Transcription

How’s it going, guys? Yuri here back with you and welcome back to the show. I’ve got a fun episode for you today.

Let me ask you a question, are you a jack of all trades? Are you the person, the health expert, the fitness coach, the … Yeah, the health or fitness expert who is amazing at many, many things and finding it tough to grow your business? Well, the two are very closely related.

The pyramid of influence and the four zones

Let me share a story with you about when I started my business online, I was the jack of all trades. I was the guy who, I just wanted to help everyone, right? I was helping people with weight loss, with energy, with pretty much anything. I was a generalist and if you’ve seen any of my work around this … You probably haven’t because you haven’t sat in on one of my Masterminds, but if you have then this will make sense, but there are what I call the ‘Pyramid of Influence’, okay?

The Pyramid of Influence has four stages and everyone starts off at the bottom and the bottom is what we call a generalist. The thing is, as you climb this pyramid, the easier it becomes to influence people, okay? Everyone starts off at the bottom as a generalist, so you have a general knowledge of health, fitness, conditions, whatever, you feel like you can help a lot of people, and just because you can doesn’t mean you should. The next level from the generalist is a specialist and a specialist is someone who, like a doctor, is let’s say a general practitioner, the doctor then becomes a cardiac surgeon, right? That’s an example of a specialist.

Influencer and community examples

Let’s use the example of Dr. Oz. Dr. Oz started off as a normal doctor, then he specialized in cardiac surgery, right? He became a really, really good cardiac surgeon and then he kind of lives in that specialist zone for quite some time. Now before we go any further, there’s a line that I draw between generalist and specialist and that line underneath it is known as the death zone, so if you don’t cross that barrier into the world of specialty, you’re toast. You might as well just stop what you’re doing and just fold up because it’s not going to work for you, and I’ll tell you why in just a few moments.

Let’s look at Dr. Oz, starts off as a generalist, becomes a specialist in cardiac surgery, then something interesting happens. Then his wife, who’s a producer, had some connections with Oprah Winfrey and all of a sudden Dr. Oz is now a guest health expert/doctor on the Oprah Winfrey show. Pretty cool, right? All of a sudden he’s becoming more of an authority, which is the third level up this pyramid. We have generalist, specialist, and authority now, authority moving closer to the pinnacle of the pyramid. Now he’s really become known around the world as not just a cardiac surgeon, but just as like America’s doctor, right? That’s kind of what ended up happening. Then lo and behold, he gets his own show and is on TV every single day, Monday through Friday, and he hits the pinnacle of the pyramid known as celebrity. We go from generalist to specialist to authority to celebrity.

Now the goal for all of us is to climb this pyramid, is to climb this mountain because the reality is that if you get up to celebrity, really like anything is possible. It’s so easy. Like Kylie Jenner, right? I think she’s like 22 or 23 years old, she’s worth $1 billion dollars. $1 billion dollars and she has seven full time employees. How the hell does that happen? I don’t even … Look again, she might be 21, I don’t even know, but she’s in her early 20s, she’s worth $1 billion dollars, and she has a skincare company, I think. How does that even happen? It happens because she’s at the pinnacle of the pyramid. She is a celebrity already, just like her sister Kim Kardashian is, right? So Kim Kardashian is at the pinnacle of the pyramid. Now I’m not saying Kim Kardashian is a great role model for any of us to aspire to, but when you have 100 and whatever, 20 million followers on Instagram, do you think you’re going to have some influence?

Look at The Rock, he’s got, the last I saw, maybe 135 million followers on Instagram. That is one third of the U.S. population. Now obviously not all of them are Americans, but let’s say they were. That’s one third of the U.S. population who follows and likes The Rock, so it’s no wonder that when he comes out with the next movie, which by the way, most of his movies are crap, right? Like they’re not really that great. Ballers on HBO is a great show but for the most part, most of his movies are not that good but they always crush it in the box office. Why? Well because he’s got that influence. At the pinnacle of the pyramid, you shout and people and say, “How high?”

Dr. Oz says there’s this new thing called raspberry ketones, all of a sudden it’s gone, like you can’t even find it anywhere. Kim Kardashian says I’m going to be at this club and now the club is like lined up around the block. This is what happens with celebrity status but you have to understand that you cannot start at celebrity, and this is the biggest fallacy that I see people make now is they start doing the whole Instagram influencer stuff. Like I’m a social media influencer, you should be blowing up if that’s what you say.

I’m going to be very honest with you, I can’t stand when I see people’s bios like on LinkedIn or wherever else and they’re like I’m a social media influencer. Um, how about you stop shaking your ass and you actually provide value for people, right? Why don’t you actually like be really good at what you do in terms of helping people and let’s do that instead of being some kind of like good looking influencer who makes people feel bad about themselves but they follow you anyways because they’re just so captivated by it? It just drives me crazy, okay?

The challenge is that we are in the era, the all-time no talent era. I was just watching this thing called Instafamous on Netflix last night, this one chick her name was Sexy Pantera or something, I don’t even like … I don’t know. She got famous because she had a video on YouTube that was seen by 30 or 300 million people and it was her like shaking her butt. That’s all it was, like her shaking her butt and that created the platform from which she has now built, I don’t even know how many followers she has but it’s got to be in the tens or hundreds of millions of people. It’s ridiculous. That is the world in which we’re living in and that is some of the competition that we’re dealing with. I think it’s nonsense but the cool thing is that if you’re really good at what you do, you don’t have to worry about that stuff.

Why a “jack of all trades” is “a master of none”

What does all of this have to do with you and being a jack of all trades? Well, the reality is that if you’re a jack of all trades, you can’t climb the pyramid, right? The likelihood of you getting to the pinnacle of the pyramid being a jack of all trades is very, very unlikely. Now Dr. Oz is America’s doctor, I think that’s his kind of thing, so if he’s America’s doctor, what are you going to be? Are you going to be America’s health coach? And please don’t do this, please don’t do the America’s number one personal trainer because what that does is it … At least in my mind, it shoots off the alarm bells to be like bullshit, who’s giving you this title, right? I mean, you can say it yourself, industry recognized #1 leader in whatever. Come on, man, just say how you help people. Let’s kind of keep it at that and let your clients determine if you’re the number one or not.

Where are we going with this? Yes, jack of all trades. So you need to jump over that hump from generalist to specialist. That’s the first thing that you have to do otherwise your business is going to sink like the Titanic and I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news but that’s kind of what happens. There’s a lady in our community who’s talking about how she’s a self-diagnosed jack of all trades and that’s why it’s a challenge for her to grow her business. I’m like good for you, like good for you for diagnosing that because that’s exactly what the problem is because when you are the jack of all trades, as they say you are the master of none.

The challenge with this is that if you say that … Let’s say I were to ask you who do you help? Well, I help everyone. Well, what I’m thinking in my mind is well really you’re helping no one, right? It’s funny because a lot of times we have these conversations with perspective people in our communities. We say hey, who do you help and they’re like oh, I help all sorts of people. I’m like great, how many clients do you currently have? They’re like oh, I’ve got zero. I’m like oh wow, interesting correlation, right?

What you need to think about is instead of being a generalist, you need to become really good at one thing, but here’s the worry is that we think that if I only help people with Hashimoto’s, I am alienating everyone else. If I only help good looking soccer players who have alopecia, which would be me, I’m going to alienate everyone else. If I only help new moms lose the belly weight or the baby weight, I’m going to alienate everyone else. The pie is going to be too small, there’s no way I could possibly build a successful business just helping this small group of people and you’re right, if that’s your belief and if you’re thinking locally perhaps, but even then.

I live in Toronto, which is … Just so you know, a couple facts about Toronto. If you’re American and you haven’t been up to Toronto, shame on you, you have to come up to this amazing city because it is phenomenal. Fourth largest city in North America and most people don’t even know that. They think of Toronto as a Niagara Falls and they’re not the same. They’ll say, “Yeah, like I was up in Canada when I was two years old, I went to Niagara Falls.” Please don’t tell me that story, I hear it all the time.

If you want to come up to Toronto, June 26 and 27 is our Mastermind that you can join in and sit in on for the two days. If you want more details on that, HealthpreneurGroup.com/2day. All the info is there. Not only will you get to hang out with me and some amazing entrepreneurs in our space and really help you build your business to the next level, but you’ll get to see Toronto and experience it. It’s a really good city, especially in the summer time.

You should view Facebook and target audiences

We’re talking about even if we stayed … So Toronto has six or seven million people, so quite large. Even if I just said I’m only going to target new moms in Toronto, that’s a very large population, right? Maybe that’s a million people, but here’s the cool thing is that … And this is funny because we speak to a lot of people and many of them, they think so small. They’re like I live in this rural area, there’s no way I could target all these people and I’m like, there’s this thing called Facebook that allows you to target anyone around the world.

I’ve got some friends that live in Eden, Utah, which is the middle of nowhere pretty much. It’s a beautiful area but there is no one who lives there, maybe a couple thousand people. And these guys, now that they’ve built a community in and around the Mormons, which is interesting because all these guys, they’re building these massive houses, they’re like seven and eight figure entrepreneurs in the health and fitness space, and they live in this tiny little town called Eden, Utah, but you know how they’re able to do that? It’s this amazing thing called the internet, which allows us to reach people all around the world.

If you’re thinking like there’s not enough people in this space, I promise you there are. Think of Facebook as your blog, as your e-mail list, as your YouTube channel, as everyone you ever would possibly want to work with is on Facebook, one billion users. Do you think you might find a few in there? I think so. Number one is you have to specialize, you have to niche down, and you need to target one single audience. That means one group of people who have the same problem and want to get the same outcome.

Couple things happen there. Number one, your messaging becomes a lot more direct so now you’re not saying I help people get healthy, which means nothing to everyone, you are the expert for people who have one quad that is smaller than the other, like literally it’s that level of specification. Now maybe not that specialized but you need to narrow down to the point where people feel like you’re speaking exactly to them and they feel that they’re in the right place by working with you, right?

That’s why if you have an ear infection, it might make sense to go to the ear, nose, and throat specialist, right? As opposed to a general practitioner who’s probably just going to give you an antibiotic. If you need heart surgery, you’re not going to go to your general practitioner, you’re going to go to the hospital and require a cardiac surgeon. If you have a tumor in your brain, you’re going to have a brain surgeon. What a thought, so why should you and your business be any different?

Think about this, like why do brain surgeons get paid so handsomely, right? They get paid a lot of money. Well, number one, no one else can do what they do or very few people can do what they do and they’re extremely specialized. You have to ask yourself, can other people do what I do? The answer is probably yes, which means that you have to find a better way to serve your clients so you can be even more valuable to them, but second is if you specialize in helping people specifically with like adrenal fatigue or Hashimoto’s or hair loss or libido, whatever it is, you now are in a much smaller competitive arena because there are very, very few people who are specialized into that level because they’re all doing the same thing.

Making more money by charging premium prices for your specialty

I’m telling you guys, like the bar is set so low it’s ridiculous. I help people improve their wellness. You’re going out of business, okay? Don’t say stuff like that. Everyone else is talking about that stuff and that’s why so many health coaches, the average income for a health coach, is $45,000. The average tenure of a health coach is just one to three years, and this is according to statistics from I can’t remember where, but I do remember one of my presentations talking about this. $45,000 a year is $20,000 more than the poverty line. The poverty line is $25,000 and change. $45,000 is literally … Wait, is that four … Just under $4,000 a month.

Now if you lived in Toronto, your rent alone would be $3,000 minimum if you’re living in and around … Pretty much in the city, for a one bedroom condo. Again, not everyone is living in big cities, but you have to understand that $45,000 does not go anywhere. Like you cannot live a great quality life on $45,000. Anything under that, like I mean anything, I would say anything even under $100,000 is very, very like … You’re scraping by, okay?

The world is expensive. If you want to enjoy the fruits of life, if you want to just take a vacation, right? If you have a family, you’ve got a family, you’re looking at a minimum of $5,000 right there, right? You need to think about how do I make more money? Well yeah, we all want to make more money. If you want to make more money you got to serve more people or you need to serve the people you’re working with at a greater level so you can charge premium prices, you can earn a lot more, and in order to do that, you need to be the specialist, like you can’t be the hack of all trades because number one, if you’re charging premium prices … When I say premium prices, I’m talking about you are working with people for a specific outcome and that outcome might be … Let’s say, lose the last ten pounds or it might be to lose the baby weight.

It’s not about how many sessions, it’s not about like dollars per session, it’s an eight week program, we’re going to work together, it’s $5,000. Now not everyone’s going to afford that, right? And that’s totally fine, you don’t want to work with them. You want to work with people who say like you know what? Yes, I’m ready to step up, I’m willing to do this now, I’m willing to make this happen, but you can’t charge those prices when your promise is I’m going to help you get healthy because what does that mean?

We’ve talked about this in a previous episode, Why No One Is Buying Your Stuff, episode 224 on the podcast, like why no one is buying your stuff. Like your promises and your offers are so vague that people can’t even visualize what that looks like. I help people achieve optimal wellness. What the heck does that even mean, right? I help people get fit. Well, what does fit mean, right? So you have to really be concrete around this stuff and your messaging needs to be bang on.

In case you’re wondering, this is the first thing we do with our clients because nothing else matters until this happens. You can’t put together a great offer until you know exactly who you’re speaking to and what your promise is, right? What it is you can do for these clients. If we go back to the Pyramid of Influence, right? The generalist is somebody who is like I’m a health coach, I just help everyone. Yay! I make a few grand here but you know, whatever. I blog on the side.

Here’s another tell, is if you go to LinkedIn and look at someone’s profile and they say they are a health expert, cookbook author, healthy chef, horse riding enthusiast, like it goes on and on and on and on. The more things they add in their description and their bio, the less likely they are to be successful. Why is that? Because they’re not really good at one thing so they do a bunch of other things. I’m a health coach, I’m a freelance writer, I’m a TV expert, I do the occasional gig here and there, why is it that you’re doing all that stuff? Because you’re not really, really good at one thing and as a result of that you have to do a bunch of other things to make ends meet.

When I’m looking at … Like I use LinkedIn quite a bit, when I look at it it’s a very easy tell for me to be like yeah, this person is not someone I want to speak with because they’re probably not in a position to even work with us or ask for help because they just can’t, right? You have to jump the chasm from generalist to specialist and you need to identify who is it that I love working with, who can I create the best results for, and being okay with saying I’m not helping everyone else.

What we do at Healthpreneur and how we’ve narrowed it down

Because I know like what we do with Healthpreneur, we can help a lot of people in other businesses. I mean, I could do what I do with Healthpreneur across every single possible industry in coaching, right? If you’re a consultant to accountants or lawyers, I mean our stuff can help you as well but I choose not to because it dilutes our message, it dilutes our brand, and it dilutes the potency of that. See, we want to be known as the only place for health and fitness experts to get more client and scale their coaching. I don’t care about helping accountants and lawyers and other professionals. We only want to work with health and fitness experts, so that’s a decision you have to make and you have to understand that by going narrow, by kind of niching down, you’re able to scale up and that’s the big thing I want you to think about from this episode.

Hope this makes sense and if you’re somebody who’s listening to this and you’re thinking man, it’s like yeah, I need to narrow this down and really get kind of clear on this, well here’s what I’m going to suggest, join us in Toronto, if obviously you meet the following three criteria: One, you have experience as a coach, so you’re currently coaching clients, right? So you’re not just like … You didn’t just graduate yesterday, so you’ve been coaching for a while, you’re coaching clients, and you’re generating revenue, okay? If you meet those three criteria, then I’d invite you to apply to join us in Toronto at our upcoming Luminaries Mastermind, which is June 26 and 27th. Again, the website is HealthpreneurGroup.com/2day, which spells ‘day’. HealthpreneurGroup.com/2day.

The reason I’m suggesting you join us is because the first thing we’re going to do on day one is we’re going to nail your … Well, on day one we’re going to really nail out your million dollar model and the first part of that is getting extremely clear on your perfect clients. Now if you’re coaching clients already and your business is doing okay, there’s probably some room for improvement and if you’ve already narrowed that down, that’s great, we can add some fuel to the fire, but the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to really get specific on who that person is and what the messaging is around that so that when you put your stuff out onto the interwebs, people finally resonate with it. They’re like wow, this is the person I want to speak with, this is the person I want to help me deal with this issue.

From there, obviously we’re going to show you how to do predictable prospecting so you have people coming and knocking on your door every single day of the week without you doing anything. We’ll show you how to teach to sell, ask, and assess coach to close, and then on day two, you’re going to be thrown into the mix with our existing clients and you’ll kind of get to enjoy some next level stuff that we talk about with them to move their businesses to the next level. It’s going to be a lot of fun. We do this three times a year. We do it in Toronto in June because Toronto in June is amazing. Again, I believe that we’re half sold out right now. If you want to join us, HealthpreneurGroup.com/2day. Not today, T-O-D-A-Y, but 2, like the number two, D-A-Y. Fill out the application if you’re interested and then I’ll get back to you within about 24 hours with a yay or nay, cool?

Thanks again for joining me on the podcast. Hope you’ve enjoyed this episode and it’s time to niche down, baby. I’ll see you soon.

Transcription

Hey guys, what’s up? Yuri back with you. Welcome back to the show. In today’s episode we’re going to be talking with how to deal with clients who’ve been burned before. Did you ever speak to a potential client and they’re like, “I don’t know. Show me some proof that this is going to work because my last coach really burned me. I lost money doing this thing and it didn’t work out.” If you’ve ever dealt with anyone like this, what I’m about to share with you could be a game changer.

Dealing with clients who have trust issues

So, here’s the deal. The reason this came on, the reason I’m sharing this with you here is because I would say about almost 20% of people we speak with come up with this issue. “I did this thing before and I got burned.” And this actually just really happened recently with a potential client a couple of days ago, so it’s kind of fresh on my mind, so I’m like let’s talk about this. So, here’s the thing is if someone has been burned before the reality is that they have some major trust issues. Okay?

Okay, so let’s look at an example. Let’s say you are in a relationship. Let’s actually no, let’s look at a better example. Let’s talk about the Bachelor, because as you know or may not know, it’s one of my favorite shows. Yes, damaging admission. So, you’ve got a guy who’s the bachelor and 25 bachelorettes, and some of them don’t progress in the season because they’re so closed off and guarded because they’re afraid to open up. And when they kind of have these conversations about why that is, a lot of times it’s because they were burned before. They had a bad relationship before. They were hurt before. And as a result, they closed down. And the irony about that is that it’s the single biggest reason why they get kicked off the show. Because their relationship with the bachelor just hasn’t progressed fast enough to the point where he even knows who this person is.

So, in a relationship, if people have been burned before, they’re going to be a lot more guarded than if everything was great with previous relationships. Right/ we’ve heard all the time, like, “Men are pigs?” Really? You sure about that? Or is it like one guy who is a pig to you and now you’re making this generalize statement? So, you have to understand first and foremost that is the thinking that these clients are coming in with. They got burned before, therefore there’s a huge amount of skepticism and trust that is required in order for them to move forward.

Playing the chasing game – or not – and an example

So, at this point, it’s up to you to make a decision to ask yourself do I want to chase this client and plead to them and show them like, “Yes, you can trust me, and I’m the best and this is not going to happen again.” Do you want to play that game? And I’m going to suggest that you don’t. And here’s why: Because it’s very, very tough to change somebody’s internal belief system.

So, we had a potential, I’m not even going to say potential client. She was maybe interested in working with us. And she’d been in our pipeline for a while, so I’ve seen her name a few times. And we sent out an email, and she responded saying that she was still really considering working with us, but she’d been burned before and she wants to know with 100% certainty that we get our clients results every single time. And I’m like, “Wow. Let’s have fun with this.” So, here’s how I responded to that. And I’m not reading you the email because I don’t have it in front of me. But maybe I should. Know what? Give me a second. Let me pull out the email. Actually, know what? I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to do this. Just in case she’s listening, I want to honor her and I don’t want to, my goal here is not to make anyone look bad or feel bad.

So, essentially what I said is I said, “Listen, I understand your position. I understand you’ve been burned before. And that’s sucks. I don’t know who your coach was. But you have to understand that we’re not the same. Like, that coaching program or that coach is not me. I have no correlation no association to that person. I don’t even know them.” Okay? Again it would be like starting a relationship with a new person and thinking that new person was exactly like the previous person. It’s just not even a logical argument. Right? But you can understand being so fear-based that’s where people are coming from. So, I said, “Listen, I understand.” So the first thing we want to do is empathize. Right? “I understand where you’re coming from. That really sucks that you went through that.”

And I said, “Listen, I agree that we are in the all-time no talent era, where it is so easy for anyone to call themselves a coach.” I mean, go onto LinkedIn and type in health coach, and you’ll get tens of thousands of results. Are those people health coaches? Eh, not really. They’re product distributors for companies like Optavia and Usana and stuff like that. There’s nothing wrong with that, but just don’t call yourself a health coach or a health expert, because you’re not. Unless you really are and you’re just supplementing what you do with those products.

So, there’s a lot of nonsense out there. It’s very easy for someone to be a health expert. Right? Like quote, unquote. So, I’m completely behind that, because I don’t believe that most people, especially teaching business, let me clarify that even further, especially teaching business are not in a position to do so. I really don’t believe so. Because most people that I see, that I meet, I’m like, “Dude, you’re 21 years old and you had one good month, and now you’re teaching other people how to do this?” It’s a little bit sketchy, a little but suspicious.

Overcoming objections without explaining yourself

But here’s the thing, is that I’ve talked about this before, when you’re overcoming objections, you never, ever, ever, ever want to be in a position where you’re explaining yourself. We talk about ask and assess, never tell and impress. Never. Okay? So, here’s what I said. I said, “I understand why you’re feeling this. It sucks. I’m sorry you went through that. But obviously we’re different.” Right? I’m not going to spend the next however many hours or paragraphs in this email to explain that, but here’s a page with a bunch of testimonials from our clients that’ll give you a better perspective of that. We have a process that works, but is this going to work for you? I have no idea. I don’t know you. I don’t know whether or not you’re someone who gives up at the first sign of adversity, or if you do whatever it takes to make things happen.”

So, what I did is I put it right back on her and I said, “Listen, your results are 100% your responsibility. If you’re looking to point fingers and you’re looking for the exit already, this is not going to work.” Because you can’t come into a coaching relationship already looking for warning signs. That’s just like going into a new relationship looking, right, you’re looking for those elements in that person that remind you of that bad relationship you had before. And then you see like a semblance of that, like “Oh my God, they sound the same. This, oh, I can’t do this. I’m out.” Okay? Because what I’ve recognized is that in a coaching relationship, it is way more about you interviewing the potential client than the other way around. And if you run a business where it’s them putting you on your heels, you’re in a losing situation every single time.

Selecting your clients and deciding whether they’re a good fit

So, I said to her, I said, “Listen, we know our process works. We have hundreds of case studies to show that. But again, your results are 100% your responsibility. Like we’ve had clients that have done a million dollars a month, and we have clients who’ve done nothing. What’s the difference? It’s the same process. What’s the difference? It’s the person. So let me ask you, why should we hire you as a client?” And I sent the email. And actually, I ended off with a P.S., I said, “Listen, obviously you can tell I’m a no B.S. kind of guy. My goal isn’t that you like me. My is to help you get results if we’re a good fit, so don’t take anything personally.”

So, I sent it off to her. And then she sent it back saying, “Yeah my previous coach sent me testimonials as well and I still got burned. So, I’m going to continue looking for someone.” I said, “Great. All the best.” So, it’s a beautiful thing when you can tell someone, listen you’re not like, here’s the way we work. And if you don’t like this, just take a hike. I’m not working with these types of people. And the reason most people don’t do this is because, and it comes back to what we talked about before. You have a pipeline issue. You have an incoming problem. You don’t have enough people who are in your pipeline who are booking calls with you and potentially want to work with you.

This is like do I care if this individual works with us? Not in the slightest. Because as soon as she leaves, that opens up a space for someone else to meet a perfect client. So, when you’re dealing with people who’ve been burned before, just understand it’s very, very challenging for you to change their belief system. And you need to avoid getting into the whole explaining game of why you’re different and how you’re special. Because what they’re doing is they’re sitting back in the chair, arms crossed, and they’re like, “mm-hmm (affirmative), sure, whatever.” That’s essentially the position they’re taking. And you’ll never win that game.

So you need to flip it and you need to say, “Listen, your results are your responsibility. I’m going to give you a strategy that I know works. I’m going to hold your hand each step of the way. But I need you to show up. I need you to do the work. I need you to learn in for support when you need it. Can you do that?” Right? Our system works. The only thing that we don’t yet know is whether or not you work. So, please tell me why should I hire you as a client?

Now the client really has to think to themselves, do I want to work with this coach or am I already looking for a way out? And if they’re looking for a way out, that’s cool, because you don’t want to work with those people anyways.

Okay? So, I’m going to just kind of shut it down there because this is probably one of the most common things you’re going to come up against. It’s one of the most common objections that we come up with, not even on the phone, but even before the phone calls. Right? It’s like, “How is this different? How are you different?” And listen, for anyone who’s out there running shady coaching programs, I really hope that you’re taken down. I really, really do hope that the FTC finds you and shuts your business down. Because you have no right to scam people out of money, to make promises that you can’t deliver on, and to really overpromise and under deliver.

And listen, I’ve made these types of mistakes in the past where maybe we brought on a wrong client here and there. But I’ve learned over the years that it is way better for the clients and yourself if you are very up front with them and tell them, “Listen, this is going to be the hardest thing you ever do. It’s going to be painful. You’re going to run into challenges. But the thing is, if you want these results, you’re going to run into all that stuff anyways. So, wouldn’t it make sense to have a coach with you each step of the way?”

Just be super, super upfront with people. But yeah, I can’t promise you that this is going to work or it’s not going to work. That’s up to you. But I can promise you I’m going to meet you 100% of the way. You need to push back and meet me 100% of the way as well. If you’re only half in, there’s not much I can do for you.” And you need to be very, very upfront with people. And if they are too scared to say, “Know what? That makes a lot of sense. I appreciate your honesty, let’s do this.” If they can’t say that, they’re not a client you want to work with because I promise you, and I promise you with every fiver of my being, once they’re in your program, they’re going to go rogue. And if someone goes rogue, they are gone.

