Transcription

Hey hey guys, what’s going on? Yuri here, special edition of the Healthpreneur podcast. If you’re watching this on video, if you’re live watching me within the Facebook group then you’ll notice that I’m carrying a little guy on my chest here. It’s not a joey, I’m not a kangaroo, this is my newest little guy, his name is Julien. And he is just two days old as of this recording. Super excited to introduce you guys to this little munchkin.

And in this episode if you’re listening on the podcast, well then you’re going to watch the video on YouTube on the replay. But in this episode I want to share three important life lessons that I’ve already learned from this little guy, who’s only two days old. And if you hear some little baby sounds in the background, that’ll be him.

The Birth Of My Son, Julian

So right now he is not quite sleeping, he just had some food, just had his breakfast. And now he’s just chilling out, so hopefully he’s okay for the episode with us. He was born on … I can’t even remember the date. So, it was June 3rd at 1:22 pm. Super awesome birth, we had him at home, it’s our third boy that we’ve had at home. He’s our fourth boy. So our previous two we had at home in a pool birth, and my wife was amazing. As she always is. She cranked him out in like an hour, it was just beautiful.

So he comes out, and the funny story about this is that a lot of people asked us was this planned, was it a mistake? It’s never a mistake, right? But it was planned, so we have three boys. Our youngest one is five years old, so there’s a bit of a gap. And we decided we wanted to have another one about a year and a half ago because we had these interesting messages from different sources about this girl hanging around in the ethers. And we’re like, okay let’s give it a go, right? We talked about it, asked the kids. We felt we were ready for another one to kind of explore that opportunity.

The whole time we didn’t want to know in terms of an ultrasound exactly if it was a boy or a girl, but we just knew intuitively that is was going to be a girl. So when he popped out a couple days ago, and I saw his stuff, I was like oh my God, it’s a boy, it’s another boy. We are producing a soccer team apparently, that’s our mission here. So anyways, it doesn’t matter if it’s a boy or a girl, what we wanted was obviously a really healthy baby, either way he’s going to be amazing.

This is, if you can see this little guy. Let me see if I can bring him on the camera, there he is. Julian Gabriel Elkaim, that’s his name. And thank you to Luka, our middle son for giving us the idea of Julian as a name, because we were kind of lost for the first day or so.

And it was kind of funny too because we’re looking to book some flights, we’re going to be traveling for half the year next year. And we’re looking to book some flights to Australia right now, and I can’t even book the flights when we didn’t even know his name. So I was like, well we got to figure out the name and then obviously we can book the flights. Anyways, that’s just a little bit of a background about what’s been happening over the last couple days. And with that said, I want to segue into three lessons that this little guy has taught me, or really reminded me of.

Three Life Lessons From My New Baby Boy

Lesson 1: Don’t Look For Easier, Look For Better

Number one is if you’re watching this in the Facebook group, I’m going to be posting more of these podcasts episodes, live as Facebook live videos inside the Facebook group. If you’re watching this as a replay on YouTube, totally cool. And if you’re listening to this on the podcast on iTunes, or Sound Cloud or anywhere else, then by all means continue doing so. And if you want to join us inside the Facebook group then go to Healthpreneurgroup.com/tribe. If you want to listen to the iTunes version, just subscribe to the podcast Healthpreneur.com/iTunes. Okay, so just a couple housekeeping things.

Now let’s get into the three things. So number one is, don’t ask for things to get easier, look to get better. It’s funny because previous to this little guy, I would walk my two dogs and three boys down the street. We go for a bike ride, scooter ride. And anyone who would walk by would be like, wow you got your hands full. I was like, I guess, no big deal. And when we had a fourth I had a lot of friends who were like, dude, there’s a lot of stuff going on here. You enjoy adding friction to your life. And I said, listen, I don’t know if you call it friction or a challenge, or an opportunity for growth, but for me I don’t know if …

It’s almost like a challenge in my life to add things to my plate because I enjoy the growth that come from that. So having three kids, two dogs, running a business, two multiple seven figure companies from home, being able to travel multiple times a year with our family, by myself, whatever. It requires some degree of growth there. And I really think that if you’re a single person or don’t have kids, life is a lot easier. Like it’s so much less friction. And to do things like get up and go, or go to a restaurant or a movie or travel, is so much easier without kids.

So not to say that life is easy in general without kids, but it’s more challenging with kids. And I guess that’s the contract that I signed up for when I came into this planet, and I’m super grateful that I have because I’ve learned so much, and grown so much as a parent, and as an entrepreneur as a result of having kids. For instance, I don’t mess around … You know what, actually, that’s not true I kind of still do mess around with my time. I’m not as productive as I still could be considering this, right?

So my kids go to school nine until three. So that’s my work time, I get up at about five in the morning, do my morning routine. I do about an hour and a half of work, then I’m with the kids, I walk them to school. Then my day is about 4-5 hours of work, and then I’m done. 3 o’clock it’s all done. And had I not had kids, I’d probably be wasting a lot more of my time. And the same goes for all of us. Like if you’re really look at your calendar and your schedule, you’re wasting way more time then you probably should be, right?

Well you know we decided to add a fourth to the mix, like this guy, I love this guy. He’s so cute, it’s unbelievable. And I think my wife and I decided to have another one because at this stage in our lives I feel like personally for me, as well as my wife, we’re at a stage where we can enjoy this a little bit more. When we first started having kids, you know you’ve got the first one, you’re not really sure how to do it. It’s the first kid, and you just try to figure things out. And our kids are so close together, so right now they’re eight, six and five.

So we always had two kids in diapers at the minimum. And now our kids are the ages where they’re really self-sufficient. So this is one of the first times where we have a baby, and we actually know what to do. While the other ones are self-sufficient they can kind of do their thing, now we can really just soak in the experience and enjoy this a lot more than maybe the first time around.

I’m really looking forward to this. This has been a lot of fun so far. And as I said, don’t look for things to get easier, I look to get better. So the easier path would be just have less kids, less stuff. And that’s one way of living, which is fine. You know, it’s a very essentialism way of living. And I’m all for essentialism in terms of stuff, like I don’t have a lot of material possessions other than my car and my house. I wear the same clothes all the time, as much as I love dressing up. Like the suits that I have in my closet never get worn, I’m wearing jogging pants and t-shirts. Or jeans and t-shirts most of the time.

I like adding elements of challenge to my life in an area where I can grow. So I don’t like making my business more complex, I like taking the complexity of business and looking at, how do we streamline it to make it more simple? In my life, four kids, two dogs, how do I take that complexity and streamline it to make it more simple, more enjoyable, and so forth? So now we’re traveling for six months next year with four kids. How are we going to streamline that? How are we going to make that enjoyable? How are we going to help facilitate the home schooling/getting some help in that process? So that when we’re in Australia or Italy, wherever we’re going to be, it’s a lot less chaotic than someone might thing on the outside.

So that’s the first lesson is always look to get better no matter what it is you do in life. Because life doesn’t get easier, don’t expect it to get easier. Just do your best to get better.

Lesson 2: Look At Challenges As A Blessing

Second lesson is every challenge is a blessing. I’m not going to say that having a newborn is a challenge, because it’s an absolute blessing. But you could also look at it as a new challenge. So you have a baby, now, all right, well how do I reorganize my work schedule? How do we facilitate things around the house so that we’re only doing things that we want to do instead of cooking all the time, laundry, et cetera?

Every challenge in life on the other side of that challenge is an opportunity, it’s a blessing. It’s a blessing to learn to grow to get better. And this kind of ties in with the first lesson.

When you are in business, for instance, and you are dealing with stuff that you don’t want to deal with, just understand that it’s not going to last forever. Right? Life, as well as business happens in seasons. Jim Rohn, an amazing influential speaker in the world of personal development, talks about the four seasons of business. And the four seasons of life, right? We got winter, spring, summer, fall. So everyone goes through these four seasons, everyone, doesn’t matter who you are, what level of life you’re in.

First season obviously, well doesn’t matter the order, but let’s just say winter. You can’t avoid the winter. The winter is, it’s the tough months. There’s no yield, there’s no harvest. Maybe the revenue in your business has dried up, client flow has dried up a little bit. And now you’re starting to panic and worry. But what comes after winter every single time? Without fail, for the past thousands of recorded years. Spring. Right?

So spring always follows winter. And spring is a time for planting new seeds, but the key is that springtime is a time to take action and to plant new seeds because if you don’t plant in the spring, you will be begging in the fall. So you want to plant your seeds in the springtime. Right? Think of yourself as a farmer, you’re going to plant your crops whenever spring rolls around, March/April. Summer is next, summer is where things are starting to cultivate and they’re starting to slowly but surely germinate and come to fruition. And now it’s your time to really protect what you have seeded. It is your time to systemize and make things better, to optimize the growth of what it is you’ve planted.

