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SUMMARY

• In this episode: How to grow your business in a peaceful way while radically increasing your profits.
• The first thing to understand is that complexity breaks businesses. Complexity creates stress. The creation of complexity is fun, but the management of complexity is a nightmare. 
• Complexity also limits the ability to scale. Scaling is like a time machine that speeds everything up. People make the mistake of assuming that the next step in their business is an advanced step, but oftentimes, the way to actually grow your business is to remove the stressors. Simplicity is actually the secret to making a lot of money in a service-based business. 
• How to make money in business: 
  1. Find people who have something that they need taken care of.
     • I think when people go into business, they underestimate what sorts of needs they themselves could fulfill. Doubt your assumptions about what people are willing to pay for.
  2. Have a process in place for turning those people into customers or clients.
     • You need a system that’s repeatable and reliable, but it doesn’t actually matter what the process is. There are a hundred different effective ways to turn someone’s need into a sale. 
     • Examples of processes:
       • Cold outreach – email, LinkedIn
       • VSL or webinar
       • Funnel
  3. Have a way to collect their money and deliver tremendous value..
• To get strangers to look at you as their next best step, have a sincere and genuine desire to help them. 
• Nearly every model of consumption is based on the transaction, the consumption, and then the newly formed beliefs and ideas. This pattern of normal behavior seems to have been forgotten in the world of doing business online. I suggest that we stop focusing so much on marketing and instead adjust our businesses to match average consumer behavior.
• What I do for clients is I take what they are good at, create an easy-to-consume $27 offer, and then scale it as much as possible. This leads to the common consumer behavior of transaction, consumption, and belief creation. After that, we can invite those individuals into the next step, e.g., one-on-one consulting, group coaching, affiliate programs, etc.
• Instead of focusing on marketing, focus on value-based transactions, which are significantly more effective and more powerful in changing the mind and opinion of a stranger. 
• To turn strangers into people who are ready to buy our done-for-you stuff, we’ve replaced the webinar and one-call close with this very simple idea of selling smaller things and changing people’s minds through that process. This results in them being ready to buy from us. 
• A lot of people fail at webinars, VSLs, and selling on the phone because of performance pressure. It’s an unwise business move to assume that you have to fit into that particular process, because the process is interchangeable. The requirement to making lots of money in business is not “do this process,” it’s “do a process.” One that works, is simple, that you can do over and over again, and is a fit for your personality. 
• Funnels work so well because you can show up in your “you-est” you, be yourself, and sell more of your services. In my opinion, funnels provide the best way to scale any company.

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INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Hello, my dear friends. I hope you’re doing well. This is Mike Shreeve and you’re listening to the no pants show today. We’re going to be talking about

How to grow your business in a peaceful way, in a stress reducing way while radically increasing the profits that your business produces and like most things in no pants land, we’re going to come at this in a different sort of angle. Okay. I’m going to give you strategies here in a second, but I really want you to understand the fundamental

Principles at play in any situation where you’re trying to grow and scale rapidly. So the first thing to understand is that complexity breaks businesses. Okay? Complexity breaks businesses. Now there are a couple of reasons that complexity will break a business. One is that complexity is very stressful. Okay. Now what do we mean by stressful? I mean, stressful in the personal sense, but I also mean stressful in the sense of like say you’re building a bridge and you’re testing how much stress can the steel in the bridge sustain. When you add more and more moving parts to a business, it is like pressure testing steel. The business will bend until it breaks. The human behind the business will bend until they break. And that’s because look, if that that’s not uncommon, it’s not just reserved for business. You take

In a household and you put all that,

All of the kids and nine sports, you put the mom and dad in different community events. You make them have a job and a side job. I mean, when you start introducing this complexity, you can see it’s a human issue. That complexity creates stress right now, complexity as a human being is fun at first because you get that rush of doing something new by adding another piece to what it is you’re doing, right? So you’re the creation of complexity is fun. The management of complexity is a stress nightmare. It just, it just is. If you haven’t experienced it yet, at some point in your life, you will, and you’ll nod your head. And you’ll say, I understand now what, what they were talking about on that podcast, complexity is, is a stress creator. But additionally, because it is in and of itself a stress on the systems because it stresses the individual out who’s running it. It also means that it limits

The ability to scale, meaning the ability to grow and create in our case, a lot of revenue. Now, why is that? Well, imagine that scaling is like a time machine. That speeds everything up. Okay. So, cause that’s really what it is. That’s what scaling is, right? If we take an example of scaling, so we take a person who is sending five cold emails per day to land a client, and then they build a system or they hire someone. And now all of a sudden they’re sending 500 emails per day, instead of 10 emails per day, that would be an example of someone’s scaling. Well, what have they done? They’ve time traveled. So if it took them, what let’s say almost 30 days to send 500 emails historically. Now they can send that in one day. That’s a, that’s a compression of time. That’s what scaling is all about. It’s taking when normally it takes a long time taking very little time.

So if it normally takes you a year to make a hundred thousand dollars, scaling is doing all the things it takes to make that in the a hundred thousand dollars in a year and doing in let’s say a month, right? That’s the process of scale. A quick example would be if normally you serve clients one-on-one, if you move to a group program and implement different strategies where you can serve one to many, that is serving a bunch of people, again, it’s a compression of time as time traveling. It’s your using strategies to do the same thing, but in better ways. So you can compress a time and that’s how you can scale. Okay. So that’s scaling well, what does that actually mean for complexity? The compression of time is simply another stress. I mean this now in, you know, like testing the, the steel and a bridge, it is another stress on top of the stress of complexity.

So why are we talking all about this right now? Because a lot, a lot of people get to a certain point in their business and they want to keep growing and they make the mistake of taking a complex X path or assume [inaudible] that the next step in their business is an advanced step meaning, Oh, I think what I have to do in order to make more money is do more things or to add this or to, to become 10 times better at X, Y, Z, oftentimes the way to scale, the way to actually grow your business is to remove the stressors in your business so that you can allow for the compression of time and that your business will be able to handle that compression of time. Right? What good is your business? If you onboard 30 brand new clients and you’re not ready to serve any of them, right?

So simplicity is actually the secret to making in a service based business, a lot of money. So what I want to do because on October 5th that that’s the very last time that I will ever offer. One-On-One done for you services. October 5th is the very last day. You need to book your call with our team by the fifth, and there’s no exceptions as last time that I’ll be doing one-on-one. And part of this, the past couple of podcasts that we’ve done and the emails, et cetera, is sort of to kind of celebrate that closing out as last time I’ll ever do it. But the reason that we are

Are that were talking about simplicity is in the context of what we’ve been doing for our clients. Okay? So whether you join us or not, I want to give you some strategies that we’ve been using for our clients to make many, many thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars per week. And you know, clients doing 40, $50,000 a month and et cetera, et cetera, this is how it’s through simplicity. So let’s

Go all the way back to the core of how business works. Okay. It’s three simple steps. Step one, you have to have someone who needs what you’re selling. Step. Number two, you need a process for turning that person’s need into a desire that they will want to pay you. And then step number three is you need a process for collecting that money and then offering the service. It’s three simple steps. If your business right now is more complicated than three steps, you might be too complicated to scale. Now, step number one, I want to give you an example of, of being a little bit more openminded about step number one. A lot of people come to the no pants. They’re like, I don’t know what I want to sell. And we say, well, think about who you can help. And then, and then they create complexity in their head.

Let me give you an example of one of our clients. So one of our clients right now, she’s doing between 30 and $40,000 a month. She is doing it, serving

A group of people that probably could also serve it’s storytelling and fiction writing and things like that. That’s about all, all I will say about that. Get, I don’t want to give our clients away. But you know, I’ve published fiction. I probably could create a bunch of info products and stuff, but for since 2012, when people started asking me for those, those products, I said, no, no, there’s no money in teaching writers. How to write stories writers are, you know, they never spend any money, blah, blah, blah. That was the belief that I had. Okay. I’m I’m, I’m okay with admitting that in public, I saw a few of my friends doing fiction, how to fiction businesses. And I just didn’t, I didn’t like that. Well, this particular client that’s exactly what she wanted to do. And she knew that there was a need. And so I said, okay, we’re going to put our marketing muscle, our sales muscle behind you, and we’re going to support you.

And wouldn’t, you know, it, the people that she, that I thought would never spend money are now spending on the order of 30 to $40,000 a month in her business that we built for her. Okay. So what’s the point of this story, except that I’m very proud and also very surprised and still to this day, I’m like, Oh, maybe now, but just as a note, I never will actually release any fiction stuff. If I ever do anything, it’ll be like a free YouTube series or something. But but the point is that I think when people go into business, they underestimate what sorts of needs they themselves could fulfill. They incorrectly assume that the only needs that need filling are sales and marketing, meaning businesses that need sales and marketing. And that sometimes discourages them. They say, well, I guess I don’t have anything to offer to anyone.

And without getting too much into it in this podcast, I just want you to really like, there’s a lot of places in your life where doubt is a bad thing. I would say where doubt is a good thing is doubting your assumptions about what people are willing to pay for. I’m a perfect example of my assumptions were incorrect. And luckily this particular client was like, yes, this is who I want to go for. And we went for them and now she’s doing very, very well. Okay. So just doubt the assumptions in step one of, you know, if you think that you don’t have anything to offer, or you think that the thing that you want to offer isn’t profit, you don’t know until you test it. I mean, you don’t know until you get out there and start talking to people and you don’t know if you don’t do it correctly, whether it was the fact that nobody wanted it or maybe you didn’t do it correctly.

Right? So again, if there’s a place to doubt in business, it’s doubting that. Okay. So that’s step one. Now, step two. This is where a lot of people get in trouble. This is where the complexity comes. Remember, step two is you just need a process to turn that person’s need or want into a desire to pay you, to help them. Now think about that for a second, a process, okay. Not a random attempts at some thing that you’re guessing at wound hope will work and a process. So you need something that is repeatable. You need something that is a system so that you can rely on the system rather than having to rely on the human being, which in probably most cases is one person trying to grow the business. But more importantly is step two. Doesn’t actually matter what the process is.

And this is, I think really important for many of the people who are in the world of no pants. There are a hundred different effective ways to turn someone’s need into a sale. There’s a hundred different ways. And every online coach and program and webinar, that’s selling you something and et cetera, et cetera, a lot of those work, okay. I make fun of the Lamborghini bras all the time. I make fun of a lot of other people. I’ve been in this industry since 2007. I think more than half of them are absolute snakes in the grass and are horrible people. But a lot of them do really, really work. What’s important. Even some of the people who are really sleazy their system does actually work right now. They may do it in a sleazy way. It might not be a way that you want to do it, but it does technically turn someone who has a need or desire into a cash paying client.

So where you often get led astray, or the problems that you have in business is determining what your process is or what happens. Oftentimes a lot of people get stuck is just sticking to a process. So remember when I said complexity will prevent you from growing your business. What a lot of people do is they will add 15 different processes together, calling it one process. But it’s really just a very complicated mashup that creates chaos and stress and ends up exerting more effort than the process and machine produces in results. You’ve probably experienced this yourself, right? If you’re listening to the sound of my voice, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about in, when I say a process and then how some people, it gets a little bit complicated, right? We’ve all been down that road. I’ve been down that road many times. It’s a constant battle as a business owner to come back to come to simplicity.

You always have to be checking yourself. Now, let me give you some examples of processes. And then I want to talk about the one that we do for our clients, because I want to sort of show you how it compares to some of the other processes, because one of the most important things that you’ll ever learn about this world of online marketing is that the quote unquote guru, the coach, the person who’s in charge of the company. So for the no pants project, that’s me. What I teach you as the quote unquote, best way is the best way for me, it’s the best way that I’ve found. Right? And so take that into consideration. It may not be the best for you. Okay? So there’s a couple of different ways. And then I’ll show you I’ll share with you the way that we’re doing for our clients.

So way number one. And, and one that I recommend that if your very first getting started out, I highly recommend it. Just get a cold outreach process going. So whether that’s cold email, whether it’s outreaching on LinkedIn, I don’t really recommend phone calls, probably cold outreach email on LinkedIn. That is a process for turning somebody who has a need into a client. Now, the downside of that is it’s manual labor. It’s you have to do a lot of work through phone calls, through follow ups, through et cetera, et cetera. Because to turn someone from, I have a need to, I want to be your client. There’s a, there’s a, there’s a lot of things I play. You need to show them that you can offer them value. You need to gain their trust. You need to demonstrate the value that you provide. You need to explain to them what it is exactly that you do so that they can understand it, et cetera, et cetera, right? If you’ve ever closed somebody, it’s not a two minute conversation, it’s, it can be quite long. And that’s even, you know, even if you’re really, really good at sales. So while the cold outreach method is really good for getting started, it isn’t ideal for long term sustainability.

So then you go on to the next level that a lot of internet marketing teachers will teach you, and it is the VSL or the webinar. Okay? So it’s run a bunch of traffic to an online video presentation, have them book, a call and then close the sale. That is a very effective way of turning strangers into sales. At scale, you can turn on some ads and you can literally have hundreds of people per day, watching that video presentation, whether you want to call it a VSL or webinar, it’s basically the same thing. And hundreds of people can watch that video presentation. A couple of people per day will book a call. You have those conversations, you close them into some scalable offer, right? Whether it’s a group coaching type of thing or whatever it is, of course, whatever. Now that that’s great. And I have built many businesses off of the back of a webinar for clients. I’ve built a few of my own off the back of a webinar, but there’s a problem with the webinar or the VSL, whatever you want to call it. And it is,

It’s probably the most complicated sales mechanism that exists in the digital marketing space. What do we mean by that? A webinar or a VSL is typically 45 minutes to an hour and a half long. Okay. The ones that pull the big ticket clients, that’s 45 minutes. It’s 45 to 90 minutes of a sales presentation that in today’s highly saturated market needs to be nearly perfect. I would never recommend that a beginner in online marketing or somebody whose business is currently doing less than a million a year start with a webinar or a VSL. I have been writing webinars and VSLs since 2007. And I can tell you that in terms of a sales mechanism, it is the hardest thing to get all of the pieces. Exactly. Correct. To be able to turn that stranger into a booked call, ready to buy something from you.

Now it doesn’t mean don’t do no. If you’re an amazing webinar writer, go for it. That’s fantastic. Again, we’re not trying to have a contest of which is the best. We’re just talking about the process that’s needed. Remember, step one, you need somebody who has a need. Step two, you need a process. So if you have an incredible voice, if you have an incredible energy, if people say you should be on TV, you’re a great presenter. If you also are able to sit down and script out a 90 minute, 45 minute VSL, if you have great audio, if you have the ability to make incredible slides, if you’re willing to test like crazy. So Russell Brunson always talks about how when he does webinars or when he did webinars. At some point he would do a webinar a week that was live. So a lot of people just go straight to evergreen.

They just go straight to automated. Cause they don’t want to actually talk to people. And they think a webinar will keep them from talking to people. But Russell Brunson will do a live webinar. And there’s one time it took him 36 different tries. So basically a webinar tweak, webinar tweak do it. The next week webinar tweak do the next week for 36 weeks in a row. And this is the guy who teaches you. You need to go do a webinar, right? Again, I’m just, I want you to think about this from your own standpoint. I’m not trying to dig on anybody, but you know, if the guy saying do webinars says, go do it. 36 times tweak is 36 times. That’s how hard webinars are. And they’re hard because the number of people who are actually really good at giving webinars, who can maintain the energy, who can put together a presentation that will grab someone and pull them in for 45 minutes to 90 minutes to get them excited to buy something from them.

That’s a very small group of people who have that naturally. Everybody else has to work really hard at it, but at the same time, and this is why it’s easy to fall into the trap of buying different processes. Because while all that’s true, what else is true is that webinars are really effective and they work really well. Why do they work really well? They work really well because they are tools for doing the following things. One is unlike the outreach method, which I’ve talked about before. The outreach method is very manual to talk to a hundred people. You have to send out five, 600 cold outreaches, maybe even more. Then when you want to, when you were doing the manual outreach, when you want to then talk to the people and tell them what it is you sell, you do it in a one to one basis, right?

So you’re, one-on-one doing discovery calls with a webinar. You want to talk to a hundred people. You run like $500 in Facebook ads get a hundred people to sign up for your webinar, run your webinar or your VSL or whatever. And your presenting that message, not in a one-on-one capacity, but in a group capacity. So this is a very effective scaled delivery process. It may be brutally difficult, but it’s very effective right now. What are we doing on the webinar? We’re gaining trust. We’re showing the value. We’re trying to provide value and advance the good webinars anyways provide value in advance. So people have light bulb moments changed their belief. They get excited to buy from you, and then they move on to booking a call. So we have this very effective tool of webinars are very difficult and frankly, most people probably shouldn’t try not yet in their business, maybe later on when they can hire very expensive copywriters and the team to bake a brilliant design and et cetera.

And then on the other hand, we have this brutal process of manual outreach. Well, one of the things that I realized is that there has to be a way in between that, that like regular people like me could do to get the effects of a webinar without having to do 36 webinar variations right now, you know, that we basically grew the no pants on a webinar. And honestly it was, it was not, it was not a great time. Now. I don’t like that. We grew the no pants with a webinar. There’s a whole bunch of problems with webinars besides just how difficult they are. But we realized, and I say, we cause the team kind of helped me to come up with this. And what we do now for our clients as of December of 2019 is we realized that there’s actually a really good way to get strangers, to essentially look at you as their next best step.

And the only real requirement is a sincere and genuine desire to help strangers. So let me explain exactly if you remember what we talked about in the last podcast episode, we talked about creating information level products, so many courses, many workshops, templates, things like that. But what we didn’t talk about is the mechanics of those products when being sold to strangers in how it relates to then those customers wanting to buy more things from you. So many years ago, I worked for success magazine. So they were one of my freelancing clients, incredible opportunity. Success magazine owns, or the owner of success magazine owns the Jim Roan intellectual property. And Jim Roan, his adios are literally what got me off the street. So I would go to the public library. I would find his adios that were illegally ripped off and downloaded onto YouTube or the videos and the audios as well.

And I would go to the public library and listen to those. And that’s how I basically got off the street many, many, many, many years ago. So it was really cool to come full circle, work for success, and then get to do some stuff with the Jim Rome thing. Well, a big portion of the success business is gathering a bunch of valuable speakers together for a weekend event. You know, a big stage at a hotel and a bunch of stairs, you know, chairs and things, and then selling tickets for people to come to those events right now, when it’s important for you to understand that concept, because what happens is the individuals who paid those tickets $50 or whatever, they were a hundred dollars. In some cases, you know, the fancier ones are up in the five, 600, whatever the ticket prices were. I don’t really honestly remember you go to the event and because you paid for that ticket, you’re sitting and listening to these speakers, motivate and share wisdom and share insights.

And you come away from that event, feeling uplifted, feeling excited, feeling differently about the company than you did before you bought the ticket. Now I share that example because that’s not an uncommon experience in the world. You’ve very likely had similar experiences in a variety of different places. In your life example, you buy a book by an author. You’ve never read before you read the book. Now you feel differently about the author, whether good or bad you feel differently about the author than before you paid to consume the work. You want to try a new restaurant. You read all the reviews, you watch all the commercials of the restaurant. You read their blog, you, you, you consume all of their marketing, but until you go to the restaurant, put down some money and actually consume the food. You, you don’t get the full change in opinion and beliefs about that restaurant.

The same is true in how you consume movies. And it’s nearly every model of consumption is based on the transaction, the consumption, and then the newly formed beliefs and ideas and et cetera. Okay? Now this pattern of behavior, a very normal, very regular behavior seems to have been forgotten in the world of internet marketing in the world of doing business online. We have put too much emphasis on make your marketing so good that it somehow, you know, completely changes someone’s mind and you know, goes, you know, completely changes their opinion and completely changes their belief system and completely, and does all these things which are required to get a stranger to buy something from you at a high ticket price. In other words, instead of looking at natural consumer behavior, because the people selling internet marketing tactics happen to be marketers, they say focus on the marketing.

What I am suggesting is that you stop focusing on the marketing and you instead start to adjust your business to match average consumer behavior. So what I do for clients and I will offer, and, and if you you need to book a call before October 5th is the last time I’ll do it is I take their business. I take what they want to sell. And I ask myself, how can we sell tickets to a little preview show? How can I sell the first copy in a series of a book? How can I get that little $27 transaction? What can we do to serve someone at that level that doesn’t involve you as the business owner and how can we have as many of those transactions as possible. So that every single day, you’re not getting people who watched a webinar. You’re getting people who bought something from you and actually consumed after a transaction.

Okay. So think about that for a second. What I help people to do, and until October 5th in which case the there’ll be some changes, different contract. The team’s gonna be in charge. I won’t be involved, but what I’m helping people do and have in helping people this whole year is to take what they are good at and to create an easy to consume, whether it’s some templates, whether it’s a mini course, whether it’s a workshop, whether it’s whatever that we can sell. Little $27 tickets to AKA $27 purchases. And then we scale it as much as possible. And what’s really happening is this common consumer behavior of transaction consumption, belief creation, meaning the belief about the company. All right. Now what happens after that is we then can invite those individuals. Meaning the people who purchased the little $27 thing into the next step of whatever it is you want that next step to be.

If it’s to work one on one with you, if it’s to go into a group coaching program, if it’s to buy him something that you recommend, you don’t have to sell your own stuff. You can sell affiliate offers, you can sell other products and programs. You can sell whatever it is. But the point that I’m trying to make is the big breakthrough that, that we are giving these clients is to stop focusing on marketing. And instead to focus on value based transactions, because value based transactions is significantly more effective and significantly more powerful in changing the mind and opinion of a stranger. If somebody buys something from you and it helps them in some way, there is a direct connection in their mind between when I spend money with this individual, I get more than what I bargained for that relationship, getting on the phone to then buy your main stuff or shoe. You don’t have to sell on the phone. If you don’t want to, you can sell via email. You can sell via Facebook chat. There’s that at that point, you don’t, again, it’s your process. Remember the back to the beginning of this podcast, what are we talking about? Step one, you need to find people who have a need. Step two, you need a process that turns those people into people ready to buy from you.

So again, whether you want to close in via messenger, via email, via phone call, whatever that doesn’t matter. The point is that you have changed the nature of the relationship at scale. And this is where the reduction in complexity and the scale piece comes in with these funnels that we build for clients. And, and by the way, I should note, you’re seeing more and more of these in the market. And there are a few people who are claiming that they invented this process, this, you know, $27 into an order bump and an upsell and all that kind of stuff. You guys I’m telling you, I didn’t invent it. I did not invent it. And I’ve been writing these funnels since 2012, right? So at least eight years, there’s people who’ve just come out in the past, like two or three years or whatever. And they’ve given, they’ve given it a fancy name and they want to take all the credit that they invented it, even though ironically, they can’t duplicate it within their own business.

That’s a whole other story for another time. The point is that this mechanism that we’re talking about, it’s not even a new mechanism. Okay. It’s even older than 2012. It goes all the way back to the early days, John Hopkins early, early stuff, late 18 hundreds style. Pre-Scientific advertising. I mean, it’s, it’s the coupon voucher for the, this and the it it’s old. It’s an old, old concept that for some reason, the internet marketing industry, because of the popularity of a few of these high ticket funnel guys have forgotten. They’ve forgotten that the problem with a high ticket funnel and a webinar is that you better be dang good at marketing, and you better be a killer on the phone and you be able, you better be able to close in one sale just the other day. Our sales person, Troy closed $5,000 short of a hundred grand in one day.

So $95,000. Troy is very, very good at selling. He has a long career in sales, but there’s something else at play here. And that is that Troy doesn’t deal with cold people. Who’ve never bought something from us talking to him on the phone, which means that Troy doesn’t have to be aggressive to close almost a hundred grand in one day, if you’ve ever talked to Troy, you know what I’m talking about? He’s an absolutely pleasant individual. I don’t think anyone would call Troy a killer. That’s not how we run our business. We don’t want to run our business. That way. Troy’s strength is in serving people on the phone in caring about people. And because we’ve removed this cold traffic, just watched a webinar, has to be done in one call close, and we’ve replaced it instead with this very simple idea, that a process that the process we’ve chosen to turn strangers into people, ready to buy our done for you stuff. Our high ticket stuff, our profit centers in our business is that we have sold smaller things. And through that process changed people’s minds and got them ready to buy from us.

So let me make a few final notes here. It might be a lot to think about in your own business, but a few final notes on this. A lot of people fail at webinars. Vsls selling on the phone because of performance pressure, right? Look, talking to a stranger is not nothing asking them to judge you and then make a decision about you and potentially reject you. That’s not nothing. And for a lot of people who need to make money now, not when they quote unquote, get over being nervous or whatever, you know, like however long it takes to finally get comfortable on the phone. Like they need to make sales. Now it’s, it’s an unwise business move to assume that you have to fit into that particular.

Cause remember, like I said, at the beginning of this, the process is interchangeable. The requirement to making lots of money in business is not do this process. It’s do a process. One that works on that simple, cause it can scale. But in my opinion, one, that is the kind of process that you can do over and over again, meaning the process. That’s a fit for your personality. Now, if you are the kind of person who doesn’t want to take cold phone calls, one call closes from a cold VSL and you don’t want to get involved with that rather. I w I would say aggressive. I mean, to, to, to close someone on one phone call from a cold Facebook ad watching a 45 minute or even an hour and a half long VSL, you have to be quite aggressive. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve ever been in some of these sales trainings from some of these people where, you know, their advice is state your price, and then don’t say anything.

And then whoever talks first loses. I mean, it’s very Glen Gary, Glen Ross, which is funny because Glen Gary, Glen Ross was actually poking fun at the thing. A lot of people who watch that don’t realize that it’s actually poking fun at that whole world and, and criticizing it quite heavily. But anyways, that’s a whole nother discussion for another time. But if that’s not your style, it doesn’t mean you can’t have a $4 million a year business. It’s not my style. And we do very well it’s because we’ve re we’ve removed the performance pressure of having to do and be that kind of a person in a company. And we’ve replaced it with the buy, the ticket, buy the $27 thing to our event, which is in our case on often many courses this coming up in hopefully a week or two, we’re going to be selling a bunch of templates.

And then a couple weeks after that we have more templates we’re going to sell. And then a couple weeks after that, we have a mini course that we’re going to be offering. It’s the same basic mechanism as a webinar, get to know you offer value, tell them what else you have, but it’s done in a way. Just think of that. Here’s the difference is the difference between getting up in front of a bunch of strangers and trying to sell them something, and then getting up in front of a bunch of people who have paid you money and teaching something, that’s the difference, right? And that’s why these funnels work so well because you can show up in your USU in that $27 offer, you can bring your cheesy sense of humor. You can bring your quirkiness and your nerdiness. You can bring your, whatever you want to bring, and you can speak into a microphone and teach with your passion and, and, and, and, you know, create a worksheet and say, this is a great worksheet.

It’s going to help you do this thing, or you can make your templates and explain how they’re awesome and whatever it is you want to do, you can be yourself without having to worry in the back of your mind. These are strangers and Oh, no, you know, I need to sell them on something. Cause that’s not the purpose of the transition action, but it’s still leads to at the end of the day, the goal that we’re trying to reach, which is to sell more of our services, our coaching, whatever it might be. Okay. So, so again, I could go on probably for hours and hours inside of our peaceful profits program, we’re going to be adding a significant amount of this type of stuff. Really helping people to build these funnels for themselves. It’s really going to be a core component of the peaceful profits program, moving into the future.

