John Randak is Lead Marketing Strategist at Peaceful Media in Portland. John is the person you call when you need more traffic to your website or you need help converting traffic into leads or sales. In fact, he has been called by folks such as Brendon Burchard, Sonia Choquette, Jeff Walker, Mary Morrissey, Dr. Mark Hyman and many, many others.

In This Episode

John Randak has been the lead marketing strategist on many high profile marketing launches and has, consequently, learned many lessons. In this episode, John sits down with Ontraport CEO Landon Ray to discuss his insights into failure, managing client expectations, and why he is learning everything there is to know about YouTube.

Topic Timeline:

0:37 Full Service Marketing Agency

John is the Lead Marketing Strategist at Peaceful Media, a full service marketing agency.

1:21 Manage Expectations

When you have high profile clients, learning to managing expectations is key.

4:42 Enjoy the Failure As Much As the Success

You can have everything ready and in place for a launch but still have something go wrong. John has learned there is always something to learn from it.

6:12 Quantitative and Qualitative

There are quantitative and qualitative benefits to every launch. Both are valuable.

7:57 A Designer and Marketer

John uses his design background in his current role of marketing strategist at Peaceful Media.

8:58 YouTube is Everything

With costs of ads going up, John has turned to YouTube and is learning everything he can to leverage the digital real estate.

12:32 Ethical Marketing

Ethical marketing is incredibly important to John; he strives to bring integrity and honesty to the marketing industry.

13:50 Anyone Can Be Famous Today

We live in an era where if you’re unique and have the right message, and it’s the right time, you can reach your audience and find success.

15:07 Be Yourself

To cut through all the noise in the age of video, be authentic and be yourself.

– John Randak

Show Transcript:

LR: Welcome to Modern Ontrapreneur, I’m Landon and today I have John Randak, who is Lead Marketing Strategist at Peaceful Media in Portland. John is, apparently, the person you call when you need more traffic to your website or you need help converting traffic into leads or sales. And in fact, he has been called by folks such as Brendon Burchard, Sonia Choquette, Jeff Walker, Mary Morrissey, Dr. Mark Hyman and many, many others, so apparently he knows what he’s talking about. Thank you so much for being here.

JR: Of course, thank you.

LR: Awesome. So, tell me what it is that you guys do at Peaceful Media. It sounds like an agency, but just give us the high level situation.

JR: So Peaceful Media is a full service marketing agency. We can redo your website, web development, front end, back end, and all that kind of stuff. But we also are a full service marketing agency, so if you need more traffic to your site, if you’re looking to convert that traffic into leads or sales, or you’re doing events or launches or that kind of stuff, we can help you with that, and we do copywriting and project management. I mean, really, what I like to tell people when they meet us is, “Anything you don’t want to do for your business that happens online in the digital space, we can do that for you.”

LR: Very interesting, cool. You’ve been doing this for?

JR: We’ve been around since 2008.

LR: 2008. Very interesting.

JR: Ten years ago.

LR: Ten years? Cool, and so tell me about the challenge of dealing with the sort of high profile clients. We have a lot of folks on here who run agencies …

JR: Sure.

LR: Which is effectively consulting. These are people that are … Whenever you hire a consultant, you’re expecting results, right? And I know, because years ago I did a similar kind of work, that often when people write you a check expecting you to make sales for them, effectively, that there are often, let’s say, differing opinions about what success looks like; and that can be challenging, right? Expectations, management and meeting what may seem super high expectations or just managing clients like this. And especially it’s almost risky, in a certain way, to take on clients with the sort of profile that you guys do, because if you blow up with a Mark Hyman or somebody that everybody knows. So, how do you handle that?

JR: Well, I guess I’ll start by saying that managing expectations, at the front, is really important, you know what I mean? If someone comes to us who is on a smaller scale right now than someone like Sonia or a Brendon and they say, “We want to be like them in one year.” We have to manage that. And then we will, basically, talk them through the process through which they get to that place. You know what I mean?

I mean, you don’t go from having 1,000 people on your email list to 100,000 in six months or something that. And a lot of people believe that’s possible and they come in believing that that’s possible, so we do need to manage those expectations. You know what I mean? For people who are already at that level and come in and want something with similar level, yeah it’s … I mean, we haven’t had, I would say, a lot of stuff can go wrong, fortunately, you know what I mean, for us. And there are things that have gone a different way than we thought they were going to in product launches or something like that, and it is our job to sort of say, “Okay, this is what we thought was going to happen, this is what happened.” And we try and be as honest as we can. I mean, we try and just brace people at the beginning for what could and could not happen in a launch.

LR: Look, we do more launches than you guys, by far, right?

JR: Yeah.

LR: Because we run thousands of customers launches and stuff, and so we see it all the time. Sometimes launches go exactly the way people want them to do, and most of the time, they don’t, right?

JR: Right.

LR: Right, and that’s the reality. So you guys are pretty successful preparing people for that.

JR: Well, I mean, here’s an example. Actually I had a call with a client this morning, and we basically, essentially broke even on the launch. You know what I mean?

LR: Yeah.

JR: And this was a pretty big client. They had come in with some pretty lofty expectations, but what we did is we grew their list by 5,000 people. You know what I mean?

LR: Okay.

JR: So we, just from a revenue perspective, we broke even. We basically met … We made what we spent in management of all of the ads and the spend that we did on those, but we grew their list by 5,000 people. And so when I was on the phone with them this morning, I was just saying you … I mean, there is like, you can put a price on that. You know what I mean? So, while we would have liked to have made five figures, six figures on this launch, the fact that we can walk away from that saying that we grew your list by 5,000 people is a really big deal.

LR: And you didn’t cost you anything, yeah.

JR: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it’s not a fruitless launch, is what I would say.

LR: Right.

JR: You know what I mean?

LR: Yeah.

JR: And if you’re looking to get yourself to one of those higher levels, that’s a really important part of that.

LR: Yeah, it is, growing your list. So if you could kind of look back at the beginning of your career in digital marketing and give your younger self a piece of advice that would have smoothed your ride, what do you think that would be?

JR: I think that I would try to remind myself not to take things personally when it doesn’t all go perfectly, that there are launches, you can work for clients and do everything right and just really strange things can go wrong. You know what I mean? And I think that early on in my career, and early on at Peaceful Media, I think that we would almost take it personally when we wouldn’t get the results that we wanted. And I think that what I’ve learned over the years is that, certain times, there are things that … And this is gonna sound like “marketing,” but something can look like failure and still be a success; and I didn’t know that when I was really early on in my career. And there can be times where you have to go through the necessary failures to get to that point at the end. I mean, I remember being at one of Jeff Walker’s events like LaunchCon and him talking about how his favorite launches were launch one, two, and three where he was making four figures or five figures; because that’s when he was really …

LR: Super excited …

JR: Super excited. And he gets really passionate when he talks about those, because he had to be really inventive, he had to be creative, and he had to do a lot of thinking about them after the fact. If you do a launch and you do six figures and everything’s easy, it’s almost not as fun. You know what I mean? Those ones where you’re really inching for every little piece of it. So I guess that’s what I would say is try to enjoy those ones, you know what I mean? Where you don’t get exactly the result as much as you enjoy the ones where it’s just like no friction, everything goes exactly as planned.

LR: Yeah, it’s funny, I was just thinking, obviously we, in entrepreneurship, there in the space, there’s a lot of platitudes and Instagram posts about perseverance and stuff like that. And there’s more recognition about failure, I think, than there has been in the past because people fail in public more than they used to and stuff like that.

JR: Exactly.

LR: But for some reason, as you’re speaking about it, I was just thinking about … I don’t really watch baseball, but I think that even the very best hitters in baseball hit a few home runs in a season, right?

JR: Right.

LR: And that’s after years and years and years of practice. And yet, people figure somehow that they’re going to come out and crack a six figure launch early on in their career; it does seem there’s a disconnect there sometimes.