And then finally in the fall is when you reap your harvest. It’s when you reap what you have sown in the spring. And if you want more, then you have to have planted more in the springtime. And part of the beauty that Jim Rohn talks about in the fall is being able to reap without complaints if things don’t go well. And reap without justification if things go really well. So if you have a huge windfall of cash, or a huge windfall in your business, like a big win, there’s no reason to justify that. You don’t have to explain why things are so good, it’s just enjoy it.

And on the flip side, if things don’t work out as you wanted them to, you can’t complain about that. Right? Because you have to understand that if you are fully responsible for the results in your life, it’s your fault. Right? Good or bad. So when you take ownership of that, and you look back over the past couple of months, well what did I do to plant enough seeds to reap the rewards in the fall? And if you really look at this. If you look at if you’ve wanted to host an event. I’ve hosted dozens of events.

And if I’m really honest with myself, the only reason they don’t have more people is because I don’t want more people. Or number two, I don’t want to plant enough seeds. Like I don’t really enjoy the constant endless promotion. So I’ve built a business now that doesn’t require me to do that. But if I really wanted to say, I’m going to have even with 1,000 people, and let’s say 500 people show up, guess who’s fault it is? It’s my fault. I could have done more. I could have promoted more. I could have reached out to more people, et cetera.

That’s the first thing is taking responsibility for your results, because they are 100% your responsibility. Just like this little guy, right? He’s my responsibility. I planted the seed in my wife, like seriously, that’s if you think about it. I planted the seed, right? And her summertime was protecting the womb, the baby that was starting to germinate inside of her, and now the fall is obviously two days ago. Which is, he came to fruition, he came out. And now we are reaping this harvest. Right? So that’s just kind of an analogy anatomically I guess.

But just understand that no matter how challenging things are in your business, they will get better. And no matter how good things are in your business, they will get worse as well. If you come to terms with that and understand the flow of life and the cycle of life, you’ll sleep better at night. Okay? Last year alone in my business we had six Facebook ad accounts shut down.Now, if you know our business, 95% of our revenue comes from Facebook ads.

All right, so for those of you who say Facebook ads don’t work, well they do, you just don’t know how to work them. When you have them dialed in it’s an unbelievable thing. So six ad accounts got shut down. I’m traveling at this time. And it’s super stressful. But I also had in the back of my mind, I’m like this is going to work out. It’s all going to work out for the best. And I knew we had to make this happen because Facebook is just such a huge platform that we can’t just ignore it and say, okay you know what, we’re not going to run Facebook ads anymore. We’re just going to blog. Right? And try that game which is not a lot of fun.

On the flip side of those challenges we learnt some important lessons, and most importantly once we got things set up again properly, not that they weren’t done properly ahead of time, but we just basically had a media buyer do all of our media buying now. Our business really exploded. So every challenge, once you get through that challenge is a huge opportunity for growth. So, don’t look at the challenge as, oh my God my life is over, and live in worry and self-doubt, and fear. Because that doesn’t serve you. You have to go from the challenge, take that challenge, and go from worry and fear to resourceful.

Okay, if you don’t have resources, you have to get resourceful. If you have fear, if you’ve got worry, you have to take that energy and put it into action because that’s the only way you’re going to dig yourself out of that hole. So that second lesson is every challenge is a blessing. So just acknowledge it, appreciate it, thank the universe or God for this opportunity for you to grow and learn and get better. Because you will, and the opportunities will come on the flip side of it.

Lesson 3: Learn From Your Mistakes

Third lesson is learn from your mistakes. I see this a lot of time, like listen, we’ve helped a lot of clients in the health and fitness space. And there are thousands more who we’ve not been able to help because they have let fear stand in the way of their dream. So what I mean by that is learning from your mistakes means if something isn’t working, stop doing it. Okay, don’t continue doing things that aren’t working because that’s the definition of insanity according to some people.

What we want to think about is successful people are willing to step up to the plate and strike out more often. That’s the only reason that I’m here. That’s the only reason that we are now industry leading coaching and training company that thousands of health, fitness, and wellness experts flock to, to help them grow their businesses. The only reason is because I’m still standing. I’m still here, I didn’t give up when things were tough. And obviously we’ve had an amazing product that really helps people and their businesses.

But there’s a lot of lessons that I learned from mistakes in this journey, from the mistakes of building a multiple seven figure business since 2006, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt in that business, I made maybe 1,000 times more mistakes than wins. But instead of crying the blues and saying, okay this didn’t work I’m going to stop doing this. This internet thing doesn’t work. You just get back up, and you try something different. And it doesn’t have to be a completely new thing, but just maybe a small tweak, a small pivot.

All right, this offer didn’t work, maybe it was the headline? Was it the price? Was it whatever? You have an idea which you think is great, but your first idea is usually not the best one, so just understanding that and being like, okay cool, maybe I’m not as good as I think I am. Let me learn, let me grow, let me get some mentorship, right? So learning from your mistakes is important because if you look at mistakes as opportunities for growth. You know I think the theme of this episode is growth, like to be very honest with you. That’s why I love being an entrepreneur, that’s why I love being a father, is that these are two endeavors that really allow us to grow.

And I think for most growth oriented individuals, these are real amazing opportunities. So if you’re a growth oriented individual, then you look at mistakes not as failures, but as learnings. Some people say sometimes you win, sometimes you learn. I think you learn when you win, I think you also learn when you don’t win. And if you take that mentality and just move through life with, okay well this didn’t work out in the way I had hoped. What did I learn from this? Knowing what I know now, what would I do differently in the future?

What wisdom can I impart on others who are also going through this journey? And when you take that mentality, that mindset, you’re more likely to move forward fast, because you understand that the more mistakes you make, the more no’s you hear. The sooner you’re going to get to the yes’s and the big wins. But the challenge is that so many people are afraid of not being perfect, that they don’t even start. They’re taking the baseball bat and they want to go up to home plate to hit the home run. That’s the vision. They want to hit the home run.

But they’re not willing to step up to the plate and strike out. And that’s why most people just don’t do anything in their business. What if this doesn’t work? What if I swing and miss the ball? Oh my God, end of the world, right? What if I invest this money and it goes to waste? Well that’s a bad way of thinking about things. Let’s look at two examples.

When we work with our clients, part of what we help them build out is their perfect client pipeline. Which again, relies on Facebook ads to drive clients into their business. By the way, shout out to Paulina, one of our clients. Who deployed her pipeline last week, she spent $394 on Facebook ads, she enrolled two clients, and made $7,900. From Tuesday she deployed, by Sunday she had made $7,900 on a $394 ad spent. That is frigging amazing.

Susan, another one of our clients. She joined our program four months ago. That same day, like literally the same day she enrolled with us, her daughter’s house burned down. To the ground. Now she could have made all the excuses in the world and pulled out and said, listen there’s too much stuff going on in my life. She didn’t. She committed to what … She kept her word, she committed to the process, and just the other week she enrolled two clients and I believe her clients were worth about $3,500 each. $7,000 right there, on a couple hundred dollar ads spent.

And this is a lady who’s in her, I believe she’s in her mid-50s, maybe late 50s. I apologize Susan if I don’t know your exact age, but I won’t divulge it anyways. Not technically savvy, has no following online. But she did what she had to do, she got the support, she worked the strategy. And her first week deployed she made $7,000. That’s amazing, right? That’s why I love doing what I do. But the challenge that really bothers me is there are so many people out there who let fear stand in their way of stepping up to the plates.

Because they think to themselves, well, what if I spend money on Facebook ads and I don’t get anything back? Well, you will get something back. Either you’ll get clients and revenue, or you’ll get data. You’ll get data of what is and isn’t working. And if you look at that as a loss, maybe you’re just not cutout in business. Because the reality is you’re paying Facebook for data. You’re saying, I’m going to give you $1,000, I want you to tell me what’s working and what isn’t. And that’s priceless. And hopefully in that $1,000 you’re obviously making some revenue.

So don’t look at things as like, what am I going to lose? Don’t hold onto stuff like, oh my God, I have this baby I might lose it, right? Or I have this money, I might lose it. Listen, money is useless until you use it. You’re giving money to Facebook for Facebook to give you all the leads and clients you could ever want. It’s just how much money are you willing to give to Facebook in return for that?

Second thing is some clients worry about the investment in working with us. And I say, listen, the most expensive thing that this is going to cost you, is if you don’t do this. And you struggle for the next months, years, et cetera. And it’s so funny, I actually this morning I sent a couple emails to some people that were interested in working with us earlier this year. You know, one of them wanted to sell his business, he had to make sure all of his ducks were in a row. Another one knew she was in a job she was miserable in, and it was like a 10/10 she wanted to work with us and her husband talked her off the ledge. Right?