What bit me in the ass and what I learned

We have a philosophy in our company that every single person is lost, confused, overwhelmed, and going rogue from day one. And so, what we do is we build out everything with that assumption. And obviously it’s not true, but we are living and working through our program with our clients with that assumption. Because what’s happened in the past before we took this stance is that, and this is again, this is a leadership issue, so my bad, and that’s the thing is that you always make things better over time, is and this actually kind of bit me in the butt with my Masterminds. This was a big learning curve. Or a big learning from that was I decided that if I didn’t hear from someone, everything was good.

And I think I’m naturally somebody who avoids confrontation, so I didn’t want to send an email to someone for instance, who I hadn’t heard from who was in our Mastermind for two months. Because I thought, well if I send this email maybe things went wrong and I’m going to hear some bad response. And two specific situations, that really bit me in the ass hard. And I had to take responsibility for the fact that “Listen, that was my bad, I should have been a little bit more, on top of our communication.” Right? And I can’t point fingers at the clients.

So, I’m just telling you, if you made the assumption that when people come into our program, they’re going to be lost and they’re going to need direction from day one, and you build out some type of plan over time to continually follow up with them beyond the normal, “Hey, here’s what you’re going to do this week. Here’s our tracking call, et cetera,” it’ll make a huge difference for the success of your clients and obviously your program and you as a coach. Okay?

So, that is how to deal with clients who have been burned before, who are super skeptical, really have trust issues. And again, it’s kind of a tough nut to crack. You’ll find that in a lot of cases, you’re not going to be able to work with them. And that’s totally fine as well.

An opportunity

So, here’s the deal. So, we are into April, and as I mentioned before, we’ve got our next Luminaries Mastermind coming up in Toronto. This is out high level group where we help coaches in our space who are doing six figures get to even and beyond. And in Toronto we have, like we do most of the time, we open up a couple spots for non-clients who want to sit in and experience two days of awesomeness with myself. That’s right. If you want my hands-on help, I’m going to talk you through our million dollar model that you can deploy in your business. And I’ll walk you through that on day one. On day two, you’re going to be thrown into the mix with our existing clients who are coming in and you’ll get a sense of what that all looks like.

So, it’s going to be two days in Toronto. The dates are June 26th and 27th. I believe we’re half sold out right now, so if you want to join us, I think we’ve got 20 spots total. I think there’s only 10 left. If you want to join us, hit me up. Actually, here’s what to do. All the information is over at healthpreneurgroup.com/2day. So, the number two and then D-A-Y. All the info’s there. You can see what we’re going to be doing. If it’s of interest to you and you’re serious, then fill out the application and I’ll get back to you within about a day or so.

Two things: Number one, you have to have an existing coaching business. If you are pre-revenue or you just got your certification to be a health coach, this is not going to happen. Okay? So, you have to have an existing coaching business. You have to be generating revenue, and you have to be working your clients.

If you meet those criteria, than chances are you’d probably be a really good fit for what we’re doing in Toronto. So, that’s the deal. So, check that out right now, healthpreneurgroup.com/2 D-A-Y. And apply today if you want to join us for some hands-on help surrounded by other amazing coaches in our space. And if you really want to move your business to the next level and a lot faster, this would be a great opportunity for you.

So in the meantime, I hope you had an amazing day. Thanks for tuning in. As always continue to get out there and do your awesomeness, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

Transcription

Yuri Elkaim:                         Hey, guys. How’s it going? Yuri here with you, once again. Welcome back to the show. I’m very, very excited to be speaking with our guest today. His name is Chris Guerriero. Chris and I have known each other loosely for maybe 10-plus years. I think we met in a pool at an event eight years ago, really briefly, and then we reconnected recently. I’m like, “Dude, we’ve got to have you on our podcast, because you’re doing some amazing things.”

Introducing Chris, his motivators, and his journey

Yuri Elkaim:                         Before we formally bring him in and have him speak, I want to give you a bit of context as to who Chris is, and why you need to listen to him, and this episode specifically. Chris has built four eight-figure companies. That’s right. There’s a lot of zeros behind that. He’s been around for a while, done some amazing things.

Yuri Elkaim:                         He’s an advisor, investor, and equity holder in companies across a variety of industries, including health, medical, digital advertising, legal, and real estate. He’s been featured on Bloomberg, and in Success Magazine, and in Entrepreneur, as a top entrepreneur of our time. He’s also a best-selling author and host of the Built to Grow show.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Chris and I both started off in the health and fitness space, and he’s been doing some amazing stuff now helping companies scale, and doing some really, really big things. Chris, really pumped to have you on the show. Welcome.

Chris Guerriero:                Yuri, I’m stoked to be here. Thank you very much for having me.

Yuri Elkaim:                         We’re going to be talking about how to build a winning leadership team in this episode. This is what you’re amazing at doing. This is how you, amongst other things, help companies grow and scale. I think it’s really important for our listeners to really understand this. No matter what level of business you’re at, this is, at some point, a discussion you’re probably going to be having with yourself, or people around you.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Before we dive into that, Chris, what’s something that very few people know about you?

Chris Guerriero:                What’s something very few people know about me? Gosh. Here. I was born to be a dad. That is my focus in life above anything else. When we get a chance to talk about business, I love it. That is a passion of mine. Growing companies, helping other companies grow, it’s a big passion of mine.

Chris Guerriero:                However, underneath everything I do … I’m doing this for my family. Everything that I do is built on my core competency of my love of being a dad. That’s probably it. It has nothing to do with anything anybody’s here to hear, so I apologize for throwing that out there, but that’s something most people don’t hear me say.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Totally. I can definitely agree with that. Another question to follow up on that is, what do you think is more challenging: raising great kids, or building a great company?

Chris Guerriero:                Raising great kids is far more difficult. I can systematize everything. We have processes to predict obstacles at different levels of growth in companies. We have processes, and I have enough experience, to onboard great leadership teams, and develop them, and motivate them, and create a culture inside of organizations, no matter what size, that scales them rapidly. But I can sit down with my teenager and be bewildered in some of the things that they bring back. It is difficult. I read more books, probably, on being a father than I do on business.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s great.

Chris Guerriero:                I write books in business, but I can’t write books about being a father.

Yuri Elkaim:                         If only there was a manual … I mean, there’s no one-size-fits-all, right?

Chris Guerriero:                There’s not, yeah.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah. I’m a big believer that parenting and entrepreneurship are two of the biggest spiritual growth journeys we can be on.

Chris Guerriero:                Yeah.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Cool. Talk to us about how you got to this stage. Where did Chris Guerriero start? Where did shit hit the fan? And how did you evolve into doing what you’re doing now?

Chris Guerriero:                I’m writing a note down of stuff that I want to talk to you guys about. I’m sorry.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, that’s okay.

Chris Guerriero:                Where did I start, man? I started as a personal fitness trainer. I started with this goal of helping the greatest number of people possible to achieve their quote-unquote “health goals,” right? But that particular mantra, that force, that passion followed us through every single company and every single industry that I’ve built since then.

Chris Guerriero:                As a personal fitness trainer, I was able to help a very few people, right? Dozens of people. Then I grew a personal training company up and down the East Coast, which had over 150 personal trainers, and we were able to help hundreds of people with that, right?

Chris Guerriero:                Then I went from there, because they were all independent contractors, and you can’t really … It’s like a constant struggle to keep independent contractors rallied around a passion. It was difficult. So I took that and I went into a health club. I started my first health club. Grew that into a chain of health clubs on the East Coast, and went from being able to help hundreds of people in the personal training company, to tens of thousands of people.

Chris Guerriero:                However, I sold that company in 2004, which was probably a little bit … just under 15 years that I was in that industry. I sold that company. Wrote my first book right before I sold that company, and utilized the same tactics that I used to really get the word out big for our health clubs in the online world, to get the word out big for our books.

Chris Guerriero:                Where most authors sell a couple thousand books in their entire lifetime, we sold 60,000 copies in the first 60 days … 319,000 copies in the first year. We’ve sold over a million copies of the book, so far. We’re really able to get out there and help a lot more people. It turned into a TV show. It turned into a lot of other books.

Chris Guerriero:                We built several good companies in the health industry. But that attracted to us a lot of other businesses that wanted to know what the hell we were doing to grow so rapidly. We started helping other companies doing that. We built this branding company, which then helped politicians to get their word out faster. It helps Hollywood producers to get the word out to fill movie seats … seats inside the movie theaters, when their movies come out. It helped us to really branch out, and help people in great industries.

Chris Guerriero:                I got into a venture capital firm, also, which I’m one of the partners in a relatively good-sized venture capital firm. In there, my core competency is, after a company goes through all of the rigamarole of getting funded by us, I’m the one who goes in to the company and I look at their systems, their people, their processes, their culture, and I help to restructure them for growth.

Chris Guerriero:                Because if we invest a couple million dollars into them, then within three to five years, I want to be able to get them double that. I want to get them $4 million more productive, so that we could take our initial investment back, and still maintain an active ownership in there, so that they are now a growing asset inside of our portfolio, right?

Chris Guerriero:                I’m sorry. Long story short, I started wanting to help a lot of people. Now, instead of helping individual people, I’m able to help companies … My own, as well as a few others, who are honest, ethical, moral, legal, and really doing great things in their world … Help them to reach out and touch even more and more people. Now, we’re just touching people in every industry, which is a good feeling.

What Chris looks for as an investor, advisor, or equity-holder

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s awesome. How do you, as a advisor, venture capitalist, investor … How do you look at, or what are the things that you look for in a company to be like, “Yeah, this is a company that I want to be a part of,” in terms of helping them grow and move to the next level?

Chris Guerriero:                It has to be a fit with my core competencies. There’s three different levels here. I am either an owner, or a partner, right? So I’m the owner.

Chris Guerriero:                An investor … completely different thing. I’m putting money in, and I expect … I want to be able to go in there, bring in a leadership team if I have to, change SOPs … I mean, I really want to be able to get my hands in there, use my core competencies, and get them to the next level.

Chris Guerriero:                I need to know that everything that I know from developing my companies, I could plug in here, get them to the next level, and it’s an investment. I’m putting money in. I need the investment back.

Chris Guerriero:                Then the third part is as an advisor, where growing companies are paying me. I need to know, before I take somebody on into this … It’s called Club 28 … That my core competencies, after growing my companies, and also investing in these other companies, I can take what I know from here, proven systems, the people, the processes, whatever it is … plug them in over here and help them grow.

Chris Guerriero:                Because my brand is on here. Right? My investment here, I’m getting paid up front, but it’s my brand. I can’t be part of a company, and have them decline, because that would look really obviously crappy for me.

Yuri Elkaim:                         What does the “Club 28” signify? Is that the number of people in it, or-

Chris Guerriero:                That’s the number of companies that I’m able to help in one year. My week looks like this. I believe everybody listening really should have a formal schedule. Maybe not as tight as mine is. I’m a little bit anal about this. But they should have a formal schedule for what the heck gets done every single week, so that they know … They can put their finger on that metric and say, “Yes, I did good this week.” Right? “I pushed things forward this week.”

Chris Guerriero:                My day goes like this … From 9:00 to 9:30, Emily, who’s been my assistant for 17 years now … Emily delivers to me my numbers. My metrics. My key metrics for each one of the companies that I own, or am a partner in. There’s three to five key metrics in every company.

Chris Guerriero:                I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, when I look at those metrics, that something’s good, or something’s not good. Right? Between 9:00 and 9:30, I’m taking notes. It’s called “Numbers and Notes.” I get my numbers. I take notes. I could look through all of my companies, and I could know, “Shit’s good,” or “Shit’s hitting the fan.” Right? “I need to talk to them about this.”

Chris Guerriero:                From 9:30 to 12:30, about, I am in meetings with my leadership teams for each one of those companies. Right? Every single call has my leadership team … For my class action noticing firm, we’re on the phone. For my branding company, we’re on the phone. For the health company, we’re on the phone.

Chris Guerriero:                Those meetings will last anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes, depending on the company, depending on the level of growth they’re having, depending on if they’re having promotions, or a launch, or whatever it is. They need 10 to 30 minutes, and I’m able to fit them all in during this time. It’s just the leadership team for this one company, and then I hang up, and I go to the next one.

Chris Guerriero:                I’m talking about three things, mostly. I’m talking about what … Everybody on the team, we’ll go around … “What have you accomplished so far?” It’s either yesterday, the last 24 hours, or the last week so far. Like today is Thursday, so we would be talking about “What have you accomplished this week so far?”

Chris Guerriero:                Then “What is your top five today?” Right? We live on top fives. Top five most important uses of our time, so that one of the main questions that people ask themselves in my companies, every single day, many, many times during the day. The same question that I ask myself, “What is the most important use of my time right now?” Right? That’s coming from our top five list.

Chris Guerriero:                We look at what they did. We look at what they’re doing right now. “What’s my top five most important things today?” That top five must be in alignment with that company’s top five. So that the company is constantly moving forward.

Chris Guerriero:                Then the third thing that we talk about is “Is there a rock in your path? Is there some kind of obstacle that either I, or somebody else on the team, or the team together can just blow up for you, and make your life a lot easier today?” Right? That’s it. That’s 9:30 to 12:30, about.

Chris Guerriero:                Then from 12:30 to 3:00, I work in my companies. I’m an employee of each one of my companies. I work … I have core competencies. I’m really good at a few things. I push things forward doing what I’m really good at during that time.

Chris Guerriero:                And 3:00, I’m gone. That is my day, every day, except for Wednesday … Which, I’m sorry. That whole long thing to answer your question. Club 28 is 28 companies that I can work with. On Wednesdays, and a little bit of Thursday morning, I am on the call with companies that are inside of Club 28, which are companies doing maybe a couple of million dollars a year to a couple billion dollars a month.

Chris Guerriero:                They’re good, strong companies that are aggressive growth. Companies who, if I went in, put my core competencies behind them, they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that we, together, can help blow them the hell up.

Chris Guerriero:                We have an average growth … I mean, I could go through … I’d have to look for the exact stats, but I think we had about 218% growth average for the companies that I worked with last year. A little more than 200% growth the year before. 100 and something percent growth … high hundreds the year before that. Again, 200 …

Chris Guerriero:               We average quite- a substantial amount of growth every single year, because when you have a good company … a company who’s really good … honest, ethical, moral, legal … doing good stuff, and then you add this gasoline. The systems, the knowledge, the experience that I have. The relationships that I have … into them, then, I mean, what … Good shit happens.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Totally.

Chris Guerriero:                Right? That’s what my Wednesday is, and I’m juiced at the end of that day. So much so that it’s tough for me to go to sleep.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s great. Well, that’s when you know you’re doing your unique genius, is that it energizes you instead of draining you. That’s great.

Yuri Elkaim:                         In terms of building out a winning leadership team … in terms of hiring people … for most companies, everyone starts off as a solo entrepreneur, or a partnership in some way, shape, or form. At what point does that first hire happen? Who, usually, is that first hire?

How to structure a process org chart

Chris Guerriero:                Well, okay. Good question. I’m going to answer it two ways. First way is, what was my first hire? Because I want to share what I believe everybody should do, but I also want to share what I did, because often there’s a disconnect. You probably learn from watching sometimes more than from listening.

Chris Guerriero:                What I did was, I had a mentor when I was first starting out, and I asked him that question, “If you had to do it all over again?” Right? It’s the most common question that you ask a real successful person probably. “If you had to do it all over again, and you were where I am right now, what would you do?”

Chris Guerriero:                His answer was, “I’d hire two people. I would hire an assistant … A really good assistant, and I’d hire a gofer. Somebody who would come to my house, pick up the hose … They’d cut my grass. They would do the stuff that I don’t need to do, so that I could be productive with my time.” Right? The assistant, their only job is to take shit off your desk, that you don’t need to do, so that you could be doing what you’re really good at to scale this company. That’s what I did.

Chris Guerriero:                Now, what I tell people to do, and what we do inside of each one of our organizations now … If I were actually starting a company now, this is exactly what we do. We create an org chart. It’s called a Process Org Chart. It’s not the most common org chart that most people know. It’s a Process Org Chart.

Chris Guerriero:                The Process Org Chart can be done no matter what level you’re at right now. Whether you’re just starting out, or your just breaking the million dollar mark, or you’re trying to break the 10, 25, 50, 100 million dollar mark. It doesn’t really make a difference. If you do this, this will help you understand if you’re overstaffed, or if you’re understaffed, and who to hire.

Chris Guerriero:                You literally create an org chart with … the boxes on the org chart represent the most important departments, or the most important processes that need to happen to get from where you are to the next level. Not to get you from $1 million to $10 million, or from $1 million to $100 million. To get you from $1 million to $2 million, or from $10 million to $12 million, right? To the next level.

Chris Guerriero:                Make that perfect organizational chart. Not with names, with the processes. This one might be a cold traffic … I may need cold traffic. I may need somebody who’s really great at cold traffic. Then, underneath there, I’m going to put the bullet points for the most important processes that have to happen in there. I’ll create the entire company.

Chris Guerriero:                My name may initially be in every one of those boxes. That’s possible. Or I may put vendors names in there, because I don’t have enough capital yet to hire anybody else. I don’t care. But those things need to happen, in order to get me from here to here.

Chris Guerriero:                Then I look at that, and I say, “Well, if I were to take my name out of one of these boxes, and that would free up a lot of my time, so that I could do what I’m really good at, which box should that be?” That’s the first hire. Most of the time, we default back to what I actually did early on, because most of the time, it is a great assistant.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yep. Totally. How does somebody who is, again, building the early stages of their company, and they’re trying to think … “Okay, I’m at $100K. I want to get to $500K, or $1 million.” Whatever that might be. How do they even know what the org chart might even look like. I guess you only know what you know, and you don’t know what you don’t know. How does someone who doesn’t have the luxury of your guidance or advice figure out what those seats are on the org chart, in the first place?

Chris Guerriero:                Well, I would start with a Google search, I guess. It’s pretty simple to say, “Here’s a company that is similar to mine.” Right? Or the next level up from me. “It’s my next-level wish list.” If your company’s doing $1 million, and you want to be a $12 million company, and you see a company that is doing things that you believe is a $12 million range, then you Google them, and you say, “Well, what can I learn? What do I think they’re doing here?”

Chris Guerriero:                You go to LinkedIn, and you look at their team. Because LinkedIn is like an open book for every single person and their job description inside of each company. It’s amazing what a resource that is that nobody even uses. We use it all the time. We steal people from other companies in a great, honest way, right?

Yuri Elkaim:                         Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Chris Guerriero:                From there. Here, I’ll give you an example. One of the things that I would do, is if I wanted a new assistant, which I don’t. In case Emily’s listening. I would figure out the job description. I’d figure out five, or six, or ten bullet points of exactly what I need, right?

Chris Guerriero:                Then I’d write down on another sheet of paper where my company is, and where we’re growing to. Right? I want to make that a marketing piece. I want to make that really motivating. That if I said it to anybody, they would say, “Oh, this person started here, and they’re growing to here? That’s pretty impressive.”

Chris Guerriero:                Then I want to go to LinkedIn, and I want to find companies that have already done … They’ve already built what I want to build. I go on their LinkedIn profile, and I’ll find out “Who’s the executive assistants?”

Chris Guerriero:                I’ll look at them, and I’ll say … I’ll send them an e-mail, and I’ll say, “Hey … Hi. This is who I am. I am CEO of Blank Company. We’re a small company right now. We’re just starting out. This is what we’ve accomplished so far. This is where we’re going. The one missing piece to this puzzle is an executive assistant to me. I see that you are doing that for a company that’s very similar. I know like-minded people hang out with like-minded people. So if you know anybody who would be a good fit for this, I would love it if you would reach out, and just let me know, and I would personally love to speak to that person. If you have any questions, feel free to ping me here. I’ll jump on the phone with you for 15 minutes, and I’ll answer your questions. I’d love this.” That’s the end of it.

Chris Guerriero:                Now, you’re going to get two things. You’re going to get people who ignore it, or just say, “Hey, I don’t know anybody. Thanks for reaching out.” Number two, you’re going to have somebody who says, “Hey, yeah. I’d like 15 minutes. Let me just talk to you about this.” I know they’re not happy in their job there. Right? I know that they want to be associated with a growing company. Maybe they feel stagnant over there. Or maybe they just know somebody who they can refer. But if I send that to 10 companies, I’m going to get a good person.

Leadership teams and when a COO or CFO comes on board

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s awesome. That’s really good. Cool. Let’s move up the journey of business. So where we’ll get into a couple million in revenue, for instance. At what point, as the CEO or the leader of your business … I guess two questions. Number one, does every entrepreneur have to be the CEO of their company? And two, at what point do you really start to think about building out your leadership team? Your c-suites. At what point does that make sense financially, as well as growth-wise?

Chris Guerriero:                It depends on the industry, and what your needs are. I would say it’s pretty common that at the $10 million mark, or give or take 20%. With all of the numbers I’m giving here, give or take 20%. At the $10 million mark, it’s very common for someone to say, “I need somebody who is going to be able to run the organization of this.” It’s normally a COO who is a first c-suite introduction.

Chris Guerriero:                After that, often, it’s a CFO. Somebody who can actually handle … That’s not at the $10 million mark. That may be at the $20-25 million mark. Because prior to the $10 million mark, we’re going to have maybe an internal bookkeeper who starts working with us, but still working with an external accounting team.

Chris Guerriero:                $10 million or so, somewhere around there, maybe we bring an accountant in. Maybe. I mean, I probably still wouldn’t bring an in-house, at the $10 million mark. But certainly I would have a very close relationship with an accountant. I mean, they would know me real well. And they’d know everything about my industry.

Chris Guerriero:                $20 million mark, maybe we have an in-house, or we’re talking about a CFO. Right? That’s probably as specific as I could get without knowing the industry and the actual company.

Yuri Elkaim:                         What are … for those that don’t really know, how much is … if you wanted to poach someone from another good company in your space, through LinkedIn for instance … I shouldn’t say “poach.” “Invite” may be a better word … What type of salary are we looking at? Just so people have a ballpark of where they need to be revenue-wise in order to make sense of this?

Chris Guerriero:                Hey, let’s attack that from a different standpoint, if it’s okay?

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah.

Chris Guerriero:                Because we have people approach us on a regular basis for jobs, and they already have great positions. The reason why we have people approaching us, and the reason why, if we reach out to somebody, they listen to us, is because we’re not poaching. We not going … By the way, not a bad word. I love the word. But that’s not what we’re doing.

Chris Guerriero:                What we’re doing is building a culture. When we build a culture … A culture starts with values. We could go through … I could even share some of my values with you, if you want. But we start with our values, and the values are my values, right? They start with me, as the leader of the company, because the values of the company I’ve got to live, eat, bleed, and breathe them. Everybody who meets me has to say, “Oh, yeah. That’s why one of their values is this, because that’s just him.”

Chris Guerriero:                Then everybody that we attract, they’ve got to buy into those values. They either have to have them ingrained, or they have to believe them. When they get there, they’re like, “Yeah, I get that. I want to live like that.” Then that’s the way they live. When they talk to our customers, talk to our prospects, when they talk to potential investors or whatever … When they talk to each other … The shit comes out. The values come out in them, right? They want them.

Chris Guerriero:                Because of that, when we reach out to people, there’s a culture in here now. Because of that, when we reach out to people, it is a culture thing. They’re coming for the culture. They’re coming because they want to be part of this growing culture, not just because there’s a number associated with it. If we go to people with a number, then those people are seeking numbers, and they will leave us.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Sure. Yeah. I mean, with that said, is there a ballpark? Are we looking at … Because I mean, there still is a point where people are like, “Culturally, this makes a lot of sense,” but this obviously has to meet their financial needs within a range. For a good COO to move from … I don’t know. $10 to whatever million, is that … What are we talking about, $500,000 hire per year?

Chris Guerriero:                No.

Yuri Elkaim:                         No?

Chris Guerriero:                COO?

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah.

Chris Guerriero:                A COO. It depends on the industry. There’s a lot of reasons why somebody will work for a company in a c-level position. The great majority … Let me put it this way. It depends on the industry. It depends on where in America, or in the world you are, because of the economic environment. I could get somebody for $150,000 in a c position in the mid-states, but if you’re going to where I am, on the East Coast, or the West Coast, that exact same position in the exact same industry is going to be two-and-a-half times that, pretty easily.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, that makes sense.

Chris Guerriero:                However, if they’re coming … I could get somebody here for far less money, if there is an equity position. For a great COO … Not a CFO. I would never give a CFO equity. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say “never.” I have never. A COO, I’ve given equity. Small percentage. And it is an equity not in the company … They don’t have voting privileges. They don’t have stock.

Chris Guerriero:                What they have is … What you find is, if you’re reaching out to somebody, and you’re saying, “Hey, you’re a COO there. Come be a COO here.” You’ve got to put a carrot at the end of the stick that is going to be something that fulfills something that they really need.

Chris Guerriero:                Here’s what most of them need … They grew a company, and they’re getting a salary, and they may get a bonus. But they don’t own a piece of the company. Over here … “You already know what you did over there. You do the same shit over here, and you’re going to get a piece of the equity. The equity starts the day you sign the contract, and it has nothing to do with the money we’ve been making. You own a piece of the equity in the growth of the company from this point forward. Because this is what you’re effecting.”

Chris Guerriero:                It may be one percent of the equity this way forward. “If you stop … If for some reason you no longer are employed here, your equity stops. But if for some reason we sell this asset while you’re here, if you have one percent equity, you get one percent equity in the sale, also.” That’s such a big carrot for the right person.

Not attracting, filtering, and onboarding properly

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s awesome. That’s really good. What do you see … Regardless of the level of the company, what are maybe three mistakes that companies make in hiring or building out their leadership team?

Chris Guerriero:                Hmm. Well, I don’t know if I have three. Let’s go through this. Maybe I have one. Maybe I have 20. Let me think.