JR: Yeah, I think that it’s interesting how people define failure. You know what I mean? Because there’s the quantitative expectations that you put at the beginning of a launch, but then there are going to be both quantitative and qualitative benefits from any launch; and the qualitative benefits are the things you’ve learned from it. You know what I mean? Like, okay we tried this copywriting, or we tried this message, or we tried this pricing point, and that was a really big thing we learned in this launch that we just did, that it’s not quantitative; is the information we gleaned from the launch itself about what customers respond to in terms of pricing. So if I say it will … If we had only used quantitative metrics for success and failure, you know what I mean, we’re totally missing the point. And I don’t do that to sweet talk the client; I really do believe that. I mean, I really do believe that you learn so much from each of these launches that you do, and you just have to know where to look, and you have to be smart about it.

LR: Yeah, so awesome. So what do you feel like your unique skill set is?

JR: I was a designer before I was ever in marketing, and so I think one of my unique skill sets is that I take that kind of … I know it’s a kind of the left brain, right brain thing’s a little antiquated, but we’ll use that as a shorthand … I think I take that right brain kind of approach into marketing. I did design. I was that guy when I was in high school. I was designing album covers and bandy shirts, and that kind of stuff. I went to university for design, and I was working on design doing a little bit UX/UI before I kind of fell into marketing. And so I think as a marketing strategist, I have that background and so I really enjoy both sides of that. I mean working with creative directors and the design people and copywriters and all the ways that if you’re doing a launch, those things come together. So I don’t know if I’ll say I’m a jack of all trades, master of none kind of thing, but I definitely, with that background design, am now doing more left brain kind of marketing work.

LR: Yeah, I know how that works.

JR: They dovetail, you know what I mean, a lot so, if that’s a strength then, yeah.

LR: Yeah, that’s cool. I think that, if I’m not mistaken, that Peaceful Media, you guys get most of your business from word of mouth, basically, right?

JR: Yeah.

LR: You guys aren’t advertising?

JR: And from referral, yeah.

LR: Yeah. So then I’m curious, just since you guys are running a bunch of campaigns for your clients, what do you feel like is kind of working? What’s next in marketing, what is the stupid human trick in how to get customers right now?

JR: It’s YouTube, everything’s …

LR: It’s YouTube.

JR: Everything’s going …

LR: YouTube.

JR: YouTube.

LR: Listen to the confidence.

JR: That’s our 2019 …

LR: Listen to the confidence on that. It’s YouTube.

JR: It’s YouTube. I mean, we’ve been using Facebook for years and years, Instagram.

LR: Same here.

JR: And cost per impressions, as you know, are just skyrocketing.

LR: I do.

JR: What cost you $10 per impression five years ago, cost you $20 now. And we can’t get the cost per lead we used to get; we can’t get the cost per sale. We’re trying to be smarter about our audiences we go after. We’re trying to fine tune what we can control; we’re trying to fine tune that.

But with cost per impressions, Mark Zuckerberg had his mid-life crisis or whatever he had, you know what I mean, and I just feel everything has changed in the Facebook front since then. So where is there real estate; where is there inexpensive real estate for online marketing? It’s all on YouTube right now, so we are spending so much time and energy right now trying to find a way to get inexpensive leads on YouTube. And so we’re hiring video people. Qe are just taking it really seriously because there’s so much real estate that’s going left unsold on YouTube. Last I heard, 30 percent of the YouTube real estate for online ads doesn’t even get sold. Which is, for me, I didn’t know this, but I think that’s why it continues to be so inexpensive to do in stream videos, display videos that kind of stuff.

LR: And it’s working?

JR: It’s working, yeah.

LR: So, it’s not just impressions, it’s actually sales?

JR: It’s actually sales. I mean, you start with impressions, and then leads, and then sales, right?

LR: Right.

JR: But I mean, I just can’t get the same cost per lead that I used to get with Facebook. And so even though Facebook is still highly commoditized and people are ready to buy on Facebook, with all of our clients when they ask us what’s new for 2019, we tell them “YouTube.” That’s where we’re going with it. And 10 years from now, if we’re here at the same place, YouTube is going to be too expensive, and we’re going to be talking about the next thing.

LR: Whatever the next thing is, yeah.

JR: Whatever the next thing is, yeah.

LR: That’s interesting. Okay guys, well, so guy on the camera, you guys know what to do, right? Videos.

JR: You got the team right here. I mean this is it. YouTube is the way to go, yeah. You get some video developers, a good editor, some music and that is where it’s all going.

LR: That’s where it’s all going. Cool, so apart from trying to figure out YouTube, what do you feel is the sort of most important thing you need to learn right now? What is your cutting edge?

JR: Beyond YouTube?

LR: It’s just all YouTube all day?

JR: That is what I am really focused on now when I’m not reading books on marketing, I am studying best practice for YouTube right now. I’m trying to find ways, the little ways in which you can get those little links over there, or there’s some really cool stuff is happening with YouTube right now where you can kind of choose your own adventures with three little blocks at the bottom, and you can skip to different places in the videos; it’s really cool stuff. And so I want to be an expert on YouTube, because I feel like it’s going to serve me really well in the coming years.

But beyond that, for me personally, I try to learn two or three new big platforms a year. You know what I mean? And so last year it was Kajabi; I learned Kajabi inside and out. The year before that it was Ontraport, Infusionsoft. And I don’t really have a big one that I’m working on right now, I guess, but I probably should be; don’t tell my boss. No, no, it’s all, I mean, it’s all YouTube for me right now; I’m studying that in my free time.

LR: Yeah. Cool. Well, you’re early in your career still, but when you think about what it’s all about, what would you want your legacy to be?

JR: I would like to look back and say that … I’m a big believer in ethical marketing and when I write copy for ads or I’m strategizing with our copywriters, we place a really big emphasis on not trying to use sort of manipulative emotional triggers to sell things. And I would want to be able to look back, if I stay in marketing for the entirety of my career, and be able to say that I was able to sell people’s products, people’s events, people’s launches without …

LR: Tricking them.

JR: Without tricking them. Whenever we bring on new clients I say, “If your product is good enough, we don’t need to trick people into buying it.” That if we can just be honest about it, and so I hope that’s what I can look back and say. And I’ll been talking to people, someone jokes with me like, “What would you want to speak about if you ever spoke at one of these events?” And I would say, “All hands down of ethical marketing.” Because we’ve all seen black hat marketing. We’ve all seen white hat marketing, and I don’t know how to say that without kind of sounding a little bit self righteous. You know what I mean? Because we know we’ve seen the bad stuff out there but I just, we … And we’re called Peaceful Media. You know what I mean? So you can imagine that’s something that we strive for. But, I hope I can look back and say that I was able to have a successful career in marketing without being manipulative, or sneaky, or kind of Machiavellian, or one of those kinds of things. So, I hope so.

LR: Yeah, good. So we call this thing Modern Ontrapreneur, and we’re trying to figure out what it is that’s unique about this moment in history for entrepreneurs. What do you think is different today than how it was a few years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago?

JR: Ten years ago it was easy. You can really go from making five figures to six figures like that. I mean if you have the right

LR: Today you can?

JR: Today you can.

JR:: Yeah.

JR: Oh my God, I mean, if you have the right product, the right message, and you know who your audience is, I mean, it’s like the way you can be a rapper, or a band, and if you have the right music at the right time and you find the right people you can become famous. You know what I mean? I mean it’s not everyone, because there’s so much noise out there, it’s harder because the density is greater, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t go from sitting on your couch … I mean Jeff Walker was working in Colorado in his basement and he’s probably an eight figure business now. You know what I mean? That is possible, and I would say

LR: That was 10 years ago, though?

JR: Yeah, but that’s what I’m saying. Ten years ago, oh yeah Jeff but I don’t think he, I don’t … I guess what I’m saying is that was incremental. You know what I mean?

