like, “Okay, what notes do I need for these? Okay, blah blah blah.” But the other thing is there’s no FOMO, there’s no fear of missing out. If I know that if I’m working on this thing now that in an objective state is what I decided was the most important thing for me to tackle at that time, knowing that the other important things to tackle are still going to get done. And I think that’s made the biggest difference for me.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, that’s awesome. There we go guys. Jon Goodman in the house. Jon again the URLs for people to, I mean other than URLs or URLs and best place for people to follow you online?

Jonathan G.:                       The best place for people to follow me online if you want my personal blog onlinetrainer.com. I spent way too much money on that domain so use it. And then The Personal Trainer Development Center. If you’re a personal trainer, fitness professional, if you’re interested in fitness marketing newsletter then it’s theptdc.com or you can just do fitnessmarketingmonthly.com and it’ll take you there.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Cool. Awesome buddy. Thanks so much for being on the show night it’s always great to get inside the brain and have you share your wisdom with us.

Jonathan G.:                       You bet man. Thank you.

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Yuri’s Take

All right. So, I hope you enjoyed that conversation. I mean, so this is the cool thing Jon is, he spoke at Healthpreneur last year and obviously as part of the Healthpreneur tribe people like to hang out with him, and not just see him from stage and then take off. Like he was with us for the whole screen half days, and he was just an amazing. So cool to see what everyone was talking about as a reflection of their conversations with him. And that’s the beautiful about being able to spend time with entrepreneurs and thinkers like this, there’s just you just surround yourself with them and it’s just, they’re so valuable.

So, one if the things that I want to leave you with as an action step today I think this will be a good practice for your business, is one simple thank you card. I want you to write one thank you card to a customer, or a client we’ll keep it business focused and just let them know you appreciate them. You appreciate their business, whatever it is.

No special offers, no anything else like that, it’s just a simple thank you card with your handwriting, okay? Not typed into a computer, your handwriting saying, “Hey Bob? Just really wanted to let you know that super proud of you and all the works you’re doing. So grateful to have you as a client, and I look forward to more awesome stuff together.”

Literally something as simple as that. And giving them a bit of acknowledgment for maybe something they’ve done well or the very fact that you just appreciate them. And if you make this a practice throughout the rest of your business journey, I guarantee you this will be probably one of the most impactful activities that you do as the business owner and this is something you can’t delegate, okay? This is not something you delegate to somebody else to write on your behalf as we talked about it in our conversation. It’s like if you’re gonna do it, do it genuinely. Don’t pawn this off, don’t delegate this, don’t let the scale this and systemize it and send it off to a company who’s gonna just you and your penmanship write a card to someone, okay?

That’s going to be my action step for you today. So, hope you’ve enjoyed this one. If you have remember to check out Jon’s stuff online really, really good. And at the very minimum remember to subscribe to The Healthpreneur Podcast, lots more great stuff coming your way. And you know what? Yeah, it’s a, by the time you’re listening to this we will be in the talking about Healthpreneur Live. Like this will be day one by the day that you’re listening to this is day one at Healthpreneur Live 2018.

I’m looking forward to giving you a synopsis of how the event went for this weekend. We’ve brought together some amazing people again this year and one important announcement that I will make for next year’s event which will also be at some point in September is that we will no longer be opening it up to the public.

If you missed out this year, sorry to say that you’re never going to be able to join us again and the only way around that is actually to be a client of ours. And the reason we decided to make this shift is because moving forward we want Healthpreneur Live to be only for our clients and for it to be a big family gathering.

More on that later, but hope you’ve enjoyed this interview. I’m going to finish off on that note. And hope you have an awesome rest of your day, looking forward to bringing you some awesome recaps and interviews next week, and we’ll talk to you then.

 

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