Chris Guerriero:                Three mistakes … Not attracting the right person. Not filtering them before they come in, right? The filtering process, the interview process, is vital. Right? We need them to jump through some hoops before they even talk to anybody. We need them talk to somebody in the company to see if they’re a fit. We need them to talk to the CEO after we know they’re a fit. Right? And we need to exhaust them in those interviews, so that they’re there so long that they begin to tell you the truth, right?

Chris Guerriero:                We need to onboard them properly. One of the biggest mistakes is that a company says, “Yeah, we’re so damn good, we not only know how to find the right person and filter them, then what we do is we have this great training program where … It’s called the onboarding process. We bring them in. They meet with people. They freaking get this great training, and then they get on with their lives. Some of them last. Some of them don’t.”

Chris Guerriero:                They want to know, “Why would I put so much money into this training, because so many of these people don’t last afterwards?” Here’s the biggest problem. The problem is, when you’re training somebody during the onboarding process, they’re drinking through a fire hose. You are giving them everything, and you’re expecting them to remember everything.

Chris Guerriero:                Then here’s what happens … They get in. They’re real excited. They go to this training. They start, and then they plummet a little bit. They come up a little bit, and they plummet. Their first 30, 60, 90 … even 120 days … is this roller-coaster. Because they don’t remember everything in their training sessions.

Chris Guerriero:                After everybody gets trained, we throw them into the fire for two weeks. Then we bring them back to a retraining, which is only a day or two. Right? But during that retraining, they’re touching on stuff, and they’re like, “Oh, now I get this! Now that I saw it live, now I get this.” They come back in, and now they’re success trajectory is much more fluid.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s awesome.

Chris Guerriero:                There’s a lot of-

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s good, because now they can … if they’ve experienced it, it makes sense for them, because they’ve already been through that process. Are you typically … with this type of onboarding training, would it be real specific, or is it more like a company cultural thing, and expecting those people to be really proficient in their area already? Or is it a bit of both?

Chris Guerriero:                Both. It’s … Well, it’s both, but the culture always comes first, prior to them even going through the specific training. The culture will be part of the interview process. Part of the interview process, depending on the size of the company, but let’s just say we have a company that’s doing a couple of million dollars, so they have some staff. They even have an office, right? This is not where everybody’s virtual … They’re working from their house.

Chris Guerriero:                They have an office. You’re doing a couple million dollars, or whatever the case is. You have somebody come in, they go through meeting a few people. They’re still doing interview process. I will take them in, and I will put them into a room with the rest of the team.

Chris Guerriero:                I’ll have the rest of the team just hang out with them, and just talk with them. I want the team to feel like there’s a fit. I want them to feel like there’s a fit with the team. I want there to be a room where it’s not a distraction to them. It’s not a work room. But they get a chance to socialize.

Chris Guerriero:                That’s big. That’s the culture fit. If they pass that, we don’t need to train them on the culture. We know that they’re a fit.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah.

Chris Guerriero:                The rest, the onboarding is really specific training for their position.

Delegating tasks daily and team management

Yuri Elkaim:                         Cool. What about TPIs, or metrics that each new hire or individual in the team or company is accountable to? Is that something that you guys employ? Is it one number, or are there a few? What does that look like, typically?

Chris Guerriero:                Well, the company always has three to five key metrics. Inside of each person, however, they have metrics, and that’ll vary. That’ll vary. Depending on the department that they are in. But there’s metrics for everything.

Chris Guerriero:                Here’s where a lot of people think that this is a gray area. Everybody understands what a salesperson’s metrics might be. Right? Here’s the number of phone calls. Here’s the number of contacts. Here’s the number of closes. Here’s the retention. The specific key metrics that most salespeople understand.

Chris Guerriero:                But when you’re an entrepreneur, and you’re looking at this, and you’re saying, “Yeah, but I have an assistant. I mean, how is there a key metrics … What are the key metrics for an executive assistant?”

Chris Guerriero:                There’s got to be key metrics for every single person in here. Those key metrics may be amount of projects that they take off my desk. It might be the amount of time they take to handle a challenge inside the organization.

Chris Guerriero:                It might be how long do you take between … to get information out before one of our team meetings? We need, our team, for our daily meetings, to have their invite, along with what they should come prepared with, an hour before the meeting, if not more. Right? If it’s less than an hour before the meeting, it’s fruitless. If it’s an hour before the meeting, that seems to be the sweet spot where the meeting’s on everybody’s mind, and they have time to prepare, right?

Chris Guerriero:                There’s metrics for everybody, and it makes it very simple when you know what I expect of you, and what you can expect of me, everybody gets along so much better.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah. That’s good. Because I think one of the big challenges for a lot of companies, and ours included, is really identifying within an operational role, what are some of the metrics? You mentioned the speed of implementation, or the turnaround time on certain things. But it’s a little more gray than “How many sales did you bring in?” Right? It’s a little bit less cut-and-dried.

Yuri Elkaim:                         But I think, for me, what’s helped is sometimes just getting creative and sitting down and thinking “What is meaningful for our company?” Even if it’s not a standard KPI, or whatever. And just thinking through that. Because I think one of the biggest problems that I’ve had in the past is bringing on team members who weren’t clear about their role, and what they were accountable to. I think … obviously, you can correct me if I’m wrong, everyone wants to know how to win. Right? How they win in their role. I think the right KPIs can really help with that.

Chris Guerriero:                Yeah. Hey, listen. Our job. Our job … yours, mine, the entrepreneur’s job, is to make everybody underneath us look like rock stars. That’s the end of it. I want systems to be awesome, so that the person using the system looks like a rock star. I want the person to feel comfortable tweaking that system constantly, so that it stays up-to-date, so that person keeps looking like a rock star, right?

Chris Guerriero:                The only way we can do this is we have regular meetings. We have daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual meetings. During our annual meeting, it’s pivotal for the rest of the year. Anybody who doesn’t have meetings with their team, I believe you could … It could be a game changer.

Chris Guerriero:                When you do these properly. It’s a tough transition in the beginning, if you’ve never had team meetings. Because if all of a sudden you have team meetings, people think you’re micromanaging them. But when done properly, it opens everybody’s eyes up, and it tells them exactly what the target is. Everybody’s … Now you’re a team working towards the target, and it’s crazy fun.

Chris Guerriero:                But our annual meeting, I really only have a couple of jobs at this annual meeting. We get everybody together, and we’ll put the … This is too big of a conversation for what we’re doing right now, but I’ll give you the 30,000-foot view.

Chris Guerriero:                We get on a giant whiteboard. I may put a big number at the top of that whiteboard. That might be, let’s just say, for argument’s sake, it’s $25 million. That’s what we need to hit at the end of this year. Then, underneath there, we’ll put the top three or four revenue sources. It might be this service number one, product number one over here, right?

Chris Guerriero:                Then every single person who has a stake in helping us grow that … every employee, every independent contractor, every vendor, will be there. Either in the room, or on the TV screens behind me, in our war room. Everybody’s part of this meeting, and everybody brainstorms on the first product or service.

Chris Guerriero:                We go over every single action that needs to take place. It’s going to take hours to get this down. The contents writer will say, “Well, we did 20 articles, and 20 this, and 20 that last year. We had four sales funnels for this. We’ll just double that, and we’ll be able to do this.”

Chris Guerriero:                Our cold traffic guy will say, “But if we’re going to do that, we’re going to have to not just use Google. We’re also going to have to use Facebook. In order to do that, we’re going to have to have all of these tasks.” In the end, we’re going to be left with this whiteboard that looks like somebody vomited on it, with millions of tasks for this … millions is an exaggeration. Hundreds of tasks to reach just this one bubble. This one product that was here. Then we’ll do it for the other two or three that we have left.

Chris Guerriero:                We have all of these tasks, and then Emily’s job will be to go up there and take one task down, and drag it over to somebody’s list. We have a column for the name of every single person who is on our team … employee, independent contractor, or vendor. Doesn’t make a difference.

Chris Guerriero:                Everybody who is in that meeting, or who has part of helping us reach that $25 million is on that. They have a column, and we drag every single task over. They take ownership of it. They say, “Yes. I’m going to do that. Put that on my list. Definitely.”

Chris Guerriero:                Everything from there, every single task … So we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if we do every task on that whiteboard, we will meet or exceed the number for that first bubble. If we meet or exceed the number for each one of those bubbles? Each one of those products or services? We will meet or exceed the $25 million.

Chris Guerriero:                Now, it just comes down to managing these tasks. Everybody has their list of tasks, which may be 100-150 for the entire year, to do, to do this. Then, the person’s job … Let’s just call it me. Chris’s job, I have a list of 150 things that I need to get done this year.

Chris Guerriero:                My job, every single day, is to choose the top five things, our top five list, every single person in our companies run their departments with a top five list every single … a daily top five list. They take the top five most important things from that list, and they belt them the hell out that day. Right?

Chris Guerriero:                That’s what our meetings are based on that you and I started talking about earlier. Our daily meetings. We go over “What did you do already? What are you doing today? What’s on your top five list?” As long as they’re taking the top five list from that project sheet, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that everybody is doing tasks that bring the company towards out top five goals. Right? If all of those tasks that are on that board get done, we will meet or exceed those numbers, and we, as a team, celebrate.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s great. What happens in cases where this type of planning is taking place, and the person who is … or the team is putting stuff out there that is maybe untested, unproven, and maybe their climbing the wrong ladder. All right? They go in, they set a goal, and the strategy or tactics to reach that goal … They’re not too sure if it’s going to work, and then they deploy it for a couple of weeks, and then they’re like, “You know what? This is obviously not working.”

Yuri Elkaim:                         I guess the question is, as a leader, there’s an element of, I guess, foresight and predictiveness, I think, can be powerful. But what happens in cases where maybe someone doesn’t have that? Where they’re just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks?

Chris Guerriero:                Well … You’re talking about the initial actions that we put on that whiteboard?

Yuri Elkaim:                         Sure. Yeah. Say, “Hey, we’re going to do $25 million by doing this, and this, and this.” Maybe some of those things, they don’t move the needle at all.

Chris Guerriero:                Yeah, so definitely there’s going to be red flags on there. The challenge … Our job is to make sure that everybody on our team earned their right to be there, right? Having a bad hire in there is a virus, and it will screw things up.

Chris Guerriero:                However, the solution to that, usually, to make it as clean as possible, right? We’re not going to be perfect on this, which means we have to be flexible in how we’re reaching things throughout the year. But to get as perfect as possible, everybody’s got to be in that room.

Chris Guerriero:                Doing that one thing helps so that our paid media people can see the mistakes that our content writer might make. Or our ops guy, because of his experience, may see the problems that somebody else might make.

Chris Guerriero:                When somebody is suggesting an action that goes up here, or a task that goes up there, we are all talking about it, and saying, “Well, if you’re going to do that, then I need to do this, this, this, and this.” Or the coder’s going to get up there and say, “The last time you opened up traffic for Facebook, everything got shut down. Right? We need to then be able to build this number of funnels out, which means we’re going to need this hosting, and these accounts, and this, and this, and this.” All of those things go on there.

Chris Guerriero:                Now, if shit hits the fan as we’re implementing those things, then it needs to come up. That becomes something that we are able to predict only because we have our daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual meetings, right?

Chris Guerriero:                The annual meeting … all those things get broken down, and taken care of daily. When we hit an obstacle, if we can’t push through it within a couple of days, then we know we’ve got to be flexible and have a contingency plan built in there. But we’ll know about it as a team, and we’ll hit that obstacle full force.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Once … I can’t remember if it was an article in the New York Times, or somewhere like that … There’s a number of different traits of great leaders. One of them was “stubborn on vision, flexible on strategy.” Like-

Chris Guerriero:                Love that.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s so good, because there’s so many times where, especially now, where things are changing so quickly with technology, and algorithm changes … I think if you’re so stubborn on like, “No, this is the way we’ve always done it.” We saw how Blockbuster ended up, right?

Delegating tasks daily and team management

Yuri Elkaim:                         Wicked. One last question for you, and then I’m going to … actually, I didn’t tell you about the Rapid Five that I’m going to throw your way in a couple moments. But so you start a company because you love doing something. You want to, obviously, live the entrepreneurial dream.

Yuri Elkaim:                         At some level of the journey, the business becomes very different from how it started. In a lot of cases, people who initially enjoyed the creative, marketing, salesy side now become managers. They’re managing people, and they don’t necessarily like that as much.

Yuri Elkaim:                         How does somebody identify … “You know what? Maybe I just want to create content, and I don’t want to run this company?” How do they … At what point do they step down, bring someone else in, and just do their thing within the company as it grows?

Chris Guerriero:                At what point? Hopefully, before they go through burnout. But it’s rarely that case. I mean, we could talk more intelligently, I think about solutions to that, than about how you can predict it, because most people can’t predict that until it’s too late.

Chris Guerriero:                Solutions are take on a partner … Number one solution, without a doubt. Take on a partner who has a core competency that is going to truly be able to help. But also the buy-in. There’s got to be … It doesn’t always have to be financial buy-in, but there’s got to be enough skin in the game so that you both feel comfortable with this.

Chris Guerriero:                Then there’s got to be the right paperwork in place, if you are going to take on a partner. A real partnership contract. A real operating agreement. Real partners.

Chris Guerriero:                Onboarding somebody who has a strong skillset. If we are at the level that we just now know we hate this. I don’t love this anymore, but I have a lot of revenue coming in, then I would onboard somebody. If I don’t have a lot of revenue coming in, I may partner with somebody. Right?

Chris Guerriero:                Because if there’s somebody who hates what their doing, because they don’t want to do what you’re doing, and you hate what you’re doing because you don’t want to do what they’re doing … perfect match. That’s why you go to these seminars and these events, right? To make friends, and talk with people.

Chris Guerriero:                If I have enough revenue coming in, I’m going to onboard somebody. If I’m at this level, and I know I don’t like it … I still love to build stuff, but I don’t like it? Then you sell. Right? This word “sell” is taboo to so many people, especially in the internet marketing industry, because they don’t understand how to sell a company. Because they never built a real company.

Chris Guerriero:                The strategy here becomes making your company sellable, and during the process of making your company sellable, you make your company so much more effective that you become far more ROI-positive. Far more profitable. Which is a great process to go through.

Yuri Elkaim:                         With that said … and I totally agree with that, because … With that said, what is something from day one … You literally just set up your corporation, what’s something from day one every entrepreneur should do in their business, whether or not they want to sell, but just with the intention that if I did eventually, this needs to be in place from day one? Or at least the habit of whatever it needs to be?

Chris Guerriero:                Day one, first thing we do, figure out who’s going to acquire us. If I know who’s going to acquire us … Which means two things. Number one, who is acquiring companies like mine? Number two, who has deep enough pockets to afford me? Right?

Chris Guerriero:                I find that, then I find what do I love doing that is a perfect fit to their puzzle? Then I build what I believe is a perfect fit to that puzzle, and then I create a relationship with them. I let them know that I’m on the radar, and that we are building something that is a perfect fit to their puzzle.

Chris Guerriero:                There is, in most large companies, an acquisition manager. Right? A person, guy or woman, in charge of buying companies. That is part of their growth model. Part of our growth model is acquiring other companies, right? That is part of how we grow.

Chris Guerriero:                Now, we’ve done this lots of different times, and we have a specific set of criteria. I’m struggling to say this, because I don’t want to share the criteria with you.

Yuri Elkaim:                         You don’t have to.

Chris Guerriero:                We have specific criteria that we look for, and that when we know that somebody’s on that criteria, they are on our radar, right? We want to create a relationship with them.

Chris Guerriero:                But if they … or somebody reaches out to us, and says, “Hey, listen. I know you’ve acquired companies like ours before. What do I need to do? This is what we have. What would I need to do? Am I a wet dream for your, or am I a piece of crap to you? What do I need to do to be appealing to you?” That’s pretty easy.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Cool. That’s awesome. That’s not something I would have thought of. That’s … Thank you for sharing that. That’s great.

Chris Guerriero:                Yeah. Absolutely.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Chris, this has been amazing. We could talk all day about this stuff, but I do want to make sure that our listeners know where to find you. Guys, ChrisGuerriero.com. Let me spell that out. C-H-R-I-S. That’s Chris, obviously. Last name Guerriero. G-U-E-R-R-I-E-R-O. Dot com. Check out his website. Lots of cool stuff over there. Where else can people follow you and stay in touch with your work?

Chris Guerriero:                Well, ChrisGuerriero.com is the easiest place. That’s the portal where we give all the information. We’re starting a program called Built to Grow, so if they go to BuiltToGrowShow.com, the Built to Grow show is where we’re going to be posting a lot of the Built to Grow shows.

Chris Guerriero:                Which is going to be programs like this, where I’m literally talking to people about how to scale. How to attract the right people. How to motivate the right people. How to create culture inside their organization. How to create systems that help companies to grow. Where we’ll be feeding them tactics … short, small tactics that we’re using inside of my companies, and the companies that I invest in, to help them grow.

The Rapid Five

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s great. Awesome. All right. Are you ready for the Rapid Five?

Chris Guerriero:                Yeah, absolutely.

Yuri Elkaim:                         These are five Rapid Five questions. I have no idea what they are. Nothing incriminating. It’s all good. Okay, number one, what is your biggest strength?

Chris Guerriero:                Leading.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Cool.

Chris Guerriero:                Leading my teams. Leading.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Cool. Number two, what’s your biggest weakness?

Chris Guerriero:                Temper.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Temper?

Chris Guerriero:                Yeah, it is … You and I started … Prior to us recording, you and I started, and we were talking about something, and I said, “One of the things I’m really focused on right now is being more influential.” Being more influential, in my opinion, means learning how to understand the person that I’m speaking with. I seek to understand, from their point-of-view, exactly what they’re sharing, so that I know how to communicate with them better, more effectively.

Chris Guerriero:                Not doing that, I tend to quickly turn things off, and stay focused on the path. Which turns out to be a little rude sometimes. I try to work on that.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I think a lot of us … the leadership types … are very much like that a lot of times.

Chris Guerriero:                Yeah. Let’s use the word “blunt,” not “rude.” Because it’s-

Yuri Elkaim:                         Exactly. Blunt … just “short.” Exactly. Number three, what’s one skill you’ve become dangerously good at in order to grow your businesses?

Chris Guerriero:                Going into companies, and being able to see holes, and filling those holes in a creative way. If I were to sum that up, it would be thinking outside the box.

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

Chris Guerriero:                Very first thing in the morning, before my feet even hit the ground, I drink a glass of water. I go work out. As soon as I’m done with my workout, I have breakfast, and then I read, and I get to work.

Yuri Elkaim:                         All of that before your feet hit the ground?

Chris Guerriero:                No. No, no. Before my feet hit the ground, I have a glass of water.

Chris Guerriero:               My feet hit the ground, and I go work out. Right? When I have breakfast, I have breakfast with my kids. When I work out in the morning, I’m working out with my son. It is all integrated with my kids. I get them to school, and then when I get back, I’m here, and I’m ready to go.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s great. Finally, complete this sentence: I know I’m being successful when …

Chris Guerriero:                I know I’m being successful when people come back to me, and they say what I have done has helped them.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Awesome. Chris. Dude. Thank you so much for being here, sharing your wisdom. Just a piece of your experience and all your wisdom. I know our listeners are going to get a ton of value out of this one, so dude, thanks so much for being with us.

Chris Guerriero:                Hey, Yuri. It was great. Thank you very much.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Awesome. Thank you.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Hey, thanks so much for joining us on this episode of Healthpreneur Podcast. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, here’s what I’d like you to do right now. If you haven’t done so already, please subscribe to the Healthpreneur Podcast on iTunes, and while you’re there, leave us a rating and review. It helps us get in front of more people and change more lives.

Yuri Elkaim:                         If you’re ready to start or scale your health or fitness coaching business, and want to start getting in front of more people, working with them at a higher level, without trading time for money, then I invite you to check out our free Seven-Figure Health Business Blueprint Training, totally free, right now, and you can do so at HealthpreneurGroup.com/training.

Yuri Elkaim:                         For now, thank you so much for joining us. Continue to be great, do great, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.

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Follow Chris Guerriero At:

https://chrisguerriero.com/

https://chrisguerriero.com/built-to-grow-show/

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Transcription

How to become more visible to attract more of your perfect clients, that’s what we’re talking about in today’s episode of the podcast.

Welcome back, Yuri here with you, and I’m wearing arguably the tightest white shirt, but check this out. I mean, like, it shows the pipes and stuff, it’s all good, but I’ve got to say, H&M, they’ve done their shirts nicely. I’m a big fan of Pima cotton, and I know this is completely a weird off tangent here. Pima cotton t-shirts are the best, and I refuse to wear any other t-shirts but Pima cotton.

Then I came across H&M, and they had just some really good V-necks, as you can see. Nice fitting V-necks and I tried these on, I’m like, man, these are amazing. They’re 14 bucks. Like, Pima cotton t-shirts, the ones I have are like $75. I’m like, and all I want, I just want black and white t-shirts. I don’t need anything fancy. Just a good fitting t-shirt, because I’m a slim, muscular kind of guy.

Go to H&M, get a medium, it fits like a glove. But I washed it, or I should say my wife washed it because I’m useless when it comes to laundry, and yeah, so now it’s a little bit tighter, to the point where it kind of is almost becoming a baby tee. If you could see below my navel, it kind of like creeps up. Anyways, why the hell am I sharing that? I don’t even know. If you want good t-shirts, H&M’s a pretty good bet. That’s what I’m trying to say.

The difference between true influencers and booty influencers

Anyways, let’s talk about how to be more visible to attract more clients. Now, you could do what I just did, and you could buy some tight t-shirts and take a lot of cool pictures of yourself and post them on Instagram and hope for the best. That’s what a lot of people do. I think I mentioned this in a previous episode. I was watching this show on Netflix called InstaFamous, and this one chick, Sexy Pantera, I think, she got really famous because she had one video that she put up on YouTube where she was shaking her booty, and I think it was like 30 million or 300 million views, and that just, like, when that happens, you’ve got a good runway now to take off from.

I see a lot of nonsense in the health and fitness space because we live in a day where being a social media influencer is an actual job title, which I think is ridiculous, to be honest with you. “I’m an influencer. Oh my god, look at my butt. It’s so round, and I’ve got 10 million followers.” As I’ve said before, it requires almost zero talent to be successful in today’s day and age. You can be a good-looking person with nothing to add in terms of value to other people, and you could have millions of dollars floating into your bank account.

I find that really saddening, because there are amazing people, and I’m going to say especially in the health and wellness space, who do have true expertise, who have a little bit more class than posting their booty on Instagram, and they actually want to help people. Right? If you’re kind of like that, then that’s awesome, because I am as well. I have no interest in taking my shirt off and taking pictures of six pack abs and all this nonsense. It’s too much.

Understanding Facebook and Instagram reach

With that said, what do we do, then, to become visible to attract more clients? Because, you could do the, I’m going to post organically on social media game. I’m going to hire a photographer to take all these amazing pictures of what life really looks like, and I’ve done this. I mean, a good friend of mine, Nick, is an amazing photographer in Toronto, so we’ll do some photos like, once or twice a year.

It’s funny, I’ll give you, I’m going to be very real with you for a second. If you’ve seen some of my pictures on Instagram, you’ll see me standing beside my car, etc., there’s a certain image I want to portray. There’s a certain image of success, if you will, that I want to portray. I also talk to him about kind of poking fun at that, where I’m kind of dressed in a suit standing beside a broken-down Honda Civic or something, just the contrast, you know, poke fun at the whole Instagram thing. Maybe we’ll do that for our next shoot. But anyways, we’ve got shoots with our kids at home where we’re playing chess, everyone’s having a good time. But the thing is, that is a small microcosm of the reality of our life.

For instance, this morning as I’m recording this, this morning, I mean, I love my kids to death. They’re the best. This morning, Luca and Arlo, our youngest two, they were fighting over who’s sitting at the bar stool, even though there’s three bar stools, one for each kid. They’re fighting over the middle one, and the other one is just one foot away.

They’re fighting over this, and all the sudden Arlo decides, like, he’s a good theatrical I’m going to hurt myself type of guy. Like, if he were a soccer player, he would be one of those guys who just dives when he gets touched. Right? He falls off the chair and smashes his face on the ground, out of his own volition. He wasn’t pushed. He did it to himself. I’m thinking this is the stuff that needs to be captured and put on Instagram. This is the true nature of what really happens in a home.

Yes, there are those moments where the kids are so cute and they’re sleeping, or they’re cute for a second and we take that snapshot, and that’s what everyone thinks our life is like. It’s a complete load of you know what. Right? I don’t really think, I mean listen, if you’re good at that stuff and you want to play the Instagram game, hey, cool, do it. As long as it is generating results for you, your business, and your clients, go for it. But, if you’re someone who doesn’t want to play the Instagram game and doesn’t want to rely on organic posting to grow your business, because that’s a very, very fast way to go out of business because it takes so long to see results from, then what I’m about to suggest to you is the truth of what you need to do.

Facebook owns Instagram, just in case you didn’t know. Google owns YouTube, just in case you didn’t know. Both platforms, well, especially the social platforms I’m not going to talk about Google, but I’ll talk about Facebook and Instagram. Both platforms, sorry, I should say Facebook and soon Instagram, Facebook has told us a year ago that we get 2% organic reach. Which means that I’ve you’ve got 1,000 followers and you post something organically, like, “Hey, here’s a new recipe from my blog,” 20 people see that. Isn’t that amazing? Isn’t that exciting? You spend all this time trying to get followers and likes because that’s what matters and you can pay the mortgage with followers. Right? You try to get all these followers, and then 2% of them see anything you post on Facebook.

Now, Instagram is better organically, but it’s going that way in the next, I’d say, two years. The reason for this is because, how does Facebook and Instagram make their money? They’re not charging you. Right? Well, guess how they make their money. Just take a guess. Just take a guess. It’s something called advertising, and if you’ve been on the news feed on Facebook, you probably see every third post is a sponsored post, which is essentially an ad.

Your two options and paying to acquire clients

Here is where we’re at in 2019. You have two choices. You can play, what I call the old way, the old game, which is I’m going to post on my blog, I’m going to post on YouTube, I’m going to post on social media, I’m going to run some free challenges that no one’s going to see. I’m going to put together some lead magnets that are not going to lead anywhere, I’m going to do all this free stuff that takes me all my time, that’s one thing you can never get back is your time. I don’t care what financial situation you’re in, you can never get back your time.