LR: Yeah, it’s been a long haul.

JR: Yeah, it’s been a long haul for him. I think that we’re living in a time now where that process, that incremental process he went through I think could probably be sped up.

LR: You mean it’s faster?

JR: I think it’s faster than it was then.

LR: How do you break through, though? Because it is denser, as you say? What is the thing that separates the masses that aren’t going to break through to the few that become rocket ships?

JR: I would say, one you have to be providing some … Okay there’s two things, one, I think you have to be unique, and you have to be able to articulate the ways in which you’re unique. You know what I mean? There’s a little bit of being at the right place at the right time too. But I think that if you were to ask me what separates your clients that just really rise quickly from those who kind of stay stagnant, it’s that there’s just something … You know, when you’re watching a movie and you just can’t take your eyes off someone. You know what I mean? I mean they have that ‘It factor.’ You know what I mean. And I don’t know how to coach somebody to do that but, and I think what I would advise to someone is just to really, really be yourself and don’t try to be someone else. If you have a product, you have a service, just really put it all out there, and then sink or swim based on that. You know what I mean? Because I do think that authenticity plays through, and we’re living in the age of video. People are going to see you on screen; you’re not going to do one of those things without that. And just hope that will resonate with people. Your question was “How do you cut through that high density?” You know what I mean? I think you really try hard to be yourself and hope that you can find those people because I think everyone has something to teach someone. I don’t know if that’s what you’re going for?

LR: Yeah, that’s great. Awesome John, appreciate your time so much.

JR: Of course, thank you so much.

LR: Would you do us the honor of signing our wall?

JR: I would love to.

LR: Awesome.

JR: Thank you.

Want more Modern Ontrapreneur Podcast?

Check out the previous episode featuring Mindie Kniss of Lucra.

The post John Randak: Peaceful Media appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Mindie Kniss is a business coach and award-winning humanitarian. In 2008 she left a fortune 100 career to become a coach and ended up living out of her office, facing foreclosure, eviction, and bankruptcy. Today she’s the CEO of Lucra, a company dedicated to training coaches and speakers. She was awarded the prestigious Global Health Fellowship in Nairobi, Kenya. She’s spoken on stages around the globe and was named one of the most influential living teachers with a path of the heart. She is an Ontraport Certified Consultant as well, her highest accolade to date. Mindie holds degrees in theology, creative writing, and philosophy.

In This Episode

Mindie Kniss was living out of her office while trying to start her business. Realizing she couldn’t do it alone, she started asking for help and began learning about marketing and sales. Today Mindie and her husband, Sean Stephenson, have a thriving business. They share the stage around the world to work with speakers and coaches and help them move past their blocks to grow their business. In this episode, Kniss shares how she teaches business with a heartfelt approach and why their company motto is “Do more good.”

Topic Timeline:

0:56 A Combined Force

Once Mindie and her husband, Sean combined forces their business, Lucra, really began to take off.

1:33 Next Level

As an introvert and extrovert team, Mindie and Sean use their personalities as a strength to get things done and take their business to the next level.

2:03 Ask for Help

You need people to grow a business, and the best way to do that is to ask for help.

3:49 Teaching From the Heart

Mindie coaches clients on how to move past their blocks. She does this by coaching them from the heart.

4:44 Visibility and Online Presence

Most of Lucra’s business comes from Mindie and Sean’s combined online presence and visibility, including speaking on stages and networking.

6:21 It’s All About the Relationship

While juggling everything with their business, Mindie and Sean make sure they are always doing the work to maintain balance within their relationship.

7:36 The Same Page

One way Mindie and Sean make it work is by keeping their relationship a priority and ensuring they are both on the same page.

8:35 Do More Good

The motto of Lucra is “Do more good.” If they can inspire others to live out their dreams, it will have a positive ripple effect on the world.

9:44 Humanity and Automation

We can automate everything in our businesses, but it’s important to keep the balance and maintain a human touch.

– Mindie Kniss

Show Transcript:

LR: Welcome to Modern Ontrapreneur. Today I have Mindie Kniss. She is a business coach and an award winning humanitarian. In 2008 she left a fortune 100 career to become a coach, ended up living out of her office, facing foreclosure, eviction, bankruptcy. Today she’s a CEO of Lucra, a company dedicated to training coaches and speakers. She was also awarded the prestigious global health fellowship in Nairobi, Kenya, she’s spoken on stages around the globe, and was named one of the most influential living teachers with a path of the heart. She is an Ontraport certified consultant as well, her highest accolade to date and holds degrees in theology, creative writing, and philosophy. Thank you so much for being here.

MK: It totally is the highest accolade ever. You are welcome. Thank you for having me.

LR: Yeah. So, tell me what it is that Lucra does?

MK: So Lucra is a combined force of my husband and I. We had two separate businesses for most of the time that we’ve known each other, until just this year. We combined forces in January and said we really don’t need all this duplication. He works with speakers, people who want to become professional speakers. I work with people who want to become professional coaches, that’s our two expertise areas. So we just put it all together because a lot of those people want to do both of those things so they’re very complementary.

LR: Yeah. Awesome. How’s that going?

MK: Amazing.

LR: Amazing.

MK: Rock star. Like so great.

LR: So great, interesting. Was it going great before or was it something about the combo that really took it off?

MK: That’s what took it to the next level because we both bring such different skill sets. He’s Mr. Extrovert, totally all about relationships and people, let’s bring in all the stuff. I’m totally the opposite, introvert, idea based, get shit done on the computer. So the two combined is awesome because realistically it’s us and then our team and we can create really anything anybody needs which is so fun.

LR: Cool. Cool. So, sounds like you’ve had quite a career so far; it’s been a winding path.

MK: It’s been an adventure, yes.

LR: An adventure, yeah. If you could give a piece of advice to your early career self that would’ve had you maybe not sleeping out of the back seat of your car or whatever it was, what would that advice be?

MK: That advice very clearly, very easily is just asking for help.

LR: Ask for help.

MK: Ask for help, because I thought, I’m smart enough. I should be able to figure this out, right? I didn’t realize at that time that that’s not how business works. You need people to grow a business and I’m like, “No, I got this, I can do it,” and plus then I was ashamed of where I was. Oh I’m living in my office now, that sucks. My home was foreclosed, I was evicted from my apartment, all that sucked. So I had this huge amount of shame, I didn’t want anyone to know because I’m supposed to be the coach. Like I’m supposed to have it all together. I totally didn’t, so I wish that I would’ve asked for help sooner, just to open my mindset to marketing and sales and all these other things that I learned in the last decade. I would’ve loved that a lot sooner.

LR: So learn marketing and sales?

MK: All that’s important, but I needed the people to help me with that. So really reaching out to help first, or asking for help first is the key.

LR: Yeah asking for help. Who did you ask help from?

MK: Oh my goodness, everybody. My husband was a huge influence in that, Sean Stephenson, he’s got a pretty nice following, and also because like I said, he’s a people person. So one of his mentors, Joe Polish, has become a great friend and mentor of mine as well. We ended up moving, from where we were living in Chicago, to Arizona specifically to be close to Joe and just to learn from people that really know what they’re doing at business and growth; surrounding ourselves and being in that environment is also really crucial.

LR: Yeah, got it. Very cool. So what do you feel like your unique skill set is?

MK: Coaching. I love just dropping in with people. I teach from the heart perspective so there’s this whole mindset thing going on with business, self-improvement, everything, I’m like yes mindset, but there’s more to it, there’s heart set, there’s intuition, there’s all this depth stuff. So I love just dropping in with somebody. My favorite is one on one but I also do some groups and that to me is where I just get to shine because I can just dig in there and see stuff.

LR: What do you help people see?