It’s just ridiculous the stuff that, you know, this is stuff you’re going to come up against with your clients as well. And the biggest cost is working by yourself. You know whether you work with us or not, I don’t care. Listen, the ship has already sailed, if you’re on the ship that’s great, we’re helping clients, we’re making money. We don’t really need you, but if we can support you, we’re happy to.

But the thing is, it’s not a matter of whether this will work. Because we know this works, we know every single time it works. The only time this doesn’t work, and when I say this I mean our process, is when you don’t do the work. Right? So we have clients they’re like yeah, show me the social proof. Show me someone with four kids, no hair, et cetera, who did this. Like, well here you go. And they’re like, no, I still want to talk to your clients. Well listen, that’s not how this works, because what that tells me is that you don’t believe in yourself enough to step up to the plates, to have the confidence to say, here comes the ball I’m going to swing and I’m going to hit it out of the park.

And you know what? If I strike out the first 10 times, I’m still going to come back up to the plate and I’m going to hit that ball out of the park. That’s the only difference guys, that’s the only difference between those who succeed and those who talk a lot of crap. And who don’t do anything. Right? And listen, I know that everyone is in a very different financial position, but I can promise you every single time you invest in yourself, your business, yourself, you’re going to learn. You’re going to grow, and if you don’t, it is 100% on you.

I could tell you stories of people who’ve come back to us with like this has gone on in my life, whatever. I’m like, I don’t care. Right? I just had a baby, am I going to use that as an excuse not to do a podcast? Like there’s all sorts of stuff that we can say as an excuse or a reason not to do something, but the thing is, whether it’s easy or not, whatever you commit to just commit to it. And do it. And if it works out, that’s on you. And if it doesn’t work out, that’s also on you. And if it doesn’t work out the way you want it to, what are the things you can learn from that?

And if it does work out the way you want it to, what are the things you can learn from that? And that’s what this is all about, is not having fear to miss … It’s not having fear of striking out. It’s having the courage to step up to the plate and understand that, you know what, the likelihood of me hitting a home run is very slim. If you think about this … I can’t even remember the percentages in baseball. But the hitting percentage, whatever that number is. I used to play a lot of baseball and I can’t even remember the numbers now.

The hitting percentage, that batters will come up to the plate with, this batter is hitting at 300%, or .3 whatever the number is. That means that he hits three balls out of 10 that he gets on plate. So 10 balls come at him, or 10 at bats, three times he’s ending up on first, second, third, or a home run. Three times, and that 300% average is considered good. Very few ball players are hitting 500%. It’s usually in the 250-350 range as far as I remember.

And so if you’re stepping up, and let’s say you’re taking enrollment calls. And you’re O for 10, okay cool there’s a room for improvements. If you’re two for 10, hey that’s pretty good. Don’t expect you to be 9/10. Right? Even the best baseball players are batting three, four out of 10 at most. So just give yourself permission to fail. And it’s not failure it’s learning, it’s learning that’s all it is. And if you have a growth oriented mindset, then everything is happening for you. Everything. Good and bad, it’s never happening to you, you’re never a victim. Right, it’s not about what happens, it’s about what you do with that.

And if you have this perspective of, okay if things aren’t easy I’m going to get better. Every challenge is a blessing and I’m going to learn from my mistakes. That’s a really great way to live.

Wrap Up With Yuri

So anyways, I hope these lessons have found you well. And this little guy has been a champ, he’s just been hanging out. And yeah, I’m really happy to introduce Julian to you guys and to the world. You’ll be seeing more of him as you listen in and watch the podcast, and obviously stay tuned to what we’re up to with Healthpreneur. So that’s all for today guys.

Listen, if you are ready to step up to the plate, and you want to hit that home run. Well it’s going to start with a couple singles, and maybe a double, maybe a triple here and there. And there will be some strike outs, but wouldn’t it make sense if you had a batting coach right there beside you to help you get better with every at bat? Well that’s what me and my team do. And if you want our help to work with you, then just let me know.

What we’ll do is we’ll put a link in the comments, but in the meantime if you’re listening to this on the podcast on iTunes, just go to Healthpreneurgroup.com/invite. And we’ll just ask you a few questions about your business where you’re at right now, and where you want to go and we’ll see if we’re a good fit. If we’re good, then we can have a quick chat, figure out a game plan for your business. We’ll look at where you are right now, where you want to go. What are some of the obstacles that are standing in your way? And we’re going to customize a game plan for your business.

Okay, we’re going to help get more leads and more clients, and we’ll craft a game plan to help you hit $10,000 per month within six months or less. Okay? That’s what we do with our clients, and that’s what we can do with you. But, you have to be willing to step up to the plate. So again, thanks for joining me. If you want to speak with us Healthpreneurgroup.com/invite. And I look forward to seeing you guys in the next episode.

So on behalf of Julian and myself, thanks guys. Have an awesome day, and I’ll see you soon.

Welcome to the final episode. You thought of the podcast, not quite my friend. Welcome to the final episode in The Client Activator Scorecard series.

If you’ve missed any of the previous eight episodes, go back and watch them or listen to them. It’s some good stuff I think, and if you want the scorecard, if you have no clue what I’m talking about, if you just tuned in for the first time, we’ve been talking about a really cool tool I’ve developed called The Client Activator Scorecard. It’s a two page tool that will help you assess your marketing, figure out where the leaks are, and give you the fixes so that your marketing becomes more compelling, people actually care about it, they respond to it, so you actually have higher conversions, more leads coming in, more clients paying you money, and obviously more money in the bank, but just as importantly, more lives transformed.

So we’ve been talking about the three pillars, market, message, magic, and the nine activators that fall within those. Today we’re talking about the final and the ninth client activator.

Market Awareness

I think this is probably, it’s tough to say if it’s the most important, but let’s just go with it, it’s the most important. Maybe, maybe not. It’s probably not the most important, but we’ll just say it is, but is not really, but it is. Anyways. Eugene Schwartz, famous copywriter wrote an amazing book decades ago called Breakthrough Advertising, and inside that book he talked about the sophistication of the marketplace and the levels of awareness of a marketplace. What he showed was that in a market that’s very sophisticated, there is a higher level of awareness amongst the people in it, and when there is more sophistication and thus awareness in a market, there needs to be an introduction of new mechanisms, new angles, new hooks, new big ideas. Let’s bring this down a notch.

If we look at the weight loss market, at the beginning of the 19th century, so the 1800s, was the weight loss market very sophisticated? The answer is probably no. I don’t think there were infomercials, I mean, there weren’t TVs, right? I don’t think there were gyms and personal trainers, and diet pills. I don’t even think it was top of mind for most people. 175 years later, it becomes a different story. So mid-20th century, so 1950 and forward, now we’re starting to look at advertising, radio commercials, TV commercials, billboard ads, magazines, Playboy, Penthouse. We’re starting to indoctrinating the culture of what we need to look like to be accepted, or loved, or attractive, and that leads into this whole cultural revolution of losing weight, or packing on muscle if you’re guy.

So what happens is over the next couple of decades, the pills come out, the potions come out, the workout programs come out, the diet books come out, the infomercials come out, the gyms pop up all over the place, the personal training business takes off, and where we are now in 2019, and when we look at the spectrum of sophistication, it’s very sophisticated, which means people have seen everything or a lot of it, right? You go to the bookstore, you feel overwhelmed with the number of diet books, which ultimately all say the same thing. You go to a gym that’s right next to another gym. There’s so much stuff. So when that happens, the level of skepticism increases in the marketplace because now it’s like well, here we go again, here’s another thing that’s probably just like the other thing that didn’t work for me. So there’s increased skepticism which is a really important thing I want you to remember, and when people have increased skepticism, what do they look for? Well there’s two things. One is social proof, that’s a real big driver of human behavior, but the second thing is a big idea.

A Big Idea

A big idea is you are introducing something new, different, or polarizing into the marketplace. So let me give you an example.  I briefly mention this in the deep dive training that goes along with the scorecard. I drive a BMW M5. I love the car. I’ve had it for almost five years now. It’s an absolute beast. If you’re into cars, you know what I’m talking about, if you are not into cars, I won’t bore you with the story. So it’s an amazing car, there is no other car I would upgrade to other than getting into spots cars which doesn’t make sense because I’ve got a large family, so there’s no kid seats in two-seater sports cars, and I’m going to stick with this.

So I was at BMW recently because I had to get the air conditioning fixed in the car, it’s the only thing that’s really just broken down after five years, pretty good. Really simple fix. While I was there, I saw the new M5. I saw the new M5 on the trade floor, and I remember speaking to the sales rep and I said, “Can you sell me on why I should upgrade to this new M5? Please, try to convince me why I should get the new M5.” And he couldn’t, and he knew he couldn’t, and that’s a very big dilemma, okay? Because the only difference between my M5 and the new one was all-wheel drive, that’s it. I mean, I think there might be a tiny bit more horsepower, but really not. It’s actually got a more annoying dashboard, like the screen that pops up on the dashboard as opposed to be built in like mine is. I think that’s super annoying. The lines of the car exactly the same. The interior features are pretty much identical. The look and feel of the car is the same, so why am I going to buy a new car, which is marginally better if at all from my current one? And some may argue that newness alone is good enough, and I do agree with that. I do agree with that for some people.