That’s scenario one, is I’m going to do some free organic stuff and I’m going to grow my business. Da, da, da, da, da. No, you’re not. It’s going to take a long time. When I say a long time, give yourself three years, minimum. This podcast, I don’t even care how many downloads we get. It’s honestly just my opportunity to kind of riff and talk about stuff, and I don’t even know how many downloads we have. I promise you, it’s not a lot. Okay? I’ve been doing this podcast now for a year and a half. We are currently at, I don’t even know, 239 episodes, I think. Pretty cool. It’s my artistic, creative outlet.

If I were relying on my podcast to build my business, man, I would not be able to sleep at night. I would not be able to sleep at night. I think we’ve had maybe a handful of clients come through the podcast, and that’s cool, because Daphna, if you’re listening, here’s an example. She was sitting in with us at our Luminaries Mastermind in LA in November and we’re having dinner, and we’re sitting beside each other and she was telling me, she’s listened to almost every single episode of the podcast, and she knew she was going to work with us before she even had a phone call with us. I’m like, that’s cool.

That’s a nice thing to have happens as a result of a podcast, but if I only got five clients from this podcast, I would be out of business, and you will as well. Blogging is the same thing. Google especially, and we’ve talked about this before as well, so if I sound redundant, I’m not apologizing, because this really needs to sink in. If you are relying on blogging, for instance, and you’re not a very, very, very popular website like WebMD.com, your stuff is not going to be found. It’s going to die into the ethers. You’re going to be found on page 103 of Google, and no one’s going to find your stuff.

I really hate to be the bearer of bad news, that’s the reality, because Google has recently made some algorithm changes. Not recently, like I mean, six months ago. They basically said, they’re basically in bed with WebMD. If you’re not a doctor or a highly authoritative figure already, your website is going to be seen by no one. My friend Josh Axe, who was on the podcast a couple months ago, 30 million visitors a month to his website. Right? Was the number one website in the world. Overnight, they lost 11 million visitors, overnight, because of that Google change. Because he’s not a medical doctor, he’s a chiropractor. God forbid. Right? Don’t play that game. It’s just nonsense.

Option number one is you do the free stuff, hope for the best, and send me a letter in three to five years letting me know how it’s going. Option number two is, you must pay for your clients. That’s it. You have to be willing to pay to acquire clients. That is a skill and an art, and it’s something that we base all our coaching around. Every single one of our clients, whether they are new or more advanced, we help them run Facebook ads to acquire clients. The reason for that is because that is the only way to predictably and quickly become more visible.

I have 5,800 likes on my Healthpreneur page on Facebook. That’s not a lot of people. But, I’ll tell you one thing, is that almost every single time I have been at an event or I’ve connected with someone new, for instance on LinkedIn or Instagram, or just anywhere else, the number one thing people tell me is, “Dude, I see your ads all the time.” I’m thinking to myself, awesome. That’s how you become more visible.

Facebook is your email list. Facebook is your blog. Facebook is your video channel. Facebook is your platform to say whatever you want, and all you have to be okay with is making a deal with Facebook to say, “Listen Facebook, I’m going to give you 100 bucks and you’re going to show this ad to this many people, and in return, hopefully I’ll get a client or two.” Or, “Facebook, I’m going to give you $10,000 a day, because I know my pipeline is dialed in, and I know that when I give you $10,000, you give me 50. Let’s keep this relationship going, because it’s amazing.”

The reason that most people don’t do this is because they don’t know what they’re doing, or number two, they’re scared. If you don’t know what you’re doing, then don’t do it, because you will lose money quicker than water going down a drain. The solution to that is you work with experts like us so we can help you do this and understand how to advertise properly on Facebook. Now, if you’re scared of advertising, that’s simply because you just don’t know it. We are afraid of things we don’t understand. We are afraid of things we don’t understand. How do we become less afraid of something? We learn about it. If populations around the world just adopted that one philosophy, there’d be a lot less bickering and a lot less war.

For instance, a Facebook ad is whatever you would normally post, with a little bit of money behind it. That’s all it is. That’s as simple as it is. Whatever you think you’re about to post on your page, you can post it, and then there’s a button called boost post. At a very simple level, that’s pretty much all you need to do. You just put $5 a day behind that post, and now that post is not being seen by 2%, it might be seen by 10% of people. Right? There are obviously more sophisticated ways of running ads on Facebook, but at its primitive level, it’s a message you put up on Facebook and you put money behind it.

Now, obviously, there are nuances in terms of what the message should say, what type of images to use, how to target the right audiences, how to set up the campaign for maximum ROI, bidding strategies, all that kind of stuff, and that’s what we’re really, really good at doing with our clients. That’s how 95% of our revenue is generated. Every single day, I give Facebook a lot of money and Facebook gives me back even more. That is a great relationship to have.

How you become more visible to attracting clients, is by running ads on Facebook. Remember, because Facebook owns Instagram, those same ads can be run on Instagram, assuming if it’s a video under a minute or if it’s text under 2,200 characters. That’s the game, guys, you have to pay to play. I’m going to say something very, very brash. Is that, if you are not willing to do that, I don’t think you should be in business. Boom, like, mic drop. I’m done, I’m seriously done, because things were different.

How we help our clients and why the organic game is different now

When I started in 2006, Facebook wasn’t around. The organic game was all that was. SEO, all that kind of stuff, you could get away with that. Today’s world is different, man. Today’s world is very, very different, dude. Bro, what’s up man? I don’t know where all these words are coming from. Anyways, today’s world is very different. You can’t play the organic game any longer, unless you have a massive following to begin with. If you don’t have a massive following, which I’m going to assume is most people, then don’t play that game.

I don’t care how many leads you have coming in. I don’t care how many likes or followers you have. If those likes and followers are not represented by the money you have in your bank account, then what you’re doing is not working. If you want to buy that house, if you want to take a trip, if you want to put your kids in a better school, if you want to buy that cool dress or that cool suit, whatever your thing is, you can’t buy that stuff with how much traffic your website got. You can’t buy that stuff with how many followers you have on Instagram. You can’t buy that stuff on how many thumbs up you got on a YouTube video.

All that matters is that you’re getting in front of clients in a way that shows them that you can solve their biggest pain or problem, and that they pay you money to work with them. That’s all that matters. You don’t need months to build up a relationship with someone. In some cases, yes, most people are not going to buy right away, and that’s totally fine. You can continue adding value to their life over time in the form of emails and stuff like that.

You have to understand, if someone has a broken leg, do they want it solved now or later? They want it solved now. There are a lot of people out there with broken legs. I’m using broken leg as a metaphor. There are a lot of people who are in pain right now, who want their problem solved right now. If you have a great solution and you have a conversation with them where they say, “Man, this makes a lot of sense. Let’s do this.” That’s how you build your business. That’s how you become more visible.

A lot of people say, “I want to become more visible.” Well, why do you want to become more visible? “So I can get more clients.” Well, why do you want to get more clients? “So I can make money and help them.” Well, that’s what we’re talking about here. It’s not about becoming visible for the sake of becoming visible. Becoming visible means you are … Well, it’s important because the best product doesn’t win, which is kind of sad, but it’s good. The best-known product wins. Does McDonald’s make the best hamburgers? Nope, but they’re doing well. Right? I would say Shake Shack is way better, but not everyone knows who Shake Shack is. The people who do obviously go there when they can.

How to know if what you’re doing isn’t working

In any industry, in any aspect of life, the best product is not the winner. The best-known product is the winner. I have 5,800 people who like me on Facebook, but I can promise you hundreds of thousands, probably millions of people see my ads. The very fact that people continue to tell me, “Dude, whenever I play a fricking YouTube video, your ad always shows up first,” I’m like, great. I mean, probably not now, because we stopped the YouTube ads because YouTube made some changes to their algorithm which has made it kind of challenging for us on the YouTube side, didn’t really make sense anymore from an ROI perspective. But, when we were running them, you know, it was like, great, I’m on your feed all the time. That’s what you want to have.

That’s what you want to do, and you want to feel your prospects, you want your prospects to think that you are everywhere all the time. It doesn’t take $1 million a day to do that. You can do that with like, 50 bucks a day, because your prospects are only seeing ads that are relevant to them. They don’t know what’s going on. They’re just like, “Why do I keep seeing this ad? Why do I keep seeing this post all the time?” When you do it the right way, it’s not annoying. It’s valuable, and that’s why our ads get so many shares and so many likes, and that’s why our client’s ads do the same thing.

The beautiful thing is that, yes, most people are not going to do business with you right away, but almost all the clients we work with decide within 24 to 48 hours of first contact. Check this out. They have no clue who I am. They have never heard of me. They have never seen me. Suddenly, an ad pops up in their news feed with a great message. They click on it. Eventually, they have a phone call with us and they’re working with us. How does that happen? How does that happen?

It’s because they have a problem, we have a solution. It’s just a matter of having a conversation to be like, “All right, is this a good fit, yes or no?” That’s all we’re doing. We’re not saying, “Well, it was great talking to you. Let’s spend the next several months dating and let’s build up a bit more trust, and then when you’re ready, when you feel more comfortable, then we can do that.” That’s not what we’re doing here. I mean, yes, there are people who do take more time to warm up. That’s fine, and maybe down the road they’ll be in the position to pull the trigger. But, 95% of our revenue comes from what I just mentioned. “I’ve never heard of you. I saw an ad. I clicked on it, and now we’re having a conversation and I’m working with you.” That’s how quickly it can happen.

Having a predictable business foundation

But, it takes a little bit of time to set up the pipeline properly. We call it a perfect client pipeline. It takes a little bit of time to set that up, but once it’s up, it’s running for you every single day of the week. If you want to compliment that with, if you enjoy posting on Instagram or if you enjoy doing a podcast, hey, go for it. But, the foundation of your business needs to be predictable. You need to have a treadmill of new leads and prospects and clients coming in that doesn’t depend on you doing the organic and free stuff.

As you have this freedom from the leads and clients and money coming in, now you have more time, you’ve got more creative expression and freedom to give out everything else for free. That’s why I do this podcast. I don’t care about monetizing it. I don’t run ads on this. I don’t care about how many downloads we get. I mean, it’s nice to see steady growth over time, but it’s not like I’m losing sleep over what’s going on with the podcast. Okay?

That’s how you become more visible to attract more of your perfect clients, you run ads, and specifically on Facebook. If you want help on how to do this, then we can help you. Two ways we can help. Number one is, we have our Luminaries Mastermind coming up in Toronto June 26th and 27th. If you want to sit in, if you qualify to sit in and be in a room with some really great people, the website is healthpreneurgroup.com/2day, that’s the number two, D-A-Y. If it resonates with what you’re looking to do, fill out the application and then I’ll get back to you if you’re a yes or a no. You have to be currently coaching clients. You have to be generating revenue. If you’re someone who’s brand new, you have no business, it’s not going to be a good fit. That’s the first way.

If you can’t travel to Toronto because for whatever reason there’s no airplanes in your area, which is always hilarious when people say that, “Oh, if it was closer I’d come.” Well, there are things called airplanes. Anyways. The second way is, if you want to chat with us directly, here’s what I want you to do. Go to healthpreneurgroup.com/training and watch our presentation. If it resonates with you, then book a call with us. Really simple. Okay? That way, we can kind of cut to the chase and we can start helping you a lot sooner if you like, and those are the two options.

If you want my help in person for two days, Toronto is the best option. If you want to start right away and work with us more virtually, then go to healthpreneurgroup.com/training. Start by watching the presentation and then book a call with us. That’s all for today. Hope this finds you well. Hope it makes sense. Stop doing the free, organic stuff, because it costs you time. That’s the one thing you can never get back in your life, never forget that.

Hey, thanks so much for joining us on this episode of the Healthpreneur podcast. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, here’s what I’d like you to do right now. If you haven’t done so already, please subscribe to the Healthpreneur podcast on iTunes, and while you’re there, leave us a rating and review. It helps us get in front of more people and change more lives.

If you’re ready to start or scale your health or fitness coaching business and want to start getting in front of more people, working with them in a higher level, without trading time for money, then I invite you to check out our free seven figure health business blueprint training, totally free, right now, and you can do so at healthpreneurgroup.com/training.

For now, thank you so much for joining us. Continue to be great, do great, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.

Transcription

I’ve been doing some gymnastics training. That’s my new thing. And I’m going to share three weird lessons that gymnastics training has taught me about business, and specifically how it can help you build your business.

I may have mentioned this in a previous episode, but I talked about how when I was playing soccer for 24 years of my life, I’d never really had issues working out. I always had a very, very, very clear and compelling goal. Jump one inch higher. Dive one inch farther, et cetera. But when I stopped playing soccer, professionally at least, my workouts really had a lot to be desired, to be very honest. I didn’t have a compelling goal. I didn’t really care about packing on pounds of muscle. That was never really something compelling to me.

How I got inspired to pursue gymnastic training

I was listening on the plane to a Tim Ferriss episode on his podcast, where he was talking to an Olympic gymnast coach.  It was a three hour session. You know Tim Ferriss, just three hour marathon sessions. Everything he does is long and drawn out, which was really good for the plane ride.  I’m listening to this episode, and I’m thinking to myself, “This is what I want to do. This is what a want to do,” because a couple days prior, I’m dead lifting in my gym. And I’m thinking to myself, “I’m not really progressing on my dead lifts that much.” Because I’ve got a longer torso, it’s not really suitable for dead lifts. Every time I dead lift, there’s usually a little tweak. I don’t really … I mean, I feel strong. But at the same time, it’s like I’m one rep away from tweaking my back.

And I’m thinking to myself, “Why am I doing this? What’s the purpose of all this stuff?” When I came across the gymnastics stuff, and a great website that I’m using called gymnasticsbodies.com, and I mentioned this in a previous episode, heavily underpriced for what they’re delivering. This should be a premium priced program for the way I see it. It’s incredible. Anyway, I started getting into this. And the nice thing is that I can do the workouts with almost no equipment. There’s no barbells for the most part. There’s no heavy lifting. And it’s all about, for me at least, starting with a foundation.  I recognized that the reason I’m having an issue with dead lifts, for instance, is that I’m super immobile. I don’t have good ankle flexion, or good ankle flexibility. There’s a lot of areas in my body that are a lot tighter than they should be. And it’s also part of the reason why my shoulder’s always been limited when I’m playing tennis, which is as you probably know, what I love to do more than anything when it comes to sports.

When I looked at this, I said to myself, “This makes a lot of sense.” I’ve always admired gymnasts because not only do they have the most incredible physiques, but they’re strong, they’re flexible. They can do things that most humans can never dream of. And I’m thinking to myself, “That’s what I want.” I don’t care about competing in the Olympics. I’m not going to go to gymnastics school. But that’s the level of fitness that I want to achieve. And it wasn’t just so that I could do handstands. It wasn’t just so that I could do muscle ups, or ring work, or whatever, it’s the ancillary benefits that brings in my life. For instance, with extra mobility and proper range of motion, I’m able to play tennis at a much higher level for as long as I possibly can, without all the nagging shoulder injuries. That’s one thing.

When I get back into some more heavy lifts, I’ll have more mobility in my lower body to be able to crank out some of that stuff without a lot of the issues that I’ve experienced in the past. Those are some of the reasons that, for me, the gymnastic training just made a lot more sense than anything else I’ve come by. When I used to think of: When did I really feel my best, it was when I was doing hot yoga three times a week. And I think part of that was because I was just so limber and flexible, and my body just felt really good. Now what I’m doing is every single day of the week, I have something that I’m doing in my gym. I’m doing some kind of limber work, like limber mobility, flexibility type stuff. Or I’m doing some type of high volume, strength, body weight type stuff. Obviously, that’s following their protocols. And so far, it’s been really good. It’s been a challenge. Right?

The first lesson: You’ll suck at first

And that’s kind of where it segues into the lessons that I want to share with you in this episode because as I’m going through this, I’m thinking to myself, “These are like, everything I’m going through, and everything your clients go through,” for instance, if you’re a trainer and you work with clients, everything that they’re going through is exactly what you go through with your business. I want to share three really important lessons, kind of weird lessons if you think of it, but very, very applicable to your business.

The first thing, the first lesson, is understanding that you’re going to suck at first. Really. Now here’s the funny thing, is that I’m a very kinesthetic person. I pick things up athletically very quickly. Not everyone does. But even then, I’ve recognized that I’m really bad at flexibility and mobility stuff. So they’re doing seated pikes, back flat, so imagine you’re sitting on the floor. Your legs are straight out in front of you, knees locked, ankles flexed, your toes are pointing straight ahead, arms above the head. I can’t even do this properly. Biceps to the shoulders. You can see even on this video that I’m limited on this one side. But actually, the right side’s actually going a lot better. Anyways, arms by the head. And then hinging from the hips right down to the thighs, flat back. And I’m looking at myself, and I’m not even close to that. And my back is rounding out hard core.

What I’ve come to peace with, what I’ve come to terms with is that, listen dude, you’re just stiff as a board. Don’t expect to look like these gymnasts who are on the videos. It’s not even feasible for the next 12 months probably. You are in a point in your journey where you just suck at this stuff, and that’s fine, because I think the tendency if you’re a high performer, type A maniac like I am, is to expect perfection from day one. And that’s just not feasible. In your business, if you’re doing something new, like for instance our clients, they’re working with us, building out their perfect client pipeline.

And let’s say they’ve never written a Facebook ad before. Well thankfully, we give them templates, so it would kind of like be helping their hamstrings be more flexible. That’s kind of what we’re doing for them. But nonetheless, if you’ve never written a Facebook ad in the way that we teach, which is very story based, and you’re not really sure how to communicate a story properly, your first ad might not be great. And that’s okay because it’s just a matter of putting in the reps, and looking at what could be better, where some tweaks might benefit the copy. And that’s one example.

Another example, and I think this is probably the most relevant example, is if you have never done phone sales, if you’ve never, or if you’ve only had a few conversations over the phone with prospective clients, and they don’t enroll a few, it doesn’t mean that the process doesn’t work. It just means that you suck, and that’s totally fine. And that’s totally okay to admit because you have to start with awareness. And we spend a lot of time training our clients on how to get better on the phone, how to be much more confident and persuasive and how to really lead the discussions to a point where that person feels like enrolling with you and working with you is the right deal, and obviously, you feel like they’re the right fit to work with you.

But again, if you’ve done a couple calls, like one of our clients was posting some of his critical numbers in the group the other day. And his numbers were actually looking really good, except for the fact that he had three calls booked, and none of those people enrolled. And I said, “Listen, man. It’s all good.” It’s all good because you have to understand that you have to put in the reps. And I recommended to him and I said, “Listen. Find one or two buddies in the group. Schedule a daily practice session for the next one to two weeks, where you guys just hammer out the transition from the conversation to the close, whatever objections might come up.” We give them all that stuff. So I said, “You just have to practice this stuff.” And I asked him. I’m like, “Where did you drop the ball? Were these three people good prospects for you? Or were they just not qualified at all?”

He said, “No. They’re actually really good candidates.” He said, “Two of the three of them really should’ve enrolled.” And the good part about that is that when you acknowledge that, you understand that you’re just one or two tweaks away from a breakthrough because zero out of three is a very different business than two out of three. If he’s charging $2500 for his program, and he’s got three calls, and no one of those three enrolls with him, he’s batting zero. But if two of three enroll with him, he’s now made $5000. And he’s almost at a 500% ROI on his ad spend. Little things like that can make a huge difference in your business, but you have to recognize that if you’re not getting those types of results, you just have to be honest with yourself and recognize that you are responsible for the outcome that you create.

We talked about this in episode 236, I believe, with how to deal with potential clients who’ve been burned before, and they’re looking for 100% certainty that they’re going to get results. And I’m thinking to myself, “That would be like a tennis player hiring a coach, and expecting their tennis game to magically be top notch overnight.” You can’t expect that because you’re the person on the court hitting the balls. Right? It’s like you’re the person taking the phone calls. We can give you the training and the scripts and the frameworks and all the stuff to help you, but at the end of the day, you’re the person on the phone. And you have to get better at having these conversations. And for some people, that just takes longer than others.

In my case, if my posterior, or if my hamstrings and calves and achilles are super tight, I’m going to suck at a lot of flexibility work initially. And that’s okay. And that leads me to the second lesson here.

The second lesson: You must give it time and focus

The second lesson is that you have to give it time. You have to give it time. And this is probably an area that I may have, with other types of workout approaches, jumped ship too soon because what I was doing wasn’t really tied into a bigger objective. But with this, I recognized, dude, you are trying to change the nature of your connective tissue. And you’re now 39 years old, and that’s more challenging to do than if you were 12. It’s going to take time. And most experts will tell you that if you really want to change connective tissue, it’s going to take six to 12 months. Now the same thing in your business. If you want to make really great strides and improvements in your business, if you have a great foundation already, it’s going to happen a lot faster.

But if you don’t, and you’re learning new things like how to get better on the phone, how to communicate your message more effectively, how to do all this stuff, it’s going to take some time. And that’s why our Health Business Accelerator program is six months because we really feel that we can get a lot done in six months. Most of it should be deployed in two to three months. And then we’ve got another three to four months to opt my scale, tweak, and really perfect that foundation so that it’s almost making sure you’re stretching every single day to reshape that connective tissue and retrain your body to perform and move in better ways. And so I think it’s really important to put your blinders on. And that’s why whether you work with us or anyone else, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that what you’re doing, you feel is right for you and your business, because there’s obviously a number of different business models you can follow.

You can post on Instagram all day long. You can do summits. You can blog. You can do all this stuff. And some of it’s smarter and better and faster than others. You just have to choose one that works for you. But when you’ve made that decision, you need to put your blinders on and only do that, and only do that for a minimum of six to 12 months because you will not see results usually in a quicker, shorter period of time. Now obviously, that’s not true because we do have clients that see amazing results in a week. But for most people, it takes longer. Go into any endeavor that you are looking to build in your business, like any kind of new business model, or if you’re looking to really accelerate or scale what you’re doing, give it time. Give it time. Don’t jump ship. Don’t try the latest thing. Don’t jump on the next bandwagon. You have to put your blinders on. You’re like a race horse. And race horses have those covers on their eyes, pretty much all horses do for the most part. They have covers on their eyes so that they’re not distracted by outside things and start going crazy.

And that’s what you need to think of in your life, in your business. You have to become that horse that has the blinders on because if you don’t, it’s too easy to be distracted by things you think you should be doing. For instance, one of our clients was, she had posted on her Facebook profile, “Does anyone know of a Facebook ad copywriter?” And I told her, I’m like, “Why are you looking to hire a copywriter to write your Facebook ads when we give you the exact templates to use in our program?” And what she got to, she was basically like, “Listen. I’m a bit of a perfectionist. I want to get this right.” I’m like, “You are possibly giving away the most important element of your business. Your message, your offer, your business, your story, no one else knows how to tell that like you do. So follow our templates. Plug in your stuff where needed. And I guarantee you’ll be a lot better off than some overpriced copywriter who probably doesn’t even understand Facebook ad compliance.”

This is an example of, there’s things you just have to learn how to do. There are things you have to learn how to do. I really believe that copywriting, at its minimum, in terms of being able to really clarify and communicate a message, is extremely important. If you try to delegate and outsource a lot of stuff like this, you are handicapping your growth because you don’t understand. You won’t have the fundamental skills that are required to influence people. One of the things I do every single week, because I write one to two new ads every single week, and that’s obviously something I could outsource. But part of the magic in a Facebook ad is the story. And you can’t have somebody else tell your story the way you want to tell it.

Now obviously, you can give them bits and pieces of your story, and they can kind of bring it all together. That’s fine. But I really believe that you should master two things in your business. Number one, and it’s actually they’re the same thing, it’s communication. One is phone sales. The second is being able to write words that move people to action, which is essentially called copywriting.

Those are two things that if you get really, really good at, you are literally writing your own lottery ticket. And everything else outside of that is a distraction. But you have to give it time. You have to give it time. Listen, the only reason I understand copy and marketing as well as I do is because I spent 10 plus years, 13 years now, since 2006 learning and applying and doing this stuff. And I’m not saying it’s going to take 13 years for you, but you have to give it time. And it’s really, really important to understand that what matters is communication more than anything else.

If you’re writing a post on Facebook, if you’re writing a post on Instagram, what you’re doing is communicating. And being able to put words together, either on video, or on audio, or writing them out, is a really, really important skill. And if you don’t develop that, you are really handcuffing your growth. So give it time, just like I’ve got to give my hamstrings and posterior time to just lengthen out.

Lesson three: When you do the right things, you’ll see growth and scale

Third big lesson from the gymnastics training that applies to your business is that when you do the right things, it sets the foundation for incredible growth and scale over time. Right now I understand that by working on my mobility and really getting my body moving in the way that it probably never has is going to take time. I also understand that by doing this, this is the right thing for me to do because I understand the payoff. I understand the benefit that being flexible and mobile, but strong as well, not just strong and not just flexible, but both combined, because either one by itself is useless. I want to be strong and flexible.

I understand that when I have the combination, those pair working together, I’m going to be bullet proof pretty much. I’m not going to be injured, obviously less. Well, I can’t guarantee that. But my likelihood of being injured is a lot less. I’m going to perform better. I’m going to feel better. I’m going to be able to do things for a lot longer period of time than if I didn’t do that stuff, because if we think of death, death is rigor mortis. Right? Rigor mortis is when your DNA … Sorry, not your DNA. The cross bridges in your muscle literally seize up, and your muscles can’t even move anymore. If you think of death as no movements, well, I want the opposite. I want to be as mobile and as moving friendly as possible. And that’s because what I’m doing now is setting the foundation for a lifetime of amazing things, travel, playing with my kids, outlasting my kids, playing tennis on the court with people 30 years younger than me, and either giving them a really good battle, or beating them, or whatever. That’s important to me.