MK: Oh my goodness, where are they blocked, what’s stopping them. They say, “Oh, but I want to build the business. Oh, but I want to get these clients. Oh, but I want to charge X amount of dollars” but they’re not doing it. I’m like, do you really want that or what’s going on? Then just figuring out what’s causing them to not do what they say they are wanting to do and helping them through that process.

LR: Yeah. Interesting. So, in terms of growing your business, it sounds like you and Sean have really clicked. Obviously you’ve created kind of a product offering that is resonating but also you always have to go get business one way or another. What is working for you guys today to actually drum up new clients?

MK: Sure. I would say two fold, one is he has a lot of visibility so he’s out speaking on a lot of different stages. So someone will see him speak and then be like, “Oh, you guys also offer training, or coaching or whatever. I want to learn more about that.” Awesome. That’s one really huge aspect, you know, which is just great for visibility. Secondly is just our online platform. His website, my website, our combined membership site which we just recently started and we’re super excited about that. I love the tech part of it and, you know, the more that we can do, and I love what you were saying earlier too about don’t automate everything, totally my mindset. It’s like, let’s keep that human interaction and human touch really, really prominent in our business but automate all the crap that we don’t want to do all the time. So with all the digital stuff we’ve got going on, that also helps a lot.

LR: Mm-hmm … Do you advertise?

MK: We actually don’t do much advertising. We have social media platforms and we do that, but we really don’t pay.

LR: Then it’s networking and speaking?

MK: Networking, some publicity as well. We’ve gotten some documentaries made about us because apparently people think our relationship is very interesting for whatever reason. So that helps too and it’s more on the publicity side, but we don’t do a lot of advertising.

LR: Yeah. Interesting, well that’s awesome. So what is your personal cutting edge right now? What do you feel like you’re learning, and what’s the next most important thing for you to learn?

MK: The most important thing, and this may seem funny in this context, but it’s always relationship, because to me it’s easy to do stuff by myself. I prefer that most times. So being in relationship is the key thing and for us, as a married couple who are also working together, and the way that we set it up, we are both business partners but I’m 51%, he’s 49% so it’s like a woman owned business, and somebody has the deciding factor. Then how do we work with that, plus marriage, plus life, plus everything else. So I would say that we generally do a good job of it just because both of us do the work, on ourselves, on the business, with our team, et cetera, et cetera, but that’s always going to be my top thing that is my edge is like how can I get as much time and attention to the marriage that isn’t as easy as me just going and building an Ontraport Page, you know, somewhere by myself.

LR: Ontra husband.

MK: Right.

LR: Maybe that should be our next product. Yeah, well, I hear you. I know a little something about that situation too. So, how do you navigate working and living together?

MK: Yeah. For us, the most important aspect of that is to stay on the same page. If he and I are not on the same page, regardless of what that started with – whether it was a frustration, an irritation, whatever – it’s getting back on the same page as soon as possible and we, he’s much better about this than I am. I’ll just kind of fight my way through it and just be like, okay we need to get this done. He’s like, no.

LR: And that’s a fight you’re always going to win.

MK: Well right, but he’ll say, no, you know what, like all of that can wait, customers, clients, business, team, whomever, all of that can wait because it’s not as important as us being on the same page. So, he’s really, really an amazing stand for that, I am learning to be a stand for that as well, so that’s the key is just staying on the same page and then we can make magic happen. It’s easy.

LR: Is it?

MK: Yeah.

LR: Okay.

MK: For us, yeah.

LR: Good. Good. So when you think about your career, like the arc of your career which is now obviously … not beginning and you think about what it will be 10, 20 years from now and looking back, what would you like your legacy to be?

MK: Our motto at our company is “Do more good.” To me it’s not about my legacy. That was one of the things, when Sean and I combined we said, it’s no longer just the Mindie Kniss show, or the Sean Stephenson show. The whole point of our company Lucra is helping people build their lucrative lives and that’s not just about money; true wealth is well being. So how are their relationships, how is their money situation, how’s their body, how is their fitness and health? So in that concept about “do more good,” I just want to inspire other people to live out their dreams no matter what that is, by doing more good on the planet. So as that happens, there’s this ripple effect that everybody’s doing more good. As long as that’s happening, and I think it is, then I mean I’m good to go. It’s not about me and my personal legacy.

LR: Yeah. Beautiful. So we named this thing Modern Ontrapreneur, and we’re trying to figure out what it is that’s sort of unique about this current moment and being an entrepreneur in 2018, 2019 when this thing comes out, what do you think is unique about this path that, from what it may have been five or 10 years ago?

MK: Yeah. Right now I think that this concept of modern, it’s really about that intersection of total humanity and then automation, digitization, whatever you want to call that on that side, because we have both. I think some people get stuck in one or the other. You know, I know some companies that barely are online and I’m like, what are you doing? There’s a lot of opportunity there, and then some companies, or people I should say because it’s all about the people, are stuck in that other side of just automating everything and then there’s no touch points and no humanity at all. So finding that intersection that’s going to work, most profitably and most efficiently for you and your company is, I mean it’s such an amazing opportunity right now today because we have the opportunity for all of that to be present.

LR: Yeah. Very interesting. It does feel like there’s something about this moment where our personalities, and I don’t want to say like personal brand because it’s really just more like you said, it’s like our humanity, our ability to just connect on a human level is almost a competitive advantage. If we can just allow ourselves to shine through, people are just hungry for reality almost.

MK: Authenticity, vulnerability, all that stuff. Not when it’s used as a tactic but when it’s legit and you just show up. I mean you’re great at that, Ontraport’s awesome, like hey we kind of messed this thing up and here’s what we’re doing to make it better. I love that about you guys. We’ve done the same in our company like, here’s where we kind of screwed up, and here’s what we’re doing now, you know?

LR: Yeah. Awesome, well, hey, thank you so much for being here, it’s been great Mindie.

MK: Thank you Landon.

Want more Modern Ontrapreneur Podcast?

Check out the previous episode featuring Jamie Caliri of Dragonframe.

The post Mindie Kniss: Lucra appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Rachel Miller is a serial online entrepreneur and a mom of six kids in five years. She began as a mom blogger and went on to build audiences ranging in the millions. She’s a published author of multiple books, including a best seller that sold more than 100 thousand copies. She’s been featured on Good Morning America as well as national magazines. In 2017, she began teaching others how to craft their own viral content and helped thousands of businesses grow engagement. With her help, her clients have had their content in front of more than 10 million people.

In This Episode

Rachel Miller started creating content for kids but it quickly morphed into something bigger. She discovered her knack for building audiences and connecting to large groups of people. Knowing her friends could benefit from this skill, she invited them to learn how she did it — 47 of them said yes. This was the start of her second business which has helped her friends and clients reach millions of people. In this episode, Rachel shares her strategic approach to building audiences and how you can craft your own viral content.

Topic Timeline:

0:45 How a Mom of Six Got Started

Rachel is an extrovert and felt the need to connect with other people. She started small by creating content for kids and house hacks, but this quickly turned into something much bigger.

1:57 Collecting Audiences

Creating multiple audiences for different niches proved to be a success for Rachel. She turned to her friends and found that many wanted to start a business so, with 47 friends on board, she launched her second business.

3:38 Not All Entrepreneurs Are Extroverts

Even introverts can be entrepreneurs by mirroring their audience back to them, like a “geeky mom” who shares about how she plays dungeons and dragons with her tween.

5:05 Learn About Affiliate Marketing and Creating Products

Rachel has used nine different monetization methods to grow her business. She teaches these methods to her clients along with affiliate marketing and how to create products.

5:46 A Formula for Overwhelmed Moms

With over a decade of experience Rachel found a formula that works  — interview your audience, find out what they say about themselves, and create content that validates who they are.

6:42 It’s About Your Audience and Not About You

It’s the opposite of personal branding. When you speak to your audience, it’s about making them look good.

7:56 Find Your Die Hard Fans With Paid Ads

With a budget of $2 per day, Rachel uses paid ads to find the most active users, then taps into the communities that are the most engaged who will help push content into the world.