It is, in my opinion, the best way to scale any company. It works on multiple platforms. So it works on Facebook ads. It works organically. You can sell it on your Instagram profile. You can sell these things via YouTube ads, LinkedIn ads, we’re testing right now. It’s an old method that has found resurgence. And it’s a great method. It’s one of the, one of my favorites, one of the, one of the ones that I’ve enjoyed more than any other that I’ve tried. And that’s a big reason why we’ve enjoyed doing it for clients this year. However, on October 5th is the last time that we’re going to take clients where I am involved. One to one, which means if you want me to help you create the offers to come up with the offers, if you want me to help you even design the backend.

So what would this funnel lead into? What could you sell for $5,000? What could you sell for 25, $5,000? Do you have, do you actually have something or do we need to set up partnerships where you can, you know, sell something for five grand and you don’t even have to sell it, but you’ll get paid two grand, right? We have options like that. There’s a whole bunch of different things that we have involved in this offer. You need to book a call and chat with our team by October 5th of 2020 we’re wrapping up an onboarding, the last of clients getting ready for Q four and the busy season of November and December and all these sorts of things. And additionally, we are going to be really doubling down and focusing on the peaceful profits group coaching program, where we will teach you with coaches, how to do this.

So that’s also an option as well. Maybe you don’t want to have us build it for you, but you would love to see we’ve built 20. I think we’re into 26 clients, maybe 27 at the time, by the time this goes out of these funnels just this year, which is probably more than maybe any company on the planet has ever built in a single year of this very specific funnel type. And we are sharing all of that and the peaceful profits, everything that we’ve learned and give obviously templates and things like that. So that’s also an option. But if you want my team and I to do it for you the last possible opportunity to be involved in that with my help is October 5th. So that’s it, my dear friends, whether you and I get to work together or not, I do hope that this has helped you to rethink the process of building your business so that you can break down the complexity and realize that your role as a business owner is really sort of more like a jigsaw puzzle, creator, not creator, Dewar of a jigsaw puzzle.

What are people who call a puzzle? Doer? I don’t know. You’re more of a puzzle doer than anything else. In other words, there are requirements in a business, but those requirements within themselves have interchangeable parts and pieces, which if sanity and peace of mind is your goal in running your business means that you get to change those parts in and out. And again, just as a recap. So we understand we’re talking about here, there’s three steps to making a ton of money in business, like honestly, and sincerely more money than you can possibly imagine at the moment. There’s just three things. Find people who have something that they need taken care of. So step one, step two, have a process in place a process. It doesn’t, it doesn’t actually matter what the process is, except that it needs to be a process that you enjoy doing, or you don’t have to enjoy it.

Just a process. Doesn’t make you insane that doesn’t make you depress, that doesn’t increase your anxiety. That so a process in place for turning those people who have that need into a customer, a client, and then number three is a way to take their money and deliver a tremendous value for the money that they’ve given you. That’s it, you, you do those three things and you do them long enough and you do them well enough. And I promise you tremendous things can happen. If you were to ask me back when I was even first coming off of living on the streets, if you would have asked me, do you ever think you’ll get to where you are? You are right now. Like if you’re, and I don’t want to, I’m not here to brag and talk about how much we are doing or whatever, but let’s say 2020, do you think you’ll ever get to that point? No, no way. No way. Not even close. It wasn’t even in my, in my mind, but because I focused on those three things, finding out what piece.

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SUMMARY

• In this episode: How I took one client to $50K per month just selling a $27 offer and how we were able to do that in three and a half to four months. 
• A lot of people don’t have anything to sell, don’t know what to sell, or tried to sell something in the past but it didn’t work. At the end of the day, all the copy and funnel strategy is nothing compared to what you’re selling. Also, when the offer is done right, it’s something that can build the rest of your business.
• The most dangerous number in business is the number one. Businesses that only have one way to collect money and one marketing stream will feel the strain of the actual consequences of a lockdown.
• People make the mistake of focusing on projects that don’t synergize with each other. One income stream should benefit and grow the other income stream and vice versa.
• The most simple, subtle, and profoundly life-changing strategy that I’ve ever come across: Create a digital product that your dream clients will buy, that you can scale, and that prepares someone to buy your done-for-you service. 
• Example: If you’re a copywriter who offers copywriting services, create a digital course that attracts your dream client for those services. Now you have two streams of income that are connected. Not only have you reduced the risk of having only one offer, you’re also probably increasing your prices on your DFY service because you have a big demand.
• Your product doesn’t have to be a course. There is a huge room in the marketplace for other things such as templates, tools, and challenges. A digital product is simply whatever you do to help other people, delivered in a systematic way.
• What do you want the product to do for you? Who do you want to buy the product, and why do you want them to buy it? 
• What if you don’t know what you want your main thing to be?
  • If you’re willing to be open, go see what sells really well in the market and ask if you can deliver similar results in a digital product. Once customers start coming in, ask them what else they want to buy.
  • But there’s a human component to business, which is why I recommend that you think first about what you want the end result to be.
• Don’t try to make a $1,000 product right away. Start at a much lower barrier to entry. Make it easy on yourself to get lots of feedback and data very quickly.
• The cost to sell our client’s $37 offer is $42. But we’ve added in the economics so that we also make nearly $70 in total overall sales of other digital products, all within a 24-hour time frame.
  • Funnel structure: Front-end offer —> Order bump —> Upsell
  • This is the guaranteed way to make every funnel you do work, if you’re willing to put in the work.
• Once you have the funnel, you can use that new revenue stream to grow the main part of your business by sending emails to your  $27, $37 buyers and nurturing them into your main stuff.
• When people want to solve their problems, they buy. And if you don’t have something for them to buy, they’re going to find someone else to buy from. The more things you have for sale, the less good you have to be at marketing.

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INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Hello, my dear friends. I hope you’re doing well. Mike, Shreeve here. Welcome to this episode of the podcast we are full for the past couple of days, we’ve been doing a case study on how I took one client to $50,000 per month. Uh, just selling a $27 offer. And how are you able to do that in about three and a half, four months? And, uh, I realized that what I want to talk to you today about and teach you today, uh, it’s going to take awhile, so consider this sort of a long form lesson. And so we had to break out from email and that’s why we’re doing it in podcasting. Additionally, this is the mandatory plug here. Uh, if you go to the no pants, project.com forward slash done for you, we’re running a very special sort of close out and of type of situation until October 5th of 2020.

So this is going to be a permanent podcast. So it’ll be up there. Uh, if you come and, uh, book a call before October 5th, uh, as you’ve seen in the email, there are special things that will happen and all that kind of good stuff. We don’t need to talk about it here on the podcast. Again, it’s the no pants, project.com forward slash done for you. Okay. So mandatory plug out of the way. What I’m going to talk to you about here today is what we did specifically. The strategies that we used to select what to sell for this particular client. So a lot of people will see the numbers in the email that I sent yesterday, $50,000 a month. That’s that’s amazing. I love that. They’ll say I love the process. I love the idea of having a funnel that works for me 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

I love the fact that it’s scalable income, meaning, uh, it takes zero manual effort for me to generate that, that revenue. Um, I build it one time. It can run for months and months, and months and years. And you know, people love that. But the next thing they say is, but I don’t have anything to sell or I don’t know what to sell, or I tried to sell something in the past and it didn’t work. So today we’re going to talk about that because the funnel structure, the copywriting, the Facebook ad strategy, all of that stuff is important, but it’s not even close to the importance of what you’re selling, uh, because, uh, one, what you sell is what people buy. And I know that sounds obvious, but if you think about it at the end of the day, all the copy and all the funnel strategy is nothing compared to that moment where the person has to put in their credit card and in their mind, they’re thinking to themselves, what exactly am I buying right now?

That’s ultimately the, the turning point in how you collect money. So when they say, what exactly am I buying right now? If in their minds, they can say, it’s something pretty awesome. Then you’ve made your job 10 times easier. Um, so that, that, so that’s important cause the conversion aspect, but also the offer is if you do it right, something that can build the rest of your business. So what I want to talk to you specifically about is this idea that when you choose the right digital offer in the way that we do for our clients and we help our clients to, to select this. So I’m going to give you some frameworks, but if you’re thinking that to work with us, you have to have this done already. It’s not true. We do this for you. Our whole entire team does it actually. Um, and I, uh, weigh in specifically in an all that kind of good stuff.

But, uh, when you make the right offer, it can grow other elements of your business. And that’s very, very important because in this day and age, right now, with the way that things are, I am in a, in, um, I’m at a point where I feel like I’m begging people to diversify the revenue streams within their company. One of my earliest mentors says the most dangerous number in business is the number one. If you only have right now in your business, one way to collect money and one marketing stream, I would caution you that over the next couple of months, maybe year or more, uh, it, that, that very simple system of one offer one marketing channel is going to feel the strain of what we have yet to experience, which is the actual consequences of a lockdown. So this is not about politics and I’m not trying to fear monger.

I just want to point something out. We have had stimulus through. So in the United States, stimulus packages for businesses and individuals through the majority of our, uh, experience with the virus, a lot of that money is going to run out soon. They’re having troubles, getting more of it approved. It’s become very politicized depending on how things go. I mean, it’s all up in the air right now. Now I’m, I’m not sure what’s going to happen. I can’t predict that. What I can tell you though, is no matter what happens, one way to reduce your own personal stress and to increase your security would be to have more than one way for people to give you money. However, the danger with that is when people take this idea of I’m going to have multiple streams of income and they, they start focusing on projects that don’t for lack of a better word, synergize with each other.

In other words, one income stream should benefit and grow the other income stream and vice versa. It shouldn’t be that doing one income stream is a separate thing over here. And then this income stream is this other separate thing way over here. And then this income stream is unconnected and over here, because then what you’re doing is you’re taking your focus and you’re stretching it and displacing it and dispersing it. Instead. What you want to do is bring your multiple income streams together so that they gain momentum by functioning independently, specifically with digital courses, here’s the most simple, subtle, and I would say profoundly life-changing strategy that I’ve ever come across, create a digital product. And we’ll talk about what those are today. That’s what we’re gonna be talking about on the podcast that your dream clients will buy, okay? That you can scale. So you can go get a ton of them and they’ll give you money.

You don’t have to do anything to fulfill on the money they’ve given you because this is a digital product. So once they buy it, they consume it. And that’s what they bought. And that same digital product prepares someone to buy your done for you service. So let me break this down. If you are a copywriter, for example, and right now, the only way you get paid as a copywriter is if you write copy for someone that is a one offer, even though you might do different, you know, I do emails and I do sales letters and I do VSLs okay. But at the end of the day, what you’re selling is your time as a copywriter to clients. That’s one offer. So you’re at risk to minimize that risk and to make sure that everything’s connected so that you’re not dispersing. So you’re working on the same business. You’re building the same business, even though there’s multiple revenue streams in that business, you create a digital course that

Meaning the people who want to buy it, your dream client for your copywriting service. Now you have two streams of income that are connected because as your digital product business grows and you get more and more customers, you now have a larger and larger base of individuals that you can communicate with in, you can email them. And you know, if they’re buying things from you, that means you probably have their address depending on how you’ve set it up, which means you can send them something in the mail. And you can say, Hey, uh, I know that you bought this digital course. And that means you’ve spent some time with me, cause I probably put some videos in there and you know, I’m one sided, but you were consuming my content. And so, you know a little bit about me, maybe I’ve helped you a little bit with this digital course.

Would you be interested in me helping you more with this done for you service? Now you’ve reduced the risk of having only one offer. Okay? Now there’s a whole bunch of other things going on as well. You’re probably increasing your prices on your done for you service because now you have a big demand where before you might have done cold prospecting or people don’t know you. If they bought a digital product from you, they’ve likely spent some time consuming it. They likely liked it. If you did a good job. And so they’re way warmer than you’ve probably ever experienced before. If you do a good job. And so when you communicate with them, Hey, I have this other thing for sale. It’s a completely different experience. And demand is created every single day as you sell multiples of these digital products.

And so this is, this is the example of adding multiple revenue streams, but making sure that they’re connected so that the growth of one benefits the other. Now let’s say life gets to a situation and the world is in a crazy place where nobody wants to pay your fees because they’re really high. Or let’s say you get sick, or let’s say you want to take a break or let’s say, you just don’t want to do done for you for a little while. It’s easier to make that decision when you are empowered by that second income stream. Now I’ll give you the example of the client that we’re talking about. In this case study. When he came to us, he had an existing freelancing business. I’m not gonna give the way the specifics, because I don’t want people copying him. He paid us a lot of money to help him and get these kinds of results.

I’m not gonna give that away for free, but he had an existing freelancing business. He was doing some client work, but he wanted to add this second income stream. Well, when we first started, he was all client, client, client, client, client. Now, uh, I am, I didn’t need to double triple check with him. I think he might have like one or two clients left, but he certainly is not selling into new client work because he doesn’t have to. Would you, if you were doing $50,000 a month, so this is, I want to emphasize to you the power of this kind of strategic thinking. I know the podcast is supposed to be about products and we’re going to get there and what kind of products to sell. But I want you to adopt this way of thinking about your business because a lot of people create a business.

Well, they think it’s a business, but it’s actually a job because they’re stuck in only one way to get revenue. And you saw this year that there were a lot of companies that were completely, I mean, I don’t want to sound over the top, but obliterated overnight because their entire business model depended on a certain thing, a live event in person connections. I mean, I’m not going to name names, but there were a few of my previous clients whose entire businesses were essentially shut down overnight. Why? Because their business model was one offering all those public speakers that we love, who would get paid $40,000 to give a speech guess what’s happened to them this year, no more speeches, all those big personal development gurus that have these big live events. And that’s where they do most of their revenue. Guess what happened this year gone?

So this is, I mean, look, we’re gonna get to the products I promise. But more importantly, I want you to think about this stuff in your business and ask yourself, you know, this is, this is why we created the done for you service in the no pants project. It’s not because we need the money. It’s not because we didn’t have multiple sources of, of revenue. We have multiple products to sell. We have multiple ways to make money in the company is because we, for years, I’ve been mentioning to people, you gotta get a funnel up selling a digital product of some kind to hedge against events like this. Now, again, I’m not a future teller. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, but how this year has gone so far, I’m doubling down on diversifying my own income just to stay safe.

Okay. So that PSA out of the way, and with your understanding of why we’re doing this, let’s talk about how do you determine what to sell? Well, the first thing that I want you to understand is that it doesn’t have to be a course. A lot of the clients that come to us when we do this with them, they say, okay, you know what? Um, I don’t feel like an expert. I don’t feel like I can stand up and talk about something for several hours and teach someone something. And my answer to that is fantastic. Good. Because first off, it’s great to have that awareness about yourself and not try to like scam people out of money by pretending to be something you aren’t. But secondly, is that there is a huge room in the marketplace for things other than product or other than courses.

So there are templates, there are tools, there are, uh, like a challenges. So for example, let’s say that you don’t really feel confident that you could teach someone how to make a course and launch it and do a six figure launch, et cetera, et cetera. But you’re amazing at organizing things. Well, what if you deconstructed the process of launching a product and put together a five day challenge where you’ve literally made like these mega Epic checklists of everything somebody needs to do to launch a product and it’s in this beautiful, it’s like formed out into SOP. I mean, it was just standard operating procedure and you have a checklist and somebody could buy that, take it to their business. And they could just sit there and use your checklist. And it would be the most stress free launch they’ve ever had. Do you think that that would be helpful to someone and the answer is of course, yes, it is.

Uh, there are a lot of people who sell those types of things and they do very, very well. And that is a 0% course. It is instead a set of digital tools, right? You could do. Maybe you’re a designer. Well, couldn’t you put together 15, let’s say you’re a funnel designer. Let’s say you bought a Katherine Jones is funnel hacking thing. I love Katherine. She’s awesome. I met her at a mastermind a long time ago. Amazing person, Catherine Jones, funnel, design hacking program, whatever it is, where she teaches you, how to be a funnel designer. Okay, well, couldn’t you put together 15 predesigned funnels in one pack. Of course you would. I mean, who it, you could and people would love it. The people who bought it, because the number of people who actually know how to design a funnel is like 10. There’s not very many people know how to do it. They want convenience. They want tools. A course is not the only thing. Now, this particular client that we helped in this case did kind of a hybrid both course and tools.

And that’s, I want you more than anything from this podcast to realize that a digital product is simply and whatever you do to help other people, this is what a digital product is, whatever you do to help other people delivered in a systematic way. In other words, I can write you a sales letter, but I can also show you how I write a sales letter. And that’s what in the no pants project is our letter system program. I literally just sat down and showed you everything. I know about writing sales letters, how I write sales letters, the process, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I could also have sold for not as much as we sell a letter system for it, but I could also have sold sales letter tools, maybe worksheets that you could take and fill out that the worksheet is basically my thought process in a worksheet that allows you to think through finding the big idea for your next promotion, and then how to take that big idea, pop it into a sales letter template. And that could be a digital product.

Now, the beautiful thing about the digital world is it’s not just for business stuff and marketing stuff. One of our other clients hasn’t quite hit $50,000 a month yet. I think she’s at around 35 40. She teaches people story and not story for business, but story for fiction story for screenwriting, uh, the, the, the digital economy, meaning digital products, digital, digital, all that kind of stuff. Um, these courses and tools and templates and all that is it’s significantly bigger than you could probably possibly ever imagine. One place to go to see the scale and to see some numbers would be to go to U Demi or Udemy, or I didn’t know. I never say it right. U D E M Y go look at some of their courses and you will see 30 to 40,000 students in these courses. And you, to me, isn’t like running tons of ads and they’re not doing a great job marketing themselves.

They just have a really big platform. That’s kind of grown by word of mouth. I mean, not a hundred percent word of mouth. They do run ads, but it’s not like they’re pushing as that. You know, they’re not putting together funnels. They’re not doing a lot of the marketing, right? And so you can go to their platform and see all these different courses and see the broad range of courses. Um, I have a really good friend who has a very successful $350,000 per year business. Okay. This is his business. He teaches people how to play piano. That’s it that’s the whole business. And he doesn’t, he doesn’t do any done for you. Doesn’t do anything like that. He just teaches people how to play piano online.

And you think to yourself, there’s no way he’s doing $350,000 a year. Is there really that much demand? And the answer is yes. So the first thing that we do when we work with clients, the first thing we did with this particular client is we look at what do you want the product to do for you? And the best way to answer that is who do you want to buy the product? And why do you want them to buy it? So in the case of this client, when he came to us, he was done for you, heavy, meaning he was mostly doing done for you in his business. And he was doing, you know, he’s doing great. He’s very good. You know, he’s good at what he does.

What we wanted to do is make sure that the people who purchased his product were the same people who could potentially hire him for done for you. And what that does, is it shapes what you could offer? Let me give you a really good example. Let’s say that I want to be a writing coach. Okay. I want to coach people how to be a writer. What I should do is go to the market with a course or maybe a template. So I could do a, I could do a course on how to be a freelance writer, or I could do a template, um, you know, use this template to get your freelance writing clients. So I go to the market and the people who are buying are

Brand new writers or people who are, you know, they’re maybe they’re struggling in their business, right? So they need some help. They buy up this course. And then I come back and I say, Hey, look, I would love to coach you in your writing career. That makes sense, right? It’s logical. It’s, uh, what I want to do in the end shaped the course that I created and it shaped who the customers are going to be and why I have them and et cetera, the wrong way to do this. If I wanted to be a writing coach would be to go out and sell how to sell more digital products with this secret copywriting formula. Now, why would that be the wrong way to become a writing coach? Well, because the majority of the people who buy that are probably not trying to become writers. Now, I might be able to sell them copywriting critique style services.

So again, it’s important to know what you want to sell, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that I could sell how to be a writer coaching services. Does that make sense? It’s an important nuance and this is sometimes we get so hung up on, yes, I’m ready to launch that. I want to launch something. I want to launch something. And we don’t put in the thought to create the connection between what we’re doing on the front end, which is what these offers are and what we’re trying to do on the backend. Okay. So very important, uh, when you create your products to think through that process, because again, we’re looking to take one income stream and make sure that as it succeeds, it helps the other income stream succeed as well. Now here’s a question I get a lot, which is, well, what if I don’t know what I want my, what we call backend, which is what maybe what if I don’t know what I want my main thing to be.

I don’t know if I want to be a coach. I don’t know if I want to be a done for you person. I don’t know what I want to do yet. There’s two philosophies on this and I take this on a case by case basis. One is if you’re willing to be open, then what you really do is you just go see what sells really well in the market. And you say, can I deliver similar results in a digital product? If so, then my funnel is just going to be the funnel. That that’s one, all one of the good funnels. Then what I do is once those customers start coming in, I’ll just ask them what else they want to buy. To be honest, this is the smart objectively wise way to build a business, go figure out what’s selling really well, make a better version of it, ask your customers what else they want to buy.

That’s a really easy way to make a lot of money, but it means it’s missing the human component, right? Um, I mean, if I want to do that, I would just go rent a Lamborghini and just go create Lamborghini funnels because those do really, really well. And they sell really well. And then I could just, once people buy the Lamborghini funnel, I can do the, whatever the rented jet funnel and the fake mansion funnel, right? Like those do sell, but there’s a human component to business. And this is why I recommend that you think first about what you want the end result to be specifically, either get help. So when clients come to us, one of the things that I helped them do is create those backend offers. So we start looking at, okay, what do we want this to end up being? What do you want to end up doing in your business?

Let’s work through that. I’ll coach you through that. You know, we can figure out what those offers are. So get help with it, whether it’s me or someone else get help trying to figure out what that main thing is going to be. And, and, and something that you enjoy and something that you are, uh, you don’t have to be passionate about it. I don’t think, uh, we constantly need to be feeling 110% passion over every single thing that we do. Cause thing I’m passionate about is living my life, not working for a living, uh, but get some help figuring what that out, what that is, or spend time building that part of your business first.

Okay. Those are really the options. So you can spend that time and say, okay, look, step one. I’m going to go figure out what my main thing is. First, I’m going to send out some emails. I’m going to do LinkedIn. I’m going to figure that part out. I can get some clients under my belt and then I’ll add the second revenue stream. Or if you’re going to do both at the same time, make sure you team up with somebody who knows what the heck they’re doing. So for that question, I know it’s a big question for a lot of the people here in the no pants. What exactly do I offer in that regard? I think those are the realistic options. Okay. I mean, I could give you some pie in the sky, stuff about, take a personality test and then, you know, it’ll all come together.

But I think those are probably the more realistic options for you. Nothing is personality test. I love him. What color is my parachute was a very helpful one for me. Um, okay. So we have the who and the why. The next thing that I would consider is when you make your products, don’t try to make a thousand dollar product. Not at first, Oh man. That’s in my opinion, some of the worst advice that’s going around right now, online because the amount of people getting in situations where they have high refund rates, because they don’t have experience creating products. And they just, somebody told them, you need to make a thousand dollar product and you make a $5,000 product and they don’t really know what they’re talking about. And then they get into all these bad refunds. Like it’s really bad. It’s very bad in this industry.

That, that happens a lot. It, it, um, in almost every other industry, you have to put in some time doing lesser tasks before you’re able to do the big one. So like, if you’re training to be a pilot, you don’t get to fly the big seven four sevens until you’ve learned to fly the little Cessna one fifties. Right? So my recommendation for those getting in the course and digital product business is don’t try to tackle a thousand dollar program for your first thing. Instead, sell something for 27 bucks. The client that we have, who’s doing $50,000 a month. The price point on their front end offer is $37. It’s a great $37 product. It didn’t take him months to create.

Got it done. Quick, put out in the market quick, got results. Quick, got testimonials. Quick, got feedback. Quick, made a judge made adjustments quick. All those things are very difficult to do at a thousand dollars because when you sell something for a little bit of money, and now, now please hear me out. So those of you who have been listening to some of my other stuff, you’re thinking about Mike, you said, if I do a, you know, if I got to the market, I need to charge something for a lot of money. Yes. When you do done for you. Cause when you do done for you, you need to charge a lot of money. So you can devote time and energy and focus to doing a good job. When you undercut your prices and done for you, you create situations where you fail to deliver because you haven’t given yourself enough space to be a human being, to have the focus and mental energy and things like that.

But in digital products where it requires zero of your time after you’ve created it, right? So you create it once. I highly recommend that you start at a much lower barrier to entry, make it easy on yourself and make it easy on yourself to get lots of feedback and data very, very quickly because to sell 20, $37 offers a day, that’s 20 customers day, who can tell you if it’s good, who can say, this is missing to say, I was confused here, can you fix this? Can you to have 20 customers a day? It’s rather easy to have 20 customers a month at the thousand dollar level, the mechanics at play to sell that easy is not a word that I would use to describe that process. So you can get a lot more data, a lot more quickly to improve the offer, to learn from your experience. And then you can make quicker, faster iterations to get to profit. So that’s why I recommend low ticket. It’s just less intimidating.

Next

Is, uh, any, you know, that’s why we do all of our, all of our clients. We say low ticket. We don’t do high ticket funnels for our clients because it would just, it would take forever. It would just take way too long, way, way, way too long. You can get a two X return on ad spend on a $27 offer. And I know plenty of people who are running webinars, selling a thousand dollar offer who would kill for a two X return on ad spend. Look to me, it’s the same return on ad spend, whether it’s coming in at a thousand dollars, a pop through a webinar, I have to give every week or whether it’s coming in at $27 a pop and then I’m completely disconnected from it. Two X is two X getting $2 back for every dollar is getting $2 back for every dollar.

So I’m going to do the one that’s faster, easier, quicker, you know, in the no pants project we’re currently working on four of these funnels internally and we’re, and we’re just launching them one after another one after another one after another. Because even if the funnel only does, you know, $10,000 a month in profit times four that’s $40,000 a month in profit. Now a $10,000 a month funnel. So a funnel that produces $10,000 a month in profit, isn’t really a scaled funnel, right? I mean, you can get much bigger numbers off of that. Once you have it all dialed in and you know, you’ve rewritten the sales page. A bunch of times, you’ve got your, you improve your offer and all that kind of stuff. Like there’s a lot of work to get there, but that’s not even really a scaled a funnel. So I’m just trying to give you guys some ideas as you think about this in your own business. Now, once you know who it’s for, why you’re doing it, you know, you’re going to do low ticket, a really important aspect of why we were able to get this client to be so profitable. So quickly comes down. Very simple

Economics, most marketing problems. Aren’t actually marketing problems. It’s problems of economics. It is, I would say in the year 20, 20 impossible to profit off of a $27 offer. I it’s impossible. Uh, the cost to sell our clients $37 offer is about $42. So every time we make a $37 offer, we’ve spent $42 in ads. Now some of you are like, Oh no, that’s that’s net negative. That’s horrible. Except that we’ve added in the economics. So that every time we spend $42, yeah, we make a $37 sale. But we also make about snidely seventies, like 66 or $67 in total overall sales of other digital products all within a 24 hour timeframe. So how we do it, it’s very simple. If you don’t know these words, that’s okay. This isn’t a full, complete masterclass on how we do these funnels. Every funnel that we build for our clients has a front end offer.

That’s anywhere from seven to $47. It has an order bump. You can think of an order bump like the candy bars at a cash register checkout. So you’ve bought all your groceries. You come to the checkout and they’re basically saying, do you want some candy bars or magazines or whatever? So the order bump is just another very small digital product could be templates could be training. It could be all sorts of different things that we sell. Um, the order page. So you have a front end sales page, it’s selling a $27 offer. Then you have this beautiful order page with an order bump. Some people take it on average, about 30% of the people take that order bump. And then we have what’s called an upsell, which is to see, to see it in the real world. Would you like fries with that? That’s what it is.

