Build Your Income Before Your Influence

Transcription:

Hey guys how’s it going? Yuri here. Welcome to another solo round of the Healthpreneur podcast! I hope you’re doing great.

So, life has been good on my end—hopefully life has been great for you. I was just in Mexico for a four day mastermind. I got to do one of my first surfing lessons, which was a lot of fun. I’ve only surfed once before, and it wasn’t really surfing, it was kind of baby waves, not any good instruction.

So that was fun. We had a great beach, beautiful waves, it was just a really great experience. Caught a few, got crushed by a few, overall it was a lot of fun.

Now, before my trip to Mexico, I was actually speaking at an event put on by my good friend Dr. Isaac Jones called 10X Doctor. I want to share one of the concepts I shared with everyone on stage, which is this whole idea of building income before influence.

This is something that—especially in the last six months—has really hit home for me. And I’m going to share exactly why. I feel this is important for you to understand.

Building income before influence

First and foremost, a lot of people in the health—and really in any space, but we will obviously focus on the health space—a lot of practitioners, experts, they want to come online and they want to build their influence. They look at everyone else and what they’re doing on social media, they look at all these Instagram followers, these YouTube channels, and they’re like, “Wow, my God! That’s what I need to do.”

And they get sidetracked into spending months—if not years—building their “platform,” without generating any significant revenue.

And there’s nothing wrong with doing that. There’s nothing wrong with building your platform, building your influence—because that’s exactly what I did for a long time in my health and fitness business.

But you have understand that that’s a three to five year game plan. Okay?

This podcast is not an overnight success. I told myself, “Listen, if you’re going to do this podcast, do this for the long haul. This is not going to show any noticeable results in the first year.”

So, this is an example of something that, for me, is the long game, but it’s not something I spend all of my time doing.

I see this time and time again, where people online think they have to do a summit to grow their list, or they’re going to do Facebook live’s every single day, or they’re going to do things other people are telling them to do, and that’s how they’re going to build their business.

A lot of this has to do with stuff that distracts us from the most important thing in our business—which is first and foremost, to make money.

If you’re not making money, you’re not going to be in business very long. So the key concept that I shared from stage was to build your income before your influence.

Here’s what I mean by that: Everything you’re currently doing in your business that is not generating income for you is literally a waste of time. Okay?

I know that sounds like a bold statement, but that’s the truth. If what you are doing is not producing income in a significant way, I’m going to challenge you to stop doing it.

Here’s an example of what I mean—and I’m guilty of this for teaching it for way too long, and I apologize because I had the rude awakening a little while ago. For the longest time I had been teaching people how to build their platforms and their business with content—creating an amazing blog and a YouTube channel all that kind of stuff.

That’s great. And our process really works, but it takes a long time to see the results. It takes a long time to see traction from what you’re doing with your blog, right? Constant, endless, production of content.

So, earlier last year we had a workshop called the Content Mastery Workshop, and it was terrific. We ran it a few times, had some great attendees, and they were in a position in their business where they really wanted to focus on content.

But there were a few people there that were kind of starting off in their online venture. And I gave them the exact recipe to do this—to follow this process for building this content machine that would generate revenue for their business.

But I recognized that for a lot of them it was taking forever to actually see monetary results from this. And it was frustrating because this is something that has really worked for me over the past ten years. But again, I go back to day one … And I didn’t do anything properly for the first three years. It was just a lot of incongruent actions, chasing a lot of shiny objects, not really being focused on anything, and certainly not focused on building my income.

So, I made a decision after Healthpreneur Live—our event in September last year. I said, “Listen. I’m no longer going to be teaching people how to build a content-based business because it takes forever, and it’s actually a disservice to teach someone to do that before they’re generating a predictable source of revenue.”

Using Healthpreneur as an example

What I’ve really shifted my focus on is looking at how we have built Healthpreneur. And it has nothing to do with content—I mean our podcast is our main content driver, and this is not a lot of effort on my part.

So, I really started to look at, what are people doing? What is not working? And what is working for us?

A lot of people are building businesses in the old model; which is build your influence, put out a ton of lead magnets, put out low end offers, seven dollar tripwires—we call them no-brainer offers—upsell people into your main off for 47 dollars … And then maybe you’ll get that person to spend one hundred dollars with you over the course of that transaction or a couple weeks.

I started to look at this model and I was like “Wow, this is really ridiculous, this is such a waste of time.” Why are we spending all of this time and effort trying to get someone to opt into our list with such a low barrier to commitment?