10:11 A Love for the People

Rachel gives a damn about her audiences and knows that her products will make their lives better. It comes from a real love of connecting with people.

10:58 Make Your Readers Look Good

Talking about your readers’ problems makes them look bad. Position your content in a way that makes your audience look and sound good.

12:11 Geeking Out on Marketing

Even after ten years, Rachel is still having fun learning about Facebook ads, funnels, monetization and how she can use the same tactic for multiple niches.

12:47 How to Love People Better

It’s a two way road. To create fans who truly love you, you have to love them back. Rachel wants to know she helped people make a difference with their customers and really connect with their audience.

13:53 From Bulletin Boards to Social Media

The day of posting a flyer on the community bulletin board is over. We have the ability to communicate with an entire town using Facebook and online platforms.

– Rachel Miller

Show Transcript:

LR: Welcome to Modern Ontrapreneur. I’m Landon and this is Rachel Miller. She’s a serial online entrepreneur and a mom of six kids in five years. She began as a mom blogger and went on to build audiences ranging in the millions. She’s a published author of multiple books, including a best seller that sold more than 100 thousand copies. She’s been featured on Good Morning America as well as national magazines. In 2017, she began teaching others how to craft their own viral content and helped thousands of businesses grow engagement. With her help, her clients have had their content in front of more than 10 million people. Rachel, thank you so much for being here!

RM: Thank you! I appreciate it, Landon.

LR: This is great! We’re not gonna talk about how you had six kids in five years. Although maybe we will. I want to start again…about what it is you actually do. So you’re at home with five kids in six years, six kids in five years, and you’re trying to figure out what the hell am I gonna do with myself, and then what happened?

RM: I was basically just lonely, and I needed to make a business that would fill that extrovert need that I have which is to talk to people and have people talk to me. So I created content that got people to engage with me.

LR: Content. What content?

RM: It began with kids activities. Like Play-Doh and recipes with your kids.

LR: How to make it?

RM: How to make Play-Doh, how to make slime, cookies your kids would eat.

LR: You did not do the how to make slime videos?

RM: Oh, my word! We did, yeah.

LR: My daughters probably watched those for days.

RM: I know. My daughter now makes them.

LR: So does mine. I’ve got stacks and stacks of slime jars.

RM: So I started with content and then house hacks to help parents, and then it morphed because eventually you get tired of play-doh, you get tired of glitter, and then it morphed into my second site, which is house tips. So how to repair a garbage disposal, how to buy a vacuum cleaner that takes care of…

LR: You seriously just like, “Whatever…get it on YouTube.”

RM: Yep, pretty much.

LR: Basically.

RM: Pretty much. I like collecting people, and so that’s truly what it is. I like collecting people so I created an audience of pre-school parents. Then I created an audience of people that want to fix their houses. Then I created an audience of cat lovers. It’s kind of a joke a bit because I actually don’t have cats, but it’s a longer story than for today. And then I made an audience of crock pot people, and I also made an audience for make-up and another one. So I asked a hundred of my friends, “Do you want to do this too? I’ve made all these audiences. Do you want to learn how to make an audience?”

LR: Why would they want to do that?

RM: Because they wanted their own businesses.

LR: How did you monetize these audiences?

RM: Affiliate sales, product sales. I had seven private label products, my books, courses.

LR: Okay so now they’re like, “Yes I do want to do this.”

RM: 47 of them on Halloween said yes. On Halloween.

LR: The people you collected to come to your house.

RM: The other ones didn’t know.

LR: They’re like, “Trick or treat.” You’re like, “Do you want to build an ottoman?”

RM: No, a hundred people on my list. So I started my second business, which is teaching people how to grow audiences, with a hundred people on my list. I emailed them on Halloween. 47 said yes, and the other ones were trick or treating with their kids so they didn’t get the email.

LR: Obviously.

RM: Yeah. I know.

LR: That’s amazing.

RM: And my business was born. This new business.

LR: This new business. And so now you’re teaching people how to build audiences. So, how do you do this?

RM: Essentially you want to have conversations with people. If you can mirror a person back to themselves, they tend to talk to you more. So if I sit similar to you, you see there, more interested. So it’s the same type of thing that you do with your audience like you would do in real life. I just make content that I know my audience would say about themselves.

LR: So, I’m curious because you’re obviously an extrovert, like you said, and an engaging person. Somebody that will talk to you about cats or crock pots.

RM: Deadly, and I don’t cook.

LR: I presume that not all of the people, the 47 people that started with you, are as engaging of people. How has this process worked for them?

RM: We’ve had 10 people grow audiences … Excuse me. We’ve had 34 people grow audiences to over 10 million, reach a single post to over 10 million, and some of those people are introverts. One of my clients, she’s extreme introvert. You will not see her picture on her own wall and I’m friends with her. So you won’t see her online. She grew her audience from zero to a million in one year, one month, one week. So even introverts can do this because introverts who love people, it’s the same thing. They want to mirror their audience back to them. So it’s almost perfect for introverts as well.

LR: Sitting like me is one thing, but how do you mirror somebody on Instagram?

RM: Well I’m a geeky mom. So what does a geeky mom want to say about herself to her friends? What kind of content does she want to engage with? What kind of post does she say? She might talk about how she was playing Dungeons & Dragons with her tween. That might be something she would talk about. So, how can you position that content as if she was saying it.

LR: Because people want to know they’re not the only ones playing Dungeons & Dragons with their tween.

RM: Yes.

LR: Got it. So then you build these audiences and then you’re teaching people how to do affiliate marketing basically. Or create products, write books.

RM: Affiliate marketing, create products, write books. We’ve got nine different monetization methods that I’ve used and I’ve grown.

LR: So this is a full on program at this point.

RM: The monetization one is kind of a side. We focus on just building the audience, and then if people want to know how to monetize it … Honestly you can only be truly good at one thing and I’m okay at monetizing at all those nine methods. I’ve made over $3000 a month on each of them, but I know people who’ve made a hundred thousand on each of those monetization methods. So I kind of give a little taste and then direct you to the person that’s best to teach those.

LR: Yeah, got that. So you’ve been at this for … Well you said your kids were up to 12 now, so you’ve been at this for a decade-ish.

RM: Yes, I’ve been growing audiences for over a decade.

LR: If you could give your early overwhelmed mom a bit of advice about how to have done this more smoothly, or something that would have smoothed the road for the next person, what would it be?

RM: To interview your audience first. Find out what they say about themselves. Create content that says that.

LR: Literally create content that says that, because people just want validation.

RM: They want validation of who they are. They want to look good to their friends and family on social media. So when they comment on your post, they’re commenting knowing that their sister’s watching on their comments. They’re sharing, knowing that someone is seeing their shares so, they’re not going to share my story of my success. They’re going to share something that shows them that they’re successful.

LR: So the like or the comment is really more about how they look out there.

RM: It’s all about your audience and not about you and not about your product. I can sell more of my product without my face on it.

LR: Yeah. Well yeah, of course.

RM: I know there’s a lot of people that love personal branding so it’s kind of the opposite of personal branding a little bit.

LR: It’s the opposite of personal branding because you’re not branding?

RM: Yourself. You’re branding your audience.

LR: You’re branding your audience as a group of people that are quirky, weird in this particular weird way, and are proud about it.

RM: Yeah, or they love their local town. You’re a realtor and you’re branding the people that love this town, and you happen to say that the lost dog is near the house that you’re selling on this street, if you’re interested in buying the house right there. The people, when you’re collecting them, you’re collecting the people who love a certain topic.

I collect crock pot people, and I love crock pot people, and we talk about crock pots, and I help them look like good cooks to their friends and family with the content. Even though I don’t cook. My cat people, I don’t own a cat, but I love cat people too. I can talk that I’m a cat’s mom, because I interviewed my cat people to find out what they say about themselves, and they say things like, “I’m a cat’s mom. I’m a crazy cat lady. I take care of cats.” So the words that they literally use, I will use those words in all my content.