Okay. So you buy the burger, they say, what’d you like fries with that? You say, yeah, great. Or no, not at this time. So we have the upsell and then that’s it. So between the frontend, the order bump and the upsell that allows us, the economics, meaning the availability of other offers and, and a certain percentage of those people buying those other offers equals our ability to spend $42 in ads to sell a $37 offer and make about two times what I say, 47 $42, I think is what we’re spending $42 to spend, spend $42. Um, all of this is in my memory, $42 to sell a $37 offer and to basically around ish, depending on the day two X, the return on ad spend.

So the really powerful thing to understand about that concept is that it is the guaranteed way to make every funnel you ever do work. And I think this is really important because a lot of people are afraid to build these digital courses. And they’re afraid to build these funnels because they’re afraid that their stuff won’t sell enough to be profitable. And my response to that is as long as you’re willing to sell other stuff, also to add more products to your mix, then you can’t fail in being profitable. Now, please don’t get it twisted. It takes work to test things, to come up with the product ideas that will work. It doesn’t always work from day one. As you saw the email that I sent yesterday, the first month that we worked with this client was a net negative month. So the last week of whatever that first month was, and then the first half of that next month, we lost money. We lost like $50. We were making sales, but not profitably. Then we made some tweaks and we changed some things and we changed some more things and we changed some more things. We made some tweaks, we changed them. And now these three, four months later, $50,000 a month.

So when you are looking at potentially going down this road of creating your own digital products, as long as you understand that, it’s not about getting it perfect the first time as I said in yesterday’s email, but also that you always have the ability to work your way out of a bad funnel situation. Meaning let’s say it’s costing you $60 to sell a $37 offer. You just can add more, offers, more products, and the math will work out in your favor. Now, again, we don’t have time right now to get into how you would do that. There’s things like down sells. There’s automated followup sequences. There’s cross selling. There’s contextual selling within the membership itself. There’s affiliates. There’s, there’s a hundred different ways to add that element of economics, the element of math, right? So if it costs you $60 to make a sale, figure out how to get more than $60 in other products that people will buy once they buy that front end thing, that’s always available to you, which means if you’re willing to put in the work, this is a guaranteed process.

Now the, the where the, where things get sketchy is are you willing to put in the work? That’s where the guarantee breaks down? One of the things that I highly recommend that people do is once they have this funnel, even if the funnel is F for every $60 that you spend, you only make $61, the fastest and easiest way to use that new revenue stream in your business to grow. The main part of your business would be to send emails, just like I sent you an email. Now you’re listening to this right now, send emails to the people who bought your product and say, I have this for sale. So my done for you, whatever it might be, make sure it’s priced appropriately. And to nurture those 27 $37 buyers into your main stuff, two thousand three thousand five thousand dollar offers. If you’re in our peaceful profits program that we teach you how to make.

Now you could spend, you know, a thousand dollars a day at $60 out and $61 back in, and he might not be making a ton money on the front end, meaning that funnel might not be producing a lot of cash, but it is filling your phone calls with clients or prospects who have spent time consuming the course or the template that you’ve created. And if you’ve done a good job, and if you work with us, we’ll help to make sure that you do a good job. If you’ve done a good job on the product, if you’ve done a good job, helping someone in that digital course situation, then the end result is they really like you. They tested you at $27. They pulled out their card and they tested you. And now they saw what value they received. You help them a little bit. And now they’re ready to buy from you.

Many of you who are listening to the sound of my voice, that’s how you and I have done business. In the past, you bought something from me. You were happy with the experience. And so you bought something else that is a natural pattern of buyer behavior. And there’s something that’s really, really important. I want to make sure people understand here, the buyer who bought your $27 thing with whether you help them or not, whether you offer them something else or not, they’re going to go like they’re going to go buy something. It’s like, you know, a mentor of mine explained it really, really well. When you go to Starbucks in the morning and you buy their coffee. By the end of the day, you’ve bought other food stuff.

So whether that’s, uh, you bought breakfast or you went to the grocery store or you had lunch or something. So think about that for a second. You, as a buyer are constantly buying things. If you have a pain, your interest is not so much in who you’re buying from as much as solving the pain. In other words, somebody who comes in at your $27 offer, if they really need help, which is probably why they bought your templates or your course, or whatever, they really want to do this thing. You really want to learn piano, which you don’t think that, you know, that’s not a huge pain, but they have a desire. And they’re trying to scratch this itch. If I really want to learn how to, how to play piano. So they buy the piano course for $27 and then never hear from you. Again, you have nothing else to teach them, except for what you put in that $27 course, you have no other way to help them, except for what you put in that $27 course.

Well, what are they going to do? They’re not going to sit and wait for you. They’re going to go buy some piano books. They’re going to go find another virtual piano teaching process. They’re going to find other people to teach them one on one. So this idea, I think sometimes we, we get, we buy into myths about what buyers are like. Um, and the reality is that when people want to solve their problems, they buy and buy and buy and buy. And if you don’t have something for them to buy, they’re going to go find someone else to buy from. Okay. Now obviously we need to make sure that what we’re offering is ethical, that what we’re doing for people is helpful, uh, but understand how people work. Um, and what that will allow you to do is to build very successful businesses based off of the economics of products, which is the more products you have, the more things you have for sale, the less good you have to be at marketing because the math works out in your favor every single time.

So I hope that this episode has been helpful. I realized that we’re about, about 15 minutes in. I tend to do this. Think to myself, it’s going to be 30 minutes and ends up being 50. I could go on and on. And, and to be honest, um, this case study, as we’re talking about this particular client, I don’t have it really planned. I’m not, I didn’t like sit down and ha I’m going to make this break case study and get a bunch of clients. I literally am just trying to share some stuff that we’ve learned from helping this particular client. Because as of October 5th, uh, those of you who are on our email list or who came here from the email list, you know that after October 5th, there’s going to be a big change to how we do done for you. And so if you would like to work with us and I can help you through choosing what to sell, I can help you through the copywriting and the building, and we’ll run your ads.

And we do all these different things for the client. When we worked together at the no pants, project.com forward slash done for you, if you would like me to be involved in that process with you, uh, you have to book a call with our team before October 5th, after that we’re making some changes to how we’re processing done for use, um, and details are all in the email about that. Uh, so, um, anyways, like I said, I could go on for literally hours and hours for the past year and then opens project. This is all that we’ve lived and breathed was these funnels, figuring out what offers work, what offers don’t work. Um, we have an incredible team that helps people. Um, but hopefully this episode has given you an insight into maybe not how simple, cause I mean, this isn’t necessarily simple. I wouldn’t call this process simple, getting clients for a done for you.

That’s a simple process, right? You figure out what you can help people with and then you go find them and you talk to them and you do that thing for them. This is a little bit more complex. But what I do hope is that you can see that it’s not terribly difficult, meaning hopefully through this episode, you’ve had some ideas about what you might do for your own digital product funnel. I also sincerely hope that you take very seriously the admonition to avoid only one income source in your business. Uh, especially considering all of the craziness that’s going on in the world. If you get nothing else from this podcast, it that’s what I, I sincerely hope you take away from that is that you actively engage in some thing, whether it’s working with us, whether it’s buying some of our stuff, whereas buying somebody else’s stuff, it doesn’t matter to me do something to decrease the risk.

Um, I would say the horizon looks bumpy regardless of what happens at the time of this recording in the next month or two. Uh, I, I, there’s just a lot of things that, um, have me thinking, it’s time to sort of button up some of the hatches, get storm ready, uh, and make smart business decisions about how to minimize the risk of one and how to start getting some momentum in other areas of your business in an interconnected way so that they are working off of each other. So that in case one goes out the other one’s still there. And even while this other one, you know, this other revenue stream or income stream might be out for a minute, it still is improving your business. That’s ultimately what we’re looking for. Okay. My friends that is it for me. Uh, we have a few things to get through in the no pants project.

We’ve been wildly building an absolutely amazing team. There are some major for us. Um, there’s major changes in how we’re going to be sending emails in the future and how we’re going to be running content and all that kind of good stuff. So I don’t want to make promises that I can’t deliver on, but, uh, I do believe that I’ll be getting back into podcasting here relatively soon. Cause the beautiful thing about a podcast is I could record a month of podcasting on like in one day, which is great. That’s the beautiful thing about this kind of medium, um, and uh, and a whole bunch of other changes. So just really, really excited for what’s going on. Our business is growing. Uh, for those of you who are worried about what the market is like, uh, from our standpoint, uh, we’re having a great year.

Um, we are, like I said, we’re growing like crazy. Um, we have noticed, uh, that sales are still taking place though. There is some, uh, there’s some apprehension. So again, as a business, we’re rolling out multiple low ticket funnels. We’re hedging against relying on only one single source of income, which we never really have. It’s not that makes me nervous. I’ve I’ve not won. I’ve not been that way since I’d say probably like 2011. Uh, I just, I don’t make that mistake anymore. Um, but we are looking to expand multiple sources of new sales and leads and things like that. So we’re definitely growing. I encourage you to not wait to grow. Uh, you know, if you have, if anything has taught me about 2020, is that the, um, the dynamic and the atmosphere can change in a matter of two or three weeks. So don’t think that in the future, I’ll get to it because you quite sincerely have no idea what the future is going to hold.

Um, I thinking back to January of this year, I don’t think anyone was very seriously thinking, uh, what happened in March was going to happen. Uh, certainly not, uh, you know where we are now. So anyways, I’m rambling now at this point, I miss talking to you guys, I’m gonna try and get more podcasts out. Uh, as soon as I possibly can got some things on our end, I hope this has been helpful. Again, if you want us to help you to build your own funnels, that’s the no pants, project.com forward slash done for you. Call us before October 5th to get in on the current way that we do things. Um, again, details in the email. I hope you all have a beautiful rest of your day and I’ll talk to you later.

The post $50k/Month Case Study: What To Sell appeared first on The No Pants Project Blog.

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SUMMARY

• Today we’re going to talk about the 5 signs that it’s time to fire your client. However, it’s important to understand that almost all client problems can be prevented through better communication. And they’re almost always avoidable if you’re willing to call up the client and have a collision conversation with them when things aren’t working for you anymore. 
• Many service providers will just silently stew—and then all of a sudden they’ll pop and quit. A year ago, I would say that while this isn’t ideal behavior, your business wouldn’t be that affected by it. 
• But now that we’re in the middle of the pandemic, I would say that people whose default response is to leave their clients in a lurch will begin to feel the effects of heavy attrition on their business in six months or so.
• So the caveat here is that what I’m about to tell you are signs, not the final straw. These are signs that a relationship needs to be fixed. 
• Get in the habit of leaving your clients better than you found them, even when they are horrible clients. Every time I fire a client, I always try to leave them with a replacement or suggestion, because you never know. Be vigilant but wise. It’s not what it was a year ago, and I think it will be harder in a year from now.
• Sign #1: They don’t follow your recommendations but demand that you generate the same results.If you tell a client, “To get result XYZ, you need to do ABC,” and they respond with, “Fantastic, but I will only do A,” then you have to say, “Then I can only give you X.” If they still expect XYZ when they can only deliver A, it’s time to have those conversations. If the conversations don’t do anything, then it’s time to fire the client.
• Sign #2: Emotional Instability
  This refers to the client’s inability to remain objective and professional about what you’re doing together. For example, a client who emails at 2 am because they had a random thought about something they were worrying about.
• Recommended book: The Whole-Brain Child by Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne BrysonRunning a business through pure emotion makes getting results impossible, because emotion is a filter that gives inaccurate information. And you cannot make good decisions with inaccurate information.
• Sign #3: Keeping critical information from you that’s required for delivering results.
• Sign #4: The client is not level-appropriate or ready for you.
  For example, a client hires you to produce content but they have nothing to sell. No matter how good you are at producing content, you won’t be able to deliver results for the client. This is one of those scenarios where you will be significantly better off if you can leave the client better than you found them.
• Sign #5: Unrealistic Expectations
  Expectations management when it comes to clients is really about ongoing conversation. And clients will naturally balloon expectations because they’re paying you money. Transactions are emotional, regardless of the amount.
• You could just quit, but that wouldn’t help anybody. You would just affirm that behavior and repeat it in the future. What I recommend that you do is to always continue to manage your clients’ expectations. If you have a client who is willingly having unrealistic expectations, then that’s when it’s time to fire them.
• Again, I would recommend a little bit more gratitude that you have clients during this time. All of the issues mentioned are manageable and fixable, and firing the client is not the only option. Don’t get into the habit of burning bridges. 

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INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

FULL TRANSCRIPT

How long have your friends hope you’re doing well. Welcome to this episode. We’re going to be talking about the five signs that it’s time to fire your client. This later this week, we’ll also talk about a couple of different signs that it’s time to fire people that you’ve hired so that you can get a good insight into both worlds. Um, sometimes it’s easy to be very self focused as a freelancer consultant, um, uh, coach, whatever it is that you do as a service for someone it’s easy to look at how it affects you and how you feel. Um, and sometimes that, uh, self-centeredness can, uh, prevent you from seeing the whole picture. So in a couple of days or next week or something, I’ll do that podcast as well to talk about what it’s like from the client’s perspective and why they may want to fire you so that you have a good understanding.

Now, why do we want to have this understanding? Well, I’ve been doing this for 12 years. I’ve worked with a ton of clients. I’ve probably have just run the range of amazing clients to absolutely horrible nightmare clients. And there’s a couple of things to understand. One, almost all client problems are preventable. They’re preventable through better communication. So you having the guts to be honest and open and transparent, uh, number two, they’re almost always avoidable. Uh, if you’re willing to have a collision conversation. So to be able to call up the client and say, Hey, this isn’t working for me. We need to have a conversation. A lot of people who serve clients will just silently get angry. And then all of a sudden they’ll pop and quit. And, you know, last year I would say, ah, that’s not a great behavior, but your business should be fine.

If you’re that kind of a person where you just silently suffer or even worse, you straight up lie to your client or your yeah. You, so you straight up lie to your client and you say, Oh yeah, everything’s fine. Everything’s fine. Everything’s fine. In secretly, you’re like working on your exit plan and you’re like, screw this guy. I’m just going to milk them for money. And then I’m out of here a year ago. I’d say, ah, you know, that’s fine. It’s not ideal. I think it’s pretty like personally. I think it’s a horrible thing to do as a person, but I think your business wouldn’t actually be that affected by it. Um, where we’re at currently in this episode is being recorded in the middle of the pandemic. We’re still in the first order consequences of the pandemic. Economically speaking, I would say the summer and maybe even the fall of next year is where we will start to see the knock on effects.

The second order consequences. And I would say, um, many service providers are woefully unprepared in their current behaviors of operating a business for what’s about to happen. Meaning if you are the kind of person who can’t have those coaching conversations and you sort of just secretly stew and then quit at the last minute or leave your clients and alert, or are too afraid to have the conversation to save the relationship and your, your default behavior is to quit. And you don’t. And when you quit, your default interpretation of quitting is that you sort of won or that you there, like you were able to eject yourself from the situation and you aren’t empathetic towards the fallout that occurs. Um, I would say in six months or so, you will begin to feel the effects of heavy attrition on your business. Okay. And if you don’t have a, um, if you don’t have a system for consistent client getting that is currently, uh, leaving you with more clients than you have time to fulfill on, then that, uh, that cycle of attrition based off of behavior, because the person who would do that kind of thing also has other correlated behavioral issues that lead to attrition issues in a business, right?

So the person who would do that also does other things in their own business, um, because it’s about value systems. It’s about, uh, prioritization. It’s about belief of what a client is and things like that. And eventually what’s gonna happen is, uh, in six months or a year as the second order, consequences really tighten up the market. Uh, you will find that that kind of behavior is really going to hurt you. So the caveat here is I’m going to give you a bunch of signs that I think you should be aware of, but understand that these are signs. They’re not, um, you know, they’re not the final straw. They’re not the once you see this happening, you must fire them immediately. Instead, these are the signs that things are headed towards the end of a relationship. And you can fix any relationship a year ago.

I would tell you don’t bother fixing the relationship, move on now with what I’m seeing, uh, across multiple clients, what I’m seeing, uh, across my friends companies, um, what we’re seeing just in the world in general, I would tell you, instead of focusing on firing the client focus first on trying to mend the relationship, um, and at the very least get in the habit of leaving your clients better than you found them, even when they are horrible clients. Okay. Um, as a general rule, I would say in the 12 years that I’ve run my business, I have only once left a client, uh, in the lurch. Um, and that was actually because of very serious family, personal issues. Um, I, there was nothing I could do otherwise every single time that I’ve fired a client, okay, not quit a client, but like, this is it.

I cannot work with you anymore. I’m going to fire you. I always try to leave that client with a replacement, a suggestion, um, and not just a suggestion of like, here’s my email, I’m quitting you today. Here’s what you should do. Bye. But literally here’s the plan. Here’s the sales letter. Like I tried to leave clients better off because you never know. You never know when you might be in a position. And I think many of you are going to be in this position in six months to a year. If you continue on this behavior of just cutting people off, you’re probably going to be in this position where those clients that you thought were nightmares, all of a sudden seem pretty awesome compared to not having any clients at all. Okay. So I always try to leave my clients better off. Um, I don’t really believe that like, you know, successful people talk to other successful people and you’ll never get to work in the industry and blah, blah, blah.

I’ve never found that to be true. I think most successful people, if, if they get fired by a freelancer, they sincerely don’t care. Like they just move on to the next person, um, which, you know, that has its own things. And we’ll talk about that in the other episode about what happens when you fire or a client or a financial quits or whatever. Um, but the point that I’m trying to make is is that, uh, the caveat that I’m giving you here is yes. Be V uh, vigilant about the clients you’re working with, but also be wise. Um, it’s not what it was a year ago in a year from now. It’s not going to be what it is today. I think, I think it’ll be harder in a year from now not easier, which is why you should get stuff going now today rather than waiting any longer.

Okay. So anyways, along ramble, uh, just, I want to make sure that you guys understand you have to stick up for yourself, but part of sticking up for yourself is not just like quietly lying, that everything’s fine. And then quitting or, uh, you know, being a monster, uh, and being impossible to work with and being a diva yourself and just firing every client that you get, because that is no, like you have to understand clients are what pays your bills. Okay. So, uh, as long as you have the understanding that these are the signs that you should work, the, you should look for. Okay. Number one, one is if they don’t follow your recommendations, but they demand that you generate the same results, then that’s a sign you need to fire someone. I’ll give you an example. We, uh, we’ve recently been taking on certain types of clients and one of the clients that we took on signed a contract, that they would follow a certain, um, delivery system.

I don’t want to give away too many details cause I’m not trying to shame anybody here. Uh, the client agreed to those, to that business model about a month and a half into everything decided that they no longer wanted to fulfill Phil, not on half of the business model, but on what would be the equivalent of about 80% of what made that business model work. Okay. So we had a contract, we agreed to how all of this was going to work. They said, I can’t do the 80% anymore. And I said, I understand why, because the pandemic, the reason that this particular client adjusted, what they were able to do was because of external forces and see, this is where a lot of freelancers get it wrong. They forget that clients are humans too. They forget that clients look, if you’re business struggling right now, or you’re having a hard time right now in the pandemic.

And it’s true. So for you, I promise you, it’s probably 10 times more stressful for your client because your client has to somehow figure out how to pay you. Right? I mean, just think of that in and of itself is stressful. Then add on the fact that they probably have to pay others people, or let’s say you’re a health coach. A really good friend of mine is a health coach. And she said, you know what? This pandemic has been making it really hard for my clients to get results there, stress eating the stress is causing, um, like, uh, hormonal changes. They’re not getting as much sleep as they used to get, and that has its own, you know, second order consequences. And so, yeah, whatever it is, you do coaching, it’s only freelancing, whatever your clients are. Probably 10 times more stressed out about everything that’s going on than you are right now.

So when this client in our situation came to me and said, look, I can’t deliver on all that stuff. I was like, totally fine. Let’s adjust our expectations. So we adjusted expectations, or at least I thought we had, because a couple of months later, she started getting, uh, very difficult to work with. Why? Because in her mind, the original contract said we would get a certain result. And she had hung on to that certain result, not truly thinking because of stress because of whatever reason, not keeping in mind, the 80% that she was failing to deliver on, which would have helped to generate that particular result. So as a result of that, as a result of the, uh, growing toxicity, uh, and the late night emails and the, the very emotionally driven this and that, and et cetera, et cetera, I just had to fire that particular client.

Okay. Um, we had multiple conversations. We tried everything we could to, uh, work within her specific needs that were outside the terms of the contract. And this went on for five months. So this is the, probably the difference between me and you, right? You want to fire your client this weekend after working with them for three days, I wait, I can be patient. I give people the benefit of the doubt. Uh, you’ll hear in next week’s thing. Um, you know, when I have somebody who works with me, I’ll give them six months to like, get their stuff together. A lot of people just fire after a week, right? Uh, and that’s because I’ve seen, I’ve seen too many times. People will turn around, right? Life happens, but typically life doesn’t happen except in extreme cases for six months, right? It might happen for three months.

It might happen for four months. Uh, it may even happen for five months, but typically somewhere in between a five to six month period, things change, people come around or whatever. This particular client never came around. And so we fired her. And that is one of those situations where the client will only allow you to be as good as you can be. Um, or you are, you can only be as good as the client allows you to be. There it is. It’s the saying that I keep saying all the time and I forgot what it is, but, um, the, uh, you can only be as the client, as good as the client allows you to be. If you tell a client to get result, X, Y, Z, you need to do a, B, C, and then they come back and say, fantastic. But I will only do a, then you have to say, then I can only give you X.

If they still expect X, Y, Z, when they can only deliver a that’s time to have those conversations. If the conversations don’t do anything, then it’s time to fire the client. Okay. Number two. Oh. And, you know, look again, this is one of those situations where if you don’t have the conversation then in, in, if you’ve never hired someone before it’s it’s, it was, it was easy for me to be empathetic to this particular client for those first couple of months, because I get it. When you buy something, you buy it for a specific reason in your mind, especially if you’re spending a lot of money. If however, you make changes because you yourself are responding to life stresses. It’s, there’s something about the human mind that doesn’t automatically then say, Oh, I guess I should change my expectations on everything. So you have to have those conversations with your clients because they’re human beings, just like you’re a human being.

I promise you. You’ve probably done something like that in your own life where you agreed to something, or you bought something, something changed in your own life. And then you were the one who was upset and having problems. And you didn’t even realize that you were the one who changed everything else was the same, but you were the one who changed the fundamental pieces that generated the result that you were desiring. Okay. I mean happens to all of us as it’s not like I’m poking fun at you specifically. Cause I don’t know who you are. This is a podcast go anybody, but just generally speaking, that’s a very typical behavior in human beings. Okay. Number two, the second sign is emotional instability. Um, here’s what I mean by that. I don’t care. What kind of personality you have, like quite sincerely, you guys I’ve been at this for 12 years.

I could care less about the personality that you have. Um, I don’t even particularly care about your political leanings because I think most people are politically active on social media and in opinion, but like their actual political activity of actually doing something about it is like maybe 0.0, 1% of them actually even doing something, you know? So I don’t care what your politics are. I don’t care whether you like every time we get on the phone, you just cuss like a sale. I don’t care. I don’t care about that. What I care about is your ability to be objective about what we are doing together. Let me give you some examples. The client who emails at two o’clock in the morning, uh, because they had a random thought about something they were worrying about, about something that I talked to them two months ago, uh, or that is part of an agreement like it’s that inability to control the professionalism in the communication.

Um, uh, here’s another good example. Let’s and this happens to me a lot. So one of the things that I do is I help businesses to scale very, very quickly. A lot of people are emotionally unprepared for scale because one of the things that happens when you scale a business is you get exposed to a lot of like frankly, horrible people, just like running Facebook ads on the internet and people being awful and rude and mean, and like purposely trying to make you feel bad in their comments, for example. Okay. Um, if I have a client and that client has never experienced that before, which past 12 years hardly any of my clients have ever experienced that, right. That’s why they hire me is to, to help them get that that going. Um, and they absorb that and then rechannel it into something else. So for example, and, and I can see, I can, I can see clients doing this.

I can watch them check their Facebook ads. And then five minutes later, send me an email about something being broken somewhere that isn’t actually broken, but they just need to like, get it out. And dah, dah, dah, that is a sign, um, that we need to have a conversation about remaining professional, but also putting your focus where the focus matters. Uh, another example is clients who don’t track their own financials and then are pinging me 15 times about how they’re not making any money. Well, are you tracking your financials because I’m tracking your financials and you’re making plenty of money like that kind of, um, they lack the objectivity, uh, and the, the ability to use logic, to think through things. And they run their business, uh, uh, through pure emotion, which is inherently unstable. It was really good book called the whole brain. I think it’s called the whole brain child, a really, really good book about the left side of the brain, the right side of the brain, the four quadrants, things like that.

Highly recommend that you read that if you’re a business owner, because what you need is a fully integrated brain. You need emotion and logic. Most people when they run their business are heavy on emotion and they don’t have enough logic. For me personally, I tend to fire overly emotional clients. Not because I don’t like their personality, but because that behavior pattern makes getting results impossible. It makes getting results impossible, not hard, not hard, impossible, because it is a filter that gives inaccurate information and you cannot make good decisions about scale. When you have inaccurate information. Let me give you an example. If you hate an ad, because somebody commented on it and you view that ad through the negative perception that you have, which is an emotional reaction to the ad, rather than a logical reliance on the data of whether or not that ad is working.

You may, as my client come and tell me, turn that out off. And now we have a problem because now I have to explain to, you know, here at [inaudible]. And even though I’m explaining it to you again, the whole brain child is such a good book to learn how to communicate with clients. You are in the emotional state. And I’m trying to explain to you in the logical state, that that communication is just not going to work. You and the client are going to that you’re going to miss each other. And so what happens is the client might say, okay, I see what you’re saying. I understand, but not really right? Secretly. They say, this person, isn’t doing what I told them to do. And I don’t like it. And then if something happens in the future with that ad, they will go back in time because the emotional side of your brain is where you store all your autobiographical information.

So it’s where you house memories. You will go back in time to when you hated that ad and then the client, meaning if you’re the client. And then you’ll say, see, I told you this wasn’t the ad to data. And that makes getting results impossible, absolutely impossible, not hard, impossible. And so in the work that I do, and I think most of the people who listen to this podcast are in some kind of results driven service, whether you’re a coach consultant, freelancer, whether you do financial stuff, whether you do business stuff, whether you do health stuff, whether you do relationship stuff, if you are responsible for getting people results and they are unable to remote remain, uh, emotionally balanced, uh, okay. Uh, what’s called integrated in the brain, uh, between logic and emotion. Uh, you’ll, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a situation that nobody’s going to win.

Okay. And I have found of all of these points. This is the hardest one to have a conversation about, because how do you tell someone that they’re emotionally and stable, that they’re seeing it through the lens of emotion I’ve been doing this for 12 years. I’ve never really found a great, um, a great way to talk about it, but reassuring them as often as possible saying, look, I understand that you’re having this, uh, emotional experience, but let me walk you through the logical side of things that tends to help in some, you know, a little bit. But, uh, I would say this is the one that for me personally ends up, uh, in firing probably the most of all of these other ones. That’s the most difficult stage because what you’re asking to change someone’s behavior and who they are. Uh, and if you read the book, um, the whole brain child, you’ll see not only who they are now, but who they’ve always been and how they were raised.

I mean, that’s very difficult to change. It’s, it’s not a high likelihood that you’re going to change that behavior, um, in any significant way. Alright, that’s sign number two, sign number three is them keeping critical information from you. That’s required for delivering results. Okay? Um, this one’s pretty straight forward. If the client doesn’t give you all the information you need to do as well as you know that you can do, then it, that you just have the conversation, ask for it. If they don’t give it to you, let them know you can’t help them. And that’s pretty much all there is to that one. Pretty short and sweet number four. If the client is not level appropriate for you, or they’re not ready for you, it’s probably a sign that you need to not work with them. So for example, if the client hires you to produce content, but they have nothing to sell, no matter how good you are at producing content for the client, when they look at their spreadsheet, you will not be on the side of the spreadsheet that you want to be on.