I had a phone, and iPhone, I had an iPhone whatever, whatever the 6S, I think, whatever it was, and then my wife got me an iPhone X. I didn’t need the iPhone X but she got it for me for Christmas, I’m like, “Cool, awesome.” Now, there are people who will line up in the iPhone store even though their pockets are filled with previous iPhones that are fully functioning just to get the new one. Now, there’s obviously on the bell curve, we talk about like early adopters and the large majority, et cetera, I’m not an early adopter. I don’t care enough about stuff like that to need the newest thing, but I understand there are people that are like that. They want the new thing, even if the new thing is not that much better. But I’m going to play things safe and just assume that most people are not going to take action on something unless the new thing is substantially better, and this is important for you to understand because this is going to go back into how you explain your coaching program, your messaging, how you differentiate in the marketplace, because if you get on the phone with someone and you introduce a program to them that’s $5,000 and they’re thinking to themselves, “Well I spoke to someone else and their program was half the price.” Or, “I did this workout program that’s $97, why is this better?”

Okay, you have to know how to answer that question, and not just the fact that it’s new, right, but you have to understand how to position this in terms of features, advantage, benefits, et cetera. I’m not going to go into details about that right now.

Coming back to the big idea. The big idea ties in with the magic, right? Which is essentially the offer, the promise you’re making to the marketplace. It can be free or it can be paid. So your coaching program should have some degree of newness, differentiation or polarity that is going to get people to really take note. As an example, I’ll give you an example of Health Business Accelerator. It’s our core program, we help hundreds of clients through the program. The promise is helping you add $10,000 or more per month within three to six months, and have a very predictable way of getting clients to help you do so. Now, does everyone get that outcome? No, because it’s obviously depends upon them, but that’s what the program is built to do, and we’ve done that with countless clients already.

So that’s the highly desirable tangible result. Now, here is the big idea. The big idea is that it’s a simple four step system that does not revolve around social media, no content marketing, and zero word of mouth, which are three of the big things that are sucking away people’s soul when it comes to building their business. So the big idea here is that we don’t do any of that nonsense. So our big idea is kind of polarizing and different from what every other business coach is doing out there. Now, the other way that we differentiate is that we’re really the only people in the health and wellness space, I shouldn’t say the only because there’s probably someone popping up right now as I’m saying that, but there are other training and coaching companies that do similar stuff to what we do, but we’re the best in the health and wellness space. So we decided to only focus on a single target market being health and fitness coaches. So that’s to give you a bit of context around our big idea, okay?

What Makes You Different From Everyone Else

Now if we look at a free thing. So let’s say you’re offering a free webinar. A free online presentation for people to attend. What’s the big idea? What’s the hook? What’s the angle? What’s going to get people excited to jump in and do this? Because remember, in a marketplace that is very sophisticated, what was that word I said? Remember that word? There’s increased skepticism. Oh, here’s another. If I could show you the comments on my Facebook ads, you would feel sorry for the human race. It is absolutely disgusting what some people with their name and profile, publicly, visible, and clickable right there will say about me, or my approach, or anything in our comments on those Facebook ads. I’m like, “Man, you’re really like bottom feeders.” It’s really sad that you would take a moment out of your day to write something as deplorable as that. But the thing is everyone, like people have seen oh my god, here is another business coach saying the same shit. I just want to punch you in the head. I hope you get burned at the stake, like ridiculous stuff, okay.

People get pissed off because they’ve been burnt before. So that’s the reality of living in a very sophisticated marketplace where people have seen stuff forever, right? So you need to be able to introduce something to the market that is going to get them to think, “Wow, this actually seems very different. This seems new.” Or it’s polarizing. I’ve got a video ad running right now, and it’s just one minute, and it’s just me ranting about why you deserve to be rich. Why you deserve to be rich. It’s polarizing because there are people that apparently believe that I said, “Listen, being poor isn’t serving anyone. Being poor isn’t noble. Being poor is selfish.” It’s very polarizing stuff to say. To people who don’t have money it’s like, you should see some of the comments, and I don’t care because I really believe it to be true. I’m not going to get into the whole rant about whatever, but what I’m saying is if you want to stand out, your stuff has to be new, different, or polarizing, and that basically means you have to introduce a new big idea. So when we came to the market with HBA we had to look at how are we going to get people into HBA, and that’s why we have our perfect client pipeline, Facebook ad, webinar, phone call.

Our webinar just can’t be a webinar. It can’t just be like, “Hey, watch this thing.” Cool, thank you. We had to introduce some degree of big idea that was going to be interesting, unique, different, and that’s where we came up with the perfect client pipeline, the four step blueprints that doesn’t revolve around anything else. The old way of building a business online is dead, which is all that stuff I mentioned. The social media, the content marketing, all that stuff. Now, is it dead? No, it’s not because some people do very well with that, myself included. 270,000 subscribers on YouTube, a million visitors per month on my blog. I’d way we’ve done pretty well with that stuff, but what I am saying is I’m taking a stance that for most people to do that is, like it just doesn’t make sense, because I’ve been down that road and I see what it entails. It doesn’t make sense for most businesses to do that, especially in 2019, and especially if you’re relatively new.

So the big idea comes at every level of your marketing. From your Facebook ad where you’re introducing a new discovery or a new solution you came upon, to what you disclose in your webinar, or in your lead magnet, or whatever it is you’re offering, to your phone call, if you’re getting people on the phone, which you should be if you’re selling something higher ticket, into your coaching program. The whole way through there needs to be a newness, differentiation, something that is going to get people to stand up and take action, and the reason a big idea is important is that we go back to that word I mentioned earlier which is called skepticism. They’ve tried everything else, nothing has worked. So this is bullshit, this is another one of those scams, whatever. But for a lot of people what a big idea introduces is a four letter word that doesn’t rhyme with duck. I’ll let you think about that for a second.

What it does is it introduces hope, and we are selling hope. Ultimately we’re selling certainty of an outcome, but what we’re doing is we are selling hope to people who’ve been burnt before, to people who have not been able to succeed with what they’ve done before, and when you introduce something new to the market, a big idea, it gives them hope because now this is the thing they might be thinking to themselves. In the back of their mind they might be like, “You know what? This is full of shit, this guy is a scammer, but you know what? Maybe, just maybe this is the thing. This is the thing. This is what I’ve been waiting for.” That’s the conversation that’s happening in their mind. Now, they’re not talking about this with their friends, this is happening in their mind. This could be the thing that gives me the thing I’m looking for. Let’s see what this is all about. Okay, cool.

Wrap Up With Yuri

That’s what a big idea is going to do, and that’s why it’s important to have a big idea, because if you don’t have a big idea, then you’re the same as everyone else and your offer is the same as everyone else. You’re bringing more vanilla ice cream to an ice cream parlor that is full of vanilla ice cream, and what you need to do is you need to infuse some chocolate ice cream in an ice cream parlor that is filled with vanilla ice cream so that when you … Just think about this. Just visualize this for a second. You go to an ice cream shop and there are 30 flavors, or 31 flavors, it’s called Baskin-Robbins. 31 different vanilla ice creams, or let’s just say they’re all the same. 30 vanilla ice creams, and then you’re looking through the glass and then you see that one tub of chocolate. Which one do you think is a bit more exciting? If you said the chocolate, you’re right. Even if you don’t like chocolate. Why? Because it’s different, it’s new, it stands out, and that’s what a big idea does for your business. Okay.

I hope this makes sense to you, and if you don’t, if it doesn’t make sense, listen, we’ve talked about this for 17 minutes. This takes time. It takes time, it takes guidance, it takes coaching to really get this stuff dialed in. It really helps if you have someone look at your business. Look at your offers and be like, “This makes no sense. This sucks. This isn’t going to convert.” To making it better, and that’s what we do every single day with our clients. So if you don’t have the scorecard yet, get the scorecard, healthpreneurgroup.com/scorecard. Once you’ve opted in you can download it, you can type directly into the PDF or print it out, whatever you want to do.

Included with that is a free bonus deep dive training called The Client Activator, where I’m going to walk you through all nine activators in 60 minutes. I’ll show you what the problems are, how to fix them, how to make yourself more compelling by stuff, I mean your marketing so that people respond to it, they opt in, they pay you money, you get more clients, all that good stuff that you want. So that when you initially said, “I want more traffic.” Or, “Want more people looking at my stuff or buying my stuff.” What you’re really saying is I want more clients and more money. We fixed this conversion piece, and then you will get more traffic than you can handle. You will have more people knocking on your door than you’ll know what to do with, but everyone’s got this backwards. They’re like, “I want more people coming to my site.” Well the reason you don’t have people coming to your site is because your stuff sucks and no one cares about it, and I say that with all the love possible, okay? I’m here to serve you, I’m here to get you thinking differently, because if you don’t, you’re going to struggle, and I don’t want you to struggle, okay?