LR: And then let it just be viral. Do you advertise?

RM: I do advise some advertising. So that’s just to find where your die-hard fans are. So with cat people, I had to find out where cat people are most passionate and most active on Facebook, so I can find that cat person that knows all the other crazy cat people. If I find her, she’s going to share that content and, when she shares it, the people who see it are also cat lovers, and so now my content has a chance of amplifying. I use ads to target that specific person, to start my page.

LR: Hold on. You said you use ads to find out where they are, but you can find out where they are without the ads.

RM: You can find out where they are without the ads, but it takes a little bit more time. When I use my ads, I use like $2 a day. So with one of the pages that we grew, the introvert I told you who grew her page to a million, she did it with $683 in total ad spend.

LR: In total, so you’re putting out these low dollar ads, getting a bunch of views and some clicks or whatever, comments?

RM: The goal in that is to find where people are most active in that niche.

LR: What pages? Where the big pages are?

RM: So in cat niche, I didn’t want the big cat pages. What I wanted was the big cat page that has everyone who can’t help themselves but comment, and share, and like whenever I post a cat thing. So I found them at no kill shelters.

LR: So the most active ones.

RM: I could find the big cat pages, but they had people who weren’t necessarily … They loved cats but they weren’t passionate, gung-ho, crazy bunkos about cats. I find the bunko crazy ones inside of no kill shelters. Now I don’t want to target “Grumpy Cat,” even though they’re a massive cat one. I don’t want to target “I Love my Cat,” even though that’s a massive audience. I want to target these big cities and their no kill shelters, because that person who likes that page, they also are friends with the most other cat people, and they can’t resist a cat in their feed. They have to comment and share. So then they push my content out to the world.

LR: Very strategic.

RM: It’s really fun, and Audience Insights in Facebook tells you exactly who the most active people are, so you know where you can begin putting that $2 of ad spend.

LR: Yeah, very interesting. What do you feel like … I mean building audiences seems like the most obvious answer here, but what do you feel like your unique skill set is?

RM: Collecting people.

LR: Collecting people. It’s a little bit sketchy.

RM: Essentially if you love people

LR: Are they always alive?

RM: That sounds weird, yeah, that sounds weird. I don’t know why I say that one, I mean it sounds weird but truly that’s what it is. If you love people, you’re going to serve them. You’re going to ask, “How can I make your day, your life, better?” When you do that, you love them, you serve them, you can also sell to them because it kind of changes the sales perspective from I’m selling you my product, to I’m serving you and here’s this product that’s going to make your life awesome and amazing, because you’re already awesome and amazing, but it’s going to make you even a little bit better.

LR: So the unique skill set in there was?

RM: Loving people.

LR: Just loving people really.

RM: Yeah.

LR: Just giving a damn.

RM: Yeah, giving a damn. That’s it.

LR: Yeah. I think that’s right. It’s interesting because people in this chair a lot of times say things like, “I want to serve, I make sure it’s all about them. I don’t talk about my problems, I talk about their problems,” but underlying all that really is just really being motivated to make a difference.

RM: And make them look good because if you truly love someone, you’ll make them look good. Sometimes talking about their problems makes them look bad. So, for example, in my DIY home site, if I talked about, “10 ways to clean your carpets,” and your mother or your friend shares it, what does that say about them?

LR: Dirty carpets obviously.

RM: That they got dirty carpets.

LR: Yeah, gross.

RM: That doesn’t make them look good. So you want to share your content in such a way that makes them, your reader, look like they’re amazing even if their carpets are dirty. So it would be something like, “10 ways to get your carpets to clean themselves,” or “10 ways to encourage your husband to clean the carpets.” The carpet’s not her fault now. The carpets cleaning itself.

LR: Lazy ass husband.

RM: That’s shareable. It’s just positioning the same content in a way in which it makes your audience look good.

LR: Good insights. What do you feel like you’re learning right now? What are you the most engaged in the next level for you?

RM: I’m totally geeking out about marketing and everything else right now, so I’m stuck in that. I’m having a lot of fun with it. Funnels and Facebook funnels and collecting audiences, yeah.

LR: The monetization part?

RM: Mm-hmm.

LR: Even 10 years in? You’ve been at this for a while.

RM: Yeah. You like one thing, you just stick with it, you know?

LR: Well ot you, you got cats and crock pots and …

RM: It’s the same thing though. It’s just collecting different audiences, but I’m doing the same tactics with those audiences.

LR: Well, what do you feel like you’d like your legacy to be when you look back on your career 20 years from now? What do you want it to have been all about?

RM: I’d love for it to be that I’ve taught people to love other people better. Because that’s what we’re doing when we’re marketing…..essentially loving people and serving them, and making a difference in our audience’s lives. And if I can help people make a difference in their customers’ lives, that would be awesome.

LR: What about people who don’t love people?

RM: Then maybe you shouldn’t go into marketing.

LR: Don’t go into marketing. So you think it’s an intrinsic thing, that you need to love people to begin with, and then you’re talking about…

RM: For the engagement yes. You could use ads if you didn’t love people and kind of brute force sales. True. But if you’re going to get them to become a die-hard fan of yours and love you and engage with you, you have to love them back. It comes across on the camera. It comes across in your content. Yeah, you have to love them.

LR: And so for you it’s about how people express that in a way that works and feels authentic, and…

RM: Makes a difference.

LR: Makes a difference, yeah. Got it. That’s exciting.

RM: It is.

LR: So Modern Ontrapreneur, to try and get at what’s unique about this moment in history and even in the 10 years that you’ve been at this, or whatever it has been…

RM: It’s exploded this.

LR: It’s changed a lot right? So what do you feel like that’s unique about being an entrepreneur today?

RM: Oh, my word. If we were an entrepreneur 10 years ago, we’d be using bulletin boards and those street things, and those people that put those signs out on the road. They’re like $10 a sign and they’re like posting them on the side of the street, I’m like, “How’s that working for you?” With the price of a single sign, we can reach a whole town using Facebook and get those people to talk to us. No one’s talking to that sign on the side of the road that someone’s putting out in little … Yeah.

LR: So our ability to reach audiences is obvious.

RM: Reach. Target. It will become more expensive because those people who are doing the door-to-door, putting the lanyards on peoples doors and stuff, you know those papers that we all have stuffed in our doors? That’s going to go down right?

LR: Mm-hmm

RM: We’re going to see a decrease in that. We’re going to see a decrease, I think, in the junk mail in our physical box as people are moving more to … They’re realizing that Facebook and Google … Regular businesses are seeing the benefit of going online, and that also means it’s glutted so our ad prices are going up. Which is why I’m in demand because I help you have lower ad prices.

LR: Because you’re doing it

RM: With $2 a day, yeah. That reaches millions, yeah.

LR: Well hey, thank you so much for being here.

RM: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

LR: This is awesome, I really like that conversation. Would you sign our wall?

RM: Of course.

LR: Awesome, thank you.

Want more Modern Ontrapreneur Podcast?

Check out the previous episode featuring Marcela DeVivo, found of Gryffin.

The post Rachel Miller: Moolah Marketing appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Marcela Di Vivo is a digital marketing analyst and speaker for SEMrush. An industry veteran with nearly 20 years of digital marketing experience, she travels the world speaking about SEO, data driven marketing strategies, OMNI channel optimization, and the evolution of digital. Working with SEMrush has allowed her to combine her passion and expertise in forward-thinking marketing, analytics and disruptive technologies.

In This Episode

Marcela DeVivo has been in the marketing industry since before the age of Google and has seen many trends come and go. She developed a unique perspective on the future of marketing by keeping a close watch on disruptive technologies. In this episode, Marcela shares her advice on SEO, Facebook ads versus Google ads, and the importance of having a personal brand.