And so for what you’re doing in your business, you need to understand that what you’re doing needs to be setting a good foundation for your future. With our clients, we tell them that what we’re doing, the perfect client pipeline that we’re building out with them, is the most important thing they should be doing to ensure their future. You don’t need to have a pretty looking website. None of that matters. You can spend $15,000 to have someone design a nice website for you, and then it’s like, all right. Why aren’t the clients coming in? Well, here’s the reason. It’s because you didn’t focus on what matters. You focused on the shiny shit. That’s what I’m going to call it, the shiny shit. Not the shiny objects, the shiny shit. We actually had a client who’s starting with us in a few months email us this morning, or yesterday, and Phyllis, one of our coaches, sent me the email. She’s like, “Hey. What do you think about this? What should I do with this?” And the person was like, “Hey. I saw one of your clients had a really beautiful website. Is that something you guys do?”

I’m like, “No. We’re not going to do that.” Maybe in our Luminaries Mastermind, we can talk about the messaging and layouts of good websites, but we’re not going to build the website for you because none of that stuff matters. We’re going to get you clients, and we’re going to put money in your bank. That’s all that matters. Then when you have all that extra money, then you can hire someone else to build your website eventually. Our Healthpreneur website right now, it needs to be redone. The messaging needs to be redone. The layout needs to be redone. Some of the stuff is old. We actually have buttons on the website that lead to things we don’t even offer anymore. That is how much of a change we need to make on the website. But are we doing it? No, because it doesn’t matter. No one’s landing on our website anyways.

What you need to do day 0 of business

You have to be doing things that are going to set the foundation for success in the long-term. And what that means, the number one thing you should be doing in your business is building a predictable sales process. That is the number one most important thing you have to do from day zero in your business. And if you don’t have a predictable way of bringing people in … If I were to meet you at an event, and I’m saying, “Hey. Awesome, great to meet you. How do you get new clients?” And if you can’t tell me predictably how you’re doing that, you have no business. Oh, I do a little bit of speaking here. I post some flyers here. I’m sorry. You have a job. I’m sorry. You’re out of business. You’re done. You need to be able to tell me, we’ve got a really strategic and simple, predictable, three or four step process where they come in from here, they go here, and this happens.

I’d be like, “Man, this person’s got their shit together.” But 98% of people don’t. So you need to do the most important thing first, which again takes time. And it might not be comfortable. But it’s the thing that is going to set you up for the rest of your life. And it’s going to set your business up in the right way. It’s not about posting on Instagram. It’s not about shooting videos randomly on YouTube, because then let’s say that people somehow find your videos. What’s going to happen next? Where are they going to go? Oh, they’re going to download your lead magnet for free. Great. Then what? You’re going to offer then a $10 product? Awesome. Then what? Oh, you’re going to take them through an up sale flow $47, $97. Great, well less than 10% of people are going to buy that stuff. You’ve got a $10 customer after processing fees, maybe you have eight of those dollars in your bank. Great job. How’s that working out?

See, it’s stupid stuff like this that just drives me crazy. And that’s why I’m on a mission to continually hammer this home, is that your sole job is to build a predictable sales process that brings in high paying clients into your business. If you want to write a book, that’s great. We just actually released our new focus planner. By the way, if you actually want the planner, go to healthpreneurgroup.com/planner. It’s awesome. But do you think my business relies on this planner to make money? No way. I don’t personally care of people buy it or not. I mean, I built it for myself and for our clients. So whether or not people buy it, who cares? If you want to get it, it’s amazing. Grab it. But whether or not us do is not going to really affect my bank accounts.

Here’s the thing. People are spending a lot of their time and energy writing books and doing all this kind of stuff. What’s the point of the book? What is the point of the book? I’m going to get my name out there. Why don’t you focus on getting other people’s name in here, in your business, instead of you getting your name out there? And then what’s going to happen when the people have the book? Oh, they’re going to read it, and it’s going to transform their life. Well, number one, it’s not going to transform their life. Maybe 10% of people actually read the whole thing and apply it. And then it’s like, well, a lot of people who are reading the book are going to hopefully seek me out as a coach, or hire me. I’m like, “That might be true.” And if that’s the ultimate goal, why don’t you just build a freaking sales process that cuts to the chase and gets them on the phone, so you can work with them as a client?

And then when you’re rolling in the dough, listen, I’m not trying to sound like Pablo Escobar here, but when you’re making enough money where you have the freedom of thought and space and time and all that stuff, where you can think of all this stuff, where you can step away from enrolling clients all the time, where you’re making six figures a month comfortably, then it’s like, yeah. Now I’m going to write a book because I want to. If you’ve got a book, and you don’t have a big platform, what’s the point? Right? It makes no sense. Very few people are going to buy it. You’re going to do the whole kind of media tour if you want, and it’s going to look great. But at the end of the day, you’re going to look at your bank account and you’ll know the truth.

I don’t want that to happen for you. Listen, I’ve written three published books. Everything I’m saying, I’m not trying to be pessimistic. I’m trying to be … Listen, words don’t teach. Life experience does. Everything I’m telling you to do here, you might just be like, “Eh, I’m going to do it anyways.” And that’s great, go for it because you’re going to very quickly realize that it’s a lot tougher than you think. And it’s probably not going to get you the results you think it is.

Now I’m not saying that what I’m talking about here with building a predictable sales process is easy. But it’s the most worthwhile and important thing for you to do because once you have this predictable treadmill bringing new leads and clients in every day, and as you improve your ability to have conversations with people that leads to enrollments, now you’re moving the needle in a big way. Now you’re doing the things that really make a difference in your business.

Why a coach is important for long-term success

When we first started doing this, this is how we built Healthpreneur. I had more clients enroll in one week than I had in the previous year doing other stuff, like the content marketing, the lead magnets, all that stuff. More clients in one week than an entire year previously. This is what’s possible. But you just have to understand what to do and what not to do. And this is why it’s important to have a coach. And listen, whether you want to work with us or not, that’s for you to decide. I’m not here to beg anyone because I could care less because our ship is sailing anyway with the clients we’re working with. But you have to find something that makes sense for you. And you’ve got to follow that. And you’ve got to put the blinders on, and you have to understand that it’s setting a foundation for years to come. If you’re doing something that is not setting the foundation for the future, and if it’s just like making a quick buck right now, you’re going to lose in the long run.

Anyways, yeah, that’s the deal. Those are three lessons that I’ve learned from doing gymnastics training. Again, you’re going to suck at first. It’s going to take a long time, minimum six to 12 months. And the same thing’s going to happen with business. And you have to be doing things that are going to set the foundation for a healthier, better, stronger, more profitable future for your business and obviously for your life as well. That’s the deal. Just a couple quick announcements.

As I mentioned, our focus planner is now available on the website. Go to healthpreneurgroup.com/planner. It’s pretty bad ass, at least I think so. And I’ve got a phone call coming in, and I can’t decline it.

Anyways, second thing is we’ve got our Luminaries Mastermind coming up in Toronto June 26th and 27th. If you currently have a coaching business, but you’re not quite growing fast enough, if you want more clients, but you’re really good at what you do and you just need a better way to get them, well, I’d invite you to join us in Toronto. We’ve got a couple spots left. It’s in Toronto June 26th and 27th, that’s what I said. Two days. The first day, I’m going to teach you our million dollar model. I’m going to walk you through all that good stuff about how to predictably get prospects, how to teach to sell, how to ask and assess, instead of tell and oppress, and how to coach to close, all so that you can enroll more clients and make a lot more money. That’s on day one.

Day two, you’re going to be thrown into the mix with our existing clients who are coming in. And then we’ll start talking about some next level stuff to really move the needle in a big way. It’s going to be an awesome, awesome time. We’ve got a great hotel in Toronto. I’m super pumped about this. If you know anything about the events that we throw, we always do them at amazing venues. This is going to be no different. It’s right in the heart of the best part of Toronto. It’s going to be great.

If you’re interested in joining us, you have to apply to attend. Go to healthpreneurgroup.com/2day. That’s the number two and then D-A-Y. And you can learn all about the events and what’s entailed. And then if you’re interested in applying to join us, you can do so. And again, we’re making it super affordable, so you’re basically just covering the cost of food and materials. This is a very rare opportunity that we’re offering. And if you’re interested in joining us, then there you go.

That’s all for today. Thanks so much for joining me. I hope this episode has found you well. And I’m going to continue to do my gymnastics work. You’re going to continue working on your biz, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

Transcription

What’s going on guys? Yuri here. Welcome back to the show. Just got back from Puerto Rico. Well, as of this recording. Not too sure when you’re listening to this.

Introducing today’s topic: Three lessons I learned in Puerto Rico

I want to share three really cool lessons that I got from being in Puerto Rico. I wasn’t just there on a vacation. I was actually there speaking at a pretty high level Mastermind that my good friend, Mark Wade, was hosting. And, Mark is the co-founder of the American Posture Institute. He’s built up some really cool stuff, also, in the business to business space, helping health experts with virtual summits and so forth. Really awesome guy.

So, he does this Mastermind every year, and brings in about 30 or so high level people. Not just in the health space, but also in different endeavors that are doing great things in their online businesses. So he asked me to come speak a couple months ago. I’m like, “Yeah. For sure. Happy to do so.” Plus, I’d never been to Puerto Rico, so, pretty cool to check that out. By the way, really cool place.

So, I was there with some people you might know, might have heard of. Jeff Walker, the founder of Product Launch Formula. He’s kind of the godfather of all these online launches you’ve seen over the years. He’s the guy who started that whole thing. So he was there. Got to hang out with him. My good friend, Todd Herman, who I’ve known for a long time. He’s the author of The Alter Ego Effect that created the 90 day year. He is a high performance coach for Fortune 500 CEOs, Olympic and pro athletes. Really, really smart guy. He was there as well. Shaa Wasmund, who’s a three time year Times bestselling author, was formally given a really cool award from the Queen of England for her incredible work with entrepreneurs, female entrepreneurs, specifically in the UK. Zach Benson, who’s like this Instagram ninja, who’s collectively got 12 million followers on Instagram between his accounts. He’s now been contracted by Dubai to help them with their social engagements, in terms of Dubai tourism and so forth.

So, some really, really high level people, and not only was I able to present and share some of the things that have worked well for us in our business, but I was also able to connect with some amazing people to learn from them. So I want to share three really big things with you right here. I think you’ll find them rather helpful.

The higher up you go the more personal development you need

So first thing is, one of the things that Jeff Walker talked about, which I thought was really, really interesting, was he talked about the higher up you go, the higher up you go in business, right? The more personal development you need. And I thought this was a really interesting insight, and I had actually never thought of it that way. And it makes a lot of sense, because initially when you get started in your business, naturally, your mindset is going to be a big factor in terms of moving through self-doubt, worry, et cetera. But, all of that is usually handled through execution, right? And, obviously, you have to go through some stuff. But here’s the thing is that the higher up the scale you get, the higher up in business you get, it’s no longer so much about tactics and strategies, it’s really about being able to push yourself, mentally, beyond what you think is possible or what you’re used to.

One of my former coaches, Dan Sullivan, always said, “What got you out of Egypt won’t get you to the Promised Land.” Which means that what got you to this level is probably not going to get you to the next level. And, I think there’s obviously a little bit of wiggle room there, but for the most part, there are nuances, there are new things you need to learn, to move to the next level. So for instance, you can go from zero to, I would say, probably half a million dollars, by yourself. Easily. Especially with a higher end coaching model, you can go to half a million dollars, by yourself, no problem. As you approach a million dollars in revenue, you’re probably going to look at having one or two other people on your team to support you. As you get above a million dollars, you’re starting to build out your team. You start becoming more of a leader, instead of a hustler and a marketer.

And this is a big shift that I’ve had to make over the past year or so, year and half. And it’s a continual evolution for myself, because my tendency is to drive the business, is to be like the marketer, for instance, because that’s kind of what I’ve always done. But I know in order for me to really scale, and I’m not talking about just adding an extra hundred thousand dollars a year, but really doubling our business, year after year, I need to really build out a great team. Now, a lot of this, you could say, “Well, yeah. You’re developing new skillsets and learning how to be a better leader.” But all of this comes down to mindset, right? It’s being able to think differently, to look at situations differently, to no longer look at yourself as the “I have to do everything” type of person. So you start developing new skillsets to hire, to bring leaders in your team, and so forth.

And, if you think about pro sports as an example. So when you look at an athlete, there’s a really big growth curve, right? So there’s skill acquisition when you’re very young. You continue to develop skills, and so forth, and obviously a lot of game repetition and so forth, in your teens. Some go from club level to collegiate level. They play NCAA, or CIS if they’re in Canada, and in this life, you are able to go pro. And at the pro level, you have … You can only get to the pro level if you’re very good, right? So technically, as skill wise, you’re there. So if there are thousands of pro athletes, what really makes the difference between the top, like the real top athletes.

And I’ll use the example of tennis, right? Tennis, if you’re lucky … Tennis is a very unique sport because there’s only, I would say … Well, to be in the top 100, you’ve got to be a very good player. But then, there’s this other level, which is in the top four, right? We’re talking about the Novak Djokovics, Rafael Nadals, Roger Federers. Like those … And usually Murray, but he’s kind of toast now. If we look at just those three guys, Rafa, Roger, and Novak, those are arguably three of the best tennis players of all time. Collectively, they have one more grand slams than all other tennis players … like, it’s not even close, right? In the modern era. Novak Djokovic, as of this recording, is on the tear, like he’s … the kid’s unstoppable. He’s obviously not a kid, obviously, he’s in his thirties, but he’s unstoppable.

And, what’s interesting is when he was in his earlier twenties, he was a bit of loose cannon, so he was a bit of a jokester, not really taking things too seriously. He had the talents, but his mind wasn’t … his head wasn’t screwed on properly. And he went through a lot of ups and downs over the past couple years. Took some time off. Didn’t know what the heck he was going to do, if he was going to come back to the sport or not. And then he had some type of … I don’t even know what happened, but it was a big 180 degree shift. And he when came back, he was untouchable. He was winning everything. And I think, if he keeps on this pace, he’ll be the most crowned, in terms of grand slams, out of any tennis player of all time, if he keeps up with this pace, over the next few years.

So what’s the difference? Did his tennis game change? Did he get better forehand, better serve? I mean, minuscule, right? He changed the way he serves a little bit. But the big thing was in his mind. Right? So he continued to evolve, and grow, and build his mindset to an infinite level. Because I believe … Think about it this way. Your physical capacity can only … it’s limited. You can only get so much stronger. You can only get so much more endurant. You can only get so much faster. But mentally? What’s the limit? It is un … I mean, there is no limit. How far you can take your ability to get into the zone, to appreciate and have gratitude, and all this kind of stuff. Whatever those mindset shifts need to be made, there is limitless possibilities for how much you can grow, internally. But, if we look at Usain Bolt as a sprinter, how much faster can Usain Bolt really get? Like milli-microseconds? I don’t even know if that’s a word. But it’s the performance improvements, from a physical standpoint, are so, so small. But mentally? It’s un-topped.

So, long story to come back to this whole idea of the more … the better you get, the more you grow in your business, the more you have to grow, personally. And here’s the cool thing, is that your business growth always lags behind personal growth. Okay? So if you want to grow your business, you need to grow yourself, first. That’s a really, really important takeaway. And that’s why, you know, hopefully this podcast is being of service to you to help you do that.

Surrounding yourself with big thinkers

Second thing is you need to be surrounded by other people who are big thinkers, and who are playing life at big levels. So Jeff Walker has a Mastermind, and I was like, “Dude. Some of the stuff you’re sharing is amazing.” His members … About 35 members in his platinum plus group. Nine years, they’ve been in his group. Nine years. And I’m thinking to myself, that is unbelievable. And I asked him, like, how do you … What’s the secret sauce here? I would love to have my Mastermind members stay with me for nine years. That would be a dream come true. And, you know, he talked about all … it being about community, and doing all that stuff. And, you know, he said, “I think part of it is, when you’re in a group with other people who you just want to be better because you’re around them, naturally, you want to be around those people more often.”

So, it’s like if you lived … And I’ll give … This is a great example. Let me give you a really good analogy of this. So when I lived outside the city, so we moved out to a small town called Port Perry. We lived there for five years and we started having kids. And it’s a small town of 9000 people, about an hour outside Toronto. Really nice little town. Historical little town. Really cool. But the thing is, our next door neighbor, he had a pickup truck that was on his lawn. Right? He’d sit out on his front porch with a beer and his tank top, belly hanging out. So just kind of get that image in your minds, okay?

Now, is that the type of environment that is going to inspire you to grow big. And when I say, “Grow big,” I’m not talking about necessarily monetarily, but just … you become your environments. And when I continue to see that … I’m like … I don’t want to see this stuff on a daily basis. And that was one of the big, big reasons why we moved back to the city. Because where we live in Toronto, we live in one of those affluent areas in Toronto, it is phenomenal. I mean, I go walking around, I feel completely inspired, every single day. People have money. Not that money is making people better or not. But when you have access to resources, you just have a nicer home, your landscaping is done properly. And this is inspiring, because that … I would rather be surrounded by that than somebody sitting on their front porch drinking a beer in their tank top, you know what I’m saying?

The value of masterminds

So, when you’re in a group with other people that are just playing life at a bigger level, you are naturally going to evolve with them. And this is one of the most important lessons I can just, hopefully, impart on you. I think I’ve said this a thousand times in this podcast, over the last hundred episodes or so, is your environment is arguably the most important determinant of your success. Right? People say that you become the reflection of the five people you hang around with the most. Whether or not it’s five or six or 10, who cares, right? But the idea is human beings are social in nature, and we will do whatever we can to fit in with the tribe. Because if we don’t, then we’re gone-zo. That’s just wired into our brain.

So if you are in a Mastermind group, or if you have the opportunity to go to events where other people are doing great things in their business, naturally, you want to keep up. And it’s not about keeping up with the Joneses, and doing all this kind of stuff that you don’t want to do.

It’s about being inspired. It’s about being lifted up. It’s about borrowing other people’s beliefs, borrowing their courage, to become a better version of yourself. Because I really believe the pursuit of money, the pursuit of being a millionaire or a billionaire is a really, really worthwhile endeavor. Because it forces you to become a better version of yourself, as we talked about in the first tip, is the more you grow in business, the more you have to develop personally. So, just, if we use deductive reasoning, logic, the more you make, the better you have to become. Right? There’s a very different level of capability and mindset, in terms of mental toughness, emotional toughness, outlook on life, all that kind of stuff. Very different between someone who’s making 30,000 dollars a year, and someone who’s making three, or 30, or 300 million dollars a year. And that’s why I continue to say, you have to do whatever you can to make a lot of money, because you are forced to become a better person in that journey. And the best way I’ve known to do this is just to get into environments with other great people.

And that’s why I run a Mastermind. I’ve been part of them. Currently part of two Masterminds. I’ve been part of Masterminds and coaching groups since 2010. I’ve spent over half a million dollars on my own coaching and developments. I think that’s important, right? Because as a coach, how can you expect people to pay you money, as a coach, if you aren’t doing that yourself? It’s just so incongruent.

So, a lot of times … Before 2010, for three years when I started my business online, I thought I could do everything by myself. I’m going to sit behind my computer, I’m going to crack the code. It didn’t happen. The big pivotal moment in my business happened when I made the decision to start going to live events. So I went to three events at the beginning of 2010. Hired my first coach from one of those events. And that was really the inflection point in my business. So I want to encourage you, and I want to challenge you to think to yourself, “What events do I need to be getting to, to surround myself with other great people?” Right? Not just the coach. Not just the person, like myself, who’s going to help you, guide you, et cetera. But the people in the room. Right? Because those are going to be your colleagues, your friends, et cetera. And they should be able to lift you up as well. Right? The rising tide should float all boats.

So, again, if you’re interested, we have our Toronto Mastermind coming up, June 26th and 27th. If you want to be in a room with about 20 other great health and fitness experts who are growing their coaching businesses, and you want my on the spot, hands on help to move your business forward, to help you get more clients, to get your mindset out of the gutter, to get it to the next level, this is a great opportunity to do so. So go to healthpreneurgroup.com/2day. So two day. And, if you meet the criteria, then you can just fill out the application, and I will get back to you personally within 24 hours.

So, that’s the second point, is you need to be surrounded by other great people. And that’s why being at events or Masterminds is extremely valuable. Even the worst events that I’ve been to were still extremely valuable, because sometimes you may meet one person who can change everything in your business. So that’s the second thing.

The third thing is … And I’m going to … Because this is going to kind of tie back into the second thing, quite honestly. So a lot of people who are in the online space are moving out to Puerto Rico. Because there’s this thing called Act 20, or Act 22, in the United States which allows US residents to move to Puerto Rico, set up their business down there, and they get amazing tax benefits. So I know about 20 people now who live down there. And, as a Canadian, I don’t know if it’s as easy. So that’s something I might look into.

But here’s the cool thing, is … Think about this. Imagine living in paradise. And your next door neighbors are not only some of your best friends, but they’re also crushing it in business. Can you imagine that? I don’t know anywhere else in the world that has that type of intentional community. And that’s what these guys have created down there. And I’m not going to mention their names, so you don’t need to stalk them. But these are people you’ve seen online, you’ve probably listened to their podcasts, you’ve seen them on TV, et cetera. And they have built an amazing community down in Puerto Rico.

And when we look at quality of life, right? We know that isolation and loneliness is actually a greater risk factor, it actually robs more years off your life than smoking does. That’s how crazy this is. And when you look at being able to surround yourself and live in an area where every other night you’re having a barbecue or get together. You’re playing tennis several times a week. You’re playing golf, hanging out. Your kids go to the same school together. All this kind of stuff, with other people who get you. That’s pretty powerful. And I think just that alone, regardless of the weather, regardless of the tax advantages, just being in that kind of environments, can make huge, huge strides in your fulfillments, in your happiness, in your level of success.

Now, again, I’m not saying you should move to Puerto Rico, or you need to move houses or whatever. I live in Toronto. There are hundreds of amazing entrepreneurs in Toronto. Some of them are some of my best friends, but the reality is that we don’t see each other that often. We probably see each other more when we’re traveling than we do in Toronto. And that’s just the nature of the city. You just really have to make it a point to get together. And, as best we try, it might be a couple times a year, at most. Very different than if you’re living beside your neighbor who’s also your close friend and colleague.

Being totally immersed in what you want

So I just thought it was really, really interesting, and … I’ll just kind of tie this back into the second point, is you need to do whatever you can to be immersed with people who are just living life and playing business at a higher level. Because most people, maybe even our closest friends and family, don’t understand what you’re doing. They’re probably not supportive of you. And I say this, like, some of our clients, I mean, I really feel bad for them, because their husband, or their spouse, doesn’t believe in what they’re doing. And that is absolutely shocking. And, how are you supposed to succeed when the person you spend the most time with in your life doesn’t believe in what you’re doing? And that’s really unfortunate. I mean, it sucks. It’s not cool to be in that kind of situation.

So, if that’s the case, and even if it’s not the case, even if you’ve got a supportive close circle, you have to do whatever you can to get around other people that are just thinking bigger, playing bigger, because it forces you to raise your game. If I step on the court, like last year, playing some 16 and 17 year olds that absolutely kick my ass, I am forced to get better to keep up with them. If I’m playing against my kids, obviously I can just, you know, tap the ball over the net. I’m not improving. So, I want you to continually think about how can I put myself in situations where I’m this … not necessarily the smartest person in the room. Where I have the most to learn. Where other people around me are playing at a bigger level. And, I just think it’s a really important message, so I’m really tying in point two and three pretty much together. They’re kind of the same thing here.

An opportunity to connect, learn, and move the needle

So, on that note, again, I want to leave you with one invitation, and that is this. Listen, we’ve got, I think, five spots left for our Toronto Mastermind, and if … I don’t care where you live. I don’t give … I don’t care if you live in Florida, or if you live in LA. There are these amazing things called airplanes. I know, it’s amazing, right? You can go to the airport, and get on an airplane, and fly to a different city, or a different country. It’s amazing how this works. And I need to … I just need to be very honest with you because if building a business is a priority of yours, you need to do things to get into these environments.

And whether it’s our Toronto event or not, I don’t care, but for the sake of this conversation, our Toronto Mastermind, two days, June 26th and 27th. I want to invite you. If you’re a coach who’s currently coaching clients, and you want to scale your business. If you want to add an extra 10K or more per a month to your business, I’m going to show you exactly how to do that in two days. You’re going to be surrounded by some other amazing game player people in the game of online coaching, and you’re going to have dinner with us. You’re going to have lunch with us. You’re going to obviously be in the room and learning. You’re going to connect, right? You’re going to see what other people are doing. Your beliefs will be challenged, like, “Oh my god, I didn’t think that was possible I could do this and I could do that.”

And, again, I’m just going to hold your hand to the fire, and I’m going to challenge you. Are you willing to get out of your comfort zone, and join us in Toronto? Right, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for any length of time, obviously there’s something that resonates with you about this. Right? And I don’t care what you have going on in June. I don’t care what’s going on financially or whatever. Obviously, if you’re in dire straits, don’t come join us, because obviously you’re not at the level to even qualify in the first place. But if your business is doing okay, you’re generating some revenue, you’ve got clients, you want to scale, then this will be a no brainer. I’m going to be walking you through our million dollar model on the first day. And then the second day, you’re going to be thrown in with a bunch of our existing clients, and you’re going to learn some really cool higher level strategies, and, again, you’re going to get to meet everyone and connect with everyone, and just move your thinking and beliefs to the next level.

So, if you want to learn more, healthpreneurgroup.com/2day. That’s number two, and then D-A-Y. Go to the page, check it out. We’ve got five spots left. If it makes sense for you, then apply to join us. The cost is very minimal. It’s basically just covering our food and materials. We’re making it super affordable for anyone to join. And, again, I’m going to just … I’m going to be very blunt. I can promise you that if you’re not with us in Toronto, your business is going to suffer. It’s not going to do as well than if you were with us in Toronto, I can promise you that. I don’t know where you are in business. I don’t know what you’re up to. But I can guarantee that if you’re trying to do things on your own, you will not get the same results as if you were with us in Toronto.