So get the scorecard, healthpreneurgroup.com/scorecard. I hope you’ve enjoyed this series. We’ve talked, we’ve had nine episodes now on this. If you’ve missed anything, just go back over the previous nine episodes and just go back through this stuff, and if you want our help, hey, we’re happy to do that as well. That’s all for me today.

So over the next couple episodes we’re going to be bringing back some deep dives. We’re going to get some people that are not clients coming back onto the show. Actually not coming back, coming onto the show. I have no clue who they are other than their name. I don’t, I’m not going to be, they’re not going to be promoting a book or anything. It’s like, here is where I need help in my business, and let’s spend 25 minutes to figure this out. So listen, I charge $2,000 an hour for consulting. These individuals are going to have a free 25 minute consult on the podcast. You’ll get to listen in, kind of like a fly on the wall, and I recommend you bring a pen because we’re going to have some really cool breakthrough. I’m not going to hold anything back. I’m going to give my best stuff in these episodes. We’ll probably release one every week, usually on Fridays, so stay tuned for that. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

If you want to be guest on the show, then yeah, just make sure you’re on our email list because that’s how I announce it. So in order to do that go to get the scorecard and you’ll be put onto our email list, and that should take care of that. Okay. So there it is. Scorecard. We have officially come to the conclusion of The Client Activator Scorecard. I’ve had fun bringing this to you. Hopefully it’s made some sense, and there we go. So I’m going to stop talking now. Hope you have an amazing day. I’ll see you in the next episode, and see you then.

Transcription

Welcome back to the podcast. Yuri here, excited to share a new tool with you in today’s episode. It’s called The Client Activator Scorecard, and it looks like this. Now, if you’re watching this on video, you can see it. If you’re listening to this on iTunes, obviously, you can’t see it, but either way, you can grab it for free over at healthpreneurgroup.com/scorecard.

 

Why You Need A Client Activator Scorecard

Now, with that said, let’s talk about why you’d even want to do that. What’s the point of this scorecard in the first place? Here’s the thing. I’ve been doing this for a long time, as you know. I’ve also been fascinated by once the mechanics are taken care of, once the funnel has been built, once the pages are there, why is it that one person’s funnel or pipeline works so much better than someone else’s? This is something I spend a lot of time thinking about. It’s something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about over the years because as I’ve mentioned several times before, I have put out a lot of things to market, and 80% of them have flopped, so I’ve learned a lot of hard lessons along the way.

What I’ve discovered is that conversions really matter. We talk about traffic and conversion, people want to get more traffic to their website, traffic to their webinar, traffic to their offer, but the reality is that if your conversions are sub-par, you can’t get more traffic because if we think of two traffic sources, let’s look at Facebook ads for a second, if your conversions are really low on Facebook ads, so Facebook ad to an opt-in page, for instance, webinar, et cetera, if those conversions are very, very poor, not only is your cost-per-acquisition going up significantly higher, but your return on ad spends becomes very negligible, so it’s very tough to scale that.

If you’re starting at $20 a day, and you’re like, “I’m not too sure if it’s really making sense,” well, it’s not that the, mechanically, it doesn’t mean that the funnel doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean that that business model doesn’t work. What it does signify is that you have an offer problem.

The offer is what is going to lead to the conversion. I come to you, and I say, “Listen, you are… ” Let’s just look at an example. You’re hiking through the desert, or you got lost. You’re on a camel ride, and you got lost, and you have no water. You’re dying of thirst. It’s beaming hot outside, and you have no water.

Here I come out of this oasis, and I offered you a sandwich. You’re thinking to yourself, “Yeah, you know what, sandwich, that’d be okay, but really, I can’t even fathom eating a sandwich right now because I’m so thirsty.” The offer of the sandwich is not going to convert as well. Now, if we take that same story, but we reverse it, and here I come walking out of this oasis with a bottle of water this time, now what’s going to happen? Conversion goes up. They’re going to chug this bottle of water in five seconds. It’s a must-have.

Now, nothing changed in the way I approached you. I didn’t look differently. Everything else was the same. The only difference was I presented a different offer to you that was a must-have. That’s what I want you to think about with your business is if you’re having a tough time getting leads, converting those leads into paying clients, et cetera, you don’t have a traffic problem. Everyone wants more traffic to their website. They want their stuff to be seen by more people. It’s like, no, no, you’ve put the cart before the horse. You need to really dial in your offer so that people actually want it. That’s what makes the difference.

The Client Activator Scorecard was developed to help you, number one, diagnose the quality of your offer, and quite honestly, the quality of your offer is basically representative by your bank account. If you look at your bank account and you don’t have enough money in there, that’s a good indication that your offer is not what it should be.

Anyways, The Client Activator Scorecard is going to pinpoint nine activators that turn cold leads into high-paying clients. What I want to do over the next couple of episodes is walk you through one by one what those are. We’re going to dedicate each episode to one activator. We’re going to go deep on that, and I’m going to help you get a better sense of how all this stuff works so that you have a better understanding of what to look for because, I promise you, I’m going to present stuff to you you’ve probably never even thought of. If we think of information as an important advantage that you have, like not knowing information is going to hold you back from moving forward and having the right information is going to be that secret weapon that can make all the difference, that’s what I’m going to present to you over the next couple of weeks with the podcast is I’m going to walk you through each one of the nine activators.

We’re going to look at number one, how is that activator, is that even activated in your business. Number two, we’re going to look at, with that, where are the leaks in your marketing. Then I’m going to give you a couple tips here and there to help you plug those leaks so you can improve your conversions by making stronger offers that people actually want.

As a result of that, you’re going to find it easier to get higher conversions. Doesn’t matter the source of traffic. I mentioned one source of traffic being Facebook ads earlier. I forgot to mention the second, second being, let’s say, affiliates and joint ventures. If you have a launch, that launch will flop if your offer doesn’t convert. Does that make sense? It doesn’t matter where the traffic is coming from. The traffic is going to dry up very quickly if it doesn’t convert well.

How To Use The Client Activator Scorecard

Again, go to healthpreneurgroup.com/scorecard. Download this bad boy. It’s actually in two pages. The first page is going to walk you through the nine activators that’s going to give you a number of statements. For each activator, you’re going to select the score from a range of one to nine that is most representative of where you’re at right now. You’re going to total up your score in a second page. Then it’s going to give you a total score, and you’ll be able to categorize yourself in one of four categories. Those categories range from struggling to dominating. Obviously, we want to be closer to the dominating category because struggling is not fun.

That is just a little bit of a preamble for what we’re going to be doing over the next couple of episodes. Your first step right now is to go the healthpreneurgroup.com/scorecard. Download the scorecard. Totally free. You’re going to fill it in. You can type directly into the PDF or you can print it out and write into it. You’re going to total up your score. I’ve also included a free bonus, Deep Dive Training, that is going to give you a very condensed version of what I’m going to be talking about over the next month and a half on the podcast. If you wanted to just get all that within the space of 60 minutes, then you’ll get all that in the Deep Dive Training, pretty much.

Again, all of that, you’ll get the scorecard and the Deep Dive Training over at healthpreneurgroup.com/scorecard. I wanted to just jump in today, really quick episode, nothing too crazy, but I do want to just let you know about this new tool we have. The goal is that it’s going to help you craft better offers that people actually want so you better conversions, ultimately, more leads and more clients and more money in your bank account, and a lot less frustration. Does that make sense?

The First Activator

I’m going to just leave it there for now, and with that said, get the scorecard. I’ll see you in the next episode, and we’ll dive deep into the first activator. Actually, you know what? Let’s do this. Let’s talk about the first activator in this episode. I’m going to leave you with some goodies. Sound good? The next episode we’ll talk about the second activator. Now, before I get into the nine activators, I just want to give you a higher level view of how, like the umbrellas that they fall into.

When we look at an offer, there’s three components. There’s message, market, and magic. Magic you can consider it to be kind of like the offer, like what is it that you’re offering someone, but you can’t just have a good offer to the wrong audience. Your messaging needs to be dialed in in order for that audience to even care what you’re talking about.

We look at message, market, and magic. If we look at the first pillar, being market, there are three activators under that. There are three activators under message, another three activators under magic. We’ll look at each one of those.