Topic Timeline:

1:18 Personal Branding and the Competitive Landscape

In hindsight, Marcela would have done things differently. Her advice is to build your brand first then work on the other businesses.

2:43 Create Your Mysticism and Build Your Foundation

Everyone has something of value to offer, even if they’re just getting into the game. Start building the foundation for your brand and, when you’re ready to take the leap, you’ll have an audience.

3:52 Get Clear on Your Goals Then Delve Deeper into Your Career

It’s never too late to pivot and start a new business if you focus, connect with people, attend events and give it your all.

4:51 The Sooner You Start the Better

The marketing space is competitive but the golden era is not behind us. There are new technologies being released all the time, and there are always opportunities if you’re paying attention.

5:38 Blockchain and Branding

Blockchain gives consumers the chance to own their identity and, if you are staying on top of the game, you could be the first to become an influencer on one of these new channels.

6:45 She Gets Things Done with Singular Focus

Marcela’s superpower is getting things done quickly and effectively. She has mastered the ability to hyperfocus. What might take someone multiple days to get done, she can accomplish in one day.

7:41 When Buying Ads, Look at Buying Stages

To determine which digital ad platform to use, Marcela recommends you look at which buying stage you’re in — awareness, consideration or decision.

9:07 Google Ads vs. Facebook Ads

Facebook can be more affordable if you’re just starting your business, and Google is ideal if you’re further down the sales funnel.

10:25 How to Maximize on Google Ads

If you have the budget to maximize on Google ads, create an alpha campaign using single keyword research and ad groups with hyper-focused keywords.

11:03 Blockchain Is Disrupting Industries

Companies are emerging with new technologies, but there will only be a few winners. Marcela believes the future of these technologies will be in blockchain.

13:07 The Two Qualities That Will Help You Succeed

Marcela has experimented across nations, languages and industries to see what works, and she found the more adaptable and versatile you are, the more likely you are to survive in the competitive marketing space.

14:11 Find the Gaps, Recognize Trends, and Jump on Opportunities

If you are willing to put in the time and effort, to be different and creative, there are opportunities for you.

– Marcela DeVivo

Show Transcript:

LR: Welcome to Modern Ontrapreneur. I’m Landon Ray and today we have Marcela DeVivo who is a digital marketing analyst and speaker for SEMrush. She is an industry veteran with nearly 20 years of digital marketing experience. She travels the world speaking about SEO, data driven marketing strategies, OMNI channel optimization and the evolution of digital. Working with SEMrush has allowed her to combine her passion and expertise in forward-thinking marketing, analytics and disruptive technologies. Thank you so much for being here.

MD: Thanks so much for having me. I’m very excited.

LR: Yeah, so tell me about SEMrush and what you’re doing there.

MD: So, I’m a digital marketing analyst and speaker at SEMrush. I started earlier this year and it’s a great role for me because I’ve been a marketer for 20 years and I started using SEMrush when they first came out 10 years ago and it’s a fantastic ability to use all these tools to improve digital marketing strategies from both PPC, organic, even social media.

LR: So SEMrush is a piece of software that does keyword analysis and tracking?

MD: Yeah, it’s competitive analysis, keyword analysis. It’s becoming a tool set that has also tools available for different types of digital marketing, both paid, organic, and social.

LR: You know, thinking about how the digital landscape today has evolved, you’ve watched the whole thing since basically the inception if you’ve been doing this…

MD: Before Google

LR: Yeah before Google. Exactly. You’ve got to agree that it’s getting more complicated out there.

MD: Absolutely.

LR: And, so if you could, normally I ask, if you could think back to give yourself some career advice, but 20 years ago, people didn’t have to deal with what they have to deal with today. So what advice would you give somebody starting out in digital marketing, somebody who was an entrepreneur who knew they had to figure out how to get customers, they understood that the internet is where everybody goes to find what they’re going to buy, what is the piece of advice you would give that will help smooth out the sort of learning process and get them over the hump so they can actually do that profitably?

MD: I think the biggest advice is to build your personal brand. I know when I started, I started launching businesses, so I created multiple businesses with different partners and then later I had clients and my focus was always in building these brands and clients or businesses, but I didn’t build my own brand enough. So, looking back now, I see the mistake because it should have been done backwards. I should have built my brand first and foremost and, from that, there I could have stemmed out all the initiatives, businesses, etc.

LR: But what are you saying when you’re starting out, you don’t have a business yet, you don’t have a career that you can sort of you know, reference, why would anybody care about your personal brand as a beginner?

MD: Initially we all have something to offer. We all have something of value, so when you’re starting out, you have your education and you can start laying the foundation. So at that point, you start building out your own personal site. I didn’t build my own personal site until maybe a year or two ago. After 20 years I didn’t need it. I was building brands and businesses. So you can build up your social media and you don’t have to tout yourself and your own skills in social media, but you can start building your audience and growing your own audience, not your businesses, but your own. And by the time you’ve got something truly unique to offer, whether it be 5 years, 10 years, however long it takes, you’ve already got a personal, the foundation of your own brand to jump off of. So I just think it’s fundamental to put yourself first and foremost and start building the mysticism and the idea of who you are, find out what’s unique about you and when the time comes, you’re ready to grow quickly.

LR: Yeah, interesting. So, just have an audience, post to social media, begin to have followers and just something that shows what you’re talking about your vacation pictures?

MD: I would say no, whatever industry you’re in, whatever you want to focus your career on, really delve deep and start getting into that niche and share and talk a lot, get to know people. Yeah, the biggest example for me is a friend in digital marketing, who started maybe five years ago, but her focus from the beginning was that, building her brand. And she started connecting, talking to people on Twitter, she just interrupted conversations, got to know people, showed up at events, really built her own brand, started speaking out of nowhere and today she is one of the best known marketers in the world, even though her background is she was a veterinarian, and she got into digital marketing from that and she just pivoted her brand and now is one of the best known marketers. So we can all do that.

LR: And do you think it’s going to be harder or easier to build an audience five years from now?

MD: I think it’ll be a lot harder. So the sooner you start, the better.

LR: Interesting.

MD: It’s just getting more and more competitive and more and more difficult.

LR: Yeah, yeah. Do you feel like the golden era is behind us, or do you think that the opportunity remains today?

MD: Fortunately the internet is too disruptive and there’s new technologies being released all the time. There’s a huge war on the brink of a new era, I believe, with blockchain coming out, so there’s going to be plenty of opportunities with new disruptive technologies for us to be known. So I do not believe that the golden era is behind us. I think we just have to always be on the lookout for the new disruptive technologies that are coming out that we can immediately participate in, and build our brand around.

LR: Yeah, and how do you think that the blockchain will relate to personal brands?

MD: It’s quite significant actually, there’s the blockchain itself. It’s simply a system, a distributed ledger. It’s ideally putting, removing trust, so when we think of Google and Facebook for example, they’re the medium, they’re the third party. So we give money to them and then they bring in the ad, you know. There’s this triangular relationship.

With blockchain, we as consumers can own our identity and we can pay directly to the advertisers, eliminating the third parties. There’s a lot of new tools and softwares and technologies that are being released on the blockchain, that when they come out, they are going to give us an opportunity to become known. The same way that the Twitter influencers, for example, those people were the first to jump in. They built their audience quickly. When there comes a new, you know, blockchain social media channel, whoever is on it first, that’s who is going to become an influencer.

LR: Got it. In those channels.

MD: In those channels, yeah.

LR: Yeah, understood. So what do you feel like your unique skill set is?

MD: Getting things done. Yep, I’ve learned over two decades in a very digital marketing is very busy, there’s so much to do all the time so, for me, my what I call my skills, my superpower, is getting things done, effectively and quickly. So I’ve learned to set goals for myself every day and I’m very productive. So by the end of the day I can do what it would take other people three, four, five days to do. Just from singular focus and just tight organization, I would say. But beyond that, in terms of in digital marketing, I come from an organic SEO background, so I have just tons and tons of knowledge on how to rank for Google and how to build the strategies, the analysis necessary to rank well quickly in Google.