So, on that note, I’m going to finish off. Yeah, I hope you have gotten some value out of today’s episode. And, I look forward to seeing you in the next one. For now, head on over to healthpreneurgroup.com/2day. Have an amazing one. Continue to be great, do great, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

Transcription

Hey, hey, and welcome back to the show. Yuri back with you on The Healthpreneur Podcast. Hope your day is going great. Today we are going to be talking about measuring what matters, and is that something you’re doing in your business? If not, well, we’re going to talk a little bit about that in today’s episode.

Introducing today’s topic: Measuring what matters

There are two reasons I want to talk about this today. Number one, I just got a Fitbit, and number two, I’ve been reading a book by John Dewar called Measure What Matters. It’s just kind of top of mind, so I thought we’d discuss this if that’s cool. So, as you can see on the video, I’m wearing this cool band. It’s a Fitbit. I just got it last week, and I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to do this. It’s funny because I have not been one to really quantify my exercise habits forever, so it’s always been very intuitive and so forth.

I never really tracked my workouts. I don’t even know why. But anyway I’m like, “You know what? I want something meaningful to work towards.” As you know, I’ve talked about doing gymnastics and stuff like that, so I’ve been doing that every day. I’m like, “You know, that can be cool to just kind of measure my progress.” So, I’ve been using the Fitbit now for a little bit to measure the number of steps I’m taking during the day, my sleep quality, all that cool stuff. It’s been really, really good.

Here’s the first thing I actually noticed is that taking 10,000 steps a day is actually not that many. For instance, I walk my dog around the block, and I walk around my house, and I’m almost at 10,000 steps. So, maybe the bar is set too low. I don’t know, usually on a daily basis, I’m at about 15,000 steps, which is pretty cool. So, right now, as of this recording, how many? We’re at 4,172 steps, so we’ll see how the rest of the day goes. Should be able to hit that. Had a good workout this morning. I’m in a good routine right now, so I’m getting up nice and early. Heading over to the soccer field, if you’ve seen any of my videos from there through Instagram and stuff. If you’re following me on Instagram, then that’s where I’ll share more of that stuff. @Healthpreneur1 is my handle.

Every morning I’ve been getting up and going to the soccer field, doing some sprints, doing some body weight workouts, and obviously, some stretching. It’s a great way to start the day. It’s getting warmer. It’s just beautiful. I really, really enjoy that time.

OKRs: Objectives and Key Results

I’ve been measuring my fitness progress and then reading this book, Measure What Matters. It’s actually really interesting. So, John Dewar is a guy who came into Google years ago. Google was kind of doing their thing, and John comes into Google and another bunch of other companies, like Intel and so forth, big, big, big companies and introduces this whole concept called OKRs, objectives and key results. I’m reading this book; I’m like, “Okay, this is cool, this is fascinating, but it’s really quite simple.” I’m like, “What’s the secret sauce here?” There is no secret sauce, like with anything. But the whole idea here is that Google adopted what are known as OKRs, and it’s become the framework for which they’ve built their business upon. An OKR is really an objective with key results supporting that objective.

So, if companies like Google are basing their entire business on OKRs, I think it’s probably helpful to talk about this, right? And it’s not just Google. We’re talking about like Intel and huge companies that are doing this. I’m just amazed that this was like rocket science for them when it was introduced to them. I’m like, “This seems pretty straightforward, but apparently for a lot of businesses it’s not.” And if Google didn’t know how to do this stuff, I guarantee there’s a lot of entrepreneurs who don’t. So, what’s interesting is that as I’m reading this book, I started thinking back to our Healthpreneur Planner, which is almost entirely based on the same premise of this OKR system. So, for instance, in our planner, we identify four… We called them the focus four, right?, So what are four big goals for the year, right?

So, those are the only four things, the quantitative objectives. So, I want to make a million dollars, I want to help a hundred clients, or whatever the objective, black or white, is. We identify four of those. Those are the objectives, okay, in the OKR system. Underneath those, then we obviously break those down into projects and things that we can do to make those goals a reality. Within those projects, we look at what are some metrics that will allow us to know if we’re moving in the right direction? So, these are essentially the key results. So, key results are things you can measure, you can quantify. In the OKR system, the objective is not as black or white, it’s more of like, you know, we want to be the industry leader. Now, how do you know when you’re there? I’m not too sure, but I like to keep goals quantifiable because you know you are…

For instance, instead of saying we are the industry leader, it would probably be better to say we are the number one fastest growing company according to the Inc. Top 500 Companies. That way, you’re either… I feel like you’re number one on the list or you’re not. Like, you know it’s happened or not. So, I’m a big believer in quantifying the results because you know when you’re there or when you’re not there. The key results are simply metrics or key performance indicators that as they move up or down, depending on what the metric is, they should move you closer to that objective. Does that make sense? So, that’s the whole premise of OKRs. It’s not like nothing we’ve never heard of before, but it became such a huge and profound component to what Google and a lot of these companies are doing, and I’m only about halfway through some. You know, I’m not fully done, and maybe there are some nuances that obviously are going to come to the latter half of the book.

The metrics for team member bonuses

But one of the things I found interesting was they talked about how OKRs are not tied to compensation and bonuses, which I thought was really interesting. For instance, if certain metrics are hit, those are independent of bonuses for team members, and I thought that was pretty cool. The OKR system is completely transparent across the company so they know exactly what the CEO is doing, the CEO knows exactly what everyone else is doing. It’s completely transparent… It’s almost like an aquarium with all the fish swimming around. You can see exactly what they’re doing, and the fish being all the team members. So, I thought that was a really cool nuance. That’s something we’re going to do a lot better job of in Healthpreneur is just making sure that everyone’s metrics are number one, identified, number two, transparent for the whole team to look at.

So, that’s just, you know, how you grow as a leader. Just kind of learn new things, implementing, and so forth. But I want to take it back to the Healthpreneur planner. So, the Healthpreneur planner, if you don’t have a copy, you can actually get one at Healthpreneurgroup.com/planner. This is a planner I’ve built for 10 years, and it’s finally in print. It’s something I use every single day. It’s a 90-day planner for people who actually want to get shit done, who actually want to reach their goals. And the reason I think this planner’s so effective is because of the way it’s built and the way it’s structured.

So, it’s not just like, “Hey, what am I going to do tomorrow?” It’s not one of those. It’s about casting your vision, like, where do I want to be in at least in the next year, like, in the next 12 months? What do I want that to look like? What are the four focus projects with the four goals, the focus four that I want to achieve? And then step by step, we break those focus four down into milestones and projects that now you have control over, right? You can’t control earning $10 million, but you can control what you do every single day to move you closer to that.

So, part of the thinking that the planner helps you work through is figuring out, well, number one, what are my focus four? Number two, how do I break those down into controllable projects? And then what are the tasks that I have control over, my team has control over that are going to help us accomplish those projects, and as those are completed, they move us closer to those ultimate focus four objectives. That’s part of the brilliance of this system is the way that it’s structured. And then from that, that becomes the guiding light for all the decisions you make. So, what you plan to do every single week, what you plan to do on a daily basis, all of those decisions filter down from the previous thinking that you did about the focus four, the projects to get you there, and those daily and weekly tasks.

So, what you’re doing on a weekly basis is you’re simply looking at… It’s almost like you’re looking back to the map, and you’re “Okay, where are we going? Okay, cool. We need to do this and that. We’ll get that done this week. I’m going to do this first thing tomorrow morning, etc.” So, it’s a really nice strategic way of planning that is not just haphazard, and you know that everything you’re doing daily and weekly is tying back to your ultimate goals because one of the challenges that I’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurs fall into is they do stuff, but it’s not tied into the ultimate objective they want. And what’s even worse is they don’t even really know what the objective is that they want.

Leads, clients enrolled and revenue

So, they do a lot of stuff, right? They’re busy, but they’re not productive. They’re busy, but they’re not effective. And so part of being a leader is knowing what to do, right? Is really knowing what matters most to work on. So, I’m going to give you four metrics right here that I think for a coaching business are really important to look at. We look at them every single week. Number one is how many new leads have come in, and leads, in our case, are phone calls. How many phone conversations have you had with prospective clients, okay? Lead flow is very important to your business. You know, if you don’t have leads coming in, you better be amazing on the back-end to get referrals and whatever else.

So, number one is how many calls have you had booked? Number two is how many clients have you enrolled? So, okay, in the space of one month, I had 50 calls booked, I enrolled 25 people, which is great, right? Now you know what your percentage enrollment rate is for that month and how many clients you’ve onboarded in that mindfulness. Now, we’ve looked at leads and clients enrolled. The third metric is going to be revenue, right? So, what’s the revenue? If you have 25 clients coming in in a month, each client pays you $3,000, that’s $75,000 in revenue. Pretty cool, right? And then the fourth metric is profit. Because if you are smart and you’re doing things like acquiring clients through paid traffic, like Facebook ads, there’s obviously going to be some ad spend.

So, if your revenue is $75,000 but your ad spend as $100,000, something’s wrong, right? So, we’re not going to jump up and down at a $75,000 revenue because we have to account for profitability. You need to look at what are your expenses, what’s your ad costs and so forth, and you need to take all that into consideration because in a premium-price coaching model, and again, there’s a lot of… We can go down the rabbit hole in this, but for the most part, you should be profitable at least two to one, at least at the minimum, two to one on your front end acquisition. So, those are four metrics, right? Leads, clients enrolled, revenue and profit. If you only looked at those four things, honestly, your business would be pretty good. Like, you would have four important dials that as they go up, you’ll know that your business is in the right direction.

So, there’s two… Of those four dials, two of them are what are known as the leading indicators, and two of them are known as trailing indicators. Trailing indicators are, they’re kind of after the fact, right? So, revenue and profit are after the fact. They don’t really predict the future unless that revenue is largely based on recurring revenue. But for the most part, revenue and profit is a trailing indicator. Now, leads and clients enrolled becomes a lot more of a predictive indicator, especially phone calls. Clients enrolled, obviously, as well. Again, if clients enrolled, if they’re on payment plans, like, if you enrolled 25 clients and they’re all paying you three payments of $100,000, then you know roughly what the next three months are going to be look like. Phone calls, if you see that number go up, your revenues should go up, right? If one month you had 25 phone calls and next month you had 50 the next month you had 500, that should correlate with your revenue and your profit.

So, your most important thing to look at and what we help our clients with, and again this is why it’s helpful to even know what you’re looking at. You know, one of the things that we do with our clients is we have a critical numbers document, and this critical numbers document is something they fill out every single week. They look at everything from click, all the way down to enrollments, right? So, all those metrics there and in between, and we give them very specific parameters of how much you should be paying for a webinar registrant. I’m not going to tell you the number because it’s a magical number, it’s good to know. But we tell our clients, “If you’re in this range, you’re golden.” How much should you be paying for a phone call? Here’s the range. How much should you be paying for enrollment? Here’s the range. If your numbers are outside of that, then you know where the leak might be in your pipeline and how to fix it.

So, for instance, if you’re getting a lot of calls booked but no one’s enrolling, where do you think the problem lies? On the phone, right? So, you have to get better at having conversations that lead to enrollments because I promise you if your pipeline is set up the right way, you’re not having 20 conversations with unqualified people. If you’re having 20 conversations with completely unqualified people, it’s no longer a phone call issue. It’s a higher up in the upstream issue in terms of your messaging, in terms of your webinar, in terms of your criteria, etc. But the key thing is that you have to measure what matters most in your business. And if you don’t know what those metrics are, I’ve just given you four metrics that will really help.

How to get help and a client example

Again, if you’re running some type of pipeline, like we are, a Facebook ad, webinar application, or phone call, and you need help with that, then just let us know. Case in point. We actually just had a new client enroll with us, and she had a phone call with one of our coaches back in September and that’s whatever, six, seven months ago now? She sent me an Instagram message about a week ago as of recording, and she asked me if I have a look at her funnel. I told her, I’m like, “Well, not really because you’re not one of our clients. It’s not fair to my clients who pay me good money to do that for them to do that for you.” And so I said, “Listen.” And she had been through someone else’s webinar training. I’m not going mention the person’s name, but they’re a very well-known person who has a webinar course, a DIY course, by the way. This is just a perfect example of why courses are never going to lead to lasting outcomes.

Not all the time, but compared to a coaching program with hands-on coaching, it’s very, very different. So, she took this person’s course, got her webinar done, got it live, and it just wasn’t working. And so she was like, “Hey, can you have a look at my webinar funnel? It’s just not working the way I want it to.” I said, “Listen. Like, I’d be happy to, but you got to be one of our clients.” And she’s like, “Well, do I get like, you know, hands on support and all this kind of stuff?” I’m like, “You will get more coaching and support that you can handle, and we will get deep into your webinar. We’ll give you full-on reviews. We’re going to review everything, slide by slide, with you. We’re going to figure out what the problem is. Maybe it’s not even the webinar, but I can’t tell you that stuff if you’re not one of our clients.”

And so she got to the point where she realized that what she was doing wasn’t working, and she enrolled with us last week. Super pumped to have her on board, and we’re going to create some magic together because she’s a really great person, really awesome business. And we can make some small tweaks in her business and just get her to that next level very quickly.

So, number one, you have to know what you’re measuring. You have to know what metrics you’re measuring. Number two is you have to like… Trying to figure this stuff out on your own sometimes can be challenging. This is why Google, you know, like, for instance, they brought in John Dewar to do this stuff with them because they didn’t even know what they didn’t even know, right? So, now they’re introduced to the system, this OKR system. Now, they’ve kind of identified some OKRs that are important for their company, and they know, like, they had a consultant that came in and guided them through this whole process. This is just another reason why, another example of why having somebody to look on your stuff like third party, that coach, that mentor, to look at your stuff is so important.

Learning from failure and avoiding pain when you can

I just shot a video for my clients this morning, and I was reminding them, I’m like, “Hey, listen. Once your pipeline’s up, there’s not much you can do. You can’t force the issue, right? You can’t force a grass to grow faster.” So, I gave him some insights and some pointers to remember about, like, here’s what you want to do at this point, right? There’s only certain things you can control, and there’s certain things you just kind of have to let them be. But if you’re trying to do this on your own, it can be really challenging to navigate this world of business, especially if you’re not as seasoned as someone like myself, for instance, right? Because I’ve been doing this for 13 years. I’ve launched hundreds of products and offers, and most of them, quite honestly, have failed, right? I’ve learned a lot from those failures. And I’ve had a couple of wins, which had been really big wins, and the only reason they’ve been big wins is because I’ve failed so often.

So, there’s a lot of that comes from pain and suffering, and I would rather you not go through that same journey. That’s why we help so many people inside of our Healthpreneur Community, right? Our Health Business Accelerator Workshop and our Luminaries Mastermind.

Here’s the thing is. If you want to be able to grow your business, right, number one is you have to identify what those metrics are. I gave you four, which I think are really powerful. If you have a coaching business. Second is you have to know what type of ranges to look at, right? If you’re getting people on the phone for $5,000, you probably need some help, right? If you’re getting people on the phone who are just not qualified, well, you probably also need some help. And if you don’t know what to look at, if you don’t know how to make those tweaks, what are you supposed to do, right? Where are you supposed to find the answers? On YouTube? On Google? It’s not going to happen.

So, anyways, if you want some help with this, then listen, come join us in Toronto. We’ve got like literally a handful of spots left. June 26th and 27th in Toronto. You’ll get my hands-on help. We’re going to build a true million dollar model, and you’re gonna get the nuances that you’re probably not even aware of to help your business grow. We actually have a doctor who I was speaking to on Messenger last week, and he was actually in another very well-known person’s course. I’m not going to mention his name, but I actually think he’s doing some cool stuff. You’ve probably seen him all over the place; YouTube, Facebook, et cetera. He took his course, got some really good momentum, spending a good amount of money on Facebook ads, but he’s getting a lot of people on the phone who are not qualified or actually not even showing up.

And I just really quickly asked him, I’m like, “Hey, man. Can you just show me one of your Facebook ads and your landing page?” I didn’t have to take an hour on this. I looked at it in 10 seconds. I saw three big opportunities, and I said, “Hey, man.” I’m like, “You got some great momentum. I can see three big issues right now that we can fix in half a day.” And that’s the power of having someone like me be able to look over your shoulder and give you those nuances and those insights. So, he’s going to be joining us in Toronto. Really, really cool stuff. And we’ve got about 20 other people that are going to be with us for the two days.

So, if you’re interested, June 26th and 27th, my hands-on help. You’ll be in a room with some really great players in the health and fitness space who are all building their coaching businesses. And if you want to move things to the next level, you got to be with us, okay? So, healthpreneurgroup.com/twoday. Two, as in the number, and then D-A-Y. Go to the page. If you meet the criteria, fill out the application, and I’ll get back to you within 24 hours, and we’ll take it from there. Sound good?

So, that is why it’s important to measure what matters. Hope you found this well. Hopefully, it resonates with you. Hope you have an amazing day. I’ll see you in the next episode. For now, continue to get out there, be great, do great, and I’ll see you soon.

Transcription

Yuri Elkaim:                         Hey guys, what’s going on? Yuri here, welcome back to the podcast. Super excited to be joined by an amazing client of ours, super, super rockstar, Brandy Lipscomb. I’m really excited to have her on the show.

Introducing Brandy and her journey

Brandy has done some crazy things with us inside of HBA. We’ll get into that just a few moments, but first just so you have a bit of context about, you know who she is. She is trained as a naturopathic physician. That was her journey up until up until this point. She was a combat medic serving in Iraq. She is a mother, a natural born entrepreneur I think.

Yuri Elkaim:                         She’s doing some great stuff in our space and I’m super, super excited to have you with us here, Brandy, so thanks so much for taking the time.

Brandy Lipscomb:            Thank you so much for having me on, Yuri, it’s an honor and I’m just so happy that I found you and your program. It’s changed my life.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Thank you very much. Let’s talk about what life looked like for Brandy, maybe a couple months, a year or two years ago, walk us through what a normal, everyday average day look like for you.

Brandy Lipscomb:            Well, let’s go back to 2017 before I sold my medical practice because I started and ran a family practice out in the mountains of rural Washington State, beautiful place, I loved my clients. But you know, I wanted to take care of everyone and so I was Medicaid, Medicare, dealing with insurance, and you have to write three authorizations before you have permission to touch your client and do anything for them. Then you would treat them for four visits and the insurance would deny it. It was so frustrating that the health insurance companies completely dictated my ability to help my clients. That was the model that I said, “I don’t want to do this anymore. This isn’t working for me. It’s not working for my clients. What else is there out there?” So I sold that-

Yuri Elkaim:                         How many clients were you typically seeing on a daily basis? Was there like nonstop go, go, go, was it burnout almost? Or what did that look like for you?

Brandy Lipscomb:            As a naturopathic doctor we take more time with people, our goal is to treat the root cause and so 30 minute office visit was pretty common an hour for our first office call, so I would really spend the time with people. I would probably see anywhere from 14 to 20 patients a day and run, run, run, and then go home and chart all night long, just sitting at my desk charting and doing paperwork for the next four hours. So yeah, it was easily 60 plus hour weeks and the burnout was very real. There’s huge relief behind figuring out how to let that go.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Awesome. Then you go from that to, what was the next step for you in that process?

Brandy Lipscomb:            Well, I mean, and that’s my personal journey, we relocated back to the East Coast to be closer to family. I was thinking, “Oh, I’ll just set up a holistic healthcare kind of advisory because I’m not licensed within the state of West Virginia.” Then my father passed away very unexpectedly, unfortunately and so I spent the next two years sort of on a sabbatical and learning about finances and don’t laugh, but I was actually selling life insurance and annuities for a while because it helped me have a flexible schedule to be home and learn about money 101.

Brandy Lipscomb:            Learn things that as a busy doctor, I never had time for personal growth and development. So over the past year and a half, yes, I protected families, but I also read 35 different books on personal growth development, and finance and I developed myself. I let my husband take the wheel and pay the bills for a little bit so that I could find some time to grow as a person.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s awesome.

Brandy Lipscomb:            Yeah, once I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was ready for something else. That was when I found you.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Was there a moment you can remember or was it like a culmination of moments that led you to be like, you know what this life insurance stuff is not really what I want to do? Was there a one moment as you’re sitting by the fireplace and it just hit you in the head or what did that transition look like?

The book and advertisement that inspired Brandy to act

Brandy Lipscomb:            Pretty much, I mean through all of the reading and the studying of personal growth and development, I knew in my heart of hearts that what I was doing with was a temporary, it was the bridge between that and whatever I was going to do next in medicine because my passion is in helping and healing and transforming lives. But there was definitely that moment and I was sitting actually in my reading chair, I get up every morning and I meditate and I read and I journal. The first 45 minutes of my day is just focused on that type of thing before the kid wakes up. It was one book, it was Jen Sincero, You Are a Badass at Making Money, that I was reading and her words were literally jumping out of the page at me. It was halfway through that book that I said, “It’s time.” Like, “It’s time, it’s here, it’s now I’m ready.” And I just, I finally was ready to embrace the next phase of my life.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s awesome. Well I will say out of all of our clients, you probably have one of the most dialed-in money mindsets. You’ve talked about some of your affirmations that you have, which is great. I think as you know, a lot of, in our space there’s a lot of hang-ups around money, charging for healing, helping people to hold it. Our job is to help, obviously, people like you, really command what’s your worth and it’s been great to see you do so great.

Brandy Lipscomb:            Thank you.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I think it’s funny too because like so many women have read that book, by Jen Sincero, and it’s good, whatever you need to do to, to build that mindset, to build your self-belief and can command which are worth a thing is awesome. So that’s really cool.

Brandy Lipscomb:            Thank you. Yeah, I’m a huge fan. I’m always recommending books to people, that’s where I find most of my healing inspiration and drive from.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, totally. So you’re ready to kind of make things happen now. Then how did you come across us? How did you come across HBA and what we’re doing?

Brandy Lipscomb:            It was that awesome ad of you and your family and the bathing suits on the beach.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, our best ad of all time for sure.

Brandy Lipscomb:            Yes, it was that great ad. You know, I’d seen it in the past and I had been attracted to it. When I felt just completely burdened by my practice, I would look at your ad on Facebook and I would be like, “I would really like to click on that. I’d really like to know how to do something different.” But I just sort of locked in my own world at that time.

Brandy Lipscomb:            Within two days of me deciding that I needed to hire a coach, I saw your ad and hit the done button, watched the webinar and by the time the webinar was done, it really didn’t matter to me what it cost to be a part of your program. I knew that your method was exactly the kind of streamlined approach that I wanted. I didn’t want to have to start the blog and the podcast and write the book and do 15,000 things. I was like, “That man knows what he’s talking about.” I just felt it and knew that you were going to present me with something that I could hook my teeth into.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s awesome.

Brandy Lipscomb:            Yeah, I was done from the day one of the webinar.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s so cool. I mean, this is great. This is a great reminder for anyone running ads, why it’s important to… longevity matters, right? If you’re running ads for a day, it’s not going to make a difference. But if you consistently put your ad out, people are going to see your stuff and I can’t… It’s funny cause my health and fitness business, everyone used to tell me, “Dude, I’ve seen your YouTube videos all over the place.”

Yuri Elkaim:                         Now, what I get whenever I go to an event is, “Dude, I keep seeing your ads all over the place.” I’m like, “That’s great. That’s what I want.” That’s what we want for you guys too. We also want you to be top of mind because, in your case, maybe you weren’t ready two years ago, but when you were ready we were right there for you and I think that’s so cool.

Yuri Elkaim:                         What was it about the message that really spoke to you the most?

Brandy Lipscomb:            Well, it was the idea that I didn’t have to… You know, I was thinking that I had to do the blog, and the podcast, and write the book and I even had the book kind of like outlined. I was thinking, “Oh, my gosh, this is going to take me three years.” Seeing your simple four step process of how you create a business and position yourself as an expert, in your field, and reach out through Facebook advertising to find your ideal client through Your Perfect Client Pipeline. It just spoke to me. I was like, “That is exactly how I want to get in front of people.”

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s great. That’s awesome.

How Brandy made it happen

Yuri Elkaim:                         Let’s talk about, because you mentioned this before, the fear of getting started. Talk to us about that whole making that commitment and what will you were going through there?

Brandy Lipscomb:            Well it was terrifying, honestly. I never hired a coach before. Spending a not insignificant amount of money on a program like this and figuring out how to make it all work, how to continue to bring money in with this one program and invest in this and get this rolling. There was definitely the fear there and that could have paralyzed me, but I’m not that type of person. I’ve always said that fear is the greatest enemy of all times. It was a matter of kind of putting on my big girl panties and saying, “I can.” Like, “How can I do this?” First of all, instead of just saying, “Oh, there’s no way.”

Brandy Lipscomb:            I knew I wanted it and so I just started saying, “How can I make this happen?” And, “I will make this happen.” And, “I don’t care how much time and effort I have to put in if I have to sell life insurance all day long and then work on this until midnight, that’s what I’m going to do.” I just made the commitment and there was no room for failure at that point.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s awesome, and that’s what we’re looking for. That’s we know and we can work with. The two things for us we look at are, number one, you have to be an expert. You have to be really good at what you do and you’re amazing and what you do. Then second is having that confidence to know that even though I don’t necessarily know how this all works yet, I will figure it out and having that do whatever it takes attitude is so important because, as you know, even within our HBA clients, there are a lot of people who go through this journey of self-doubt and the worry and the so forth and that’s part of the journey.

Yuri Elkaim:                         For you, what were some of the initial challenges and how did you work through some of that?

Brandy Lipscomb:            Well, I’m not that technologically savvy by nature. I mean, I was one of those physicians who was dragged myself kicking and screaming into electronic charts. I would have written on paper for the rest of my life. I had never created a webinar before. Yeah, the webinar piece of that puzzle, figuring out how to deliver this message in a way that is going to attract the people that I know I can help, that was definitely one of the biggest challenges.

Brandy Lipscomb:            Then figuring out how to record the darn thing. I remember laughing my first couple of attempts to record the webinar. I finally paused the computer for a second and I went into my family room and I told my husband, “There’s definitely a learning curve to this.” You know? “This is going to take a little bit longer than I thought it would.” But I had some water and went back in and was determined to craft this, because I knew that message, on that webinar, that that’s what’s going to be representing me and working for me out there 24/7. Yeah, that was by far the most challenging piece of it. The rest of it sort of flows, you get through the webinar and it’s just like he just climbed the mountain and you’re up at the 10,000 foot peak and it’s downhill from here.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Totally. Awesome. So from start to deploy, how long was that? What about two and a half months for you?