Right? So I call them red and black employees, which is basically when you’re looking at a P and L the profit is the color black on the spreadsheet. And anything that’s in the negative, which is just, you know, an expense or an outgoing kind of situation, um, is red. Now that’s not how an actual PNL works, but you get the idea, right? So, um, you want to be the client who is on the black side of things. You want to be the client who is positively producing for the client. You don’t want to be on the red side of things. You don’t want the client to look at you and say, well, this is just an expense. We’re not actually getting anything from this. We’re not growing anything more often than not that particular situation comes about because the client isn’t ready for what you can do.

If you’re a relationship coach and you want to help couples build strong relationships. But the couple that you’re working with is just not at all, ready to take your coaching. Um, that’s not your fault. Okay? If you are a business coach and you want to help someone with their financials, uh, but their business isn’t, doesn’t make enough money to even pay you much less. Have you do financial, that’s not your fault. Okay? And this is one of those scenarios where we use the word firing a client, but this is definitely one of those scenarios where you will be significantly better off. If you can leave that client better off than you found them. Okay? So if you have somehow misinterpreted them and your filter, wasn’t in place, and you’ve taken on someone that you now are waking up and realizing, Oh my gosh, this is not who I thought they were.

And this is not, they are not at the level that I need them to be at, for me to be able to deliver results. Then you, in my opinion, because you took them on because your filtering system wasn’t good enough. In my opinion, you have a moral obligation to help them rather than, you know, pitching a fit and, you know, acting like a child and just saying, well, you’re not good enough for me. And I’m outta here and buy, and you’re screwed, right? That, that, um, again, that is a bit, if you, if you go that way, that’s a behavior that in about six to 12 months is really going to bite you in the butt when client patients, and how the market works and all that kind of stuff is going to catch up to you. So this is definitely a situation where you want to, um, leave them better off than you found them.

Okay. But it doesn’t mean that you should stick around. Okay? Because every time you have a client that isn’t an ideal client, that client is taking up room, that you could have used time, energy, emotional energy, et cetera, that client is taking up space that an ideal client could have taken up. Right? So if you have the ability to serve five clients a month, and two of them are bad, you need to get rid of them so that you can fill those two slots with good clients. All right. Um, next, and here’s the last one. Number five unrealistic expectations. So expectations management could be, I mean, you could probably get a master’s degree in expectations management, but expectations management, when it comes to clients is really about ongoing conversation and clients will naturally balloon expectations. Okay, look, they’re paying you money. Um, for some of them, they’re paying you a lot of money for some of them, they’re paying you all of their money and you have to understand that transactions are emotional.

I don’t care if it’s a corporate CEO, who’s been in business for 40 years. Um, I’ve had those clients and I’ve had absolute beginner clients, the amount of money changes, but the level of emotional connection to money almost never does. So for the CEO, it might be $500,000 for the absolute beginner. It might be $5,000, but the emotional connection to money is still, always there. And so you have to understand that when a client comes into your world, eat, no matter what you say, they hear what they want to hear. And sometimes they create unrealistic expectations. One of the things that they do sometimes clients will do sometimes is they will bring in on related information when discussing relevant to you information, for example, they may say, look, it’s been awesome working with you. I see that we’re making this much money because of what you’re doing, or I’m getting this result because of what you’re doing.

But I’m also over here spending, you know, X amount of money, which is making it so that I can’t spend this much money on you. And they start bringing in like all of this other stuff, right? That’s outside the scope of what you’re delivering now, which is why you need to have a very good contract to make sure that scope is clear. But that is an example of a client’s expectations. Ballooning. Now you could be the service provider, coach, consultant, freelancer, whatever, who just says, okay, bye, I’m done goodbye. And just quit. Uh, that helps nobody. And if you do that, what will end up happening is that you will be affirmed in your behavior. And so you’ll repeat that behavior in the future. And, and again, as I said, eventually, you’ll start getting into a game of attrition. Um, so, uh, what will, uh, what ends up happening or what, what I would recommend that you do is to always continue to manage the expectations, say, okay, thank you for all of this information.

I’m now going to pick out what’s actually relevant to what you and I are doing, and I’m going to make it clear. Here’s the area of focus. Now, if that particular client comes back and says, well, I don’t think that. And then they start bringing in that other stuff and other stuff. Then what you have, what you need to understand is that what you have on your hands is a client who is willingly having unrealistic expectations when they willingly have unrealistic expectations, that’s when it’s time to fight or them. Okay. Um, and this would be a good time to leave them better off than they were before. Not in a condescending way, not in a rude way, not in a ha I told you way, but helping a client to understand that what they are looking for, what all of the things they’re trying to bring together, all of these extra things, all this extra, like, you know, they think that they’re going to pay you something and make a hundred thousand dollars a month and all this kind of stuff.

Uh, you informing them of what it’s actually going to take is in my opinion, um, a good thing to do if you’re going to leave for that particular reason. Okay. So that’s it, those are the five number one don’t follow. They don’t follow your recommendations, but they demand that you generate the same results. Number two, emotional instability, number three, they keep critical information from you. That’s required for delivering results. Number four, they’re not level appropriate for what they’ve hired you for. They’re not ready for you basically. Number five, they have unrealistic expectations. So that’s how that is it. My dear friends, I could probably make 50 more podcasts on this, about, uh, dealing with clients and when to fire them again, I would recommend that you consider in this time right now, um, a little bit more gratitude that you have clients and understanding that all of the issues that I’ve mentioned here, even the emotional instability, they are all manageable.

They’re all fixable and firing. The client is not the only option. Okay. It is an option that I recommend you use once all other options have been exhausted. And then lastly, don’t get into the habit of burning bridges, uh, uh, eventually behavior with, cause that that behavior has knock on effects. And I don’t mean external knock on effects where, Oh, you can’t work in that industry anymore. I mean, internally it has knock on effects. I’ve personally been a part of a lot of teams and I’ve had my own teams as well. Um, I’ve never seen, and it doesn’t mean that this is like a huge population sample, but more often than not the individuals who act in that sort of way, um, I’ve never actually seen them go on to bigger things, right? When we quit with I’m going to quit you, and I’m going to go on to bigger stuff and I’m going to quit you this way.

And I’m going to, I’m going to, you know, all the, like the YouTube videos of people filming themselves quitting and ha quitting is the best. The more you reinforce that idea, the celebrate, the breaking of a relationship to celebrate a failure. I mean, if you’ve had to fire a client, um, in some ways it’s a failure of your ability to communicate your ability to filter clients, your ability to build a business where you don’t have to fire clients, right? Um, the more you reinforce that particular idea, the more that seeps into the subconscious and manifests in a subconscious driven behaviors, things like habits, um, things like belief, systems, things like value systems and things like that. So, uh, the point that I’m trying to make is, uh, I’ve talked a lot over the years about firing clients, and I want to make sure that I give you the appropriate balance.

Um, that firing a client is a good idea when all other options have been exhausted, but to be, be the person who wants to work through those other options is significantly more fruitful financially. And for me, at least peace of mind wise. Um, and as we’ll see, uh, you know, like when I hire someone I’ll work with them for months and months and months and months, even if they’re not delivering, uh, cause I just feel like that’s, that’s a much more fruitful way to, to just be a human being. Um, anyways, so that’s in a different podcast, so that’s it. My dear friends for this one, I hope you have an awesome day and we’ll see you in the next one.

The post 5 Signs It’s Time to Fire Your Client appeared first on The No Pants Project Blog.

• In this video, we’re going to be talking about the two metrics we should be looking at in order to fix a business. Those two metrics are: 
       a. Cost Per Sale (CPS)
       b. Average Order Value / Lifetime Value (AOV/LTV)
• Let’s break this down as simply as possible. Let’s say you’re selling something for $50. When somebody buys it, your AOV and the LTV of that person is $50. That’s how much they’re worth to you forever because that’s all they’ve ever bought from you. 
• And let’s say it costs you $50 to make that $50 sale. That’s not a very successful business, is it?
• So how do we fix this business without marketing? Because marketing will only try to lower the CPS. And while that is a worthwhile effort, it is a harder way to fix the business quickly. 
• Instead, a better solution would be to add a $5,000 offer onto the back-end. Even if only 1 in 50 customers purchase it, that’s 2 percent of everybody who bought your $50 item.
• .02 x $5,000 = $100
• So if 2 percent of the people who buy the $50 thing also buy the $5,000 thing, your AOV/LTV is now $150 on average.
• This also increases your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) from zero to 3x (for every $1 we spend, we get $3 back). And that’s without changing marketing. 
• Now what if we have a $25,000 offer, and 1 in 100 people buy it?
• .01 x $25,000 = $250
• We now have an AOV/LTV of $400 and a ROAS of 8x (for every $1 we spend, we get $8 back).
• Now I know a lot of people will be afraid to offer $5,000 or $25,000 items and will try to sell something for $295 instead. OK, let’s assume that this $295 thing is so amazing and that 1 in 10 people buy it. 
• .1 x $295 = $29.50
• All this does is bring your total AOV to $79.50 and ROAS to 1.59x.Now here’s the difference:
       a. Sell $295 item: Every time we spend $1,000, we make $1,590.
       b. Sell $5,000 and $25,000 items: Every time we spend $1,000, we make $8,000.

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INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Hello, my friends will be doing well in this video. We’re going to be talking about how to fix any business specifically when you’re talking about two metrics, those metrics are the cost to make a sale. And the average order value, lifetime value of your clients and customers.

When you look at your business in these two measurements, it doesn’t matter whether you’re using paid traffic or organic or whatever, because even if you’re using organic, there’s a cost to make a sale. If you want to be paid a hundred dollars an hour, you have to factor that in to how long it’s taking you to market something. So for example, if it takes you 10 hours to get a client using some kind of whatever it is that you’re doing, and you want to be worth a hundred dollars an hour, it means it actually costs you a thousand dollars to get that client.

So there is a cost to make a sale. And then that sale is worth a certain amount of money over time. Now, let me break this down for you as simply as possible, let’s say that you are selling something for $50. Okay. It doesn’t really matter what funnel you’re using. It doesn’t matter, whatever. Let’s just for sake of example, I want to show you the math. Let’s say that you’re selling something for $50, okay? Which means when somebody buys it, your average order value and the lifetime value of that person is $50 because that’s all there is in your business. They buy that thing and that’s how much they are worth to you forever, because that’s all they’ve ever bought from you. And let’s say for whatever, whatever it is you’re doing, it’s a funnel. It’s organic, it’s affiliate, whatever it costs you $50 to make that $50 sale, let’s say, well, that’s not a very happy, successful business. Is it because you need to fulfill on the $50, you need to have a customer support. You need to pay your, this, you need to pay or that, et cetera, et cetera. So how do we

This business without marketing, because what marketing will do is marketing will come in here and it will try to lower this cost per sale to become more efficient too. Let’s see if we can get it to cost us only $40 instead of $50. And while that is a worthwhile effort, and I’m not saying to ignore that it is a harder way to fix the business quickly. Let me show you if let’s say for example, we’re selling something for $50 and people are loving it and we’re selling a lot of it, but it’s not making us any money. One of the things that we could do is we could add a $5,000 offer onto the backend for those people who have paid $50 and want the next step, whatever that next step might be. Now you may say, okay, but how many people who pay $50 are actually going pay $5,000?

Well, let’s say for example, when somebody buys your $50 thing, you then invite them to a many chat or you invite them to book a call and you really intimate, and you have these good conversations and you really do a good job selling and et cetera, et cetera. And let’s say that one in 50. Let’s see, let’s say that. Well, like I want to make this really conservative that one in 50. So 50 people buy your $50 thing. And one of them says, you know what? I actually would like that $5,000 offer let’s pull out our calculator. One in 50 is the same thing. As saying 2% of everybody who bought your $50 item is going to buy your $5,000 offer. Well, what is 2% of 5,000? Let’s do our calculations here. It’s a hundred dollars now, what does that mean? It means that on average, if, if 2% of the people who buy the $50 thing also buy the $5,000 thing.

It means that on average, our average order value or the lifetime value, meaning when somebody comes in, how much money do they on average spend, we’ve just added a hundred dollars to this math. So now this is $150. We took the business from a return on ad spend of zero, because there’s a dollar in a dollar out. You get no return to a return on ad spend of three X. Every time we spend $1, we get $3 back. Okay? Now this is hopefully sinking in, in the significance. We didn’t change our marketing. It still costs us $50 to make a $50 sale. See, this is what happens. People they get so hung up because look, marketing is very sexy. There’s lots of bright, shiny objects, and you can do all sorts of cool things. And the gurus in the marketing space are very convincing that marketing will save your business.

It probably won’t because the best you could do in your marketing is to go from $50 to $40 cost per sale. It’s not like marketing is going to take you from $50 to $1, right? The improvements are incremental. When you look at the economics and increasing your average order value and the lifetime value, meaning people are able to buy higher more stuff from you that takes you from zero to three X return on ad spend. Now let’s think of something else. What if we have a $25,000 offer and one in 100 people buy it. Okay. So we offer a 5,000 and a $25,000. Well, here’s what happens if one in 100, so you, you sell a hundred of these $50 things and only one of those people say, yeah, I would like your $25,000 offer. Watch this. So 0.01 times 25,000 gives us $250. So what do we do with that $250?

Remember, that’s the average amount that someone will spend overall? Because one out of a hundred will that $250 gets added on top of this number right here. So we actually add it here and we say $250, and we’re going to just cause we’re recording a video. We don’t want to look silly. Now we have an average order value, average lifetime value of $400. So what that means is we make $400 and we spend $50 to make it. We’ve just given our business an eight X return on ad, spend eight X return on ad spend. That means every dollar that we spend, we get $8 back. Every dollar that we spend, we get $8 back. How much marketing did we change? None. We didn’t change any of it. Look, we’re happy that it’s selling. Oh my gosh, that’s the hardest thing to do. We have this offer, maybe we’re running, paid traffic to it.

It’s 50, whatever it is that’s selling. And this is what happens. Like if you run a webinar and you’re selling a thousand dollar course, and you’re just gutted that it’s costing you $1,200 to sell a thousand dollar course tack on some of this other stuff. Cause now you spend $1,200 and you have an average order value. If I felt whatever it is, whatever your numbers come out to be, this is how you fix it. So every dollar that goes out now in this scenario, $8 comes back. Are you going to get that $8 immediately? No, it’s going to take some time to take a $50 person to a 5,000 or a $25,000 offer. And I’ll make another video this week on what do you even put in a 5,020 $5,000 offer? Why would somebody go from 50 to 5,000 to $25,000? But this is how you fix broken businesses. It’s not about making 50 new funnels. It’s not about cranking out 900 different pieces of content. It’s not about a, I need to like tweak and become the best person on Facebook ads ever. 

I will take bad Facebook ads and expensive cost to acquire customers. If that means I’m allowed to focus on this backend stuff. If I can focus on the economics, if I can focus on what else could we sell at a higher price point to increase the lifetime value, to increase on average what someone is able to spend in my company. Most people don’t even let their customers spend that much in their company. They don’t have other things for sale. Now I’m going to show you something that I know a lot of people are going to jump to. They think, Ooh, 5,000, I’m afraid 25,000. That seems like too much what I’ll do instead. And there’s running out of room here. So I apologize for this instead of what they do is they say I’ll just sell something for $295.

Okay,

Cool. Let’s run that math through. Okay. $295, let’s assume. Okay. Let’s assume that there’s $295 offers so amazing that one in 10 people buy it. So the people who were, who bought your $50 thing, let’s say one in 10 of them, buy it. Now let’s compare that to your one and 50. Um, that’s a pretty big jump in conversion rate, right? That’s a lot more people are buying this two, nine, five, five, five times more people are buying it. I can tell you from experience that is not like that’s very generous because the 5,020 $5,000 offer you’ll see in another video actually gives you a much better. Um, for the person who’s buying it, they get a much better result than two 95. And buyers tend to look at price to determine value. So if they see something for two 95, they just assume it’s not nearly as good as a $5,000.

That’s another video, but let’s just, just understand that a two nine, five selling five times better than a 5,000, that’s pretty generous, but let’s just assume that that’s what happens. So that means 10%, right? So we take that 10%. We multiply it by two 95 and that means we’ve added $29 and 50 cents to our average order value. Now, remember we were not, let’s just assume we’re not doing 5,000. We’re not doing 25,000 because this is what most people do. They they’re like I’m afraid of 5,000. I’m afraid of 25,000. So I’m just going to sell more two, nine, five. Well, all you’ve done is added 29 52, your average order value, which gives you an average order value of 79 50. Okay. So let’s figure out our return on ad spend here. So it’s 79 50. It still costs us $50. So our average return on ad spend in this scenario is 1.59 X.

Okay. Now here’s the difference? Here’s the difference in this scenario where all we have to sell is some $295 course. Every time we spend a thousand dollars, we make 1,590. Okay. Cause we didn’t do the 5,000. We didn’t do the 25,000 in the, in this case where we do the 5,020 $5,000. Every time we spend a thousand and we make eight grand, this is the difference. And this is why by understanding what you’re selling on the backend, how you’re increasing your LTV, how you’re increasing your AOV is so much more important than being really good at marketing. Because even if you’re really, really good at marketing and you make the mistake of, okay, I’m just going to tap, tap on a 295 on the back end. And that’s my whole business. What you will find is, uh, the math just doesn’t work for you. It’s going to be very difficult to scale, especially if you have, you know, costs like a Facebook ads manager and, and software and there’s refunds and their support staff.

And there’s all these different things. So this, my friends is how you fix any business. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, e-commerce coaching, whatever it is that you’re doing, this map, math matters in everything that you do. Um, and so if you have the opportunity to get into higher ticket stuff, so if 5,000, $25,000, if you can create an offer that serves someone more intimately, which we’ll talk about in another video, then you can radically change the financial outcome of your business. Okay. And if you want us in my company to help you with any of this, yes, there’s a link in the description to book a call with my team. We’d love to talk to you about how we can help you with any of this. Uh, we have our own various high ticket offers as well. And, uh, you can book a call with them totally free, no obligation where no pressure. And, uh, yeah. Anyways, hopefully this has been helpful and we’ll see you in the next video.

The post How To Quickly Fix Any Business appeared first on The No Pants Project Blog.

• Content is king, and it can help you scale your business to $100k or more per month. Today I’ll be sharing the content schedule I use in my own business. This is what I use for my clients as well.
• I should make it clear that my content strategy is not about being popular. I would rather focus on the people who will be the most receptive to my content and will therefore be the most likely to trust me enough to take the next step, whether that’s buying my high-ticket coaching program or getting them into my done-for-you. 
• Content schedule:
  • Monday – content pillar
  • Wednesday – content pillar
  • Friday – case study or client success story
• For Monday’s and Wednesday’s content, all I’m doing is thinking, “How can I help my dream client today?”
• You don’t actually have to come up with the idea yourself. Instead, go find out what people want. If you don’t have a following right now, just start putting content out there so that you can get some feedback. If you already have a client/customer base that you can approach, simply ask them what they want. 
• There’s not really a formula in creating this content other than sitting down and helping as much as you can. This is something that you’ll get better at over time with practice. And when you do your best to help people, they will receive that sincerity and listen to you.
• We distribute our content to anywhere we can put it for free (email list, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.). That consistency and frequency is what slowly chips away at people’s doubt. 
• Now how do you produce all of this content without losing your mind? Every 2 weeks, I will dedicate an afternoon (about 2-3 hours) to sit down and create content in a batch. I usually do it on a Friday when things have calmed down. I will then have my VA or another team member take care of the distribution. 
• Every single piece of content you create should have a call to action, whether that’s to book a call or join an email list. A big mistake that I see a lot of people making is that they never invite their audience to do the next thing. 

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2. 15 Ways To Double Profits During Hard Economic Times Report
   Need a few tips to help you through the hard times? Download this 40+ guide and I’ll show you what I do to help businesses thrive during even down turns.
3. Download ‘The Anti-Commodity Formula’ Workbook!
   Learn how to attract your ideal clients and customers, charge more than your competition, and build a business from a home that you love.

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Hello, my dear friend, hope you’re doing well. This is a video where we’re going to be talking about how to create content for a business, wanting to scale to $100,000 or more per month. Okay. So we’ll, we’ll call this the seven figure content creation secrets. This is what I do in my own business, and this is what I do to help my clients as well. Now there’s something very, very important to understand here. My content strategy is not about being popular. I could care less how popular I am. I am instead looking to laser focus, my content to the people who will be most receptive to it. And for whom it will be, uh, it will have the maximum efficiency in converting them into, uh, somebody who trusts me enough for them to take the next step, whether that’s buying my high ticket coaching program or whether that’s getting them into my done for you.

That’s my approach. So if you’re looking for pumping your numbers and having huge followers on whatever, that’s not really what this is about. This is minimum input for maximum output. So we’ll talk about schedule, what to post, et cetera. Let’s go ahead and get into it. So as you can see here, I’ve written out Monday, Wednesday, Friday. That’s when we do our content distribution and the content type that we distribute is on Monday content, pillar, Wednesday content, pillar, Friday case study, or a client success story Monday and Wednesday contents. Very simple. All I’m doing is I’m thinking about how can I help my dream client today? What can I create content wise that will help them in a profound way to have a breakthrough. Now, one of the big mistakes, a lot of content creators make is they think that they have to come up with that idea themselves.

And the answer is they don’t. Instead, your job as content creator in your business is not to guess what people want, but to go find out. Now, if you don’t have any following right now in zero distribution channels, but you’ve been able to build your business to, you know, 15, $20,000 a month, just by sheer effort and organic referrals and things, then what you need to do is you need to start just creating content, putting it out there, distributing it to a Facebook page, a LinkedIn, whatever you have set up in your business so that you can start getting some feedback of some kind, some kind of put a piece of content out there. Somebody asks a question and that spurs the idea for the next step. If however, you have a base of core clients, customers that you can approach to ask, let me show you what can happen.

So here’s my coaching program. So this is called the Peaceful Profits. It’s our No Pants Project Coaching Program. We have 839 high ticket clients in this particular program right now. And I just ask them what they want, right? My job isn’t come up with the idea as my job is to research and be a detective and say, what do you need to hear to help you get what you want? And I ask them and you can see here, 36 different comments, 36 different ideas that helped me to spur even more ideas and et cetera, et cetera. And you can see we’re only distributing two ideas a week. So 36 ideas is a lot, right? That’ll get us plenty. Uh, for the next couple of months in the content that we’re creating. Now, a quick note on creating this content. There’s not really a formula except to sit down and help as much as you can.

And to keep it around 10 minutes or less, if you’re doing video or a podcast, attention spans, aren’t really that long. And you want to make sure they get a good golden nugget and then go away. So that’s pretty much how you create that content. This is something that, uh, I think you just practice and you get better at over time and you do your best to help people and people will receive that sincerity. And because of that, uh, that sincerity you will be listened to. I mean, I think that really is the secret of how to get listened to, there’s not like some secret formula or anything like that. It’s just be honest and be sincere and sincerely trying to help people, okay. Said sincere about 50 times. So let’s move on. Uh, the net, the last on Friday, what we do is we send out a case study.

The case study specifically is a result that we have gotten for a client. And that’s pretty much it very simple. Now let’s talk about where we distribute this and how we distribute it for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we distribute this everywhere. We send it to our email list. We send it to our LinkedIn. We send it to Facebook. We send it to anywhere that we can take this content and put it for free. We will do that. And we do that week after week, month after month. And that consistency and frequency is what this is going to sound bad, but really it’s what chips away at people who are following you. If they come into your world and they have huge doubt, this consistency of man every week, you know, every week she’s sending me something helpful twice a week and every week I’m seeing success story after success story.

Now, what do you do if you don’t have success stories, just replace it for now with a content pillar until you can start regularly developing success stories to send every Friday. Okay. Now let’s talk about something that’s really, really important. How do you produce all of this? How do you create all of this without losing your mind? Three hefty pieces of content a week? That sounds like a lot of work. Well for me, I block it all up. So I’ll show you exactly what I’m talking about here. Okay. So I’ve done an absolutely horrible job of drawing a content calendar, but this is the main idea. What I like to do is every two weeks I will dedicate an afternoon. That’s all it takes is about an afternoon to sit down and create this content in a batch. Okay? So remember we need Monday, Wednesday, Friday content.

So every two weeks I have a Monday, Wednesday, Monday, Wednesday content pillar. So I have to create four content pillars. And then I’ve got Friday, Friday, I have to case studies content pillars. Remember they’re simply six to 10 minute videos. And this typically, I like to do just an email or just an interview. So this either takes about an hour to get the interview or about 30, 45 minutes to write the email where I break down what we did for them, where they were, blah, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera. But these only take six to 10 minutes. So you’re looking at a maximum of 40 minutes for the total amount of time that your content should be running for, if that makes sense. So 10 minute videos, but 10 minutes, I like to do a three X on how long it will take me to create that 10 minute thing.

So for example, if I know that it’s 40 minutes worth of content, I’ll probably be spending 120 minutes to create that 40 minutes. As you can see here, that the way that I’ve created this as I, I just have like this little stylist thing, it’s like a wacko, w a C O M pen thing. I don’t know if you guys can see that. I just write it on here. And you know, it, it is what it is. You don’t have to go overly produced these days, as long as you’re sincerely helping people. If you want to do a, I don’t know where my phone is, but if you want to do a podcast, you can use something called anchor.fm, literally record the podcast on your phone, distributed on your phone. If you’re writing your blog posts, et cetera, et cetera. So you shouldn’t be spending, you know, hours and hours to create this content.

Instead, you should be sincerely answering questions that people have as best as you possibly can bring your expertise to the table. So it shouldn’t take you more than three times as long as the content pieces. Here’s what I do. I just write it all down. As you can see here, uh, what the, uh, what I’m going to be covering in the video, just as a general rough outline. And I let the ideas come to me whenever they come to me. So, you know, it might not still be in the work session. I might have an idea three days before my work session, jot it down. And then, you know, I know I’m going to show up and start making content. So that’s how I get the content pillars done. And then for the case studies again, I can do the interviews actually at this particular point in my business, I have a member of my team doing the interviews.

So I don’t even have to do that anymore. But what I’ll do is I will say, okay, let’s say week one, we got to get content done. I will choose one of my dedicated work. Uh, I call them peaceful times rice, uh, where I block off an entire, let’s say afternoon, let’s say this afternoon here, uh, for content creation. And then I’ll block off this entire afternoon for content creation. Then I will do that on a Friday. I like to do it on a Friday because things have calmed down. I’m not trying to create it on a Monday or a Tuesday where things are really crazy, you know, cause everyone’s coming back from the weekend, the team’s coming back from the weekend, things like that. And then I will, uh, have either my assistant or, or someone else on the team just set all this stuff up and distributed.

I don’t need to be spending time posting stuff on LinkedIn and posting stuff on this. And like, that’s definitely a virtual assistant task. So all I do is I create it. I write up the little blurbs, whatever needs to be done. I finished that in one afternoon of two, three hours, maybe, uh, in an afternoon. And uh, and then we go from there and that’s how you can get a month’s worth of content done in two afternoons. None of this is rocket science. You probably already knew a lot of it, but hopefully this has served as a really good reminder that this is, this actually is all that it takes. If you can consistently maintain that this schedule, what you develop is momentum. What happens is people who are watching you from afar, who are following you on your social media channels, but never comment who have heard about you and are lurking you in the background.