Today, I just want to really quickly touch on the first one. The first activator is single target market seeking a solution now. Single target market seeking a solution now. If we look at, again, if we look on the scorecard here, you’ll see there’s just a number of statements. There are three statements, and you’re just going to identify which one most identifies your situation. If I just read the statement off the scorecard, on the end that is not ideal, here’s the statement for single target market seeking a solution now. Your single target market is everyone. You’re willing to work with anyone who will pay you.

Now, that is on the side of the spectrum that is least ideal. Now, as you’re going through the scorecard… Listen, you don’t have to share this number with me. This is for you. You have to be very honest with yourself and look at that statement, and just ask yourself, “Is that me? Is my single target market everyone?” Surprisingly for a lot of health and fitness and wellness professionals, it is. “What kind of clients do you coach?” “Well, I help anyone.” Well, you would put yourself in that category then, a one, two, or three based on how severe that statement is true for you.

If we move along the spectrum from one to three, kind of like the worst category to a middle of the road, the statement is you focus your marketing efforts on whatever the hot or trending market is right now. Let me repeat that. You focus your marketing efforts on whatever is the hot or trending market right now.

You kind of just jump on the bandwagon. You talk about keto’s hot. Now you’re this person jumps on keto, and then next year, it’s something else, you jump on that. Listen, if you have the bandwidth to do that, that’s fine. You can do that. Procter & Gamble has, and I’ll save this actually for a future episode, but they enter a market, and every single time they do, they have one focus, and that focus is to dominate.

Yes, there’s having this awareness, like what is it that people are talking about, how can I add value here, how can I solve some problems as opposed to just working within a market that no one cares about anymore, but the thing I’m trying to get at here is that you’re just not jumping from one to the next. You’re not an intermittent fasting person one month and then a keto person the next month and then a raw food person the next month and then a whatever, like… Become the best in a specific space.

Again, if you’re in that, that’s middle-range, four, five, or six, and then the ideal is you dominate a specific target market and you focus on helping people who are seeking help now. That’s the ideal. Again, it’s seven, eight, or nine of that statement, nine being this is 100% true of my business, this is exactly what I’m doing, boom.

Again, don’t lie to yourself because if you go through the scorecard and you get a very high score, that means you are absolutely crushing it in your business. If you have a high score but your bank account doesn’t reflect it or if you have a high score and you feel stressed, overwhelmed, and it doesn’t feel like you’re getting anywhere, then you’re not being honest with yourself.

If you were absolutely dominating and just crushing and doing tons of good stuff, making tons of money, helping a lot of people, and you feel really good about what you’re doing in business, your score should be high on this scorecard, but if it’s not, your score should be lower. Don’t lie to yourself. It doesn’t help anyone.

An Example Of The First Activator

The focus, the ideal is to move from “I help everyone,” move it towards “I focus on helping a single target market seeking a solution now.” For instance, with Healthpreneur, we only help health, fitness, and wellness coaches, not people selling supplements, coaches, so it’s a niche within a niche, who want to get more clients and scale their coaching so they’re not dependent upon one-on-one. That’s what we do. If you’re a coach who wants to get more clients, and you want to move away from burnout, we’re the best at what we do. I could do the same thing with all coaches. I could do any coaches, business coaches, Internet marketing coaches, whatever, it’s the same thing, but I chose not to because we want to dominate and be the number player in this space.

The first activator, and the reason this is important is that this is going to tie into your messaging down the road is once you identify a single target market, it’s very easy to craft messaging to that specific group of people versus if you help everyone, how do you distill your messaging down so that everyone feels understood? You can’t. That’s the challenge that I face when I was starting my health business was that I was kind of a generalist. I just did everything. It was very, very tough to do that. Obviously, we made it work to some degree, but it’s very, very, it’s tough to do that because you’re like, “Hey, yeah, you’re competing with dodge rocks.” It’s a very tough place to win when you try to be a big fish in a big ocean. It’s a lot easier to be a big fish in a small pond.

Don’t worry, there’s more than enough people. If you’re worried about, “I’m going to alienate people,” yes, you will. Great. That’s what you want to do. Could you serve everyone? Yes. Doesn’t mean you should. Make sense? Just because you can help a lot of people doesn’t mean that you should help a lot of people. It means that need to focus on helping the right people, and at least for now. Down the road, you can obviously expand and so forth, but at one single time, your single target market needs to be the focus, and they need to be seeking a solution now.

When I was 15, I broke my leg playing soccer. I wanted a solution right now. I wanted a cast. I wanted my leg to be better. That’s seeking a solution now. Many times in my life, I’ve been kicked playing soccer, and I got bruised. Was I seeking a solution now? No, I just threw some ice on it. No big deal.

What we’re going to talk about in the next episode is the second activator, which is actually going to segue for what I just wanted about into a deeper dive on that specific topic, which, again, I’m going to keep you in suspense on just so that you tune in. Today, just a little bit of an introduction to The Client Activator Scorecard. We talked about the first activator being choosing a single target market that is seeking a solution now. When you do that, again, this is the first step to starting to improve your conversions.

Now, the final thing I’ll mention is that you can’t just have one of these dialed in, and then everything else is whatever. You have to have all nine of these dialed in. Think of dog-sledding. I don’t know if you’ve ever dogsled before. I haven’t, but I have two dogs, and it’s close enough because if one dog wants to go left and the other one wants to go right, or if I want to go for a walk forward, and they’re just like, “Nope, I’m not moving,” that’s kind of like what this is like is if you have seven activators cranking, but two of them are not, it’s going to be like you’re driving with your brake fully pressed down to the floor. You’re not going to make the headway, but the thing is if you can release the brake on those two activators, and now you have all nine activators working like clockwork, it’s amazing what can happen to your business, and that can happen very, very quickly.

The Wrap Up

That is my message for today. I hope you find it encouraging. It’s a really, really cool tool. I think you’ll really get a lot of value out of it. Again, just to finish off, healthpreneurgroup.com/scorecard. Download yours today. I will see you in the next episode where we’re going to talk about the second activator, the second Client Activator. For now, have an amazing day, and I’ll see you then.

Transcription

Today’s episode is going to be in Spanish apparently. That should be a lot of fun. If this were 20 years ago, I could totally do that because I did quite a bit of Spanish in school and I could talk very fluently but that’s not what we’re going to do today. I apologize. Actually not, I don’t apologize. That’s just the way I rock sometimes, that’s the way I roll.

Introducing the three big mistakes

Today we’re talking about three big business mistakes. Try to say that three times fast. They’ll save you millions of dollars. These are actually three big and embarrassing business mistakes that I made since 2006 and I’ve extracted three of the thousands that I think will really hit home the most for you. My intention here is that I can provide a bit of wisdom, having kind of gone down the path and I can look back over my shoulder and you’re a little bit behind me and I’m thinking to myself, you know what? There’s a pothole coming up. If you can go around this way, instead of going through the pothole, it’s going to save you a lot. Cool.

You may have heard one or two of these before. I don’t know, but I’m going to share them nonetheless.

In 2006, I started my first business online selling information products, right? Workouts, et cetera, et cetera. I didn’t know what I was doing, we’ll just put it that way. I had no idea, no direction, no coach, no business model, no system, no rhyme or reason, no plan, nothing. I just said a bunch of everything, right? It was like a buffet of stuff that really didn’t make a lot of sense.

Mistake number one: Don’t take advice from everyone

At the time I was still training clients and one of my clients, his partners said, “Why don’t you package your workouts into like physical DVDs and stuff and people will buy them.” I was like, cool, let’s do that. He also said, “You should do some trade shows because then you can sell them at the trade shows.” I thought to myself, okay, cool. You’re a successful-ish type of person. You have your own business. Hey, I’m going to take your advice. Let’s do it. $35,000 later, I come back home a couple of weeks. I was living in a house, third floor of a house and I remember coming home one day and I just see on my front porch stacks of boxes. It was ridiculous.

It was just so many boxes from floor to ceiling. I’m thinking to myself, oh my god, that’s a lot of inventory. Number two, I got to carry all that stuff upstairs now because there’s no elevators you know, these creaky stairs. I had to carry all those boxes up. Then our apartment was maybe 800 square feet so our entrance hallway, which was not much of a hallway, whatever it was, it was floor to ceiling boxes. That’s all it was for probably more than a year. It was just floor to ceiling boxes of inventory. I’m thinking to myself, okay, I’ve got an issue now because number one, how am I going to move this stuff? If people did buy this, how am I going to get it out of my house? What does shipping and fulfillment look like? This is not really convenient. This is not a lot of fun. That was the first dilemma. Second thing is that I had to put all the frigging products together. One box was the box itself, the packaging, which was flat. I had to take a cardboard thing that’s like the cover for whatever product and you’ve got to unflatten it so it puffs out and you have all the sides.