Brandy Lipscomb:            Two and a half months.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, awesome. So context for the viewers, listeners here, you’ve no background in like running an online business? Not technically savvy.

Brandy Lipscomb:            No.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Obviously, we tell everyone, “Listen, there’s going to be challenges whether you work with us or not, but it helps if we’re there to guide you through it.” So you go from nothing to deploy Your Perfect Client Pipeline in two and a half months, which is awesome. Then what happens? What was the moment for you we’re you were like, “Holy shit, this works?”

Brandy Lipscomb:            The first week. I mean, I deployed some ads and they weren’t even that great yet, my webinar wasn’t even that great yet. It was my like, “Okay, I’ve got this done, I’ve got my program outlined, here we go world.” I had my first two clients within the first week and made enough money to pay back my entire investment in your program.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s amazing.

Brandy Lipscomb:            Yeah. It wasn’t just a one off like, “Oh, I sold a program to someone, I’m going to help one person. Yay.” It was, I enrolled two clients by the end of my first week and I was on cloud nine. I was like, “I have proof of concept times two.” Then when I’ve gotten some feedback from those clients and they are so happy, and they’re doing so well, and they’re completely healed and they can’t imagine their lives without my program. It’s such a good feeling.

Brandy’s program, how it has worked, and her mindset

Yuri Elkaim:                         Oh, that’s amazing. That’s so good. If we’ve got other HBA clients watching right now and they’re currently going through the building of their pipeline and going through all that self-doubt, and the worry, and the challenges and the sticking points, what advice, what encouragement do you give to them?

Brandy Lipscomb:            Well, become the Jedi Master of your own mind. Every thought counts and guard your thoughts, hone your thoughts, you would weed your garden weed out of your mind. Don’t let like those anxious thoughts of like, “Oh, I don’t know if this is going to work.”

Brandy Lipscomb:            Yuri, I don’t have time for that. I don’t allow negative thinking and fear-based thinking to route or seed in my mind. If I catch myself having a thought like that, I immediately stop it, correct it, change it into a positive and charge forward. There’s just no other way to do it.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I love it, that’s so good.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I think it’s important for everyone to remember Tony Robbins famously says, “Success is 20% mechanics, 80% psychology.” I think when we work with hundreds of clients who are going through the same process and it’s amazing to see what allows certain people to really crush it quickly. Then others take a lot longer and there’s nothing other than between the ears, right?

Brandy Lipscomb:            Right.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s why we had the whole segments on the podcast called Between The Ears because it is such a limiting factor or it’s your best friend. I love how you mentioned like it’s your choice. You can just be conscious and aware to stop it and choose a better thought that serves you and that’s so important.

Brandy Lipscomb:            Yes, it is. The mindset is everything and it is normal to have fear, right? That’s normal. I think we all have a little fear of failure within ourselves, but we also have our greatness. How dare you not share your greatness with the world?

Yuri Elkaim:                         Totally it’s selfish. Come on.

Brandy Lipscomb:            Yeah. If I let fear rule me, then my clients wouldn’t be out there winning tennis matches and golfing vacations and getting their range of motion back. I’m so glad I didn’t let fear stand in my way.

The results Brandy has seen

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, that’s awesome. Are you comfortable sharing one of your best months so far? What you’ve done, just ballpark figure wise?

Brandy Lipscomb:            Well, that would be the month that we’re currently in. I deployed my program at the very end of February and got two clients right away and then the next two weeks it was like slow down. Luckily it was a time for me to really work on building out my modules and everything. We’re at the 25th of the month and I’m over 25K for the month.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Shit, that’s awesome. Amazing.

Brandy Lipscomb:            Thank you.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I mean like the virtual high five, that’s incredible.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Better than selling life insurance, right?

Brandy Lipscomb:            Yeah.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I mean, you’re helping clients in such a deep manner, which is tremendous. I’ll say this from, from our side of things as coaches, it’s amazing to see success stories like yourself because it’s so inspiring, not just for us but also for all the other clients that we’re working with, right? Because everyone wants to know that this can work, right?

Yuri Elkaim:                         I know without a shadow of a doubt that it works. I tell everyone, I’m like, “Just borrow my belief. It works. Just borrow my belief.” But it’s always nice to see beacons like yourself who can now shine the light. Like, “You know what that’s like, I can do it. If Brandy can do it, I can do it as well.”

Brandy Lipscomb:            Right.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I just want to thank you for being that beacon, it’s so awesome.

Brandy Lipscomb:            Thank you. Yes. Borrow my belief guys, this works.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, totally. What, if someone’s watching this and considering working with us, or they’re on the fence or they’re like, “I don’t know what this guy is, he’s a bit of a, who knows what.” What would you tell someone if they’re considering working with us in the HPA program?

The importance of investing in yourself and your mindset

Brandy Lipscomb:            Wow, I’m really big about people trusting their intuition, but I am definitely going say that if there was someone out there who’s looking for a coach, and looking for a method, and looking for a program that is designed to give you from A to Z the support that you need, you’ve brought in the most amazing people around you to help you bring this program to life for us. From the copy coaches, the Facebook coaches, I mean I would say it’s a no brainer. Your commitment to excellence shines through every single facet of this program. Yeah, it’s been a joy. It’s been a privilege and I would recommend it to anyone interested in starting a business, especially in the health and fitness space.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Awesome. Thank you. Thanks so much for that. Brandy, this has been really, really great. Final words of wisdom before we finish off, just from your perspective, your journey so far, which again is still so… I was telling, I don’t know who I was telling yesterday. I’m like, Brandy is going to be crushing $100,000 months in like a couple months or something.

Brandy Lipscomb:            I think it’s possible.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, it’s going to happen. I have no doubt. Based on your journey so far in this whole world of entrepreneurship, what words of wisdom would you give to someone else who has expertise, who is maybe unsure of how to do things. If they were reading your book, if you had written a book, what’s the one nugget you’d want people to really take home from, from you?

Brandy Lipscomb:            I guess it would be something about intentional cultivation of that which you want. Reading 35 books on personal growth, development, finances, manifesting, that year of investing in myself changed my life, Yuri. It changed my mindset. I can’t have a bad day. I program myself, I’ve honed myself to the point that I go to bed thinking about how great tomorrow is going to be regardless. I wake up at 5:30 in the morning, right before my alarm clock, and I wake up and I’m excited. Do something that makes you jump out of bed excited to get your day going, but don’t go so fast that you missed the parts where you cultivate your own personal health and well-being.

Brandy Lipscomb:            My lifestyle today, my daily life is amazing and I’ve crafted it to be exactly what I want through intention, through journaling, through excessive reading and meditation. It’s all right here, Yuri, that’s all there is to it.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s great. You just actually reminded me, before we finish off, what is deal? What does your day-to-day life look like now? It used to be 60-hour-plus weeks, on the verge of burnout, what does life look like for you now?

Brandy Lipscomb:            Well, I wake up and take some supplements, drink my mineralized water. I meditate and then I journal and read. Then I exercise for about 30 minutes. Then I get to have morning time with my four year old. He wakes up and we have some games, cartoons. I leisurely drop him off at school by 9:00 in the morning and I’m in my office. I have office hours where I’m working on whatever my list is for the day. I definitely am a list maker.

Brandy Lipscomb:            I’m probably working from about 9:00 to 3:00 four days a week and then about 9:100 to noon on Fridays. So that by 3:00, I’ll go pick up my kid, I’d bring him home. We play in mud puddles, we play in the yard. Fridays are always our special day to go, we have a play date Friday afternoons. Weekends I just let my funnel work for me and I enjoy time with my family. So I’m probably working about 25 to 30 hours a week now and I’m loving every minute of it.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s awesome. So good. So good, Brandy. Well thank you so much again for sharing this, for opening up and hopefully inspiring a lot of our listeners and viewers once again. Thank you so much Brandy.

Brandy Lipscomb:            Thank you so much, Yuri.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, well totally. I mean this is a pleasure. I mean, for me it’s not even work because very much like it is not work for you when you had to do what you love.

Brandy Lipscomb:            Exactly.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. So guys, if you’re watching this, listening to this, if this has inspired you and you’re like, “You know what, I’m ready to make this happen.” Two things, watch our online training our webinar, it’s at healthpreneurgroup.com/training. If you like what you see very much like Brandy did, then just book a call with us and we’ll see if we’re a good fit. If we are, then I’m sure we can make some magic happen together.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Thank you guys for tuning in. Brandy, once again, thank you so much for time, I appreciate you and we’ll see you guys soon.

Transcription

Is your story helping or hindering your progress. You know this is a really important episode and the reason I’m sharing this with you today, actually the reason I do this podcast is, because stuff happens, right? In business and life, and then I think about it, come up with some ideas around it and then I just share it in the form of this podcast.

That’s kind of the essence of a lot of these solo rounds. In the sense of years having conversations on the phone, via chat, email, et cetera with clients, non-clients, prospective clients, people in general, I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of stories being shared. Like, my life is tough, shit happened, whatever, right? But I want to share some perspective with you.

Introducing today’s topic: Letting your story help or hinder your future

What do the Rock, Kevin Hart and Oprah Winfrey have in common? Well, number one, there are three of the most successful people in the world in terms of their influence, income, impact. Second, they’re all of a minority race, right? Being black, obviously the Rock is more Polynesian, but nonetheless. And three, and I say that because culturally, at least you know, decades ago that I mean, and maybe even to this day in some areas of the world can be a barrier to a lot of people’s progress, right? And it’s sad, but it’s kind of true. And third, they all went through shit for a long period of time.

So I shared these three stories with you because I think it’s really important to remember that no matter what you’re going through, people have gone through far worse. And in those situations, there’s always two outcomes. Outcome number one is you let your story dictate your future. Or outcome number two is you circumvent or you kind of catapult above the story to make the future or to create the future you want to create.

So we look at the Rock, right? So the Rock has 141 million followers on Instagram, arguably like that’s the third of the US population, if you will. If he ran for president, he would probably win just based on popularity. He grew up in a really poor neighborhood in Hawaii.  He got into playing college football but was injured quite a bit. Ended up getting into the Canadian football league, the CFL playing for, I think it was the Calgary Stampeders. And at one point in that journey he had $7 in his pocket, that’s how much money, he had $7. He goes from that to major depression, popping pills the whole bit to starting a career as a wrestler. Going through that whole journey, then becoming an actor. And now the highest paid actor in Hollywood, $1.48 billion in revenue he generated last year in 2018. Okay? That’s pretty impressive.

Oprah Winfrey grows up again, super poor area bouncing back and forth between her parents. One house to the next type of thing across the country, moves backward with her mom at a young age. From the age of nine repeatedly sexually abused, okay? Goes on again years down the road to become arguably one of the most influential entertainers, if you will, in the world.

Kevin Hart, same thing, grows up, not necessarily the best upbringing in terms of his family, his neighborhood. Goes through a bunch of crap, grew up in Philadelphia, gets into comedy and does fairly well, but admittedly is really bad with his money, makes a lot of bad decisions, eventually figures things out. And now he’s one of the highest paid, the most revered comedians on the planet.

The choice you must make

So the reason I share this with you is, because those are just three examples of millions of people on this planet who’ve been through remarkable things and who’ve come out on the flip side against all odds. And then there’s the other half of the population, I’m not even going to say half, 95% of the population who have gone through similar experiences, have been sexually or physically abused as kids, have gone through a divorce, have lost their job, have whatever, like you name the story. And for whatever reason, they have allowed that story to hold them back from their dream.

So here’s what I want you to really think about is that anything in your life is a choice, right? You have the choice to let that story be your story and continue singing that song, continue telling that story as your justification for why you can’t have what you say you want, or you can write a new story.

You see in most people’s lives, whatever the age, it’s like they have a book and that book has already been written and all they’re doing is reading it over and over again, and they’re telling that same story to everyone else. And then again, there’s the small percentage, the Rock’s, the Kevin Hart’s, the Oprah Winfrey’s who have that book, but they decided to put it on a shelf. And instead what they did is they took out a new book with blank pages and they said, “I’m going to write the next chapter. I’m going to write the book I want to read. I’m going to create the future I want to create.” And listen when no one has written a book before you, it takes a lot of balls. It takes a lot of courage to write that next chapter. When everyone else is saying, “Y’all, you can’t do it. Look at what you’ve come, like what you’ve gone through. Come on, man, just get a secure job. Just go back to the way things were. You’re going to be a lot safer.”

Where success fits into your story

You see the select few, there’s, like success and when I say success, I don’t just mean financially. I mean, success is the worthwhile pursuits, I think, of a worthy goal. Worthwhile pursuit, meaning it’s something you spend a lot of your time and energy pursuing because it’s something worthy. If it’s finances or health, right? A better looking body, healthier body, better relationships with your kids, with your spouse, whatever success is to you. Success leaves clues, right? And see, I believe that success in one area of life is 100% transferrable to any other area of life. But the thing is you have to choose a new story, you have to create the story you want. So when I was 17 as I mentioned, I lost my hair. Okay? So the story that half of my family, so my dad’s side of the family was reading or saying was that, “Oh my God, poor you, you lost your hair. It must be so challenging.”

And I’m thinking to myself, “Whatever, I’m going to create the story that I want to create.” And that story was, hey, you know what? Yes, it sucked that I lost my hair. I used to have really nice hair. It was cool, but things can be a lot worse, right? There are people suffering with far worse conditions, I just lost my hair. At least I have my health, at least I’m fit, at least whatever. I decided that I’m not going to let hair loss hold me back from my dream. And even to this day, I mean, if you saw some of the comments on our ads, like it’s hilarious. On my Instagram and Facebook ads, people talking about how I look like I’ve got stage five cancer, how they would never take advice from someone with no eyebrows. Like who cares? Right? There’s all this nonsense that people talk about. And you know, I just posted this on my Facebook profile the other day, is that no one who is doing anything worthwhile in their life has time to post negative crap on the Internet, right?

So if, and I’m assuming your listening to this and you’re not that type of person anyways, right? But if you’re getting negative comments, that people are kind of smack talking you just understand that they’re not doing anything meaningful with their life. Seriously, they’re doing nothing meaningful with their life. And that’s a blanket statement, I know. But I would venture, and I would put some money on that because for someone to take any amount of time out of their life to write a whole paragraph, or even just stupid comments like that, it says a lot about them, right? And it’s really unfortunate that so many people are out there to pull other people down and not, I shouldn’t say so many, but enough people, right? So I want you to really, really think to yourself like, am I telling a story that is helping me or hindering me?

Because listen,  I don’t care and I don’t want to sound like I don’t have compassion because I do, but when you hear story after story it’s like, okay, here we go again. Right? Life was tough, stuff happened. Things didn’t work out as I hopes, you know, people, a lot of people are looking for handouts. They’re looking for hall passes. Like, “You know what? Like, the last year was really tough for me I’d really love a hall pass,” and my thinking through that is like, “Listen, man, everyone’s life is tough. Life is never going to be perfect or ducks are never going to be in a row. How many more hall passes do you want?” Right? There’s always going to be something, there’s always going to be an excuse. For every excuse there is always a flip side. There is always someone who has the same story as you, who is absolutely crushing it. And I’m going to finish this by sharing one story of a colleague/friend and I’m not going to mention the name. But multiple time, New York Times bestseller in the health space.

An example and an analogy

Number of years ago, her son was hit by a car and he was put in the hospital, doctor said he was pretty much done, like at best he’s going to be a vegetable. And this individual said, “You know what? That’s not going to happen, that’s not what’s going to happen to my son.” Now here’s the interesting thing, is that not only did she commit to making sure that her son was going to be resurrected to his healthy self again, even though the doctor said he was, you know, toast. She was in the middle of her first book launch. And so there she is in the hospital doing whatever she had to do to get her book launched. And not only did she launch the book, it became a number one New York Times bestseller. And that’s happening in the hospital room. Right? Her son is in literally a coma. So she’s taking care of him, trying to get him back up the speed, which by the way he almost made a full recovery, which is amazing.

She goes on to publish and launch this, you know, this number one New York Times best seller and then several after that. But here’s another great example of someone who could have said, “Listen, life got in the way, you won’t believe what just happened to my son. I need a year to figure this stuff out.” And that’s why success is hard, because most people don’t have what it takes to do whatever it takes to reach their goals. And I believe that everyone has within them a fire that can burn really bright, that can really do amazing things in this world. But for whatever reason they get fearful, they get doubtful. They need to see all sorts of proof before they can move forward and they simply lack courage to live their dream. So I want to leave you with, like I really, really want you to think about this, I want you to ask yourself.

I want you to look in the mirror and look at yourself and say, “Okay, I committed to X results by this certain amount of time, this date or this time. I wanted to be a millionaire by the time I was 30 or I wanted to do this by the time I was whatever.” And I want you to ask yourself, “Have I achieved that goal?” And if the answer is no, I want you to really sit and reflect on why that is. Why have you not achieved the goal you said you wanted to achieve? And I promise you it’s not because you didn’t have enough support. It’s not because of this, it’s not because of anything else around you. And this is the big, this is the big distinction. It’s never about an external factor, it’s always an internal factor. 80% of success is psychology. Okay? And the quicker you understand that and the quicker you realize that you are the only limiting factor in your life, the sooner you can break free from that.

It’s as if you’re driving a car and you have your foot on the gas pedal and you’re like, “Why am I not moving forward? Why am I not moving forward? Why am I not moving forward? You know, this car isn’t good enough, right? It needs more horsepower. You know, it needs to look better. I need more mechanical support on it.” And then you recognize that the whole time you’ve been revving this engine, just revving this car and it’s not moving anywhere. This whole time you recognize, you finally realize that your other foot has been on the break and that break is your story. It’s your story that you’ve been carrying around like a blankie and I want to encourage you to let the story go and move on. No matter how bad it was, and listen, like I’m not trying to discredit anyone’s past, right? You’ve probably gone through some really bad shit in life and I, listen, I’m not going to sympathize with that because everything happens for us. It doesn’t happen to us.

The only time it happens to us is when we choose to let that be the situation. When we choose to be a victim of our circumstances instead of a victor, instead of taking out a new book and writing a new chapter. And I really, really want you to think about this because I promise you, no matter what it is you want in life, the only reason you don’t have what it is, is because of you. It’s nobody else’s fault, it’s your own. And I say that with all the love and compassion I can possibly give, because the reality is that’s the truth. Nobody can hold you back from your dreams. Listen, if Oprah Winfrey can go from what she went through to becoming Oprah Winfrey, if the Rock can go from what he went through to where he is, if Kevin Hart and thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of other people we don’t even know of, have been through similar journeys and have come out on the flip side, there’s no reason why you can’t do it. There’s no reason why you can’t do it.

And I tell people often the biggest difference is simply your level of desire. How much do you want it? I was watching a really great interview on The Joe Rogan Experience with Kevin Hart and listen, like I’m not a huge fan of Kevin Hart in terms of his comedic, like a standup and stuff. I think he’s a funny guy, I just don’t like his standup’s personally. But I was listening to this interview he did with Joe Rogan and I’m like, dude, I have so much more respect for this guy now because this is like, he’s a guy who’s got his stuff together. Like he’s really well thought. He’s got some really great perspectives on stuff and you know, he talked a lot about, you know, Joe Rogan was like, “Hey man, like why do you do so much? Like why do you do so much? Like you have everything, you have more money than you can possibly spending a lifetime. Why do you keep going? Why do you keep playing up at 5:00 AM every day? Why do you keep doing all this stuff?”

And Kevin Hart said, “Listen it’s not about why do I do this stuff, it’s more of a why shouldn’t I do this stuff?” And I’m like, that’s great. Right? Here’s a guy who wants to contribute, who wants to make his life, the life of other people better and he’s in a position where he can do that. Right? And I just thought like, listen, I’m going to just finish this off before, I mean, I’ve second talk on for hours about this stuff, but I want you to really, really consider the story you’ve been telling yourself. And are you going to allow it to continue limiting yourself or are you going to continue to allow it to slow you down, to hinder your progress, so that six months down the road, one year down the road, you think to yourself, “You know what? I did this thing and it didn’t work.”

Final takeaway: Take responsibility and write a new story

No, no, no, that’s the wrong thing to say. You have to always take the perspective of, I didn’t work and this is something we tell all of our clients, all of our perspective clients is like, “Listen, we know what we do works. The only thing we don’t know is whether, or not you do.” And a lot of the, you know, a lot of the teachings in marketing is always about like absolve the customer’s pain, essentially saying it’s not your fault, right? You’ve been told this and that, you’ve been misled. Right? And that’s to a degree, true. But I think honestly it is your faults and it’s my fault and it’s our fault. Any time we don’t have what we want in life, it’s never a factor of external things, it’s always up to us. And that’s what I want to leave you with, is I want you to really look in the mirror and ask yourself, “How am I not showing up? How am I letting the story I’ve been telling myself or telling other people, hold me back?” And I want to challenge you to create a new story.

I want to challenge you to take out a new journal, a new book, and I want you to write the next chapters instead of using the same old story book that you’ve been telling for maybe a little bit too long. Okay? So that’s all for today’s episode. Some deep thinking and reflection to really ponder on this one and for now, I hope you have a great day. Thanks for joining me. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode and keep doing what you’re doing. Keep up the great work and I’ll see you soon.

Transcription

Hey guys, what’s going on? Yuri back with you, and I’m super pumped to be bringing one of our secret weapons to the forefront today. If you’re one of our clients, you know this handsome man, his name is Cody Burch, and he has been an amazing contribution to our team and our clients for a long time now.

Introducing Cody Burch and his expertise

Cody is responsible for building out a lot of the tech that we build out for our clients. But he’s also one of our Facebook ad coaches and really helping our clients figure out their Facebook ads, how to take their pipelines from doing okay to being a lot more profitable. But outside of working with us, Cody has a digital agency called Red Anchor Marketing.

Dude you’ve just been doing this for so long. You’re so well versed in not just Facebook ads or tech, but you understand marketing, you understand direct response, you understand funnels.

In my conversation with Cody, we’ll be talking about funnel triage — what to do when your funnel isn’t working.

Cody’s had a really cool process. So he’s going to walk us through that and if you like what you hear, Cody’s got a great event coming up called the One Hour Funnel.  It’s a live event  that’s happening  June 6th through the 9th in Denver.  You can check it out on his website onehourfunnellive.com.

Is that correct?

Cody Burch:                        In Denver, yeah.

Yuri Elkaim:                         There we go. So guys, if you want hands on help from Cody himself, definitely check it out. In the meantime, Cody, ready to rock and roll.

Cody Burch:                        Let’s do it man. Thank you for having me on. I’m excited to have this chat, it’s one of my favorite things to talk about.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, totally. Awesome. All right, so let’s back it up a little bit. Out of percentage wise, when someone launches, whether it’s a coaching program, supplements or whatever, whatever it is they’re selling, everyone’s using some type of funnel. In your estimation, what is the likelihood that someone’s going to hit it out of the park right away?

Cody Burch:                        It’s a slim to none chance that, that’s going to happen. I think that’s true with any… could be a video we shoot any podcasts we make any thought that we express out in the world any event that we do, anything that we do as business owners to say, I just need to do it once, and then I’ll nail it and then I’ll just, whatever, retire or buy a second home or going to internal vacation. That’s not the reality. It takes more than one. We’re talking about funnels in this context, so you’re right that, yeah, everybody, number one, you have a funnel, whether you call it that or not, you, you have one, you have an amount of people that come into your world. And then some people drop out and some people take the next step, whatever that is.

Cody Burch:                        Then they matriculate through your whole process. Then sometimes when they fall out, what do we do? Where do we look? What gaps are we trying to fill? What holes are we trying to plug in? How do we make it better?

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s awesome. Yeah, because I think a lot… and you probably see this quite a bit too, because you help our clients build with their tech and the tech is, it’s a pain in the butt, but honestly is probably the least important thing. Because it’s like you’re the pages, they’re done, but what’s on the pages, what’s the message? What’s all that stuff? So let’s talk about this. You got nine kind of checkpoints that we want to look at, right?

The One Hour Funnel and the symptoms of a sick funnel

Cody Burch:                        Yeah. There’s nine steps to it. And again, yeah, for some context, I’ve built lots of funnels, probably hundreds of funnels for myself and for clients and for the people that you and I get to work with together. That’s why I created that concept of a one hour funnel. Because to me it’s… when your kids go to a birthday party and they’re about to leave and the mom or the dad of the kid had said, they’re like, “Hey by the way, grab the grab bag out the door, it’s got candy and some suckers and some junk in it and grabbed that.”

Cody Burch:                        That’s how I kind of see the funnel part. It’s like, “Oh, by the way, before you go grab the template that you needed, then make it, and don’t let it take forever.” Because it’s way more important to communicate clearly to define the market well, to contextualize our message to the people at the moment that they’re at, that they need to hear it and experience it. That’s way more important. The tech side to me is an oh by the way don’t forget to do that thing. That should take you about 30 minutes when you’re done and then really nail the front end. That’s a little bit of the punchline of this nine step. It’s not nine steps in a row, but there’s nine areas to look forward to resuscitate a dying funnel.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Cool. I like that resuscitated like funnel CPR.

Cody Burch:                        That’s right. Exactly. So yeah, here’s the symptoms that I’ve found and maybe you can relate to this. Number one, you have a funnel or a sales process or a sales system that’s just kind of sick and like it’s almost successful. It’s kind of working. What that funnel needs really is a lot of water and maybe some aspirin or some Ibuprofen or something. It needs a good night’s rest, and it’s going to work. There’s simple tweaks that you can make. So just as I’m explaining these buckets, there’s three buckets I want you to categorize as you’re listening, which bucket your existing sales process falls into. So it’s a little bit sick, but it’s close to working and it needs a little bit of love, and it’s going to be back in no time. Then the second one is you have a funnel that needs to go to the hospital.