This consistent content schedule will chip away slowly, their doubt and skepticism. And they will begin to see you as an advocate for them, which is what you should be. If you’re going to be in business, you’re going to be a coach or service provider freelance or anything like that. You need to be an advocate for the people that you serve this content will do. So it’s very simple to create very quick to create. Um, and it’s, it’s really the consistency and the frequency and your sincere desire to help people that gets you, that momentum. Now, uh, every single piece of content that you create should have a call to action. That call to action should be whatever you want them to do. Whatever the next step is in your business. Whether it’s book a call, watch a video, join an email list, whatever it is, every single piece of content, your content pillars, and your case studies should move someone to the next step.

That’s a big mistake. I see a lot of people making, they create beautiful content, and then they never invite someone to do the next thing. It’s your job to move the person to the next step. And with that said, here comes my call to action. If you would like to watch an hour long video where I break down the four stages of what it takes to scale a business, $200,000 a month or more go ahead and click learn more on this video, somewhere around here. That should be a learn more, or there should be a link somewhere that you can click depending on where this video is distributed. If you’re watching as a Facebook ad, there’ll be a learn more button. If you’re watching this as a YouTube video or on our social media, there’ll be a link somewhere, uh, to watch that hour long training video on what it takes a scale to a hundred thousand dollars or more. And then additionally, uh, you can have a chat with our team to determine what your next step should be if your desire is to scale as well. Uh, because every business comes in at a different point and figuring out where you’re at and where you need to go. We’d love to have that chat with you completely free, no obligation, just follow the link or click, learn more. And we can have that call set up for you.

That’s it, my friends. Hopefully this was helpful. And I’ll see you in the next one.

The post This Content Schedule Grew My Biz To $100k+/month appeared first on The No Pants Project Blog.

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SUMMARY

• In this episode of The No Pants Show, we’re going to talk about how to get through any crisis. I think it’s timely because we’re currently in the middle of a pandemic.
• Now this will sound horrible and arrogant, but while the pandemic is awful and the consequences are very real, this is not the first time that human beings have experienced a crisis. This is not to downplay what’s going on here, but we’ve been through worse, and that should be good news for us. You’ve survived crises before. You’re going to be fine because you’re hardwired to get through this. The ability to survive is already inside of you. I’m just going to give you a few tips to better pull it out.
• Tip #1: Create Distance
  It’s not a good idea to hit refresh on Facebook News every 10 minutes for the latest headline on the coronavirus. I’m not suggesting you stop seeking information, but scaling it back might be a better approach to minimizing unregulated emotion, which is the most dangerous thing in crises.
• In aviation, they teach you that the riskiest part in an emergency isn’t the mechanical failures; it’s the welling of emotions (fear, anger) that clouds your ability to make good judgment. 
• Some ways to create distance are: removing yourself physically from the environment, not being on social media, not checking your business stats every couple of minutes, practicing meditation (emotional distancing), and separating your identity from the crisis. 
• Tip #2: Journal Accurately
  Distancing ourselves allows us to see accurately. Now we need to start recording accurately. When you’re not recording what’s actually happening during a crisis, you will have an inaccurate image of what’s going on. And dealing with a crisis with an inaccurate image will very likely lead to you making the wrong decision.
• When I journal I try to get as granular and accurate as possible. As I’m doing that, I’m still in distance mode so I can remain objective. There will always be some level of emotion, but we want to try our best to be as accurate as possible. We ask ourselves, “What exactly is happening right now? What did we try? What are we doing?” And then, “What is the real problem? What is the real solution?”
• Tip #3: Identify Gaps
  Most general aviation accidents are caused by what’s called pilot error. Almost never did these crises appear all of a sudden from nowhere; rather, they’re the result of the pilot making a series of bad decisions over time. The same is true in business. You don’t have a business and then suddenly not have a business, unless you’ve done something illegal. 
• Tip #4: Get Help
  Get help with creating distance. Have somebody else take a dispassionate look at your business to help you understand what’s going on and come up with a possible solution. Have someone make sure you never make the same mistakes again. 
• Navigating a crisis is certainly manageable when following these steps. Ultimately, you’ll have the ability to prevent future similar crises. The good thing about a crisis is that you’ll remember it once you solve it.

HOT NEWS & DEALS

1. Free Training! How I Scaled To $100k/Month+
   For anyone serious about scaling their service business, this training will cover the 4 Stages To 7-Figure Growth. Perfect for the coach, consultant, or freelancer stuck in a hamster wheel business who wants to grow and scale.
2. 15 Ways To Double Profits During Hard Economic Times Report
   Need a few tips to help you through the hard times? Download this 40+ guide and I’ll show you what I do to help businesses thrive during even down turns.
3. Download ‘The Anti-Commodity Formula’ Workbook!
   Learn how to attract your ideal clients and customers, charge more than your competition, and build a business from a home that you love.

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Hello, my dear friends. I hope that you are doing well. I got to say, I am happy to be back doing these podcasts. I have missed sharing this stuff with you. Um, so I’m really, really happy to be back. Uh, one of the things that we’re gonna talk about today is how to get through, um, any crisis. Now, I think it’s timely because we’re in the middle of this pandemic. We are, um, I would say still in the early stages, but certainly going through, uh, what is going to be some very difficult economic times. I think something that a lot of people haven’t even talked about is the knock on effects, the butterfly effect of these things that are happening, right. We’re, we’re still sort of in first order consequences level, there’s going to be second and third order consequences beyond all of this. So we’re definitely in a crisis.

Okay. Now I’m going to say something that will sound horrible and arrogant, but I hope that it will reassure you about what I’m going to tell you. So the pandemic is horrible. It’s awful. The consequences are very real. Um, businesses. Some of my friends, businesses are just have just been decimated. People are losing their jobs. Um, they’re losing what they’ve worked their whole life for. Um, people are dying. Obviously lots of people are dying. Uh, even the people who aren’t dying are walking away with permanent damage, um, to their heart, to their lungs. Uh, even the people who don’t have permit damage and they just get really sick. It’s pretty awful. Uh, you don’t have to look very far to just hear the actual unbiased firsthand accounts of people who’ve actually gotten sick. And it sounds pretty, pretty bad with all that said, um, this is not the first time that human beings have been through a crisis.

I would, and this is not to downplay what’s going on here, but this isn’t even close to the worst crisis that we’ve ever had. I mean, not even close, which should be good news for us because human beings have survived crisis after crisis. And if I can be Frank with you, you yourself have also survived crises before. This is hardly the first time you’ve ever been stressed. This is hardly the first time you’ve ever been afraid. This is hardly the first time you’ve had some negative consequence, uh, placed upon you by an external force, meaning something outside of your control happened. And now you have to deal with the consequences. I can tell you for myself, I grew up in crisis mode. I’ll spare you the details. But one example, we moved every six months, 28 times, by the time I was 18, that’s not a crisis free environment.

You don’t move that often. Cause things are great as a business owner. And those of you who are listening to this who are business owners, you know, that crisis, especially when you start getting into scale is kind of par for the course. There’s all sorts of studies that say, um, things like a divorce or things like getting laid off from your job or things like moving like these very, um, uh, high crisis, high stress events, um, you know, they have longterm knock on effects and things like that. Um, but there’s also evidence that, uh, business owners go through maybe even per year, one or two of those events. And let me give you an example. Um, the person who loses their job, uh, probably feels the same way, uh, that a business owner feels when they have $80,000 in payroll, they have to pay in one week and they have $5,000 in the bank account.

That’s probably the same stress level, right? Uh, so anyway, the point that I’m making is, uh, the first step in getting through a crisis is to understand that even though it feels like it, this is not the first crisis that you’ve gotten through. Okay. Um, also it’s probably not the last crisis you will go through. Every generation has multiple crises that face that generation. Um, there’s nothing unique or new about human beings going through hard things. Now at first that might feel discouraging to you. I would recommend that you spend some time pondering and meditating that idea, because what it really means is that you come hardwired to get through this, even without the tips and tricks that I’ll tell you here, okay, I could just end this and say, you’re going to be fine because you’re programmed to be fine. And for many of you that would click the light bulb on that you are going to be okay.

Um, no matter how bad it gets, okay. Even if the worst happens to you, you’ll be okay because you are programmed to be okay. All right. So that’s the first thing that you have to understand is that this is already inside of you. I’m just going to give you a few tips to better pull it out. And in order to survive through this crisis and when the pandemic is over, hopefully you will continue to live your life by these general rules. Because if you’re a business owner, I’m like my wife and I were talking the other day, a lot of our friends that don’t own a business are starting to sound like my wife and I, um, you know, we’ve been through a couple of financial crises because of B being a business owner. I mean, I don’t think I talk about it too much, but I’ve had some pretty big business failures in the past. Um, and so, you know, the uncertainty of how are we going to hit payroll? Are we going to be able to pay our rent? Things like that, that happens sometimes even when you have an amazing year, sometimes that does happen. Um, so again, if you’re in business, D being able to deal with crisis is a skill that you need to develop because there will be many more over the course of your career. Okay? So here’s four things that I do when I feel a crisis coming on. The first one is that I create distance.

It’s not a good idea to hit refresh on Facebook news every 10 minutes for the absolute latest headline about the Corona virus that I’m just going to put it bluntly. That’s not a good strategy for dealing with a crisis. Now I need to make a huge disclaimer here. Um, I’m not suggesting that you stop seeking information and updates about what’s going on, but maybe scale it back to checking once in the morning and checking once in the afternoon or scaling to checking once a day or scaling to checking once every other day, that might be a better approach to minimizing the most dangerous thing in crisis, which is on regulated emotion. Let me give you an example. So you may know that I am in aviation. I love aviation. It is my passion. I am so sad for all of the aviators who, whose jobs are at risk.

There’s going to be furloughs. Aviation industry is just being gutted right now by everything that’s going on. I love aviation and being able to see the world and travel, and I love flying planes, and I love everything about planes. One of the things that they teach you is that when things get bad, when an emergency happens, the riskiest part of dealing with that emergency, isn’t the mechanical failures. It isn’t the airplane structure. It isn’t, it’s not those factors. It’s the welling of emotion of fear. Um, in some cases of anger, uh, it’s that welling of emotion that clouds your ability to accurately translate what’s going on around you, and then makes difficult the ability to take that translation and make a decision for the positive. Okay. In other words, that’s a long winded way of saying if solely, okay. You know, the miracle on the Hudson, if solely had begun to focus too much on all of the things that were going wrong and had a well of, uh, unregulated fear, unregulated fear, not that he didn’t have fear, it’s not that you have to be unafraid when a crisis is happening. It’s when the fear is unregulated. When it is out of control, when it is all consuming. If that had been the case, that certainly would not have been a miracle on Hudson. He had options to go to different airports. Um, and even during the investigation, there was some doubt as to whether he could have made those airports and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, the point being on regulated emotion, clouds, your ability to make good judgment.

And so step one of dealing with a crisis is to get that on lock. In, in other words, to minimize the unregulated aspect of emotion, you’re never going to get rid of emotion. There’s no point in even trying to get rid of emotion. That’s like trying to get rid of breathing and thinking you’re still going to be a human being. And fear is sometimes a good thing to have. The video keeps, you know, it keeps people in between the lines when they’re drive that they’re afraid of, of crashing and things like that. Is there, there are, there are positive aspects to it, but one of the fastest ways to have emotion take over is to constantly poke at the fire in this case, if you’re afraid of what’s going on with the pandemic, one of the worst things you can do is check every five minutes about what’s going on with the pandemic, especially reading these headlines, reading the misinformation, reading the talking head, that’s just trying to get airtime.

And I mean, there are a lot of triggers for increasing fear and actively pursuing the inputs of all those fears will lead to clouded judgment. And that’s never a good thing to have in a crisis. So there’s a couple of ways to create distance. One of them is your physical environment. So for example, in where my office is, um, w it’s a, it’s an area that, I mean, I’ll just say it. They don’t believe that the coronavirus Israel, I don’t know why they don’t believe Israel. And so in the office building, nobody was wearing a mask. Nobody was wearing a mask, nobody was social distancing, nobody was doing any of this stuff. And I went to the office, um, because I really it’s like really important to me lately that I keep my business separate from, uh, my family. Um, and there was things that I have to do at my office, uh, once or twice a week.

So I was going to my office once or twice a week. I was doing my, where my mask doing. The whole thing was wearing gloves, all that kind of good stuff. Well, wouldn’t, you know, nobody’s social distancing, nobody’s wearing masks. And, uh, they, um, the building sent us an email and said, well, we’ve had an, uh, coronavirus outbreak. And two people from the office building are now hospitalized. And it turns out the two people who were hospitalized were like three or four doors down from my office. Now here’s a good example of, okay, I’m not going to the office anymore. If I kept going to the office, guess what? I’m gonna be constantly worried and et cetera, et cetera. Now this, and I have to understand this didn’t just happen. This happened in March. Okay. Like when all this stuff was first happening and people weren’t sure what it was and all that kind of good stuff.

So that’s, that’s one example of removing yourself and of the environment. So that’s a physical example when you’re dealing with a crisis. The other example is just not being on social media, not being with people who are constantly freaking out all the time, not being with people who are et cetera. Okay. Now that’s talking about the Corona virus, but what about a crisis in your business? Well, I’ve been working with a lot of, uh, no pants, project clients who tend to be not like my normal freelancing clients. So when I normally fast with clients, they have to be making at least a half a million dollars a year. They have to have a whole host of et cetera, et cetera, with no pants, project clients. They’re typically more in the earlier stages of their business. One of the things that I noticed is the clients who have the most anxiety, uh, about what’s going on, um, are the clients who check their stats the most often.

Okay. And that’s not a dig on any, on dig on the clients or anything. Um, that’s, uh, the sign of an earlier businessperson, meaning the longer you stay in business, the more, you know, checking your stats every couple of hours is it’s, it’s a great way to trigger her, um, that it, that unregulated emotion. Okay. Checking your Facebook ad comments every couple of minutes, great way to feel horrible about everything that’s going on. Um, so that’s another way of changing your environment is what are you doing right now on the computer or on your phone that is probably stoking the fire of unregulated emotion and how can you change that environment in which it might be a digital environment, but it’s still an environment when I’m in financial problems. Right? Cause I’m scaling my business. Right? So one of the big things we got to worry about is cashflow.

One of the things that I’m not going to do is refresh my bank account every five minutes or every day, even because what what’s that going to do? It’s just going to keep, it’s like flashing. The things are bad, sign. Things are bad. Things are bad. It’s like just keep reaffirming that things are bad instead of spending that time, doing something, building something, making something better. Okay. Solving the problem. Okay. So that’s one way to create distance between me and the crisis. Uh, and don’t worry that this is the whole, my whole thing is we’re only on one of four. So people are like, wait. So you’re, you’re a solution for dealing with crises is just to like ignore it. No, no, no, no. Create some distance from it. Okay. Stop, you know, uh, generating unregulated emotion. Um, and then of course there’s emotional distance.

So meditation, in other words, what we’re trying to do is lower the volume of the monkey mind, sort of the random thoughts we’re trying to lower that volume so we can look up objectively at what’s going on. And then here’s an important one. I think a lot of people don’t think about when they’re dealing with business crisis. And it’s interesting because I’m seeing it pop up when people are trying to deal with a pandemic crisis and it is separating your identity from the crisis. So for example, if your business is failing right now, one of the worst things you can do is say, I suck because my business is failing.

That is, that is a great way to turn something objective, which is your business into something emotional, which is you. Like you are not your business. I know it’s a Western thing that when somebody says, what do you do for your living? What do you do for a living? And you answer a, as I am like you, you answer as an identity answer. So what you do for a living, I am a writer. It’s a very Western thing to internalize what we do and say, this is who I am, but it’s not who you are.

It isn’t what you’re, your business is a way to make money. It’s a way for you to add value to the world. When you’re in the middle of a crisis, you need to be really clear that those are two separate things. Otherwise you will internalize everything in very negative ways which creates negative, unregulated emotion. And then you’re in trouble. Again, you don’t have the ability to think clearly to make correct decisions. And it’s very interesting to me right now, watching again, civilians non-business people who don’t go through this sort of personal development process and examining themselves and looking, you know, and having these challenges and dealing with them for a lot of people who are going through this, really for a lot of people, this is their first crisis in like a major way. Um, and I don’t mean, uh, uh, like for a business owner, big crisises or kind of like the thing.

And, um, but for a lot of people, this is like a really big crisis and like more than they probably ever dealt with. Um, it’s interesting to see people turning it into almost identity politics. The human need to turn something into this is about me in some way. When in reality, what is happening in the pandemic is that there was a virus and the virus is acting in a way that a virus acts period, full stop. There’s nothing about you in that thing. And yet people have really worked very hard, all sorts of mental gymnastics to turn it into a, a statement of themselves. Um, and I think that’s very dangerous when dealing with a crisis, because for a couple of reasons, one, obviously it increases the unregulated emotion, but whether it’s pandemic or we’re talking about business, if you believe that the crisis is a statement of who you are as a person, it limits your ability to choose because you are limiting what you are able to, uh, view as an acceptable choice based off of how you view yourself as an identity.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say that your business is in crisis. Okay. And you are, um, you’re not separating your identity from your business and you view yourself as a very kind person. Okay? You view yourself as a very kind, like that’s a value that you espouse that you hold dear to yourself. And let’s say that the crisis that your business is in is that you have no more money and half of your clients owe you money. Now, when you’re in a crisis and you are unable to separate identity from the crisis itself, you’re going to be limited in what you can do to collect that money, because you believe that you or your, your, um, how you identify as a kind person is regulating what you should do in that scenario. Now I can already hear some of you saying, Oh yeah. Well, if I was in that scenario, I, I do think kindness is important and et cetera, et cetera. And, and I agree with you, but if there’s a contract where the client owes you money and by them not paying you’re now almost, you know, you’re going to be not able to pay your rent. The belief that your kindness is more important than being able to pay your rent is why you’re in the crisis.

Whereas by separating your identity from the business, you can still collect in a kind way. I’m not saying that you have to forego your values. What I’m saying is the danger is when you completely dismiss collection, because you feel incorrectly that, well, let me put it this way, because your judgment is being impaired by an identity that you believe in about yourself. So what we’re talking about here is separating ourselves from the crisis, not to become detached, not to give us ethical wiggle room to do something we normally wouldn’t do, but to make sure that our decisions during a crisis are not unnecessarily clouded by aversion of unregulated emotion. Let me give you another example. And I know this might be difficult because very few people are in this have ever been in a crisis, right? So it’s hard. Sometimes I know there’s a couple of no pants.

People who are listening to this are totally getting it. Like, I know for example, um, there’s somebody who works in emergency services services, and she’s probably like, yeah, I totally get what you’re saying. Those of you who don’t normally deal with crises, or haven’t ever dealt with crises, this might be a really foreign concept to you. But when I fought fire, I loved my firefighting brothers and sisters loved them. The, I think about them often. And this was like 15 years ago that I was a firefighter. Right. And I still think about them all the time. One of the things that you’re taught is that when it’s time to go put all the niceties aside, because it’s time to go. In other words, there were moments where these brothers and sisters that I love as a firefighter, we’re in polite society, complete a holes because something needed to happen.

In other words, we were in a situation in a scenario, in a crisis in which please, and thank you, had no relevance to getting the command out to the right people as clearly as possible and as timely as possible, that is proper. And everyone involved, it’s not like afterwards, we were all like, why did you yell at me? Why did you say it that way? That was so unkind of you. There was none of that kind of conversation afterwards, because we all knew in that moment that we were in crisis mode and we all instantly separated our identity, separated our, um, feelings, our emotions to get through the crisis alive. I mean, I, I specifically remember being completely manhandled during one fire. I remember somebody grabbing my pack. Uh, this was when we were in Alaska and literally like, just chucking me. Cause, uh, the, my very first fire, I was only 19 or something, 18, 19.

So I was still only like a buck, 40, a buck, 50 and weight, and just chucking me and just be, and you know, th that this is what I’m talking about. Okay. I’m not talking about stop being a good person. I’m saying in crisis mode, you need to be able to do what needs to be done. And the only way to do that is to be able to separate to cause separation so that you can deal with the crisis at hand. All right. So number two, so you create distance so that you can actually solve the problem. You need to be able to see the problem from the distance. You need to be able to not be clouded by emotional judgment. You need to be cool-headed and you need to be able to, um, see things for what they are. Number two is journal accurately.

Okay? So we’ve distanced ourselves so that we can see accurately. Now we need to start recording accurately. I can’t tell you how many times I work with someone I’m recording, what’s going on. So I’ve, you know, when I work with someone, I record everything. How many emails did they send out to their email list? How much are we spending on ads? Um, what’s the click through rate? What’s the sales conversion rate. What’s this how for dollar in what’s a dollar. I was like, I measure things like a crazy person, because accuracy is important. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked with someone and they say, Oh, my business isn’t working. Or, Oh, this isn’t a D I want to make more money or whatever. And they haven’t been tracking anything. And when I show them the accurate reporting of what has been happening, it’s like they’re seeing their business for the first time.

They’re thinking, Oh my gosh, like, I didn’t realize that this is what was going on. I didn’t realize that things were this good. I didn’t realize that. So when you’re in crisis, if you’re not recording, what’s actually happening. You will have an accurate image of what’s actually happening. And when you’re trying to deal with that crisis with an inaccurate image of what’s going on, you will to an almost 100% degree of certainty make the wrong decision. Okay. So here’s what I do. I journal always journal love journaling. The idea here is to journal accurately, not to have a diary entry, but to record what’s going on. I ask what’s happening. Okay. So sometimes I’ll call the state of the union, um, journal entries. I will say something like I have $5,627 in the bank account. I owe $47,500 in payroll over the next week and a half.

Okay. We have tried four funnels. None of them are working because funnel a, we spent this much, we made this much, we tried this and this and this funnel be dah, dah, dah, dah. And I will try to get as granular and accurate as possible. Now, as I’m doing that, I’m not, I’m still in that distance mode. So I’m not sitting there in the journal and being like, and we tried this. And, and so and so on the team, didn’t do a good job. And I’m so mad at him. And I’m just gonna, I can’t believe this. How could that all, all of a sudden, we’ve lost clarity. The second you start to let that happen, you’ve lost clarity. You can’t be remain objective. Your, all the stuff we talked about in number one. So we are accurately as accurate as possible. There will always be some level of emotion, which means there’ll be some level of inaccuracy, but we’re trying our very best to be as accurate as possible to record what exactly is happening right now. What did we try? What are we doing? What is the state of the union as to where we are right now? Then we ask ourselves, what is the real problem? What is the real problem?

When you really start to ponder what the real problem is, you can begin to come up with real solutions, example, $5,000 in the bank account and 40 whatever I said earlier, $50,000 of payroll due in the next two weeks. What is the real problem is the real problem that you don’t have $45,000. Because if that is the real problem, then all you need to do is go get a loan, borrow it from somewhere, run a promotion, do something to come up with the money. If the real problem, however, is that you have $5,000 and owe $50,000 in payroll because your payroll is too high.

That’s a very different problem. I mean, you still might need to come up with the money and et cetera, et cetera, but to prevent the crisis from continuing on to prevent you from being in that spot again in 30 days now is the time to address the real problem. If the problem is that last month, you didn’t really sell anything. And so of course you don’t have any money. So for example, one of the things I like to do is I like to set a goal for myself. How many times I promote something to an email list. If I see that I have $5,000 in my bank account and $50,000 that I own the next two weeks, I go back and I look at the accurate tracking, how many emails did I send to my email list? And how many of those were selling something?

And what was it that I sold? And how did those, how did that, how did that go? How did it, you know, was it a good sale? Was it a bad sale? Was it above, below normal? What price point where we selling it at? Because we’re looking for the real problem, the real reason that we’re in this crisis now, as it relates to the pandemic, I’m not qualified to identify what the real problem is, but it seems to me that most people aren’t really thinking about the real problem, right? I know that there are very smart people who are, and I’m very grateful for those very smart people. But I would say the general public seems to be worried about other stuff, right. Which is what we do. Sometimes when we’re looking at our business, we look at all the other problems except for the real one.

So for example, you’re trying to get clients and it’s not working and you’re running out of money and you’re thinking this freelancing thing doesn’t work, or you’re thinking this business thing doesn’t work, or you’re thinking, you know, none of this stuff that I’ve tried works. How many cold emails did you send last week? How about last month? How many times did you get on the phone? How many times did you invite someone to get on the phone? Maybe the problem isn’t that none of this stuff works. Maybe the problem is that it, you’re not working any of this stuff.

And that’s, I’m not trying to like, make anybody feel bad. I’m saying those are the wonderfully precious things that you can discover when you journal accurately ask what’s happening and then ask, what is the real problem? Then obviously the next answer is what is the real solution? Like what is the actual real solution to the problem that you have now? This is where outside help is helpful because, you know, nine times out of 10, um, the solution that you’re looking for to the problem you have, has already been discovered by someone else. I heard someone say something which is both a positive and a negative of coaching. Um, they said most coaches are simply selling you the solution they found to their problem. So connect with somebody who had the similar problem to you and their solution will probably work. That’s that that’s, you know, that’s the good side of it.

The negative side is that coaches sometimes try to sell their solution to somebody else’s problem that their solution didn’t actually solve, but that’s a whole nother podcast for a whole nother time. Um, so the real solution, I would say, oftentimes in a crisis is very rarely the first solution that comes to mind, right? So if you’re in a business crisis and your down money or a client’s really upset or et cetera, et cetera, that gut reaction that you think the solution is to a particular problem. Um, I would say it’s very rarely the best solution. Um, and it’s probably even more rarely the real solution, right? So a lot of people might say, okay, I didn’t have a very good month last night, sorry, a month last month. And my numbers are down by quite a bit. And I need a better month because cashflow is getting tight. Well, let’s say they’re using cold email to get clients just cause it’s an easy, straightforward. You send some emails out, you get a client, okay. Let’s say, that’s what they’re doing. Well, oftentimes what will happen is they’ll say, ah, okay, I’ve identified accurately what’s happening. I didn’t send that many cold emails out. So that’s the problem. And they may be correct, but then they say the solution is what I need to do is just work harder. Ah,

That’s probably,

Probably not the actual solution because you’ve probably actually tried that already a better solution. The real solution might actually be to hire someone else to do the cold outreach email for you to hire a virtual assistant, to hire a team, whatever it is. Um, and, and, and that’s, you know, that goes back to decision making that goes back to strategy and we can have a whole conversation on, uh, the identification of real solutions, but that is one of the things you have to do in a crisis is to make sure that you are, um, you know, I mean, I’m, I’m really not, I know it’s so weird that all of this pandemic stuff has been so politicized, but for example, um, you look at the United States and how we’ve handled the pandemic versus other countries and their strategies. Um, and you can see that, uh, I won’t, I won’t make any decisions, but there have been a variety of solutions that, uh, in each of the countries, in each of the States, the people who have been in charge have thought were the best, um, the best solutions for their constituents, their constituents, right.

Um, and you can see that they’ve all had, uh, different results, which is to say that some solutions were actually better than others. How’s that for a political answer, may man, maybe I should run for politics. I think that’s about as neutral of a, of an analysis of what’s going on as I’ve ever heard anyways. Um, two of my own horn here about being a neutral. Um, so the, the point that I’m making though is that’s a really good example of in a crisis. There actually are right answers, right? Um, there are answers that are better than others, and that’s important. I think when you’re a business owner, because sometimes you can fall into the trap of thinking that any answer is better than no answer. And then what happens is you can waste time, resources, energy, money on an answer that actually was significantly worse.