I don’t even know if I’m explaining this properly, but anyways, I had to make the outside box make it … I had to turn a flat piece of cardboard into a box and I had to do that like a thousand times over. Then I had to stuff all the DVDs and CDs in the box with the booklets for every single one of them. Then talk about a waste of time, right? Then I’m thinking, okay, well I’ve got to now transport these finished products to wherever. We did four trade shows, which were a really good learning experience that I would never recommend you do because here’s the thing, at a trade show, you’re one of a hundred or a thousand exhibitors. People are walking by with suitcases, not because they’re moving, because they’re empty and they’re looking for freebies and the free samples from all the different vendors. That was a really big rude awakening because I’d never done a trade show. I had no clue what the heck was involved. We go to the trade shows, we had some of our workouts on display that they could listen to on their iPod. We had a pretty good setup. It was pretty cool.

Again, we’re asking people to workout. These were like women’s shows and health shows and it wasn’t like going to Paleo f(x). Okay. It wasn’t like that at all. Long story short, I spent about $35,000 in products. Another 10 or 15 in trade shows and we may have made like, who knows, a couple dozen sales. It wasn’t anything to write home about. For the next 10 years, no, nine years, nine years, I had all of these boxes in my house so we started off in the apartments. Okay. I had floor to ceiling boxes in our whole entrance way. Got rid of maybe one or two of them and then we still had like dozens of big heavy boxes. We bought our loft in 2010 I think. Took all those boxes to the loft, put them in the storage locker, never touched them. Didn’t sell them because I’m like I got to send them to my fulfillment center in the states, which is going to cost me more than the value of the products themselves. Did that. Moved to our house out of the city when we moved out there, took all the boxes again with us, tucked them in our crawl space, took up the whole crawl space.

Then when we moved back to Toronto four years ago, took all the boxes back, and I remember the movers just piling them up in the garage. I looked at my wife Amy, and I said, you know what? This is ridiculous. I’m going to take every single one of these boxes to the dump, which was about five minutes down the road. I packed up my car, did two or three trips and I just threw them. I just tossed them in the dump and I’m like, I don’t even give a shit anymore. This is garbage. This is ridiculous. I’m holding onto this dead weight that I’m not doing anything with. I’m not even selling this stuff. What am I doing? I threw all of the inventory in the garbage eight years later. My big epiphany with that is don’t do that. Okay.

Number one, if you’re going to do physical products, never have this stuff shipped to your house, just have it done at a fulfillment center, which I didn’t even know about at the time. Obviously, we’ve done physical products since then, but I don’t see them. They’re in a fulfillment center and they get shipped out from there and it’s a lot smarter that way. Never package your own products. It’s stupid.

It was a massive waste of time, massive waste of money. The worst part is that I actually took out a credit line, that initial $35,000. I had that credit line for almost 10 years. It was just sitting there, I don’t even want to pay it off. It was ridiculous. I must have spent, I don’t even know, it must have been close to $20,000 in interest. It’s crazy. Yes, I mean, maybe I could have been more physically responsible with this and paying it off sooner but it was just ridiculous. Such a huge mistake. If I come back to the lesson about this is number one, don’t take advice from people who aren’t already doing or have done what you want to do.

Mistake number two: Be clear on what you want

Number two is you have to be really clear on your vision. You have to know what you’re going to do before you do something. Otherwise, you might get into something that you don’t necessarily want to do. We’ve actually had this happen I think two or three times with clients who they start with us and then five months down the road they’re like, “You know what? I actually don’t want to be an entrepreneur.” I’m like, I don’t care. That’s your problem.

Okay, that’s why we qualify people extremely aggressively, assertively, whatever, on the front end because we’re like, listen, this is going to be hard. If you have a change of heart four months down the road, that’s on you, that’s not on us. Okay? That’s your choice. There’s no refunds. There’s none of that nonsense. Right? We’re not going to give you a refund because you had a change of heart four or five months down the road. You have to be super clear about what it is you want to do. If you want to work with us, cool, but if you’re like, “I’m not sure.” We’re not going to work with you. That was a big lesson. Just knowing what you want, getting the right guidance, and don’t listen to people who should not be giving you advice. Very often that includes your spouse. As I’ve mentioned in one or two YouTube videos that are called, why most spouses don’t support you. It’s a sad truth. Okay, that was the first one. The second big blooper, second big mistake, I’ve talked about this before, was 2009.

Mistake number three: Be careful with your promises and sell what people want

At the tail end of my three year struggle online, I had a great idea. I’m going to interview a dozen or so of the most successful online fitness experts and we’re going to talk about how they’ve stayed in such great health and such great shape while building six and seven figure businesses. I’m thinking to myself, who wouldn’t want to know this stuff? Really, I just wanted to know that stuff. It wasn’t even about anyone else. I was like, I just want to know this stuff. I spent several months interviewing 13 experts. Made a lot of big promises. I said, guys, this is going to be a huge launch, seven figures. It’s going to be the biggest launch the fitness industry has seen. I put myself out there, befriended a lot of these awesome experts and made a lot of big promises. I spent probably about three or four months building this whole thing out, interviews, the funnel, the whole bit. The night before we go live, I’m out to dinner with some friends. I’m like, guys, “Whatever you want, it’s on me. Take your pick.” Drinks, food. It’s all good. They’re thinking like, “Dude, did you just won the lottery or something? What’s going on?”

I told them what was going on the next day and they’re like, “Cool, man, that sounds awesome. I hope it all works out.” Next day I jumped out of bed like a kid on Christmas morning, run down to the Christmas tree, also known as my computer. Opened it up, checked my stats and zero like nothing. I’m like, what the hell is going on here? Back of my mind I’m like, okay. The problem is that the website is down. Obviously, there’s so much traffic. We must have just blown the circuit. Checked the website, it’s fine. Talked to our tech team or the tech guy who built out the site. I said, “Any issues?” He’s like, “No, everything’s good.” I looked at the stats a bit more in depth, looked at the traffic. Traffic was coming in. That’s when I had that sinking feeling in my stomach. I’m like, oh my god, this is not working. Long story short, four day promotions, we did this four day launch. I had all the partners, all these people promoting it. I’m like, hey guys, this is going to work. We made some tweaks, it’s doing great, whatever. What was supposed to be a seven figure launch turned into a $5,000 launch.

After paying out commissions, I ended up with $1,500. Pretty good use of my time, right? Four months of work, a lot of big promises. I looked like an idiot. I completely lost face. I felt completely embarrassed. Here’s the big lesson there. Big lesson there is be very careful about what you promise. Okay. I’m all about over promising, but you’ve got to over deliver as well. I was too naive and I was too inexperienced back then to make those types of claims. Number two is don’t sell people things you think they need. Sell them what they want. I was selling motivation. That’s what I was selling. I was selling interviews, which are essentially now known as the summit. I was selling interviews on behind the scenes, inspiration, motivation stuff. People don’t care about that. It’s like, “Yeah, I’ll just watch that on Netflix for free but if I’m going to buy something, I want a frigging solution to my problem.” That was a big lesson for me. Third lesson is despite all that, you know, all the bad stuff, there was a silver lining.

The silver lining was I made some really good friendships even though I kind of blew it on the promotion and I made some promises that obviously weren’t fulfilled in terms of the outcomes, I was able to really solidify a lot of great relationships in that process. Some of those people are still some of my best friends to this day. I’m very grateful for having had that opportunity to build those relationships. Obviously, everything with respect to the launch was water under the bridge because most people understand like, listen, it’s not the end of the world. Sometimes what you think is going to work just doesn’t. As long as you learn from it, it’s all good. Those are a few things that I pulled out of that. One other thing I recognized, I don’t like doing launches, I don’t like doing launches. With that said, let’s talk about the third big blooper and this is actually not necessarily a blooper but it was almost a massive one so I’m going to share with you.

Book writing and distribution

My book, “The All-Day Energy Diet,” this was my first published book. It was published with Hay House, such a great company. Reid Tracy, the CEO is such a great guy and I’m forever, eternally grateful for them because they’re such amazing people. This is 2014, so now I’m like, you know, built a seven figure business, big following, good name in the space and I am hellbent on hitting the number one spot on the New York Times list. That’s all I cared about. Every single day I was visualizing this, I was strategizing. Nine months out, nine months out of the actual launch, which was going to be in September, I was strategizing the funnel, the game plan, the whole bit. Starting to really fortify my team, JVs and people who are going to support the book. I’m thinking to myself, this is a book. No one’s going to support a book if there’s no money in it, because most book launches don’t make anything for anyone. I said to myself, if I want people to support the book, I need it to make sense for them financially.

What I decided to do, as I said, I’m going to buy all the books or I’m going to buy however many books I need to buy and we’re going to give it away for free and we’re going to do a free plus shipping offer. That meant I was going to invest $300,000 to buy books, to buy my book. Then obviously when people bought it, we obviously distribute it appropriately so that the New York Times list would see them as normal book sales. That’s obviously a very popular play in the whole book launch game just in case you haven’t noticed. Nine months of testing, test it up one funnel, ran Facebook ads to it. Didn’t do so well. Try this one. Try that one, try this one. Finally, we got really confident on … We had a really good funnel. It was making good money for a free book. The way this worked was at the company we were working with to distribute the books, they require the money, $300,000 the day before the book was published. Right? I think the book went live on September 21st. They needed the money September 20th. The challenge was that I didn’t have all that money.