If somebody is opting in to a lead magnet, the likelihood they are engaged with you at a high level is very, very small. Instead of doing that, I want to suggest something that’s going to be a lot more powerful.

Looking at Instagram … Why are people spending all their time doing Instagram stories all day long? They’ve got their phone with them, taking pictures and videos of everything they eat, every single thing they do.

And I’m just like “What’s the point?” It’s such a waste, for me personally. If it’s working for you, that’s great.

And when I say working for you … There’s a very strong distinction here. Working as in actually making a lot of money for your business, okay? Not like, there’s a few opt-in’s from all this stuff and that’s it.

But for me, I don’t want to have my phone on me at all. I don’t want to be on my phone when my kids are around, I don’t want to be on my phone when I’m eating food—I want to be present in whatever I’m doing. We do have an Instagram presence, but I don’t really spend any time doing Instagram stories anymore.

I don’t care what the “Gary V’s” say. There are a lot of different ways to grow your business, there are a lot of different ways to scale the mountain. If you feel like you need to be on social 24/7 and you love doing that—and it’s actually producing revenue for you—great. But if you feel like you have to do that because the so-called experts are telling you to do that, and you’re miserable in the process, that’s just ridiculous.

Remember, Gary V built his influence over a decade, okay? It took him more than a decade to get where he’s at right now. He’s been doing it for a long time.

Most “gurus” and influencers that you see have been around for a very long time. Here’s the thing you often don’t recognize: Most of these people started off with driving traffic to some kind of core offer.

I’m not going to name any specific names, but there’s a very popular podcaster who’s a friend of mine now, he’s got one of the top podcasts in the world, but he started off selling a LinkedIn business building system. Eh? That is how everything started for him, and now he’s shifted to building out his podcast and his influence from there.

When we look at guys like Gary V, he started off building winelibraryTV, right? And now he’s in a position where he doesn’t really need to worry about making money because he’s got VaynerMedia doing its thing.

So, I think it’s very distracting to be watching what other people are doing and thinking you have to do the same. What I would strongly propose is that whatever you are doing in your business has to be strongly centered around building your income. And then you can worry about building your influence. Right?

The old way of building an online business is dying

You need to have a predictable machine that is generating leads and clients for you and your business every single day, without your constant involvement. If you don’t have that you will continue to struggle—or if you’re not struggling, you will struggle at a very high level.

I say this because I’ve spoken with hundreds of entrepreneurs in our space and I’ve helped a lot of them. I’ve seen what they’re going through. They’re either charging way too little for their personal services or they’re putting out little products, like “Here’s a lead magnet, here’s a ten dollar ebook.”

And again, I am part of the problem because that’s what I was teaching for a little bit too long. So I do want to apologize for putting that message out there.

At the time that is what I thought people wanted, and then I recognized that it just wasn’t producing any appreciable results for people. And yes, you might be making a couple sales off your ten dollar product, but what is 50 dollars going to do for you? Not a lot.

What’s 5,000 dollars going to do for you? Well, that’s a little more interesting.

I really want to challenge you to think about the fact that the old way of building an online business is dying. It really, really is dying. And that means selling low information products—information products in general are dying because information is ubiquitous, it’s all over the place.

Anything that becomes digitized will become de-monetized. We’ve already seen this—you’ve got an amazing blog post that covers everything you would sell in an ebook for free. So now the ebook becomes commoditized and obsolete. How are you gonna sell that? Right?

We’ve got people that are doing 30 day challenges for free, which is fine. Or 30 day challenges for 47 dollars, and they get ten people in there. They’re making 470 dollars over the course of a month. They’ve put all this effort into doing something and they’re not even making a thousand dollars. It’s just ridiculous.

Simplifying your business

The big opportunity moving forward in 2018 and beyond is moving away from products. Unless you’ve got a very high quality supplement that can’t be commoditized and is priced compared to everything else on Amazon.

Or, the big opportunity for you as an expert is to really focus on higher level, premium priced coaching. When I say coaching, I’m not talking one-on-one—I’m talking about group-based coaching where you can work with 10, 20, even 50 people at the same time. Moving them towards a common goal.

As a result, you’re charging anywhere from 3-5,000 dollars. Now here’s the thing to realize … The effort that goes into selling a 3-5,000 dollar program is the exact same that goes in to selling a ten dollar ebook. Why would we waste our time selling ten dollar eBooks?