That ends up making you worse off in the long run. So for example, let’s say that you have cash flow issues. So you develop this mega offer and you throw that mega offer out to your audience and your audience eats it up. And now you have to deliver on that mega offer. And that mega offer turns out to be way worse to deliver than you had anticipated at being that would be an example of while. Yes, technically it was an answer to your cashflow problem. Now you’re miserable in delivering it. And so you’re actually worse off in the long run because now maybe you’re back into cashflow issues because you don’t even want to do that offer anymore, but now you got delivered, et cetera. Okay. So, um, create distance journal accurately now identify gaps. Okay. So this is part of the solution process, but even more specifically when you’re in crisis mode, um, most crises are arrived at because of a stream of previous failures that led to the moment you’re in now.

Okay. So let’s think about this in terms of aviation, most aviation accidents, um, that are pilot error, or even a lot of mechanical accidents, but let’s say for general aviation, um, a big portion of general aviation accidents are caused by what’s called pilot error, which is to say the pilot made bad decisions during crisis and crashed the airplane. Now, what is interesting when you study these pilot error, uh, case studies is that almost never did the crisis. All of a sudden appear from nowhere. In other words, the crisis slowly bell, uh, built by the pilot, making a series of small, incorrect decisions or small errors, which then eventually compiled into the plane, being in a position where the pilot could not recover it or, uh, do what he needed to do to correct the mistakes that he had made. The same is absolutely true in business.

You don’t have a business and then all of a sudden have no business unless you’ve done something illegal and the whoever comes and gets ya comes and gets ya right now, say, for example, you are running a business and things are going along well. And then all of a sudden you’re out of money. Well, that happened because six weeks ago, seven weeks ago, you started to slow down your prospecting or, you know, you started to slow down your prospecting cause you didn’t have enough time or your promotion that you were running started to fatigue. Cause you didn’t have time to like refresh the ads or whatever. And this happened six or seven weeks ago, but you kind of just ignored it and ignored it and focused on this other stuff and focus on this other stuff. And now all of a sudden you’re in a position where you need to make money yesterday.

The problem with needing to make money yesterday is that it’s very difficult if not impossible to do so. You’re now in the plane, you’ve made some bad decisions and it’s very difficult to recover. You can look at the pandemic. Um, people have been warning us about this very specific type of pandemic for, um, I’ve seen as early as six years ago, uh, people having fairly big conferences about, um, this very specific, like a very, this very specific type of virus, uh, being an actual threat, nobody really did anything decisions, decisions. And then once it came here to the United States, there was another set of decisions. And then there’s been more decisions since then. And now we’re sort of in a situation where we’re definitely crisis mode because of the string of decisions that led you to the moment of crisis that you’re in. Okay. That’s how crisis works.

Another example is going to be a horrible example. Um, but again, I’m just trying to give it to you, uh, as, as, as I see it, um, health crisis. Okay. Uh, if you spend a lot of time making poor decisions about your health, not getting sleep, not taking care of your mental health, putting poor, uh, food into your body, um, and then your body metabolizing that food and, and, and making it part of who you are and you know, all that kind of stuff. Um, and then all of a sudden you have a health crisis. It that’s a series of decisions. Now, obviously with health, there are some people who are straight just born with, um, uh, ill health. And there are instances of, um, you know, just, uh, diseases, randomly popping up and things like that. That’s not what we’re talking about. Obviously we’re talking about these, uh, types of crises that are made through a series of bad decisions.

So step three of how to, how to navigate a crisis is identifying the gaps. In other words, identifying what went wrong that led you to this particular crisis that you’re in. So many people get through a crisis and don’t learn a darn thing. They don’t learn nothing 2008 crisis. Did anybody learn anything? No credit card debt is higher than ever has been my biggest concern about the crisis that we’re going through right now. Isn’t it. Nobody’s going to learn a darn thing, which means that the crisis will happen again. If a pilot makes a series of bad decisions and by sheer luck walks away from the series of bad decisions that he’s made the chance of him surviving again is near zero. Meaning if he makes that same mistake, like just the odds are not in his favor.

So part of navigating a crisis, cause look, crisis is going to be hard. Whether you learn something from it or not. Part of navigating a crisis for me is to learn from it. That’s why growing up. And we had crisis after crisis and I’m just some young kid going to be the new kid in the class. Again, I would observe, how did we get to this point? So that when I grew up, I wouldn’t make those same mistakes.

That’s the, that, that, that is what’s really wild is that learning from your mistakes is the value of a crisis. Otherwise crisis, like there’s nothing that you gain from a crisis except to learn how to avoid future crises. It’s not like you’re better off by having experienced the extreme stress of not having enough money and then figuring it out. So you could pay everybody or whatever, pay your bills or whatever in your business, and then not learning how to avoid that ever again in the future that there’s no, there’s nothing gained there. So identifying the gaps, identifying how you got to that point, for example, your short on payroll, identifying the fact that and realizing, identifying the gap that the reason you can’t hit payroll is because you haven’t been promoting your main offer. You haven’t been generating leads. You haven’t been emailing your list.

You haven’t been doing whatever. So identifying that as critical and the last element for navigating a crisis. And, and it’s so obvious now, but when you’re in a crisis it’s so difficult to remember is get help, get help with a couple of different things. One get help to create that distance. And sometimes the best way to create distance is for someone just to say, Oh yeah, I’ve been through that before. And all of a sudden, all that, that unbridled emotion, it kind of succeeds a little bit. And you think, Oh, okay, well, if somebody has been through this before already, I guess, I guess I’m okay, we’re fine. We’re going to get through this. Right? So having somebody help you to create distance even, or even if it’s just like some people that you just go hang out with for like 30 minutes and don’t think about stuff or a group of people who hold each other accountable to not check their bank account balance every 30 minutes.

You know? I mean, like, it seems so obvious and so silly. And so like almost meaningless, but it’s so critical to have that kind of help. So that’s one way you can get help people to help you create distance. Another way that you get help as people to help you identify all that stuff. Like what is actually going on. So having somebody else look at your business and say, who’s dispassionate who isn’t in the emotional pole that you might be going through in your crisis and just saying, Oh yeah, you know what, like, actually it’s not that bad. Like this look at you did get a hundred leads last month, but you only got a hundred, you need like 500 to hit your income goals and blah blah. And you’re like, Oh, okay, well I know how to do it, et cetera, et cetera. So having somebody else take a dispassionate, look at your business to help you understand what’s going on. Somebody to tell you what the solution could be like, that’s obviously help. And then of course, lastly is just having somebody to help make sure that you never make those same mistakes again. So when you identify the gaps and you say, well, you know what, the big problem is we, we need 30,000 leads a month and we only got 1000 leads a month. No wonder we don’t have any money. Who can you get to help so that you can get 30,000 leads next month?

I mean, it’s so simple on paper. What makes it difficult is our human reaction to crisis. And to be Frank that we typically start a crisis by obsessing over it, by checking our thing, you know, whatever it is, checking the news 50 times, checking this 50 times, um, having it connected to our identity, all that stuff that I talked about earlier. So that’s it, that’s how you navigate a crisis. Um, it’s at least that’s how I’ve done it. And I’ve been through quite a few. Um, I’ll be through many more. I, I wish I could tell you that while you navigate through crises, you’re going to feel amazing. Uh, I have personally not experienced that. That could either be because I haven’t actually figured out the best way to navigate a crisis or maybe those other people are just full of baloney. Um, but I can tell you that, uh, when following these steps, it is certainly manageable, right?

Um, you can certainly reduce a lot of the stress. You can certainly reduce a lot of the, um, the fear, a lot of the uncertainty by following these very simple steps. And then if you do follow these steps, what you’ll ultimately have is the ability to prevent future crises of that same sort. Right? So if you have cash flow issues in your business, if you go through this process to identify the reason why you got there and what the solution is, once you solve it, the good thing about a crisis is you’ll remember it. And so when you remember that, that, that, you know, like, let’s say for example, you learn the power of new conversations, right? And you say, gosh, I realized the reason that my business is failing is because I didn’t have enough conversations. Once you realize that that’s actually what the problem was, then it’s ingrained in you to never let that be a problem again.

And that part of your life and business is solved. Like when I think about the pandemic and I saw, um, I have to admit I’m a little bit of a germaphobe. Um, and part of that is because I used to do this stuff. And I was like, uh, when I, like, when I was younger, I used to take care of people. Anyways, the point is like, I’m a little bit of a germaphobe. And it was so interesting that like the beginning of the pandemic was starting and they were like exposing how little people actually wash their hands. I was like, Oh, gross. Hopefully, um, people wash their hands a little bit more. Um, there’ll be a little bit more conscious and cognizant, uh, of, of, um, viral spread and all these sorts of things. I don’t know. We can hope anyways. Uh, so, but the point is, when you are doing your business, you can learn these lessons and then you will be able to, um, avoid future crises of a similar nature, which means, and this is what this means.

That crises can be unbelievable gifts. They can be gifts that no coach will give you. No course will give you no mastermind will give you having a crisis is not something to fear. It is something to celebrate because what you will learn in business anyways, right? So we’re talking about business right now. What you will learn will stick with you for a very long time. And if it’s a crisis of a fundamental nature, it means you will be an expert in preventing that crisis from ever happening to you again. And that’s really, really powerful. The mistake to make would be to give up in a crisis to shut your business down in a crisis. There’s a lot of stats about businesses that don’t succeed. You have to understand that when a business closes down, the business is closing down by choice as a reaction to the crisis that they have experienced.

Okay. Now I’m not saying that they’re willingly making that choice or that they’re happy about making that choice or that it is even necessarily the wrong choice for them to make for some people, their businesses in such a crisis, that to get out of it would not be very smart at all, like for their personal life and their health and it’s and all that kind of stuff. But understand that when a business shuts down, it is shutting down by choice. And what that means is that the businesses that survive cause every business goes through a crisis, are the businesses that have chosen to turn the crisis into whatever that might be a launching pad for the next step. Um, and they’ve also chosen to live the consequence of choosing to push through the, the very thing that they’re struggling with. So I don’t want anyone to walk away from this and say, well, Mike said, businesses closed down because they want to close down.

No, no. And that somehow people who go through crises are better than people who don’t go through crises. I’m not saying that either. Um, there are very real consequences to crises. There are very, very real problems that you have to overcome and they are very difficult to overcome sometimes. And it can, you know, it can be very stressful and very, you can all just crazy. Um, but it’s important for you to, to understand that that is the objective reality of what is going on during a Chrisy, uh, crisis, uh, when it comes to business okay. When it comes to business. So anyways, that’s it, my dear friends, that is it for our second episode, since getting back to the podcast, um, this one was naturally long. The team will have good fun, making fun of the fact that I can make a six minute podcast.

Uh, but hopefully these are helpful. Um, if you would like some of that outside perspective, if you would like someone who can help you to identify, um, wherever you might be in your business, that you can be a sounding board can help you to preemptively solve potential crises. There is a link somewhere around here, description something, something Facebook or wherever. This is a that you can book a call with my team and we’ll take a look at your business and we will see if we have something that we can do to help you. Um, we’ve got a lot of different options. Check out that link, book, a call with her team, and we’ll see what we can do for you. Otherwise, I hope you have a wonderful and amazing rest of the day. If you’re in the middle of a crisis, know that I am here with you, I’m going to be creating content to help you through it. Um, and also know that you can get through this. Okay, whatever it is that you might be experiencing, you absolutely can follow the little steps that I’ve learned, find out, and you’ll make sure that this crisis is something that actually benefits you in the long run, rather than just, you know, a sore spot in your life. All right, that’s it. I’ll talk to you later. Bye.

The post How To Navigate A Crisis appeared first on The No Pants Project Blog.

• Today I’m going to talk about the most scalable funnel that I have ever seen in my more than 10 years of doing this. After building lots of funnels for lots of different people, I’d say that this one, without a doubt, solves the biggest problem to scale, which is a cash flow issue.
• This particular type of funnel, which is also called an SLO funnel, a tripwire funnel, or a breakeven funnel, has existed before the direct mail days, so be a little wary of people who are claiming that they were the ones who invented it. 
• This funnel includes: 
  • Sales page ($27)
  • Order bump ($37)
  • Upsell #1 ($95-$195)
  • Upsell #2 ($47/month)
  • Thank you page – the most important page in this entire process
• Typical ROAS: .9x-2.5x
• When you put $1 into your advertising, you can get that $1 back within 24 hours. But that doesn’t make it a profitable business. This funnel, however, allows you to take your cost per sale (CPS) out of the equation.
• Getting customers to buy your $2k product will bring your CPS down to $0. But how do you do that? The thank you page is the critical piece here. To take someone from a customer to the next sale, you need conversations.
• There are many different ways to have conversations, but what we really love doing is sending people a follow-up email that sends them to a Manychat with a free PDF download. We then have our sales team have actual conversations with these individuals. This has allowed us to completely remove the need for webinars, SOS sequences, and the like. 
• Having real conversations is what is going to help you get through all of the craziness that’s going on right now if you want to continue selling your high-ticket items, one-on-one services, or whatever it is that you’re trying to sell.

HOT NEWS & DEALS

1. Free Training! How I Scaled To $100k/Month+
   For anyone serious about scaling their service business, this training will cover the 4 Stages To 7-Figure Growth. Perfect for the coach, consultant, or freelancer stuck in a hamster wheel business who wants to grow and scale.
2. 15 Ways To Double Profits During Hard Economic Times Report
   Need a few tips to help you through the hard times? Download this 40+ guide and I’ll show you what I do to help businesses thrive during even down turns.
3. Download ‘The Anti-Commodity Formula’ Workbook!
   Learn how to attract your ideal clients and customers, charge more than your competition, and build a business from a home that you love.

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Hello, my dear friends, hope you’re doing well. Let’s talk about the most scalable funnel I have ever seen. And I’ve been around for a minute. I started in 2007, early 2008. So this is, and I’ve been lots and lots and lots of different funnels for lots of, lots of different people. This one, I would say without a doubt solves the biggest problem to scale, which is actually a cashflow issue, which we’ll talk about here in a second, but I want to break down what this funnel is, give you some insights and, uh, and we’ll go from there. A couple of things I did not invent this funnel, but there are some things that we do unique about our funnel. Um, and second, be very wary of anyone who says that they invented this funnel, um, because this funnel has existed since the direct mail days a and B. And before that, even, so just be a little weary of some of these people making claims like they’re the face of this particular type of funnel. They are not. This has been around for a long, long time.

Okay? So this is some people call an SLO SLO funnel. Some people call it

Tripwire funnels. Some people call it a breakeven funnel. It’s very, very simple. You may have seen many of these. I apologize in advance for my drawing skills here, sales page. You’ve probably seen them $27, $37, $47, whatever they might be. You’ve got yourself, the order bump, which is something along $37. Then of course you have the good old sell, which is oftentimes somewhere between 95 and $195. Then of course you have yay. Our upsell, okay. That’s English. I promise upsell number two. And that’s a number also. I promise what we like to do when we build these is we like to do continuity and we’re going to talk about why we like continuity. And then we have, of course the thank you page, which in my opinion, my humble but accurate opinion is the most important page in this entire process is actually the thank you page.

Now we have built, um, like I said, we’ve built a close to 30 different funnels since January of this year. I’m recording this on July 31st. So we’ve been doing a couple of funnels per month, and I can tell you that this is without a doubt, the most scalable funnel ever. And that’s because of something very, very simple, typical row, as on this funnel, like in real life, not in the here’s the webinar I’m going to sell you like my $10,000 course on how to build this in real life row as somewhere between 0.9 X. Um, and we’ve seen consistently the high end be about 2.5 X. So a dollar in 90 cents out or a dollar and $2 and 50 cents. Now what’s beautiful. And why this becomes the most scalable funnel in the world is there’s two things that happen. Okay? One is obviously you put a dollar into your advertising and within 24 hours, okay, you get that dollar back.

That’s great. That means you can go to the market. You can, you can run this and run it and run it and just build big lists of customers. You can sell 20, 30, 40, 50 of these a day. Love it. It’s wonderful. It’s great. Um, but that doesn’t really make a profitable business, a dollar in a dollar out. Now you’ve got support costs. Cause you need to like run support. You got a, maybe you have to outsource your ad. So you have ads management fees, like there’s all this other stuff that starts to compile. There’s the cost of the software to run the funnel, the build, the funnel, et cetera. And nobody ever talks about that, right? That’s not going to sell you into their program if they tell you that,

But that for us.

So this has become the most scalable funnel in the world for one very simple reason. And this is it. It is cash flow. The number one problem that that most entrepreneurs have coaches, consultants, freelancers. When they’re trying, when they have something that’s selling, let’s say you’ve got a $5,000 coaching program. Let’s say you have a $2,000 a month service that you sell to someone and you’re able to do it in some other funnel. Maybe you have a VSL funnel. You have some of that kind of funnel. The number one problem you’re going to run into is that you will not have enough cash to scale as quickly as you probably want to scale. It’s not like you just press a button and all of a sudden it just blows up and you’re making a ton of money often, what will happen? Let me give you an example.

We had a client who had a $2,000 offer and it was costing them $200 per sale when they were selling 10 a month. And they came to us and they say, okay, look, what I want to do is I want to start selling 30 to 40 to 50 of those a month. Obviously their goal was 50, right? They wanted to hit a hundred thousand dollars a month. Well, what do you think happened to this number right here? When we started to scale the ads, of course it ballooned and ballooned to 500. And then once the market started to get saturated, it started to ballooning to 900 a sale. And the only reason they were even making sales in the first place is because this had a, uh, you know, a, um, a, what are those called payment plans? Uh, you know, whatever, it was 12 payments of 249.

So when you have a $500 sale, you’re starting to lose money. We have a $900. So you’re starting to lose money before you make the money back. And before you think, well, Oh, it’s because my, you didn’t know the secret to this Facebook ad that look, we have some of the best media buyers. I work with some of the best media buyers. I respect people like Justin, Brooke, and you know, I listened to at-scale all those, we, we follow the best media buyers in the world and we implement their strategies. And they’re just the reality is, is that when you increase and scale and offer, it becomes more expensive. There’s market saturation, there’s ad fatigue. There’s all these different things that happen. Okay. So this is what happened with this client. So a lot of people, what they’ll do is they’ll say, Oh, well,

I guess that, that means what I have to do is take what was working and either accept the fact that it’s more expensive or try all these little bright, shiny object tricks and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

What this little SLO tripwire, most profitable, scalable funnel in the world actually allows you to do is take this number out of the equation. Okay? So for example, let’s do a new sheet here and I’ll show you what I mean

When you have the SLO tripwire funnel, whatever you want to call it, a dollar in and a dollar out within 24 hours. And then you sell that $2,000 thing. Then your cost per sale equals zero. Okay? So then all you do is you just push this as hard as you possibly can. Now you probably already know this. This probably makes sense to you already. You probably thought about this. You may be even trying to make this happen, but there’s a missing piece. And this is the critical missing piece. This is why I say the thank you page is the most important. How do you go from a dollar and a dollar out making customers to them then suddenly buying this $2,000 thing. What’s the trick. What’s the secret. What’s the, I’m going to give you the most simple solution that we’ve come up with after testing this for a long time and trying to, you know, like just really just racking our brains and the whole team coming together to take someone from customer to next sale. What you need are conversations. There’s lots of different ways to have a conversation. You could tell that customer, thank you very much for buying this thing. Now I’d like you to go watch my webinar. You could tell that person, thank you very much for buying this thing. I want you to go watch this VSL. Thank you very much. Let’s book a call. There’s all sorts of different things, but here’s the thing that we’ve landed on that we really, really love. And I want to share this with you. It’s really, really fun. We’re enjoying it immensely.

Okay?

Okay. Here’s what we do. Somebody buys the $27 offer. Oops, that’s a seven. I promise $27 offer. We then send an email plus some followups, but we’ll just keep it simple for now that email sends them to a many chat with a PDF download. All right. So what are we talking about? I promise that says download. Um, so somebody buys our thing for $27. We send them a quick email and then we send them to many chat to say, Hey, I have something for you. It’s the next step? It’s this free PDF. If you’d like it, all you have to do is just click this button. They click the button, they’re taken to their Facebook chat. So it’s a, it’s basically a mini chat. We don’t do automations. We don’t do anything. We just have a welcome message in many chat. They say, I love this thing.

I want this PDF. We say, here it is. And then what do we do? We have our sales team have actual conversations with these individuals and say, Hey, how’s your $27 purchase going? Whatever that $27 purchase thing is, Hey, how is your business going? And then they go through a typical conversation like you would selling anything else. We’ve completely removed the need for webinars. We’ve completely removed the need for complex SOS sequences. We completely remove the need for all of this complexity. And we’ve kept it real and organic. Now I hear some of you saying, Oh, but Mike, I want to do a webinar. I, you know, I want to, and you, you start to your mind goes to automation, automation, automation, automation. I’m going to tell you something. This shift going from removing the cost to acquire a customer, and then moving that customer into a, a conversation with an actual human being is what has allowed us during the craziness that’s going on right now in the world where people’s fear and doubt and attention span and their, uh, their unwillingness to part with money and, and, and their, their lack of optimism and their, their feelings of insecurity.

Having a conversation with a real person will always, always beat out a webinar. It will always beat out a VSL because in a webinar, in a VSL, you’re talking at someone with many chat, you can begin to talk with someone. Their trust is, is it’s open. It’s there. And you’re talking with customers. You’re not talking with freebie seekers, you’re hiding the mini chat behind the $27. Um, and you can put this many chat in the email followup. You can put it on the thank you page while I say, thank you. Page is so important. Just a little link of, Hey, have a chat with us. We have this PDF. We’d love to deliver to you, et cetera, et cetera. There’s all sorts of places. You can put it within the program. You can have it as a bonus section. Hey, we have this bonus PDF for you.

Click this button. They go to many chat, et cetera, et cetera. But the point that I want to make here is my time’s almost up. Having real conversations is what is going to help you get through all of the craziness that’s going on. If you want to continue to sell high ticket items, to sell your one-on-one services, to sell your, whatever it is that you’re trying to sell, you need to start talking to people because they are afraid. They are scared. They are nervous. They are, they need that intimate, uh, sort of, uh, um, that connection. You know, it’s one of those things that I don’t agree with, everything that Gary Vaynerchuk says, but he did say something that has really profoundly effected my business, where he says scale. The unscalable, the hard thing to do is to talk to people and everybody wants to hide behind their webinars and hide behind their VSLs and et cetera. I’m telling you, you can eradicate all the stress of having to write a perfect VSL, having to write a perfect webinar, having to create the perfect email sequence. If you’re just willing to dump people into a many chat, send them one message that delivers a PDF download, and then start to talk to them. You will be absolutely surprised at how easy the system process and the system becomes for creating and scaling your business are my difference. That’s it for me today. Hope you enjoyed it and I’ll see you on the next one.

The post The Most Scalable Funnel in the Universe appeared first on The No Pants Project Blog.

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SUMMARY

• This will be a mini masterclass on a decision-making framework that has been very valuable to me in my life and I want to share it with you. I’ll also be talking about why I decided to pause podcasting and why it’s now back on.
• Whether you’re a business owner or someone who’s trying to balance multiple things (e.g., job, side hustle, creative endeavor), this episode will help you know what to put first. This episode will be all about making the right decisions at the right time and knowing what to do next so you can get to where you want to go.
• We’ll be using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to help us with the decision-making process. There are four sets of needs that must be taken care of in a specific order before we can reach happiness or self-actualization. 
• Need #1: Physiological
  Making sure we have enough to eat, that we’re sleeping, and that we’re able to manage or prevent illness.
• Example: You’re trying to decide between three different ways to earn an income: your job, a creative endeavor, and a freelancing business. The first decision you make should be to ensure your physiological needs are  being taken care of. Ask yourself if your physiological needs are being threatened or made better by pursuing one of those three things. 
• Book recommendation: Why We Sleep by Matthewr Walker
• Need #2: Safety
  The easiest way for us to think about this is in terms of financial security.
• Example: You have a job but you’d like to pursue an artistic endeavor and a side business. The first thing you should do is to not jeopardize or threaten your financial safety. Maybe there’s 10 things you want to do right now, but if you’re not financially secure, pursuing those other things will not give you the benefit you’re hoping for.
• Need #3: Love and Belonging
• Need #4: Esteem
  Do I enjoy what I’m doing, and do I like who I’m doing it with? To get here, we first had to start with physiological and safety needs. A lot of people get it backwards.
• Example: I build for you a machine that brings in daily phone calls of potential customers, but you only want to work one day a week. That’s a great goal, but by skipping over financial security, you continue to unnecessarily suffer the feelings of having one of your lower level needs unmet. 
• It’s important to be able to objectively identify where you and your business are actually at in the hierarchy of needs. This is why I stopped podcasting. I love it, but my business had an operational issue; I had to step back from the higher level needs so I could fix the lower level needs.
• How to know what to do next:
  Step 1. Figure out where you or your business are at on the hierarchy of needs. Get outside opinions if you can.
  Step 2. Ask yourself, “Is this threatening any of my needs or is it making things better?”

HOT NEWS & DEALS

1. Free Training! How I Scaled To $100k/Month+
   For anyone serious about scaling their service business, this training will cover the 4 Stages To 7-Figure Growth. Perfect for the coach, consultant, or freelancer stuck in a hamster wheel business who wants to grow and scale.
2. 15 Ways To Double Profits During Hard Economic Times Report
   Need a few tips to help you through the hard times? Download this 40+ guide and I’ll show you what I do to help businesses thrive during even down turns.
3. Download ‘The Anti-Commodity Formula’ Workbook!
   Learn how to attract your ideal clients and customers, charge more than your competition, and build a business from a home that you love.

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Hello, my friends. I hope that you are doing well. It has been a very long time since we have been together here on the podcast, I’m actually going to talk about why specifically we’re going to be talking about the decision I made to pause podcasting and the decision I have made recently to turn it back on and why I did that. This is going to be a mini master class on a decision making framework, which has been very valuable to me in my life. And I want to share it with you. Those of you who are noticing that the pandemic is. So if you’re a business owner that the pandemic is increasing both the volume of decisions that you have to make, and the complexity of the decisions that you have to make this episode will help you for those of you who are trying to balance multiple things.

Say, for example, you’re trying to balance a job. You’re trying to get your side hustle going, and you also have a creative endeavor going. This will help you to know what to put first, what to emphasize first, what to do second it’s it’s. This episode is all about making the right decision at the right time, knowing what to do next and prioritizing all of the choices that you have to make and all the things that you can and should be doing to get to where you want to go. Now, in order for us to talk about a framework that works, we need to, uh, have a quick lesson on motivational theory. In other words, how human beings, self motivate, um, how human beings operate, uh, so that we can establish ground rules for making decisions. Okay, so Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. You’ve probably heard it many times.

Does it have its flaws? Absolutely. But as a general rule for how the human mind works, self-regulate self motivates. It’s a simple enough tool that we can use it fairly regularly, and it will provide for us a, a high likelihood of success when we apply it to our decisions. So specifically Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is simply a, uh, I mean, how he founded his, he used biographical assessment, which isn’t necessarily the most accurate, but essentially he deconstructed the set of needs that a human being must fulfill in the order that they must be fulfilled in. So that that human being can reach a, what he called self actualization or self fulfillment. Now let’s break this down. Most of the advertising, most of the political, most of the social media messaging that you receive on a daily basis is pointed towards self actualization. Now, what does that mean?

Okay, what the heck is this? What are we doing? Are we having a philosophy near? What, what, when, when somebody is trying to sell you a pill, for example, they use the picture of the young lady, probably in a swimsuit, uh, having the time of her life running in the beach, and then she has her summer dress on and she’s running through the field of whatever, and they’re showing you happiness, okay? But the pill doesn’t solve happiness. It solves a very physiological, the goal need, it solves a CA a biochemical reaction. It it’s something that is at the physical level level. And you know what they’re selling you is happiness politically. Uh, when somebody tells you that things ought to be this way, what they are selling, they’re selling you. What they’re asking you to buy into is the self actualization of an ideal. They’re selling you the best case scenario.