Cody Burch:                        It’s really sick. I remember one of my kids, Jacob, my oldest, he’s 12 now, when he was little,  he had croup really bad. When he’s 12 months old and you freak out at, you didn’t know how to fix it. I remember Christie and I, my wife, we rushed to the hospital, was close by and he was coughing and it was just the worst. Then they’re like, “Oh, he’s fine.” You get him outside and let him breathe. But you don’t know. That’s kind of what’s happening now. I don’t know what’s happening with my sales process. It looks like it’s really sick. I don’t know if it’s going to pull through or not and it needs to be handled. Then the last bucket is you have a funnel that’s on the deathbed and it doesn’t even lead some honest friend or me or somebody to say, “Hey, this isn’t worth pursuing. You’ve just missed it. This one’s dead and gone and we need to call it and we need to start over with something else.”

Yuri Elkaim:                        Euthanize it.

Cody Burch:                        That’s right. Get it over with, ease the pain and let it move on to the next life. Whatever you decide.

Yuri Elkaim:                        Okay. So we’ve got sick, got to go to the hospital and just put it out of its misery pretty much, right?

Cody Burch:                        Yep.

Yuri Elkaim:                         All right. How does someone… because this is an interesting conversation because we all know, we know that persistence and keeping at it and tweaking optimizing is important to really hit that breakthrough. But at what point have you noticed where it’s just like, you know what, this is just not going to work. Let’s just shut it down. How do people identify that point?

Cody Burch:                        Yeah, there’s a couple of symptoms to look for and I’ll try not to use too much marketing jargon. I’ll give you like a colloquial example first, right? So, one is, I’ll give you an example from my own life, I know in my world and my business. The one hour funnel business I can generate leads for a few dollars, like $2 to $3. I just know that’s what it costs, whether it’s downloading a book. I did a five day challenge recently with that. I really loved, I’ll be doing that again. That got same thing, $2 or $3 leads. People loved it, lots of great feedback. Then I launched a funnel that was for a three hour online training I was doing and I got $25 leads and I knew instantly something’s wrong with this.

Cody Burch:                        The messaging, and that’s what I’ll teach you here. There’s three big areas to start to look and see there’s a market, it’s the mechanism, like the funnel itself where it’s the message and then this is kind of how I come up with this funnel triage process is quite recently I had to do this for myself and say, where did I miss that?

Cody Burch:                        That wasn’t a good offer. That wasn’t the right market, that wasn’t the right way, what happened and I just knew. Hopefully with people that if you’ve run any kind of marketing or any kind of funnel process in your business, you know, it costs an amount of money to get a webinar registration or to get a new opt in or to download my lead magnet cheat sheet checklist, pdf template, whatever it is we’re giving away, hopefully have a baseline of data and then you can have an opinion about it, and go, yeah, this is off, there’s something’s wrong. It’s not like with your kids or your pets or those two kids, you know something’s up they’re not eating their meals. Something’s wrong. They’re not usually like this. It’s no different with our online marketing efforts.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s so good. I do think it like number one, I think both of us are in a unique position where we’ve done this for so long that we can kind of see those symptoms and recognize them for what they are. A lot of people though that are maybe not as experienced see that stuff and they freak out. It’s like it’s a group situation. It’s like, oh my God, my son’s not breathing. What do I do? Hopefully with this we can reassure that, that it’s not the end of the world and give them some good guidance on what to do. Okay, cool. So we got a message market mechanism, which is, yeah, it’s huge. I think that that’s a really, really big piece of the puzzle that a lot of people forget about. How does somebody identify, for instance, which of those three might be not working?

Cody Burch:                        Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit more about some of the symptoms which will point you in the right direction. So look for the following things here and I’m just going to give just some places to start to look. If you have a super low opt in rate, now again, it’s a little bit market specific, like your or your opt in rate might be way higher or lower than mine and you might be way out more. Okay. Or less okay with that than I am. I might be cool with 20% you might need 80% in your life or vice versa. It’s a little bit market dependent. But as you know, like I know what my opt in pages are for myself and my clients and, like you and I have a good feel for what it should be for the Healthpreneur people going through.

Cody Burch:                        We know like, hey, your page should be converting at around 40% like that’s just the number. So we can look at that as an interesting indicator to say, is it this? It’s just like when you go to the doctor and they check your temperature or they look in your ear, they look in your eyes, they look it down your throat. Where do we look? One place to look is your opt in rate of your first part of your funnel. And if it’s less than 20%, typically it’s, sometimes it’s 8% okay, great. Something’s horribly wrong with this. Like there’s something’s very wrong. We should be… we’re missing something big. That’s a place I’ve got a few more. I’ll just list them off then you and I can chat about them if anything else comes to mind. But if your cost per lead is too high, like I just mentioned, mine was $25, that’s too high.

Identifying what to expect with opt-ins and click-throughs

Cody Burch:                        That’s a problem. That’s like your kid gets out of bed and his face is green. I mean, something’s up. It’s not a good thing. Having really low conversions. So for a lot of people I work with, there is a front end offer. So there’s a opt in for a training or a download a template, and then there’s something else on the back end. Hey, like it since you like this, like for me, if you like the book, you might also like this course that I have. That should convert around one to 3% typically. You send a hundred people through, you should get one to three sales out of that. If you’re getting less than, there’s something up with that. High cost per impression, which that’s a metric in Facebook really, in the advertising, but I do a lot of Facebook ads.

Cody Burch:                        You’ll see with a great message when those all coalesces together, it’ll be like five bucks. You can reach a thousand people for $5-

Yuri Elkaim:                         So CPMS

Cody Burch:                        CPM, yeah. If it’s over 20, again, something’s over $20 to reach a thousand people. Something’s up. Especially in the Facebook world, Zuckerberg doesn’t like what you’re doing, how you’re saying it. People aren’t responding to it. They’re not clicking on it and you’re going to pay the penalty for that with a higher cost per thousand impressions and then the last part is-

Yuri Elkaim:                         I just got to jump in quickly for those, for those who are listening or watching who are into Facebook ads, how do you find relevant score, kind of ties in with that. Do you find… is there a pretty correlation if it’s an eight, nine or 10 that is, it’s a lower CPM or have you noticed any correlation there?

Cody Burch:                        Yeah, for sure. So a higher click through rate, which is the last metric on here. So, if you have a high click through rate, which is good, you want people to be clicking through your ad and then a high relevancy score and they’re going away with that, is that right? They’re going away with something it’s either that or it’s positive, negative feedback. It was something that’s going away. They made up a new metric, which is kind of the same thing, but basically they’re saying if you put an ad in front of people, so Facebook wants their users to have a good experience and stay on the platform longer and they want us as advertisers to spend more money.

Cody Burch:                        It’s a win win for us as advertisers and for the people going through the content as well. If we’re providing a bad experience, that’s why Facebook won’t let you say like, “Hey, are you depressed? I’ve got a solution. Hey, are you overweight? Hey, do you hate how you look?” We can’t say that people are going through Facebook, and that’s when I said at the beginning the context of what people experience our advertising and our message on Facebook and really anywhere, but let’s just talk Facebook, they’re scrolling through. They just got on Facebook not to buy something but to be entertained or maybe to kill some time. They might be at a stop light, they might be at the bank, they might be in the bathroom.

Cody Burch:                        There’s re places people are on Facebook consuming stuff for some reason to see their pictures of their family or cat videos or whatever. Then our ad hits them, and they’re scrolling through the newsfeed and then we say something and then how do they feel? Do they click on it? Do they read it? Do they pause? Then Facebook knows that’s I need a T-shirt that just says Facebook knows. If they hover on your ad for a while that counts as an impression like Facebook knows whether they click or not. It’s kind of interesting. But yeah, for sure that experience we provide people through our messaging is going to pay off or it’s going to be expensive depending on the experience we provide.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Cool. I’ll let you continue there because I know you had one more thing to say before I jumped in with the relevant score.

Cody Burch:                        Yeah, all good. Yeah. So the with the five that I looked at, as a quick reminder for those taking notes, a super low opt in rate as a problem sign, a high cost per lead or a high cost per customer, is a problem. Low conversion rate is a problem, high cost per thousand and then a super low click through rate. Those are all of the things to look at. Ideally, a lot of people we’re talking to have run some Facebook ads. They have a more established baseline so they know and if they don’t know those industry standards like, “Hey, I’m in this space, what should I expect?” And you should expect this baseline metrics. But if you’re ready, I can run through the nine areas and we can go a little bit deeper on those.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Let’s do it.

The nine areas of a successful funnel

Cody Burch:                        Alright, so the three that I mentioned earlier, the three areas to start with, it’s I’m looking at this diagram, it’s hard to, it’s like a verbal, verbal meme, verbal explanation of a diagram. The market message and mechanism, and we’ll go with each deeper on each one of those. Let’s start with the market. When you have a great market combined with a great message. So you found a great pool of people you can serve and you’re talking to them in a way that they like to be talked to, you’re going to get a lot of fans. So that’s the first possible output.

Cody Burch:                        Now fans are okay, they’re not everything but fans are great. You want people to think nice thoughts about you. But it’s also fun when those fan turn into leads and those leads turn into customers. The way that you generate a lot of leads as when you have that great market and then you have a great mechanism. Now for me and by mechanism I mean like the funnel. So for me like using my one hour funnel book example, when someone downloads the book they’re a lead but they don’t know who I am yet.

Cody Burch:                        They haven’t read the book, they haven’t watched the video, they haven’t heard the podcast. So they’re not necessarily a fan yet, but they have become a lead. Then the third combination. So marketing message, you have fans, marketing mechanism, you have leads. Then mechanism and message means you have a machine that’s sitting idle ready to go. So we just need to give it, more people. Let’s talk about the market for a second. So there’s three areas then here we can chat about. Feel free to jump in at any time with a question or comment. So with the market, the three things that I’ve seen when, and if you’re missing one of these three, this would be a great place to start to look. If you have a sick or dead or dying funnel. The first is a defined demographic, the second is pain, and the third is you’re able to provide consistent results.

Cody Burch:                        That’s the three things around marketing. I’ll talk a little bit more about each one of those. So a defined demographic could be just let’s say, here’s my statistics. I’m a man. I’m 38. I have kids, I drive a minivan, and I drive a sports car, and I live in a house, in a cul-de-sac and I’m a member of a gym, and I eat a certain way, and I vote a certain way, and I go to church and like that’s my… that’s just who I am. If you wanted to reach people like me, the more defined you can get about your demographic, the better. The example I like to give is, let’s say you were trying to sell me lawn care services, I would be a great demographic for you.

Cody Burch:                        I’ve got young kids, I’d rather be drinking Kombucha and watching college football. Then spending my whole Saturday mowing. So if you can define that demographic, well who’s that for? Well, they’ve got to be home owners. They’ve got to have a yard, they’ve got to live in this cul-de-sac. They’ve got to drive a minivan. They’ve got to be parents or whatever, and then they can present that message to me compared to I’ve got a thing and it’s for people like, well who is it for? It’s for men. Who though? Are they 22 are they 58 is it my dad? Is it my kid? Who’s it for? The clearer we get, the better off we’ll be with our marketing. Is that what you’ve seen Yuri?

Yuri Elkaim:                         Totally. That’s the biggest thing I mean in HPA it’s the first thing we have our clients do is really focus on who’s that perfect client. Because if you don’t narrow that down, your messaging not only becomes super diluted, but now you can’t scale your business because now you have one on one clients with whoever you can help. That’s definitely not a way to scale or, or run a business profitably. So for sure.

Cody Burch:                        The next one real quick is about the pain. Where you’re tuned into the pain and discomfort that they’re going through. I’ll stick with the lawn mowing example because I really don’t like doing that. For me to mow the lawn, I have to clean up after the dog in the backyard. I have to move the trampoline out of the way. I have to find those new balance shoes. They used to be white, but now there’s some shade of green. I have to put on my crappy gym clothes that I don’t mind getting sweaty and dirty and gross.

Cody Burch:                        I have to pray there’s enough gas in the gas container to fill up the lawn mower. I have to pray that the lawn mower doesn’t blow up in a big cloud of smoke because it’s old. I have to move my car out of the way so I can get the lawnmower out and it takes me several hours to do that. So that would be, if you’re tuned into the pain, if I saw a sales letter that said that like, “Hey dad, wouldn’t you rather be drinking Kombucha, watching college football, keep the new balance shoes in the garage, stay in your comfortable robe, hanging out with your wife and kids and your dog will take care of everything and it’s 30 bucks or 50 bucks or gosh 100 bucks.” If they’re so dialed into that pain, I’d go, they get it, they get me, they understand what I don’t want to be doing and I don’t care what it costs. I need them to take away all that pain from me and give me less.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah. And then like what you just did, I hope you guys got what Cody just did because you just described my situation as well, like moving the trampoline, the dog poo the whole day. I think when you lead, for instance, with a message like that, immediately it pulls people in. Because it’s like that’s exactly what I’m going through. As opposed to being like, “Hey, you want us to cut your lawn?” And it’s like, wow, whatever. There’s no connection yet. So that pain point is so powerful. That’s a really good example.

Cody Burch:                        Yeah. Also, for the last one around market is a market where you have demonstrated results in the past. Believe it or not. I see people get into markets where they don’t have a track record of getting results. People love case studies. They love testimonials, they love success stories. They love knowing that it’s worked for other people just like them. I see this too. I love sales. I love marketing. We had a door to door guy come by recently. He was selling pest control, like spraying for ants and spiders. Luckily he caught my wife and not me, but I caught him. She’s more empathetic. He’s like, “Hey, do you know the Johnson’s and the El Canes and the whatever.” I’m a bad neighbor. So I was like, “No, I don’t know who they are.” But he was like, “Oh, I was just talking to them and they told me to come by.” He was using that technique like, hey people just like you have just signed up for this thing. It was good. It was good.

Cody Burch:                        I didn’t sign up, but it was a good marketing tactic. Make sure that you can speak to the results that you claim to provide in a way that’s consistent where people know, okay, got it. This person with this message that understands this demographic, that understands my pain has also helped people a lot like me get the result that I need as well.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, that’s great.

Cody Burch:                        Those are the three round market, define the demographic, pain and results. The next one, if you’re ready, Yuri is the mechanism. You Ready?

Yuri Elkaim:                         Let’s do it buddy.

Cody Burch:                        All right. So the three things around mechanism is making a funnel or like a lead an opt in page to a thank you page. There’s some way to convert that market into somebody that’s on your email list so we can speak to them, we can serve them, we can help them, we can love on them and we can get them a great result. The three things around lead generation, which I’m totally obsessed with, is we need to provide a lead generator that’s consumable on a page that’s converting. Then also in a one way that’s really engaging. So let’s talk about, they all kind of work together, but I see a lot of people, they’ll put something out there that people don’t want.

Cody Burch:                        They’ll put out a… I’ll just use some hyperbole as an example. You know, a 400-page e-book, 39 video courses, a 52-day challenge. Now I’m kind of kidding. But people don’t want that type of stuff. They don’t really know who you are. They’re not sure how you can get them a result. Something that’s consumable in a landing page that converts really well in a way that’s really engaging with that target market. People go nuts for it.

Cody Burch:                        The best examples I like to give it for like what exactly do you mean? While I typically mean a one or two page pdf cheat sheet checklist, download. Recipe, script template, Yuri I have seen you put stuff out there that’s exactly what to say on a sales call and you’re like, oh my gosh that I want that so bad because I know you’re usually good at sales and I’m not very good at it. I need to get better at that. Those types of things are so helpful. They’re quickly consumable and again, depending on the market that you’re in for people that are listening, I made a checklist. One of my first funnels I built, I got in, I did the thing where you get in shape and then you think you’re a fitness coach. I did that for two months, but I made a checklist that was my lead magnets.

Cody Burch:                        Like, hey, if you want to do this, like I did it, you need these 10 things. That’s all it was. It was one page. It had my logo on it and it had a checklist. It had 10 things with 10 little boxes next to it and I called it the whatever checklist. Those types of things are very helpful, quickly consumable people love them and they really attract people to them. So if your funnel’s not converting and it’s sick and it’s dead or dying and you know you’ve nailed the market, there might be something up with the mechanism you’re using to put things in front of them that they just don’t want. It’s hard to consume, they don’t want it. It’s not converting, it’s at the wrong time. It’s in a way they don’t want it. Maybe you thought they’d love video, so you made a bunch of videos, but they really wanted to just read a checklist.

Cody Burch:                        They didn’t want to opt in for your hour and a half documentary or whatever. Just be mindful of that. Does that make sense?

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, totally. It’s actually, it’s something that we see with… because our whole business is based on a webinar funnel, right?

Cody Burch:                        Yeah.

Yuri Elkaim:                         We know that we’re alienating a large percentage of the market who don’t want to watch a Webinar. And you know, for us, it’s worked out. It’s worked out for our clients. But I think over time, like, whoa, we also have a book funnel, right? So we know that for people who don’t engage with our Webinar, at least we can put a book in front of them that’s simple 28 pages really quick to read. Yah. So like totally, totally makes sense for sure.

Being clear and empathetic in your messaging

Cody Burch:                        Yeah. So that’s the mechanism side there. The last part with the final three areas to look if your funnel is sick or dead or dying is the around the message. Messaging to me is really important. It needs to have three things and needs to be frequent. You can’t just do a Facebook live and then never do it again and expect people to continue to love you and opt in and be your fan. Yu can’t send an email or do a podcast episode. There has to be a frequent message where over time, I don’t know the stats, I’ve heard all sorts of stuff. I remember I was at a conference recently, they showed what it was like when somebody bought a car because I think we hear things like, well it takes seven touch points to make a decision. It was something like 419 touch points before this person bought a minivan.

Cody Burch:                        What she searched on Google, how she searched for minivans and then minivans for me and then Toyotas and then Toyota dealerships near me. I mean it has to be a frequent message we put out to people. I’ve heard people tell you to your face, Yuri I’ve been listening to every podcast episode for this many years, and I’m here seeing you face to face or coming to your event. I hear that too. I’ve been doing a podcast for a year, and the most recent person that bought a ticket to the event, I looked at where they come from, and they got my book like nine months ago and they’ve just been paying attention. I didn’t know. But they’re watching the Facebook lives, they’re reading the emails, they’re watching me put out content and videos and then they like and go meet this guy, and now they did.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Social talkers.

Cody Burch:                        That’s right. But it needs to be frequent. It needs to be frequent. Second thing needs to be clear where people say, again, if you’re back to the lawn mowing example, is this for me or is this not for me? I see a lot of people that we help and we kind of diagnose what’s happening in their sales process and their funnel and say, “Hey, this isn’t super clear on how you can help them. It’s a little too ethereal. It’s a little too broad. It’s a little too unclear. We need a very clear message for people.” Giving these, that’s why all nine of these are interconnected. When you have your defined demographic, you’re in touch with their pain, you know, you can get the results. It’s easier to make a clear message that way because you know, like, “Oh, this is, I’ve got it. I’ll tell a funny story about how… the other store, I was talking about a guy in Healthpreneur about, he has a program for people that want to continue to eat meat.

Cody Burch:                        We were talking about that same vivid language of people that want to get in better shape, but maybe they’re afraid they have to give up their meat and their steaks or whatever. So we we’re talking about, what that’s all like. Then the whole example like I did with the lawn mowing, like for me, same thing, you put on your grilling clothes, you get the spatula, you get the de greaser or the butter, or you get the seasoning, you put it outside, you get something to wave the flies away and you open the grill and the charcoals hot and you put your hand on it. You feel the warmth and you slap that stake down.

Cody Burch:                        You hear the sizzle. If you’re a vegan, I just really grossed you out. I’m sorry. But that’s how you can use that type of language. Your target audience, that message will be so clear. They’ll be like, “Oh, they get me. They understand.” I don’t want to give that up and worry if I’m burning the Kale chips like they want that message, they get it. Whatever your take is on that. So be really clear. Then the third part of that for the messages to be really empathic and that’s part of understanding their pain. But just knowing that, and I type this a lot in ads, I will talk about the pain and frustration and maybe the average day they’re going through and I’ll literally type, I get it. I’ll just say those three words. I understand I’ve been there like it’s easy as you get some success with online marketing or growing a business to forget what it was like to be there.

Cody Burch:                        Whatever struggle they’re at. If you used to be really overweight and then you got in better shape and now you want to show them how to do it, remember how it felt when somebody said they were having a pool party and you don’t want to take your shirt off. I get it. I’ve been there. I was so nervous when I went on that first date or whatever. Use that type of language and not a manipulative way but a really empathic way to let them know you understand what they’re going through, what they’re afraid of, what keeps them up at night. What are they moving toward? What are they moving away from? What do they really, really want? How will it impact their status? Does having the best kept lawn on their block mean something to them that they want that award, that their neighborhood, let me help you stay inside. I got this, I’ve been there. That that type of stuff is so important, and people really are drawn to that type of empathic or empathetic learning, listening messaging.

Yuri Elkaim:                         100% yeah. I say the empathy is the one word marketing plan. If you really understand your audience, and it’s funny too, because I’m sure you hear this a lot too. Like, “Hey, Facebook advertising doesn’t work.” It’s true if you don’t know what you’re doing, if you’re working with somebody who doesn’t know what they’re doing, but it’s the lifeblood of our business. It’s the lifeblood of many businesses. There’s a very big difference between having a Facebook ad and having a Facebook ad that works. A lot of these elements of like the messaging, the empathy, really vividly talking about what does a day look like as you mentioned, not just like, “Hey, are you tired of eating meat?” Really describing the process. There’s a very, very big distinction there.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I really hope he has got this because there is no… everyone’s looking for the magic thing, but this is where the magic is. The nine things you’ve mentioned, it’s almost like steak spice, right? The perfect state spice, it’s not just like pepper, it’s not just salt. It’s a combination of much different spices and when they’re brought together, they really make the steak that much more flavorful unless you just like it with salt, which is fine as well. But yeah, these have been really good. Yeah, just really good stuff. Cody. Awesome.

Some practical takeaways and Cody’s upcoming live event

Cody Burch:                        Yeah. A couple practical takeaways. I’m a super practical guy. You may be wondering like, well, what exactly are you saying Cody? Put all those words into a super long Facebook ad. I might be saying that. You should maybe try that. You and I love long Facebook ads. Great storytelling adds great. You can just draw people so near. Then like my best converting landing page is the one where I give away my book and it just, it’s so stupid simple and you can’t even scroll. It says, most people think building funnels is hard. It’s not, tell me where to send your copy, or it says something like that. So it’s got like 14 words and a name and email address. Well why?-

Yuri Elkaim:                         Can you share it already, they just need like tell me where to send it.

Cody Burch:                        Because the ads are doing a lot of the heavy lifting and messaging in the ad and the name of the book is like, so it’s like, “Hey, building funnels, I want to do it faster. Go get this.” The work has been done, but you don’t need to have these super long landing pages. When you do so much great work in the ad by then, it’s like walking into a room and all the dominoes are already lined up for you and you just apply a little bit of pressure to that first one because you’ve nailed these other ones with frequent, clear empathic messaging and a defined demographic where you get their pain, we can get them results, and then you send them to something that’s consumable, converting and engaging. It’s like done. You don’t have to set up the dominoes.

Cody Burch:                        Compare that to walking into a room with a bunch of dominoes going, what do I do with these? Where do I set them up and how do I knock them down and in what order? Well now you kind of know when you nail this, and so if you ever decide to type these words into your ad, go for it. Give it a shot. If you don’t decide to type these words in your ad, that’s okay. But I just want you to get really clear and it’d be a fun exercise for you to do it. Like a creative writing process, like you’re in middle school or in high school to say, “What is their average day look like?” And write that in as vivid language as possible. Just so you know. Then whenever you put out a Webinar, a sales call, like every interaction, every touch point you make with your target market they’ll know like, hey this person, this guy or this girl gets me.

Cody Burch:                        They understand it, they’ve been there, they see what I’m going through. So that’s the next step for people, I would say for sure.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, totally. And guys, if you’re thinking to yourself like I don’t like doing Facebook ads. I don’t like doing all this stuff. Listen, I’m like, whether or not your running your own Facebook ads, I think it’s worth it. If you spent a whatever, an hour or two to craft one really good ad because that ad could generate hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars for your business.

Yuri Elkaim:                         It might not, but it could. I think instead of just whipping out a couple sentences and hoping for the best, spend the time, do what Cody’s mentioned her it can really, really make a difference in your business. Honestly that we’ve been around for a while. We know other people that are successful in the online space and they’re not like PhD’s in marketing, they’ve just tested stuff, they’ve done stuff and there’s little nuances that when you start to see this stuff, it’s almost like you, like you have X-Ray Vision to be like, “Oh I can see what’s going on here.” You start to notice these things and hopefully you guys, if you’re watching or listening to this, what Cody has shared with you has been able to give you a bit more of that kind of X-Ray Vision to look at your own funnel or maybe even look at what other stuff is working and kind of start to piece together some of those commonalities.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Really good stuff, dude, man, thanks for sharing this. This has been even for me, like super insightful.

Cody Burch:                        Yeah. Yuri, thanks for having me on, man. It’s been fun to chat about. I could do this all day and for people as they’re thinking through this process and thinking I’ve got a sick funnel. I need to rush it to the emergency room. It just so happens that, that’s what my event is all about. If this resonates with you at all and you want to go get your funnel fixed and get it off life support, then that’s what the event is that Yuri mentioned at the beginning. So yeah, it’d be cool to see people face to face and that’s where Yuri and I met at a live event to the acceleration of learning and relationships happens there as well.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Totally. Again, one our funnel live, so one as O-N-E, hours, so everything spelled out, onehourfunnellive.com. Check it out guys, really great event. Super affordable.  I’m not going reveal the price. I’ll let you guys go to the webpage. Cody’s making it super affordable, beautiful venue. Christy, who’se your wife is also our event planner for our events. So you know guys like it’s going to be pretty epic, June 6th to 9th in Denver.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Dude it’s going to be a great event, super pumped for you. If you guys are watching or listening, you want more Cody, check it out. It’s really an-

Cody Burch:                        Awesome. Thanks for having me, I appreciate you man.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Absolutely man. All right guys, hope you enjoyed this one and take action on what Cody shared with you.

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