And here’s the other thing to remember: when someone buys a ten dollar product, there’s very little commitment from them. Ten dollars is less than going to a movie. So there’s very little commitment from the client or customer’s perspective. But if you charge someone three thousand dollars to really help them get a desired result, is that person maybe a bit more committed? Absolutely.

So, getting away from the low-end nonsense and really moving towards simplifying your business, offering what we call a “dream come true” system in a way that is higher priced … That only attracts the best possible clients to your business.

Best possible clients means people who actually show up and do the work because they are committed. And it forces you to be your best because people are paying you a good sum of money.

So everyone wins. And that’s really where the opportunity lies moving forward.

Even with our Healthpreneur business, we’ve simplified it in a very big way. We’ve taken away all of our lead magnets, taken away all of our courses.

But even that, we know people who buy that book are not committed, right? They’re not committed to really moving to the next level.

So for us, we looked at … If our main mission is to give people the training they need and the personal touch they deserve to grow their businesses, and grow their income, then for us, it’s two things.

We’ve got our workshop and our mastermind. That’s it. Those are the only two ways we can serve our audience.

I’m at a point now where I have no intention of putting out ten dollars offers to capture the low-hanging fruit of people who don’t want to invest, to attend and go through our workshop with us. Because that’s not worth our time, that’s not worth our customer service effort. It really, really is not.

I would personally rather have a much smaller business in terms of volume, and work with people more in-depth, really help impact their business, than serving thousands of clients with a five or ten dollar product which no on really takes action on.

I’m not saying that this is what you have to do, but this is the way we’re moving. This is exactly the way we’ve built our business, and this is exactly what we’re recommending.

All other Healthpreneurs who love dealing with people—coaching, teaching, serving, instead of spending all your time marketing, setting up funnels, writing sales copy, split testing, optimizing, all the stuff we can’t stand doing … If you’d rather teach and coach your clients, actually work with them deeply to create an amazing result for them (and as a byproduct of that, be making five to ten times more profit in your business) then this is the way forward.

It really, really is the way forward.

Because you’ve got two options. Number one is you sell low end information—and you need a massive volume to make that happen. I don’t know about you, but if you’ve got a million people on your email list, go for it. But, I guarantee most people listening to this are not there.

So, you can do that and struggle, and even if you’re running Facebook ads to that type of information, it’s going to be very tough to have any kind of margin to make it worthwhile.

The flip side, is you say: “Listen, I would much rather spend my time teaching, coaching, serving people, and really helping them achieve an amazing result. I’m willing to charge a higher price point, work with fewer people, and spend the same amount of energy and a lot less time doing that.

As a result, as I’ve built up this predictable marketing machine around me, I don’t have to spend all my time doing the marketing.

So, you need to build a way of predictably generating leads and predictably generating clients from those leads—without your constant involvement.

The Seven Figure Health Business Blueprint

Now, the good news for you is that we’ve figured this out. If you want to go deeper on this, we’ve got a great webinar that we have newly released. It’s called The Seven Figure Health Business Blueprint.

If you want the step by step on how to do this, I strongly recommend you attend the webinar. It’s awesome, you can do so over at healthpreneurgroup.com/9. You can register for the webinar over there.

Now, I really, really feel strongly about this. It’s something that, again, we don’t even want to move forward with people who don’t get this. And if you do get it, that’s great. If you still want to stay in the world of selling books and low end information products, that’s awesome. Continue to do that if you like and if it’s working for you.

But, if you really want to take your business to a very high level in terms of profit, so that you can enjoy more of what you got into business for—the freedom, more time with your family, the ability to travel, not having to deal with thousands of pain in the ass clients or customers who are complaining about ten dollars or are looking for a download link from the five dollar product…

If you want to avoid all that and really live a better quality life, serve the clients you care about—then this webinar is really important to take in.

We’ve had a lot of people go through the webinar, and they’re like “Holy cow, this has been the best 71 minutes of my time.” It’s opened their eyes to what is possible, and how the dying model that is currently the online business world is dying a slow—and in some cases very fast—death.

If you want the new way to build your income before your influence and actually put more money in the bank so you can sleep better at night and really achieve the things you want in life, this is a must-attend webinar.

So again, it’s healthpreneurgroup.com/9, and I strongly recommend you check it out today. Do not wait any longer, your future really depends on this information, so, go there now.