They’ll say they’re selling you another version of happiness, that this is the thing that will solve for your happiness marketing messages. It’s the same thing. The thing everybody is trying to sell you self-actualization fulfillment. Your highest level of, of being happy. All the webinars are by this program and you will be happy. You will achieve your highest level of et cetera, et cetera. Now inherently the idea of showing people how to become happy. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with that idea. What causes problems, however, is that these commercials, these political arguments, these, uh, webinars and things, what they fail to, okay, what they failed to reveal is that there are a whole host of steps between where you are at now to actually being happy. And it’s not as easy as taking a pill, the pill will solve the physiological issue that’s going on, but you won’t necessarily be happy.

The course on the webinar might help you to develop a skill, but you can be quite miserable with a skill. The political idea might improve some aspect of something, but there’s still all of these other problems and et cetera, and et cetera. So a Maslow’s hierarchy of need does is it says, okay. Yes, self-actualization is great. And it’s something that we should aim for and we should go for it. And it is achievable. And many people have achieved it. They’ve lived their full purpose and et cetera, and et cetera. But there are a host of things that must be taken care of first before you can ever possibly hope to be happy. Now, why are we talking about this in the wall? We’re talking about choices and making decisions. It’s because if you believe that everything is one step away from self actualization, meaning from where you are, you just have to make one more right decision or from where you are, you just need one more thing and then you’ll be happy.

Then you’ll be self-actualized. Then you’ll be what you will be doing is essentially what a young child does when they look at a map. Okay? So the young child, you pull out the map, you say, we are here in Portland, and we’re going to go down to LA to go to Disneyland. And the young child says, Oh, wonderful. I see it on the map. It’s only three inches away. We can take a straight line, Portland to LA, we’ll be there before I even know it. But you, as the adult know that that’s not true. If you’re taking a plane, there’s a whole host of things you have to do. You’re going to have to wake the kids up. You’re going to have to pack. You’re going to have to get them in the car. You take the car to the, maybe you got to get a shuttle to take the shuttle to the airport. Then you got to do this. Then you’ve got to get on the plane anyway, on the plane. The plane goes like that. And then there’s this whole process. Then when you land the plane, then you gotta, so as the adult, you know, it’s not that simple. The child sees it. And they think it’s that simple. And the child is the one who feels disappointed when it isn’t that simple.

When you are making decisions, it is similar to becoming the adult for your own outcomes. Okay. Now, what I want to do now is described to you, like, if you were, let’s say to take a plane trip or, uh, or driver or whatever, and you were going from Portland to LA, there’s all those additional steps that must happen first before you can get to Disneyland. That is what Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs has already described for us, so that we can be the adult in the decision making process. And we can know what to do next by finding out where we are. So before we hit self-actualization Maslow’s hierarchy of need tells us there are four other sets of needs. That must be, uh, essentially, uh, taken care of before we can reach happiness. And there’s a specific order that these needs go in. Okay. So I’ll tell you what the needs are. And then we’ll run you through some examples, and then we’ll talk about the framework. So the four needs are the first need that must be taken care of before you can progress to any of the other things. So the first thing we gotta do or sin, we’re gonna, we first, we gotta pack our bags right before we take this trip to Disneyland for us as decision makers, the first thing we have to decide, the first thing that must be taken care of the first need. That must be satiated is physiological.

So for example, that is making sure we have enough to eat, making sure that we are sleeping, making sure that we are, uh, if we are ill, that we are able to manage that illness. If we are, uh, uh, to prevent future illness or injury, et cetera. Now, I hope that you are thinking about this in terms of decision making for yourself, because what a lot of people do, especially business owners, is they look externally for the thing that will make them happy. So let’s say you’re trying to decide between three different ways to make income. You’re deciding between your job. You’re deciding between a creative endeavor and you’re deciding between let’s say a freelancing business. Okay. How do you know which one of those to pursue first? Well, the first decision that you make isn’t which of those do I start first? It’s first to check in and make sure that physiologically those needs are being taken care of. It also means that you need to look at those three things and ask yourself, are my physiological needs threatened or made better by pursuing one of those three things. Let me give you another example.

If you have a business and you’re distracted and pulled in all these different ways, because there’s so many bright, shiny to pursue in your business, and this is common with business owners, I’m going to tell it to you. And you’re probably gonna to like that doesn’t make any sense. A lot of business owners get so distracted with running the business and doing all these funds side things that pretty soon the business isn’t making any more money physiologically speaking. If the business is a living thing, not making money is the same thing as not having any food. It’s the money is the life force that keeps a business alive. So physiologically speaking, if you’re thinking about, should I join this mastermind? Should I try this thing? Should I do that thing? Should I go on a vacation? Should I, well, first you need to take care of the physiological need of your business.

And you need to focus on that part of your business until it is consistently being met. Meaning that need is consistently being met for 90% of the people who run businesses. They’re worried about self-actualization, they’re worried about this like pie in the sky thing of, you know, whatever their big dreams are. And they’ve completely ignored. Sales is completely ignored, bringing in cash. They’ve completely ignored. Being able to deliver on the promises that they have made to people. So this, hopefully this is starting to turn some light bulbs on for you. And that you’re like, Oh, okay, I’m starting to see now that there actually is an order by which a good decision can be made, especially for businesses, right? Do you need to rebrand your logo? If you aren’t even making sales, do you need to worry about taking, like, how are you going to take Friday off every week if your business isn’t even making sales?

Well, no, you first need to take care of that base. Physiological need. Now, if you don’t have a business yet, and you’re sort of starting one and you’re getting it going on the, on the side, you have to think about, if I go this way, will it threaten the physiological needs of mine that are currently being taken care of by this job? And you can use that to frame your decision making, but there’s even a third way to consider this knowing that your physiological needs are the base core, most important. They’re the first thing that must be taken care of in order for you to progress to the next step and reach happiness. If you are currently, whether they’re business owner or not in a position in your life or your physiological needs yeah. Are not being met than it is now. Wonder that everything else is incredibly difficult.

And specifically, I’m talking about two things. Oh, really? Three. I guess you could say, I guess one, are you being, are you hydrated? Okay. I can’t tell you how many people would just feel so much better if they just drank more water. Okay. Put away the sugary drinks, drink more water too. Are you putting fuel? Yeah. In your body, are you putting garbage in your body? Again, people would, they would see tremendous benefits and energy and motivation and all the things that they’re trying to find tricks for. If they just took care of the physiological aspect, the thing that will actually solve the problem before trying to again, go for self-actualization in one big step. And the third is sleep, sleep, sleep asleep, really good book by Matt Walker. I highly recommend why we sleep. If you read that book, um, you also have some really good interviews on YouTube.

Read that book, watch his interviews, learn more about the power of sleep, and you will see why probably the things you were pursuing that you thought would make you happy. Uh, aren’t really the things that will make you happy. And that in fact, it could be as simple as fixing your sleep, getting the professional help to have better sleep. Now I’m not coming to you as some person who’s always slept well. I, uh, the way I was raised, um, we can skip that part for now, but there was just stuff that happened when I was a kid where sleeping became very, very difficult. And then I became a firefighter. And then I became a chef, which was just really all weird, odd hours, long shifts. And I worked night shifts for a company and [inaudible] et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, sleep has been something I’ve struggled with.

Uh, always. And so I am coming to you as a fellow person who can tell you that there is a big difference between sleeping and not sleeping, like a huge difference. Okay. So physiological needs first. So whatever you’re looking at, whatever decision you have to make first, you have to address the physiological need. Does it improve or does it threaten my physiological? Cause I am a human being. Those needs are real. If those needs aren’t being met, no matter what I do, I will either fail or I will succeed and be unbelievably unhappy. Maybe even made worse than I am now. Okay. Physiological needs. Next is safety needs. So this is for example, the, uh, I think the, the easiest way for us to think about it in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the safety needs is financial. We don’t have to talk about many of the other feelings of safety, um, because they’re very complex, but also we’re all here talking about business.

And so let’s talk about the thing that would make many of us feel safe. And I would imagine many of my listeners here don’t feel financially safe, especially not now during the Corona virus and the pandemic. So for those of you who have felt a shift in your own internal, happiness and anxiety and et cetera, it’s probably because your sense of financial security has been threatened. So again, we go back to Maslow’s hierarchy of need. Is this need of mine being made better? Or is it being threatened by whatever decision I make here, but whatever’s going on around me. So now let’s think about this in terms of a decision,

Let’s say that you have a job and let’s say that you have an artistic thing that you want to pursue. And let’s say that you have a, a side business that you’d like to pursue as well. And you say, what should I do? Well, first don’t jeopardize or threaten your financial safety. That’s step number one, being in this business of coaching and helping people to grow and start their own businesses has been very interesting for me because a lot of people will make purchases that they, uh, that, that threatens their they’ll make purchases and decisions that threaten their financial stability. In other words, their ability to feel safe financially, and then they will freak out.

Well, it’s no wonder it’s not a surprise. There’s nothing new or shocking or unique about that. That’s how human beings work. Now, the adult, remember back to our, um, example of, uh, of taking a plane trip to Disneyland. The child stays up all night. The night before forgets their snacks at home is on the plane, hits a little bit of turbulence and start screaming and crying. And just as flat doesn’t feel good and it feels horrible and can’t make any decision whatsoever. And you know, and it’s a mess. The adult in that situation says, well, of course the child feels horrible. They didn’t sleep. They didn’t bring their snacks. There’s some turbulence. They may not feel very safe right now. And that’s the difference. Understanding Maslow’s hierarchy of need can make you an adult for yourself so that you can self regulate, uh, because the child is not really helping anyone when they’re in that state, when they’re freaking out, they’re certainly not helping themselves.

So when you’re looking at what should I do, what should I focus on? Well, focus on the thing that makes you financially secure. Again, we go back to the business owner. Yeah. Maybe there’s 10 things you want to do right now, other than getting on the phone and closing sales. But if your financial security is threatened, those pursuing those other things will not give you the benefit that you are hoping they will give you. So for example, a lot of people ask me, okay, I’ve got this business going, how do I find time to be creative?

Meaning how do I pursue a side project? And my answer is step one, you work on the thing. That’s paying your bills until a point where ignoring it would not threaten it. In other words, building your business, creating systems, getting a virtual assistant, getting yourself there, financially referrals, whatever you gotta do to build your business to a point where ignoring it, because that’s what you will do by pursuing a side project. So ignoring it for however many hours a week will not threaten your financial stability because the second that your financial stability is threatened, what do you think is going to happen? That creative endeavor, it’s going to feel miserable, not fun. It will make you angry. It will make you confused. It will feel the thing that you wanted to pursue for fun. And you loved will turn into something horrible because now it’s a distraction. Now it’s actually contributing to threatening your safety needs.

So what should you do? You should focus on the thing that’s currently taking care of you financially strengthening it so that it never feels like you’re being threatened by it. And then you can pursue the other stuff. Now I’m not talking about work on it for years. In most cases, it’s just a few simple tweaks might take a couple of weeks, couple of months, but being able to make the right decision to protect your need for safety. In our case, financial security is the adult thing to do and is what will actually allow you to then pursue those other things. So let’s say you have a job you’re thinking about starting a freelancing thing. And you’re thinking about doing something like writing fiction. What should you do? Well, it depends and depends specifically on this.

You can’t inherit more financial risk without feeling that all kind of come apart. Right? In other words, don’t try to do fiction and a freelancing business while ignoring your job. The job is what’s paying you right now. Now, if you’re feeling like I might get fired from my job very soon, cause the pandemic or I’m, you know, maybe I was a commissioned sales person and nobody’s, you know, maybe I’m been real estate commission. Sales is no good. Well then go for the thing that you are going to do to replace what is now the threatened financial security and focus on just that. And you might say, well, Mike, so does that mean I should do a freelancing business? Well, it depends. What can you afford in terms of the threat levels to your finances? Let me give you an example. Let’s say that you do have a job it’s being threatened.

So you’re feeling unsafe, which is motivating you to start something new. You could start a freelancing business or a side business or whatever it is that you want to do. Um, and here’s some things we know about freelancing. You can get clients relatively quickly. They typically pay upfront or at least half upfront, which means the day you close the deal, you can make money. You can set a rate in which you get paid for whatever it is you’re doing. In other words, it’s not speculative in nature. You say, look, I charge $150 an hour. You know, when you get work, that’s exactly how much you’re going to get paid. So on paper that seems financially a little bit more secure than this, for example, fiction, all right, we’ll have is a fiction fiction. You could write 50,000 words, which will likely take you more than a month.

If you have something else that’s in the way that one book is certainly not going to sell a ton of copies. And even if it did one, you can’t predict how much it will make you back cause it’s different. And it just depends on how it lands in the market. So you can’t predict exactly how much you’re earning for that particular thing. And number two is you don’t get paid until 60 days after it sells. So the sales I make today, I won’t get paid for 60 days from now. And so in this decision making process, what are we doing? We are breaking down objectively the mechanics of the thing we’re trying to make a decision about. And then we are relating it to Maslow’s hierarchy of need and checking to make sure that we’re not just making rash decisions. So in this case, if your job was being threatened, so that’s that need to take care of your financial security. My recommendation would be to start a freelancing business or get another job, right? If that’s, if that’s an option, then you prefer to do that because Maslow’s hierarchy of need. If you’re pursuing fiction, because it, you just think it would make you so happy under these circumstances. Guess what? It will not because the lower set of need in our case, the safety need of financial security is there’s a very high risk that it’s not going to work out in the way you think it’s going to work out.

Now, does that mean that fiction is always the wrong answer. Of course not. If your job is all ready, satisfying your need for financial stability. Now you may not be as, as you want to be, but your bills get paid every month. Then the things I said earlier about it takes 60 days to get paid. You could write a book and you’re not going to get paid the same. It’s going to take a couple of books, blah, blah, blah, etc, etc. Those don’t matter because why, because those aren’t relevant to that need that need has already been satisfied by the fact that your job has kept you financially safe. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about financial freedom. Okay? Financial freedom is a self actualization.

It’s higher up on Maslow’s hierarchy of need. Having all your bills paid, knowing you’re going to be able to pay rent, pay your mortgage, put food in your belly, put food in the belly of the people that you love, that changes the, it really changes your ability to make decisions. So we go back to the business owner. What decisions did you make in your business right now? It depends on what your financial safety needs are and whether or not they’re being threatened or they’re being met. That’s the deciding factor. Okay? That is where you can steer your ability to make decisions. And then you can analyze whatever it is. You’re trying to decide about as to whether or not that’s the next right move. So you think, gosh, should I join this $50,000 a year mastermind where we’re going to talk about how to like achieve our blah, blah, blah, or you know how to be a better leader or how to do the dah dah, dah. It depends.

Are you making enough from your business right now? And if the answer is no, well then that’s probably where you should start before you get too worried about self actualization. And it’s not, I’m not coming at this of like, you must be a pragmatist. What I’m saying is that self actualization is impossible when your financial safety is threatened and you don’t even have to take my word for it. Just look at your own life. Right? How many times have you been, like, I feel super fulfilled when the bill collector is calling you 10 times a day.

I mean, unless you’re just completely detached from reality, in which case anything can be self-actualized self-actualizing right. And that’s a whole nother conversation for another time. Um, but again, it’s, you know, not everybody, uh, this stuff isn’t for everybody. Let me just put it that way. Okay. Next we have love and belonging and esteem. Now this, honestly, this is for me, tell me where you start to get into, do I enjoy what I’m doing and do I like who I’m doing it with? Okay. Cause we’re, we’re using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and in a business sense. Okay. So do I love my, the people that I’m working with? Do I enjoy these customers and clients? Should I change who these customer and clients are? Do I like what I’m doing right now? Do I like how it makes me feel? Do I like how I am operating in this business?

Do I want to work less? Do I want to focus on something else in my business? Okay. These are the decisions that you make at this point. Okay. But you’ll notice that to get here. We first had to start with physiological then safety. Now we can worry about all that other stuff. A lot of people get it backwards. They say this business must do X, Y, Z, and I’m just going to go. I’m going to go straight there. And then they’re freaking out because they’re not making the money. They thought they were going to make.

Um, you know, uh, I won’t name any names. I think about, for example, um, I’m working with someone a couple. Someone’s where the desire to run their business a certain way is causing them an incredible amount of stress because financially the business, isn’t where they want it to be. Even though I have paid for them, the mechanism that will solve the financial needs need. If they want, just let go a little bit on this higher need to solve the financial need. Then we could revisit the higher need. Okay. I’ll make up an example. Now that’s not has anything to do with anybody specific. Let’s say that I build for you a machine, which brings in a phone calls every single day of people who want to buy your stuff, but you only want to work one day a week. Okay? That’s your goal. It’s a beautiful goal.

It’s a wonderful goal. I love it. That’s a great goal. And you have made that decision, but the problem is that you skipped over financial security, meaning you just went straight to I’m working one day a week and I don’t care what anyone says. And so there’s this mechanism in your business, which is there’s a mechanism in your business, which is able to solve the financial insecurity that you feel. But because you’re stuck so much on this desire to work only one day a week, you continue to unnecessarily suffer the feelings of having one of your lower level needs unmet. And here in lies, one of the major problems of having one of your lower level needs unmet, those are significantly more powerfully felt than having one of your higher level needs unmet. Okay. Significantly worse to have a meaning in scope of consequence, but also just what it feels like.

So for example, um, many people can tolerate working at a job. They hate because the job pays the bills. Right? Very few people are able to tolerate starving for very long because they don’t have a job that pays the bills and you know, things like that. So let me give you another example. Okay. So this is a common example that I use because it, um, well, it’s, it’s, it’s interesting. It’s interesting to me, the human, the way the human mind works in the first world. Uh, so many of, you know, I lived overseas in, in several places for several years in third world countries. And so my take on the first world is just, um, I don’t know. Some of it is very confusing to me. Let me give you an example.

Cold email will fix most, let’s say six figure business problems financially speaking, right? So if you make about 10 to $20,000 a month in your business, whatever is it, whatever it is that you sell, if you were to have a financially risky or maybe your financial situation was being threatened, I mean, a client’s left or something you could solve that problem very quickly by sending some cold emails, uh, selling a high value service to strangers, like very like within a week or two, the problem is problem is this. The problem is that individuals are often so focused on higher level needs that they will sacrifice lower level needs and then wonder why they feel miserable. So for example, in the cold email, they’ll say, Ugh, I don’t like how it makes me feel to send a cold email or I don’t like cold emailing on general principle, or I don’t want to be embarrassed by someone rejecting me or I don’t, I can’t focus on sending 30 cold emails right now because it’s boring, right? And yet financially lower level hierarchy of needs. Their financial sense of security is threatened.

This is the importance of being able to objectively identify within yourself where you are actually at in the hierarchy of needs. And you can take it a step further and ask yourself in the hierarchy of needs. Whereas my business at, and this is why I stopped podcasting. I love podcasting. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love making this stuff for you guys. I love making videos. I love doing all that. It’s why I got into this business. I love teaching. I love sharing. It’s wonderful. However, my business had a very serious problem.

It wasn’t our financial security or stability. That was the problem. At the time it was an opera. It was the safety of our operations. Meaning, um, operationally speaking, we had a situation with team that I had to step back from the higher level need, which for me was fulfillment within the no pants project. In other words, I was focusing because our lower level, these are physiological mean our sales were strong. Our safety nets were there. We had plenty of money in the bank. There was lots of great things going on. It was amazing. And then we try this new thing and we brought a bunch more team on which increased our costs and also increase our complexity. And so I had to step back from the higher level of, you know, self-actualization within the business that I could focus on fixing the lower level needs.

Now the lower level needs are fixed and being fixed and on their way to getting fixed to where we’re no longer in the state of threat operationally. So now back to podcasting, we’re even going to do YouTube videos now, but that’s an example of this decision making process, uh, at play. Now you guys have to know, I hate operations. I sincerely despise management. Um, I don’t like I don’t like creating SLPs and systems. I don’t like having to like find out that someone we hired isn’t actually qualified and that maybe they were allying. And like, I don’t like any of that, all of that stuff. And like having to babysit people who shouldn’t have been on the team in the front, none. I don’t like any of that. I hate it. I absolutely hate it. But what’s worse is pretending that everything’s fine focusing on the self actualization piece.

Cause that’s where we all want to get to turning a blind eye to a threat at a lower level need. How does a, you know, more, a foundational need in the business and then waking up six months later in the business being completely destroyed, that is significantly worse. And I have to on this podcast, give a shout out to the clockwork team. Um, and Emily and Adrian over there at the clockwork team, they were the ones who pulled me out of that funk. They were the ones, uh, along with our director of operations here, um, Kaylee who were like, no, we need to solve this now.

And that’s, you know, that’s a little side note, uh, when you are making decisions, it’s great to have people to help, help you to see objectively where you are actually at in the hierarchy. That can be very helpful as well. So that’s it. My friends, I would say this episode might be a little bit cerebral, just, I’m not saying like I’m not meaning that of like, it sounded smart. What I mean is this might seem super, um, theory based, meaning yeah, but what’s the actual Mike, what will, this is the step by step, step one, figure out where you or your business are at on the hierarchy of needs. Be objective, get outside opinion. If you can be objective about where you’re actually are at and then ask for whatever you’re trying to decide, is this threatening any of my needs or is it helping me to solve the needs?

Is it, is it making things better? Uh, the work that we’ve done in the no pants project has made my operational needs. Um, I mean the team we have now is incredible, incredible. Once we made some adjustments, once we sorted the systems, once we pushed through some pretty rough times, um, the, the team now is, is, is 10. X-ing the results, uh, that we ever were getting before. I mean, it’s, it’s incredible what will happen now for me in my mind that need is no longer threatened. So he can move to the next thing, which is getting the podcast, going again and getting YouTube, going again and et cetera, raising our price and doing new cold stuff and being like cold audiences and all the, all the next stuff that we’ve kind of thought that would be nice to do. But first we need to deal with this.

So hopefully this has been helpful. I know many of you right now during the pandemic are probably facing some similar situation where there’s something that you know, is, uh, probably threatening one of your lower level needs or more foundational needs. So physiological safety, um, and you may have been procrastinating, uh, PR you’ve may have been procrastinating dealing with those issues because they’re uncomfortable issues to deal with. And instead you’ve been focusing on higher level needs because those are more fun, but I can tell you, they will stop being fun very quickly. The longer you wait to address those more base level needs. So for those of you, okay, and give some exact examples for those of you who are kind of like, well, I want to do my creative stuff, but my business isn’t doing as well as I thought it should. I would say, fix your business or those of you who are in a job and the job is fine and you want to do a creative or you don’t know what to do.

The da will go, go. If you, if, if it’s fine, if it’s financially fine, it’s not being threatened, then great move on to the next level, go to your next thing. If it is being threatened well, address that and address it with the option. That makes the most sense for specifically addressing that need, right. Because if you say, yeah, but what I really want to do is write fiction with my life. Okay. Um, that’s amazing. That’s great. Self-actualization but it’s going to be very difficult to do. If in two months you’re fired from your job and there’s a, you won’t be working on fiction in two months, spend those two months getting business, which allows you to work on fiction. That’s what I would recommend. Um, that’s what I would, that’s what I would do. Okay. Anyways, that’s it. My friends has been the first podcast back in a while.

Hopefully it wasn’t too mumble jumble. We’ll get back into the groove of things. I’ll get better at podcasting. Again, I feel a little bit rusty for those of you though, who want help and want that sort of objective. Um, you know, that, that, that you want that outside look or more specifically for those of you who are looking for that map, um, meaning do this first, get this solid, then do this next, get that solid, then do this next and get that solid. If you’re looking for a plan like that for yourself, for your business. Um, there’s a link in the description somewhere here in the podcast that takes you to a training where I show you how I basically followed the same framework, decision making framework to take what was a hundred thousand dollar a year freelancing business, and turn it into a a hundred thousand dollar per month scaled com business, which we’re now, I mean, we’ve blown past a hundred thousand dollars a month quite some time ago, but I’ll show you how I did that in about two and a half months.

Okay. The process, the steps that you need to go through in order to get there again, um, there’s a link somewhere, depending on where you’re listening to this podcast, uh, click that link. You can watch the video. Um, and then if you’d like our help as a team, just book a call, we’ll have a quick chat, C, C we’ll, we’ll help you to analyze where you are in this process. And, uh, and we’ll have a call and we’ll see if we can help you with some other stuff you got done for you, options, coaching options, all sorts of different options. All right. So that’s it. Hopefully this has been helpful and I’ll talk to you later.

The post How To Know What To Do Next appeared first on The No Pants Project Blog.

• Dreaming of a $100k per month business? Then you’ll have to go through these 4 stages first. Whether you do it on purpose or by accident, this is a natural progression that every business has to go through in order to grow and scale. I’ve done this a couple of times and I’ve done this for my clients regularly as well.
• Stage 1: Offer Expansion
  Offer expansion is based on the idea that most people who can get to $20k a month in their business will have to tweak and improve their offer first before it can become a $100k per month offer.
• What does offer expansion include?
  1. A re-examination of the audience and offer match, i.e., who is buying this thing, are there other people who could also benefit from this thing, and are those audiences connected in some way? In other words, broaden your audience.
  2. The price of the offer. Many people are significantly undercharging for what they do. For example, if you’re selling a service for $1,000, there’s no way you’ll be able to do it 100 times a month without burning yourself out. One solution is to add recurring income to your offer.
  3. Making sure that what you’re offering is fulfillable at a higher level with less work for you. You cannot be hands-on because you’ll just exhaust yourself and people will start to talk. When you get to that level, results beget results.
  
• Stage 2: Automated Marketing
  For 80 percent of the people that come to me, I actually recommend LinkedIn over Facebook and YouTube ads. I recommend hiring a VA and automating your LinkedIn process before going to paid traffic. This allows you to get that scale and automate conversations, which Facebook and YouTube ads typically don’t do.
• Stage 3: Leveraged Income
  Leveraged income is basically, what mechanism can we put into our business that offsets advertising and marketing costs so that our real cost to acquire a customer ends up being zero? And how can we make that income completely hands-off for us to fulfill? Those $27, $37, $97 funnels that you may have seen floating around are examples of leveraged income; their whole purpose is simply to offset advertising costs.
• Why is leveraged income stage 3 and not stage 1? Because you need experience with the people that you’re working with at scale (which happens in stages 1 and 2) before you can start doing really well with the $27 offer.
  
• Stage 4: Work Yourself Out
  This is my favorite thing about business. Ask yourself, “If I take a 2-week vacation right now, what happens to my business?” If the answer is anything other than, “My business continues to grow,” then what you have is a job.
• When you have a business that can function independently of you, that’s when you actually have something that’s sustainable. I would say that’s the most difficult part of this process but it’s also the most rewarding. What’s interesting is that when you get to stage 4, you’ll find that by working yourself out of your business, you actually end up making significantly more than if you were to stay in it. 

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INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES:

FULL TRANSCRIPT: How To Scale to $100k/Month (4 Stages of Growth)

Hello, my dear friends, hope you’re doing well. Welcome to this video. We’re going to be talking about the four stages to getting to a thousand dollars a month in your business. This is, this is a natural progression that every business has to go through. Whether you do it on purpose, you do it strategically, which means you get there faster, or you do it by accident and get there. These are the stages that you’re going to go through. So for those of you who are interested in growing and scaling, this is what you can expect. Um, I’ve done this myself a couple of times and I do this for my clients regularly. Um, and we’ve really kind of drilled it down to the core four pieces that it takes to get there. Okay. So first stage is what we call, offer expansion. Now offer expansion. It’s based off this idea that most people who I can get to, let’s say, $20,000 a month in their business, they have something, they have an offer.