I had to ask some friends and colleagues. I’m like, “Hey guys, are you willing to loan me some cash short term? I’m going to give you a really good interest rate and I’m going to pay you back in a week.” Obviously everyone’s like, “Dude, you’re full of crap. How are you going to pay me back in a week? That’s a really big claim.” I told them, I’m like, “Hey man, we’ve been testing this funnel for like months. We know our numbers, we know our metrics.” I have two people step up. That’s right. One person stepped up and said, “Yeah, I’ll transfer the money.” It’s all good. The Friday before the money was due, he pulled out. Here I am on a Friday afternoon, and I’m short $180,000. I’m thinking, oh my god. I don’t know if I’ve ever been in such panic in my life. I had a momentary breakdown and then I thought to myself, dude, pick yourself up. Pick yourself up off the floor and get resourceful. You need to figure this out because if you don’t, you’re screwed. I’m the type of guy where it’s like, I don’t care what’s going to happen, but I’m going to figure this out.

I had to do something that I never, ever, ever want to do again in my life, which I got super uncomfortable and I started reaching out to everyone I knew, sending them emails, phone call, text messages, “Hey man, I’m in a real bind. Can you loan me some money?” Some people were like, “No, you’ll figure this out. You’re a resourceful guy.” I was like, fuck you but thank you. Right. That’s how I felt at the time. Then two people stepped up. I’m not going to mention their names, but one of them is a very, very well-known coach for entrepreneurs. I was actually in his program for quite some time. I will be forever grateful for him for stepping up and supporting me on this because he believed in me and that was huge. Another person who was a really great friend and a colleague in our space and he stepped up as well. Between the two of them, I had $180,000. It was a very, very stressful couple of days because the thing is that the banks aren’t open Saturday and Sunday for the most part.

This was like a Friday afternoon and I’m scrambling. It was really, really intense. They came through. They wired over the money, had the money, wired it over to the company. The next day we go live and things went great. Everyone’s promoting it. All the partners was doing really, really well. Earnings per click are off the charts. People are making great money. The book sale, they’re flying off the shelves virtually really. I’m thinking like, this is really, really going well. The next week, I get a phone call from my agent on a Tuesday night. I’m having dinner with my kids and my wife. She was like, “You hit number two.” I’m like, what? She’s like, “You hit number two on the New York Times list.” I was like jumping for joy, and I was just like, who hit number one? She’s like, “Peter Thiel, Zero to One.” I was like, who’s that? Then I figured out, he’s like the co-founder of PayPal, initial investor in Facebook. I’m like, okay, I’ll give it to him, whatever.

That was the journey of my book launch but the thing I want to remind you here of is number one, if I did not do that, my book would have been like in the ethers. Which means that if I did not take the onus on myself to invest $300,000 to make sure this book launch was going to go the way it needed to, number one, the way most people do book launches, they don’t have the cojones to do that. I don’t think you need to do that because I don’t think it’s a very good use of money or stress or risk because what if it flops? You’re out $300,000, but the cool thing is that those two people that stepped up to loan me the money, I paid them back in five days. The New York Times listing was awesome but I was even more proud of the fact that I was able to … Sorry, my dogs are going crazy upstairs because apparently someone’s at the door.

I was most proud of the fact that I was able to pay them back in five days, which was my initial promise, which was great. Big lesson learned from five years prior when I made a lot of big promises and couldn’t deliver, now because of my experience and wisdom, I feel more confident in the promises that I was making. The thing here is that if you have a book, and most people want to write a book. I tell them, don’t write a book because unless you have a massive platform, and I’m talking about, I had the biggest people in our space support us. All the people you see on TV, the New York Times bestselling authors, the big experts in the health and fitness space, they were all supporting this book launch. Now, if you don’t have those friends, don’t even bother. Okay, because it’s not going to be worth your time. You need a massive amount of books to move if you want to hit the New York Times list. Even then like why, what’s the point? If I think of like why, what’s the point of hitting the list? It means nothing. It’s like having a PhD. Cool, I got that, but it really doesn’t do anything.

It’s nice to have now, but I’m happy I have it, but would I do it again? No. Knowing what I know now, never. If you got a book and you want to sell the book, you got to ask yourself why am I trying to do this? Why do I have a book? Am I trying to use this as a business card to put out there and hopefully I’m going to get clients? Because if you want to get clients, just get clients. Don’t tippy toe around the situation. Just get clients. Build out your perfect client pipeline. Save the book for a couple of years down the road when you got more of a following, when you got more money to throw at it, right? If you’re starting relatively early on in your business and you’re hoping that your book is going to do it for you, I’ve seen this too many times to think otherwise. It’s just not going to happen, right? You need a huge following and then you can’t just get people to be like, “Hey man, can you mail for my book and send people to Amazon?” You might have a few people that’ll do that, but remember there’s an opportunity costs for everyone’s time and their resources.

Someone send you an email sending an email to their email list, getting people to go to Amazon, what are you making? What does that person making for themselves? Were they’re going to make, whatever, 10% commission on Amazon sales? It’s not enough for most people. You have to structure the launch in a way that rewards your partners and even a bigger way that it rewards you. Most people are not willing to do that. It takes a lot of testing. It takes a lot of guts. It takes a lot of money to throw at this. There’s been launches where people are giving away like Teslas for first prize. I’m like, you guys are insane. Right? $10,000 first prize. That’s one of the things that we give away. Actually, sorry, that’s not true. One of our top prizes was $20,000 or we pay in full for whatever mastermind you want to join for that coming year. That, I mean is ridiculous, right? It’s stupid. Those are some of the things that you have to do to get people to promote your stuff beyond just wanting to help their audience.

Why anything worthwhile isn’t easy

I’m telling this to you because there’s again, I see this over and over, every single thing you are considering doing or have done, I’ve done. The membership sites, the book launches, the free plus shipping stuff, the supplements, the summits. We’ve done all of it, all of it. Every single thing you’ve seen online, we’ve done. We have a blog that gets a million visitors a month, our YouTube channel has 270,000 subscribers. Everything. Okay? Some of this stuff works really well. Some of it doesn’t. You have to understand what goes into creating those outcomes. That’s the thing that people don’t understand. That’s the thing that I really want to share with you in this podcast in these episodes is what goes into this stuff because if you don’t realize what you’re getting into, you’re going to have some challenges. When we work with our clients, we tell them very honestly, like I’m telling you right now this is going to be the hardest thing you do, there will be days where you cry, maybe.

There will be days when you doubt yourself. There will be days when you’re asking yourself, man, this doesn’t work. Can I do this? We tell them all that stuff upfront because if they were to work with us and they didn’t realize that, they’re going to have massive buyer’s remorse, and we don’t want people to work with us who are not willing to accept that because building a great business is not easy. Anything worthwhile in life is not easy. If you’ve got kids, is it easy? Hell no. Is it rewarding? Maybe. I think so. I think it’s the best thing ever, right? It’s my legacy on this planet is to just be a great dad. Having a great relationship with your spouse or even your friends, is that easy? No, it takes a little bit of thought and it needs to be a priority. Anything that is worthwhile is not going to be easy. If you’re looking for easy, you’re looking in the wrong places. I really want you to not look for hard, but just understand that like with working out for the first time, you’re going to have some soreness.

My intention with this episode was to just give you some of the lessons that I’ve learned in three or two big flops and then potentially a third big flop that was diverted and avoided based on my experience and wisdom.

Anyways, I hope this has found you well. If it makes sense, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Hit me up on Instagram @healthpreneur1. Just send me a DM and be like, “Hey dude, man, that was legit,” or, “You’re full of,” you know what.

Anyways, second announcements. We’ve got our Luminaries masterminds coming up, Toronto, June 26th and 27th. We have a handful of spots left. If you want to join us, go to healthpreneurgroup.com/2day, so the number two, D-A-Y. Learn more of what we’re doing at the event. If it resonates with you, then fill the application. We’ll get back to you within about 24 hours. Couple things on that. You have to have an active coaching business. You have to actively be coaching clients and you have to be generating revenue. If you’re brand new and you just got your coaching certification, it’s not for you. Okay, that’s the deal.

It’s going to be a great two days together. You’re going to have my hands on help to help you get more clients, scale your coaching and make a lot more money and really set things up properly. If that’s of interest to you, then the clock is ticking. Go to healthpreneurgroup.com/2day.

Thank you so much for joining me. Hope you’ve enjoyed this one and I’ll see you on our next episode.