That’s working, whether they’re selling it via referrals or organic or outreach or whatever it is that they’re doing, they have an office, but that offer must first be prepared and tweaked and expanded and made good enough to be a hundred thousand thousand dollars per month or 200 to $300,000 per month offer. Now, what does that include? What does offer expansion include? Well, a couple of things. One is a reexamination of the office, the audience and offer match specifically, who is buying this thing. And are there other people who could also so benefit from this thing and are those audiences correlated or connected in some way, example, uh, if you sell something to coaches, okay, you could definitely make a hundred thousand dollars a month on coaches, but could consultants also benefit from that same thing that you’re selling to coaches? If so, expand the offer to include consultants, because now what you’re doing is you’re expanding your audience.

You’re still staying narrow, right? So you’re still saying no, this can only help a specific group of people, but I’m including these other specific group of people into my office. So that I have a bigger audience to draw from, which allows me to have a more sustainable business. I can’t tell you how many times people go out. They make a lot of sales in something, and they completely, you know, run through their audience and their ad costs go up and CPMs go up and, you know, they sort of saturate their market. So the bigger the market, the better when you are looking to grow and scale. The second thing is the price of the offer. Many people are significantly undercharging for what they do. And as a result, they will never be able to hit a hundred thousand dollars a month, right? Because the mechanics of fulfilling on the offer are impossible under those thousand dollar per month revenue numbers.

So let me give you an example. If you sell something where you are doing it for someone, and the thing you sell is a thousand dollars in no version of reality, will you be able to do something for someone a hundred times a month without completely burning yourself out? Uh, under no, uh, you know, thing, adding things like recurring income to your offer. So let’s say you have a coaching offer, okay. Let’s say that your coaching offers good and it’s $2,000 and you’re happy with $2,000. You don’t want to increase your like, Oh, you know, I could do 50 coaching clients a month. Okay, that’s fine. But without transferring those $2,000 per month, people into a recurring fee after 90 days, or without transitioning them into something larger, what you’ll end up doing is making the number one cash flow mistake that most people make when they’re trying to scale, which is to assume that how much it costs you to get 10 people to buy something for $2,000 is how much it will cost you to get a hundred people to give you $2,000.

Right? So for example, let’s say that your normal cost to acquire a $2,000 client is $200. Well, when you scale that to 50, to a hundred of those per month, it’s not going to cost you $200 per 2000. And that’s where a lot of people get stuck in scaling is they haven’t expanded their offer to match the new demands of cashflow that come with scale. And so they can’t scale. It’s impossible. It’s mathematically impossible for them. Uh, the last piece of course, in offer expansion is, you know, it’s all about the mechanics that we are talking about, but making sure that what you’re offering is fulfillable at a higher level with less work from you. Okay? So here’s what I mean. If you want to get to a hundred thousand dollars a month and you want to sustain that, whatever that income or revenue, whatever it is, and you, you cannot have something that doesn’t serve the people who buy it at scale at a high level, if one, your hands on, because you’ll just exhaust yourself.

Things will slip through the cracks is no good. And too, at that level of expansion into the market, people will start to talk and you need to be able to maintain a solid reputation. And you need to be able to deliver lots of results because when you get to that level results, beget results, right? So if somebody buys a coaching program, somebody buys a service from you. Somebody buys something from you. You get to a sort of a point at which any paid traffic that you’re spending money on is now starting to be a matched in revenue generation, by people just telling their friends, uh, the success stories that you’re constantly able to generate and share and et cetera, et cetera. So you need to in offer expansion, there’s a lot of work to do. You’ve got to figure out how to make your offer so that it fulfills better.

You’ve got to figure out how to make it. So you’re less involved. You gotta figure out if the pricing works, you got to figure out if it was a big enough audience, et cetera. So that’s stage one that I think is what takes people the longest to figure out which it doesn’t have to. I mean, if you look around you, there’s plenty of offers to look at, to model, not copy, but to model and say, how are they doing it? How can I do it better? All right. So that’s stage one stage two now is where we get into automated marketing.

Now, for most people, you can talk about Facebook ads. You can talk about YouTube ads. You can talk about a lot of things, but I would say for 80% of the people that come to me, I actually recommend LinkedIn. I recommend hiring a virtual assistant, automating what it is you do on LinkedIn and then going to pay traffic because you need to, there’s a couple of things that you need to figure out in stage two stage two, you need to figure out is what is the message that I can send to people broadly? And who are these people and what are they responding to? And how much is it costing me at scale to get them into my business? What hiring a virtual assistant and going to LinkedIn does is it allows you to get that scale, but it allows you to also do something which Facebook ads and YouTube ads typically don’t do, which is to automate conversations.

Okay. So a lot of people go from, I have a business where it’s completely referral based. And when I make a sale, it’s because I’ve had us, you know, a back and forth email conversation. And I had, uh, you know, two separate phone calls. And then they try to, you know, as untrained webinar, creators, or as untrained Facebook ads, people, they then try to like compress that whole sale cycle that they used to do into a 45 minute webinar. And they wonder why it doesn’t work. What, getting a virtual assistant, going to someplace like LinkedIn does is one. We know everybody on LinkedIn is there to do business to is it’s a much more organic approach, meaning it reflects more of this process over here where we used to, you know, there used to be more intimacy in the sale. Uh, and it allows us to sort of take one step over rather than the complete jump of here’s what we were doing.

Now, we’re going to try this a completely different thing in which we’re not trained in at all. Um, and then with the virtual assistant obviously allows you to step back and start to measure numbers, which is, again, one of the things that very few people practice before they get into spending on ads and YouTube and things like that is looking at metrics, making decisions based off of metrics, not based off of feeling, et cetera. So I recommend most people there, their first automated marketing should be on LinkedIn and it should be hiring somebody, creating SLPs, going through creating the templates and all that kind of stuff experiencing at, in a much more forgiving environment than trying to go straight to Facebook ads. Okay. Next stage three. This is where we start to talk about our

Leveraged income.

Now I’ve got other videos floating around here where we really dive deep into leveraged income, but what leveraged income is basically what mechanism can we put into our business that offsets advertising and marketing costs. So

Watch that are

Our real cost to acquire a client or a customer actually ends up being zero. And how can we make that income completely hands off for us to fulfill? Let me give you the short version. Have you guys seen the $27 $37 $97 funnels that are floating around? That’s a version of leveraged income. They’re called SLR. Tripwires whenever you want to call them. The whole purpose of that thing that someone has created is simply to offset advertising costs. If you want to really scale and I’m talking exceed a hundred thousand dollars a month, stage three, leverage income is really where you begin to experience, uh, the, the scale friendly math. If you can take your cost to acquire a customer to zero, because you’re offsetting it with Facebook ads or sorry, uh, with leveraged income through Facebook ads or through YouTube or through whatever that will change your game forever.

Now you’ll notice it stage three. It’s not stage one. Why is it stage three? Because in stage one and stage two, we’ve gotten to know the people that we’re working with our business is scaling. Like we’re hitting 70, 80, $90,000 a month just in stage one, stage two. Uh, and you need that experience with the people that you’re working with at scale. So to an audience before you can really start going out there and doing really, really well with a $27 offer. Typically when we work with our clients to do one of these leveraged income funnels and SLO trip wire or whatever you want to call it, uh, we actually don’t just break. Even. We typically make a profit on this leverage income and offset all of our ad costs. Now, the only way that we’re able to do that is by going through stage one and stage two first, and having that intimacy with exactly who it is that we want to attract into the business. We have to know what the messaging is, what do they respond to, et cetera? Now, stage four is, and this is actually stage four is probably my favorite thing about business. And it’s simply to work yourself out.

Okay. Uh, essentially if you take a two week vacation and this is a really good litmus test, ask yourself. If I take a two week vacation right now, what happens to my business? And I, and I don’t mean take your computer with you and work on your business. I mean, you completely shut off your team. Can’t talk to you, your clients, can’t talk to you. Nobody can talk to you for two weeks. What will happen to your business? Now, let me ask you this. What will happen if you took six weeks off from your business in that same way, nobody can talk to you. Nobody. You’re not checking anything. You take your computer, you toss it in the Lake and you just go to the woods for six weeks. What happens to your business? If the answer is anything other than my business continues to grow, then what you have is job.

So stage is taking everything in stage one, two and three, and it’s creating an actual business. There’s a lot of people floating around the interwebs these days with their little to comment on because two comma club award, or whatever plaques that are up there. And they don’t even realize that they don’t have a business, they have a job. Okay. A stage four. It’s all about working yourself out of it, of the business so that it can function independently of you. All right? And that’s when you actually have something that’s sustainable. That’s I would say the most difficult part of this process. It’s also, in my opinion, has the highest reward. I would rather get paid less too, never work again than to get paid a lot to work 90 hours a week. Okay. Uh, that’s my personal approach to things, but what’s really interesting is that when you get to stage four, what you’ll find is that by working yourself out of your business, you actually end up making significantly more than if you were to stay in it and sort of essentially be the stop gap in your company.

Be a lot of business owners don’t even realize they are the ceiling that is preventing their business from growing. When you can create it to be independent from you, it’s, it’ll, it’ll blow up beyond your wildest imagination. So, um, that sounded like a Willy Wonka promise there, but it’s true. I mean, I’ve done it in multiple businesses on my own help clients with it. Uh, they’re always surprised. I’m always surprised I’ve even been doing this at when the business becomes its own living thing, how big it can get. And I don’t mean big and like, you know, 90 employees or anything, but how much impact, how much, um, opportunities can be created without you necessarily having to be a part of it. So that’s in my friends really quick video for you this week on how to get to a hundred thousand dollars a month, if you would like to talk to my team, or if you’d like to see an extended version of this training, where we spend about an hour or going through all of this stuff on how to grow $200,000 a month or seven figures a month, or whatever your goals are, is how to grow, scale your business.

Uh, there should be a button somewhere or a link somewhere on this video, go ahead and click that you can watch the training. You can also have a chat with our team and they’ll take a look at where you are in your business and they’ll see whether or not you’re ready for this, what stage you’re at in your business. And then we’ll see if there’s anything we can do to help you. All right. My dear friends, that’s it for this video. I will hope to see you on the next one. Have a good one.

The post How To Scale To $100k/Month (4 Stages Of Growth) appeared first on The No Pants Project Blog.

People say that getting your first buyer is the most important milestone in your entrepreneurial journey.

I disagree.

The real milestone that matters is not your first, but your 10,000th buyer.

10,000 buyers for a $1 product means a year’s college tuition.

10,000 buyers for a $10 product means a six-figure income.

10,000 buyers for a $100 product means life-altering money.

You get the idea. A buyer (or three) might be a fluke. 10,000 buyers is life changing.

But how do you get your first 10,000 buyers? 

Simple: by following people who’ve already done that, and much more.

The Secret Principle of Entrepreneurial Success

I’ll let you in on a big secret.

It’s the secret behind the success of all the rich and famous people in the world, from Steve Jobs to Seth Godin.

Ready?

Here it goes:

“You can succeed at anything in the world if you can find the right people to follow.”

I know this sounds far too simple. Maybe even a bit hokey, but it’s true: successful people build their success by following already successful people.

This is how Jony Ive built his career (by following Dieter Rams), how Larry Page picked up his business chops (by following Eric Schmidt), and how Mark Zuckerberg learned to think big (by following Steve Jobs).

To just give you an example of the value successful people place on mentorship, Jeff Bezos runs a mentorship program where a top executive gets to “shadow” Bezos to all his meetings, lunches and travels for a year or two. It’s the “follow the successful” principle amped to an astonishing degree.

To Get 10,000 Buyers, Learn from People Who Have 1,000,000 Buyers

Pop quiz: if you wanted to build a sports car, what would you do?

A – Ask a dude named Enzo Ferrari

B – Figure things out yourself and create something truly “innovative”

You’d obviously choose option A, right?

Yet, when it comes to online entrepreneurship, so many people choose the latter path. Instead of following successful people who’ve already sold hundreds of thousands of products, they try to reinvent the wheel and come up with something original and innovative.

Except that to truly innovate, you have to first master the mundane.

This is what I believe you must do if you want to get your first 10,000 buyers: follow people who have 1,000,000 buyers. Figure out how they closed their first deals, how they deliver value, and what makes their business tick. 

To make your job easier, I’ve compiled advice some of the best advice from 10 of the world’s wealthiest entrepreneurs on getting your first 10,000 buyers. 

Lessons from Your Virtual Mentors

The people on this list come from a wide range of backgrounds. Some of them are writers. Some are marketers. Some do SEO, some do social media.

They all have one thing in common: they’ve done exceptionally well in their business life.

Here’s what they have to say about building a business and getting your first 10,000 buyers:

1. Neil Patel: Help the Right People

You know him as the founder of Quicksprout, KISSMerics, CrazyEgg, and HelloBar.

He’s kind of a big deal. And he’s all over the internet, writing guest posts on SearchEngineLand, etc. ,etc.

In founding four businesses, Neil has sold millions of dollars of products. This includes info-products as well as SaaS tools that start at $200/month.

So how did Neil get his first customers?

Through cold email outreach.

Here’s an email he sent to Michael Moritz, Chairman of Sequoia Capital and a man worth just shy of $3B.

He sent this email way back in 2007 when he was still in college and things like user-experience and conversion rate optimization were largely niche nerd hobbies.

Neil wasn’t able to close a deal (in his own words, he wanted “too much money”), but he used the same tactic to build a million dollar revenue business.

He adopted the same approach when he was building out his software businesses – CrazyEgg and KISSMetrics. As he recounts in this Disruptware podcast interview, Neil let potential customers use his software for free just to get them on board early.

So does this mean you should start spamming everyone in your email list about your offer?

Not quite.

The twist that makes manual outreach successful

Let’s take your average internet marketer struggling to sell spammy $39 Clickbank products on dubiously named websites.

Suppose your email lands in his inbox telling him how he can improve his site and make tens of thousands of more dollars.

(Of course, you mention that you can do it for him for “just” $5,000).

Do you think this marketer is going to stretch his already overextended credit and pay you the $5k to do it for him, or he’s just going to take your advice and (try) to implement it himself?

This is what Neil found out as well.

“When I used to target people who weren’t rich, they would just take my recommendations and implement them on their own”

The lesson?

Target only rich people.

“Millionaires, on the other hand, are more likely to offer you a job or a consulting gig.”

See, millionaires are busy. They don’t have enough time to figure things out on their own. They have the cash AND they understand the ROI of quality work – if spending $10,000 today makes them $100,000 over 2 years, it’s a worthwhile investment for them.

How to apply this to your business:

1. Make a list of 10 successful people you can help make more money/save time/live a better life.
2. Pitch them your ideas via email. Don’t hesitate to give away the entire farm in your email – it’s the execution that matters, after all.
3. Offer to implement the ideas for them for a fee.

Bonus: Successful people have overflowing inboxes. You can drastically improve your chances of being noticed by doing something beyond an email – such as a Slideshare, a custom landing page, or even a video.

For example, here’s an email Bryan Harris of Videofruit sent HubSpot:

HubSpot called it the “best guest post pitch” they’ve ever received.

Bryan not only sent an email, but even included a demo of the final product.

Smart? You bet.

Other things you can learn from Neil

Invest in clothes. Like $162,301.42 worth of clothes.

Tools to help you get this done

• Yesware, to keep track of emails.
• Boomerang to reschedule emails.
• VoilaNorbert to figure out anyone’s email address.

2. Derek Halpern: Drafting your way to 10,000 buyers

You’ve probably seen Derek’s handsome mug all over the internet.

It’s definitely the first thing you see when you land on his wildly popular website, SocialTriggers.

But it’s not his good looks that got him featured on Entrepreneur, Forbes and Fast Company. It’s his ability to pull massive traffic numbers (Alexa rank: 19,884) and sell millions of dollars of products.

So how does he do it?

Drafting.

That’s a term from racing – when you ride closely behind someone to reduce wind resistance. It’s also called riding in someone’s “slipstream”.

In business, this means drafting behind your competitors and being where they are.

“Drafting is about hopping into your competitor’s slipstream. If they get featured somewhere, you try to get featured there too.”

Translated:

• Find bloggers/journalists etc. who’ve written about your competitors.
• Jump in and offer answers to questions and doubts raised in the article.

Here’s how this works in practice:

• Suppose you create incredible headphones but your competitor (with inferior headphones) gets all the press.
• You read the press reports and you notice that quite a few raise a few concerns about the headphones’ bass.
• You email the journalist/blogger and tell them about your recent post that answers all concerns about the bass.

Congratulations, you’ve now successfully drafted into your competitor’s slipstream. They did all the work of reaching out to bloggers and journalists and working with them to get a story out. You just jumped in and offered your own expertise, completely undercutting their work.

Since Derek is a super nice guy, he even has an email template to contact your target bloggers:

Hey Name,

I saw you wrote about [insert topic]. Well, I’ve got some [insert unique story angle] that answers the concerns you raised in your original article. Here’s the article:

[insert link to article here].

You’re busy but you’ll find this as the perfect answer to [insert the concern they raised].

– Derek

Why this technique works

This technique works because of two reasons:

1. The ground work has already been done for you by your competitors. If a post about your competitor’s product got the publication 10,000 page views, you bet they would be interested in writing more about products in that category.
2. Smart bloggers, writers and editors know that people are fundamentally tribal. They know that if they can position your product in opposition to your competitors, they’ll attract fans/haters of both products. This is why you can’t escape those Apple vs. Microsoft debates online – the manufactured controversy is too tantalizing for publishers.

Derek goes in-depth about this technique in this long (52 minutes and counting!) video he shot for Entrepreneur.com.

Other things you can learn from Derek

The Pareto Principle: success is 80% promotion, 20% creation.

That is, spend at least 80% of your time promoting your content, 20% writing it.

Tools to help you get this done:

• BuzzSumo.com – to figure out what’s the most popular content on your product/niche.
• FollowerWonk.com – to search Twitter bios and find the right bloggers/authors/editors.
• Good old Google search.

3. Ramit Sethi – Winning with Psychology and Data

Ramit Sethi is the author of the NYTimes Bestseller, “I Will Teach You to be Rich”. He’s been featured in Forbes magazine as a ‘money expert’ (right next to Warren Buffet). Over the years, he’s built up the ‘I Will Teach’ brand to cover everything from saving money and negotiating a raise to starting a business and getting your dream job.

For his flagship course – Zero to Launch – he charges $12,000 per student. And he has so many students that he has to routinely shut it down.

So how does Ramit make money?

Straight from the horse’s mouth:

“About 98 percent of my stuff is free, and then, occasionally, I will release a course. Usually, these courses take me a couple of years to develop, and then they tend to be pretty premium prices”

Before Ramit was a money guru, he was writing code and studying psychology at Stanford. And that’s pretty much formed the foundation of the IWT business: data and psychology.

According to Ramit, data helps you stand out from the crowd of me-too competitors:

“The beautiful part is that because so few people are doing this, if you do even a small amount—you completely stand out. You don’t need 25,000 data points. That’s ridiculous. It took me years to be able to get to that. If you have 20 qualitative responses to one survey question, that’s pretty informative.”

And psychology is what helps you be the best:

“IWT isn’t about money, or entrepreneurship, or even careers. In truth, IWT is about using psychology to live a Rich Life. The psychology, persuasion, and social influence lessons I learned at Stanford, applied in my life, and tested in my business. This is what I teach every day via my personal laboratory of IWT.”

How to apply this to your business

Data + psychology sounds super nice on paper, but you’re obviously wondering: how the heck do I apply it to my business?

Ramit has an answer for that as well.

In this post on getting your first freelancing clients, Ramit nails down the data + psychology approach.

Essentially, he says, you have to:

• Get inside your clients’ heads and truly understand what they want (the psychology part).
• Collect feedback on your business, your pitch, your ability to execute (the data part).

You can easily apply the same principles to virtually any business.

It’s not really rocket science, but it is a lot of spadework. Be prepared to spend hours meeting people in your target demographic to figure out what they want. Don’t assume that your pitch, your business or even you yourself will be liked or not – test it out in the wild and gather real data.

Other things you can learn from Ramit

“Don’t Underbid to Get Early Clients – It Hurts Your Pocketbook And Credibility.”

And if you ever need a pick-me-up, just head over to YourSurrogateAsianFather.com

Tools to help you get this done

• Google forms – to create surveys.
• Google Sheets – to gather all responses.
• Typeform – to create better surveys than Google Forms.

4. Noah Kagan: Validate Your Idea Before Building Anything

Noah Kagan is the founder of AppSumo and SumoMe. He also has the distinction of being employee #30 at Facebook and #4 at Mint.

Besides marketing, Noah also has a profound love for tacos.

Both AppSumo and SumoMe are now multi-million dollars a year businesses. Sure, Noah missed his $100M payday by getting fired from Facebook way before its IPO, but he’s bounced back and pretty much built a very large and enviable fortune through sheer marketing hustle.

His secret?

Start small, validate your idea and deliver exceptional value.

Start with really small potential customers and use them as your sales people once you’ve over-satisfied them for larger customers. 

Noah followed this when he was building Payments for Facebook Games (Gambit). He then followed it when he built AppSumo, which was famously started for just $50.

Here’s why:

“All I’m going to suggest is that you start with a much simpler essence of your product over the course of a weekend, rather than wasting time building something for weeks… only to discover no one wants it.”

Which basically means that before you bet the farm on an idea, at least make sure that your target customers want it. Stay lean, build a simple, cheap prototype (‘MVP’ in startup speak), and release it on your target audience.

How to apply this to your business

This is essentially a three-step process:

• Find a profitable idea.
• Find a way to make a cheap prototype.
• Find a hungry audience who can test the prototype.

This sounds pretty hard, but it’s actually quite simple when you break it down.

• You can find profitable ideas on Amazon Top Sellers list by seeing what sells (something I’ve followed to sell 978 fiction books per day), by looking through frequent requests on Craigslist, and by generally being aware of what you see people using every day, and what they struggle with.
• You can build a cheap prototype by outsourcing it to coders from India or Romania on UpWork. If it’s a simple product, you might even be able to customize a WordPress theme for it (and save money in the process).
• To find if there’s a demand for the product, use tools like Google Trends to see search volume for it. Then use Google Search to find niche communities such as forums and sub-reddits to find people interested in the product. Pitch them your idea and see what they have to say. 

This might be a lot of work, but it’s far better than wasting 1000+ hours building a product only to find that no one wants it.

Other things you can learn from Noah

When in doubt, use quant based marketing.

Tools that will help you follow Noah’s advice:

• Google Keyword Tool to see search volume for a product
• Google Search to find number of competitors in a market (more competitors = proven market).
• LaunchRock.com – to set up a pre-launch page (and collect emails).

5. Ryan Deiss – Teach Your Way to Success

Ryan Deiss is the hugely successful marketer behind DigitalMarketer.com. He is THE guy you want to turn to if you want to understand internet marketing.

Apart from making $1000 from every blog he starts (besides $6M from another blog about survival skills), Ryan has tons to teach you about getting traffic and building funnels.

The most important thing you can learn from Ryan, however, is this:

“The world does NOT need more information. Instead, what the world needs (and values) is a trusted authority who will organize and aggregate all the GOOD information that’s actually worth reading into one place.”

In other words, you need to STOP creating completely new content and instead, curate the best content on a topic that already exists.

And you need to do it consistently enough, and with enough focus on quality to be considered an ‘authority’.

Which is to say, you must become a respected teacher and not just a content creator.

You’ve already seen how effective this approach can be – Oprah built a billion dollar empire ‘curating’ people, so much so that the people she associates with get authority of their own.

This, in fact, is the strategy behind Ryan’s entire business model at Idea Incubator:

“Really, the centralizing thing is we’re looking to provide information and strategies for people who are actively looking to improve their lives. Whether it be financially or emotionally, getting more balance in their life. We’re out there offering solutions to people who are seeking answers.”

How to apply this advice to your business

In Ryan’s own words:

“So as crazy as it sounds, the first step to becoming a respected authority in your market isn’t to publish something new and amazing…

…the first step is to identify and associate with the most trusted, authoritative experts in your niche and then seek to aggregate and promote THEIR CONTENT in one place (i.e. your site)“

To do that, follow this process:

• Find at least 10-12 leading authorities in your niche.
• Find out what their best content is.
• Curate the best ideas from this content and wrap it in your own insight.

This isn’t really complicated – the best blogs online follow this model. The Buffer.com blog, for example, essentially curates marketing knowledge from all across the internet. Derek Halpern at SocialTriggers.com doesn’t actually do any psychological research of his own – he just finds what has already been researched, and he presents it in a better fashion.

In fact, even huge influencers such as Malcolm Gladwell follow this model.

You can get similar influence and authority by following in Ryan’s footsteps.

Tools to help you put Ryan’s advice into practice:

• BuzzSumo, for finding the most popular content on a niche.
• Google Scholar,  for finding research papers to quote studies on your topic.
• LeadPages, for capturing leads that drop by your site.
• Drop, for creating autoresponder sequences for your leads.

6. Brian Clark: Just Get them to Read the First Sentence Read. Then Another…

Brian is the founder of CopyBlogger and the Rainmaker platform. Through Copyblogger,he has helped educate a generation of writers and copywriters. Even 9 years after founding it, the blog remains the gold standard for writing blogs online.

Oh, and all this has helped Copyblogger turn into a $7M/year business.

So what makes Brian Clark and Copyblogger tick?

Words.

As he says in this Mixergy interview:

“If people don’t want what your words in any medium, text, video, audio, what they’re conveying, you’re wasting your time. It really comes down to that.

We went from zero to seven million with just that (words)…So you can make a lot of money with just plain old fashioned words and I think I need to keep reminding people that”

Quoting legendary copywriter Joe Sugarman, Brian notes:

“Every element of copy has just one purpose — to get the first sentence read.”

So in a way, great copy is just a string of sentences that compel the reader to read the next one. 

It’s as simple as that. And it can make you millions of dollars.

How to apply this to your business

The first rule of winning with words is to deliver value, and then to monetize that value. As Brian notes:

“If you can create free content, you can create premium content that people will pay for and that’s the way you get into business.”

The second rule is to engage the reader with each and every word you write. This means you must:

• Write a compelling headline.
• Follow that up with an engaging lede to keep readers interested.
• Focus on the benefits – tell readers what they’ll learn through your content.
• Deliver on the promise and offer compelling proof of every claim.
• Close with a flourish (and a strong CTA).

Now this is all high-level stuff. You’re obviously wondering: how can a beginner even begin to learn how to create great copy?

Do this:

• Read ‘Ogilvy on Advertising’. Then read it again. And again.
• Read Joe Sugarman’s ‘Advertising Secrets of the Written Word’.
• Follow this 30 minute exercise I outlined earlier. Do this every day for 10 years and you’re guaranteed to create wealth.

Tools to help you put Brian’s advice into practice

• Swiped.co – for doing my 30 minute copywriting exercise.
• Read-Able.com – for figuring out where your content stands on the readability scale (hint: the best copy reads at a 4th to 8th grader level).
• EMV Headline Analyzer – for checking your headlines’ “emotional quotient”.
• Word, Notepad, Google Docs, Scrivener, or any other tool you use to write.

All these entrepreneurs have been successful in fields as different as marketing, social media, copywriting and teaching. Yet, once you dig through their work, you start noticing patterns. Regardless of what they do, these entrepreneurs always:

• Focus on delivering value.
• Have mastered the art of communication, whether in words, images or video.
• Focus on helping the right people instead of building a “one size fits all” solution.

Follow their principles, and you’ll soon be on your way to 10,000 buyers yourself.

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