LR: So this is kind of a throw away question given that you’re an SEO person, but I normally ask what is working to get customers in your business right now? Do you still feel, though, that search engine optimization is the best strategy? Is that the one you would invest in first if you were a new business?

MD: No.

LR: Okay

MD: No.

LR: What would you work on?

MD: I’d really switch things around, instead of looking at the channels, so I don’t look at SEO or Google ads, or Facebook or…. I look at it from the point of view of buying stages and buying journey. So, I look at awareness consideration decision. So, I look at what are the best channels at the awareness stage. If you’re a new business and you’re launching, Google organics takes time and it really does take a lot of effort to mature content, links, authority, so I think a quicker channel is Facebook. Facebook ads particularly, not so much organic, there’s just no more organic reach, but Facebook ads is a great way to get an audience.

LR: Awareness, yeah.

MD: Awareness and then you take those visitors and you can cookie them, and you start remarketing to them and from them you build lookalike audiences. From there you start getting them into your email list, and you send them emails, and then you start nurturing them so that when they’re ready to get to know your product, your service, then you’re top of mind.

LR: Yeah

MD: So, I think that organic really is more of a consideration channel.

LR: It’s more of a consideration channel…

MD: And obviously a decision. But it starts at consideration.

LR: Yeah, and it’s also challenging, right? It’s certainly challenging for a new business to get anywhere with organic. And how do you compare, when you think about the differences between paid search on Google and paid, you know, sponsored ads on Facebook? How do you think about the difference between those two channels?

MD: Well, they’ve become so similar, you know they kind of mirror each other. Google does now similar audiences as look alike audiences, so they’re very similar now, but I believe that Facebook can still be more inexpensive, but it is very much at the top of the funnel channel because people don’t go on Facebook to say, “What am I going to buy today?” They’re checking in on their friends; they’re looking at videos; they are entertaining themselves. So you really have to disrupt them and, you know, versus on Google ads, they’re looking for that. If they type in “bathing suit,” they’re possibly going to buy. So it’s further down the funnel. Unless you’re doing Google display and that’s, of course, similar to Facebook which is also disruptive.

LR: Yeah, so your recommendation for most small businesses is to start where it’s less expensive. You’re not going to get burned so fast because even Google paid ads are expensive and dangerous.

MD: Exactly.

LR: Yeah.

MD: Yeah.

LR: I think that jives with my experience also.

MD: Yeah, then there’s ways on Google ads where you can create very targeted campaigns, so we call these alpha campaigns, where you create single keyword ad groups and you really hyper focus on a very specific, small core set of keywords so you can use that or you can say, “Look, I’m going to set aside a budget to test” and you do what’s called a broad match modified, so you just like open it up and put a lot of budget into testing which keywords convert and then you pause and you take the converting keywords and you put them in alpha ad groups. So there’s ways of maximizing Google adwords, especially as a way of testing what works and what doesn’t work, so you can be a lot more strategic about your budget.

LR: Yeah, very interesting. So, what is the cutting edge for you? What are you learning about, what are you excited about?

MD: Blockchain

LR: Blockchain’s the thing.

MD: Yeah, definitely.

LR: And so you’re excited about that because you think there’s going to be a new Facebook coming out on the blockchain or is there something else about the blockchain that is exciting to you?

MD: I think they’re disrupting every industry. Every one.

LR: What about the fact that they haven’t disrupted any industries yet?

MD: They’ve disrupted crypto, well not crypto currency, that’s true! They’re on the brink of disrupting most industries. When before Google came out, we had Alta Vista, we had the Yahoo directory, we had DMOZ, we had Excite, right? So we had 10, and they were all fighting for market share and they all had a little bit of visibility but none had a lot and it was sort of the stage that we’re at now. They’re all kind of forming, but they’re all, you know, just in the formation stage. Then there’s going to be I believe a stage where there’s going to be all these companies or blockchain initiatives that are going to be vying for attention and then, of course, you will have a few winners that will emerge. But it’s early days. I think it’s 1999 in blockchain right now.

LR: Yeah, and when do you predict the first sort of break out use case will be for blockchain?

MD: I think we’re going to see that in, ah, there’s so many different initiatives.

LR: Social ID, voting, currency, payments…

MD: All of those are coming out. I think in payments.

LR: Payments

MD: Yeah

LR: Will be first?

MD: Yeah, I think so. Because there’s already a lot of different platforms for it and as with the growth of remote workers, the international workforce. I mean, I work with, my team across 12 countries. We have people in Russia; we have people in Italy. I mean literally, we are everywhere. So paying people is very difficult

LR: Is it?

MD: And we’re seeing more and more of that, so I think that the blockchain application of being able to remit payments across the world quickly and inexpensively will be the first.

LR: Yeah, well that would be nice. That would be nice. So when you think back on your career, you know, 10, 20 years from now whatever it might be, what do you hope your legacy will be? What would you like to be remembered for?

MD: I think for creating very diverse and multichannel digital strategies. I think the ability to be, ah, to think, to create strategies that transcend a specific channel or a specific brand is one thing I’ve been working on for two decades. So we’ve done so many different campaigns that just across nations, across languages, across even not just channels, but also industries. So, I think the ability to be versatile and just see that it doesn’t start and end with Google. I’ve seen it before, but there’s going to be a growth and the more adaptable we are, the more we’re going to be able to thrive, so I think my legacy is being able to perdure in an industry where many people have not lasted and doing so by being very creative and versatile.

LR: Yeah, yeah, awesome. And lastly, we call this thing Modern Ontraprenuer trying to get at what is unique about entrepreneurship in this moment. We’ve been at it, the both of us, for quite a long time now. What do you think it is that’s unique about being an entrepreneur today 2018, that may be different than 10 years ago or even five years ago?

MD: Yeah I think we can circle back around to what I was talking about personal branding. Even though it is getting harder and more competitive, I still believe there are opportunities for entrepreneurs to distinguish themselves quickly, using a lot of the different channels. I know with influencer marketing, for example, many of these influences have not been at it for a decade or two. They have been at it for a year or two, and they’ve been able to build out incredible brands.

So I think for those people who persevere and that are willing to put in the time and the effort and to differentiate themselves, it’s not just doing the same old tried and trusted things, but just willing to be creative and different, there still are opportunities. It is more competitive, it is more difficult, but there’s gaps. So being able to analyze and find those gaps and filling them creatively is what I believe is the biggest opportunity that we have right now.

The blockchain cryptocurrency space was that and has been that for the last year or two. It was a gap and many people came in and filled it quickly and fortunes have been made. Some fortunes have been lost as well, but that would have been unthinkable prior to the internet. And prior to what we have now. So whoever has the capacity to recognize trends and jump on them creatively, there’s so many opportunities.

LR: Yeah, beautiful.

MD: Yeah.

LR: Well, thank you so much for being here. This has been great to talk to you. I really appreciate it. Will you sign our wall?

MD: Awesome, thank you. Awesome, you too. Happy to.

Want more Modern Ontrapreneur Podcast?

Check out the previous episode featuring Matt Coffy of CustomerBloom.

The post Marcela DeVivo: Gryffin appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Matt Coffy founded CustomerBloom in 2010, an international digital marketing agency specializing in profit engines, which is a proprietary sales funnel marketing platform. Coffy recently built and launched PracticeBloom, a marketing agency for medical practices and the healthcare community. He’s appeared on CNN, speaks at numerous industry events yearly, and has a podcast and news articles that reach thousands monthly. He’s also a seasoned guitarist and a lead singer and songwriter in his rock group, the Matt Coffy Band. He shares the stage today with national acts at major music festivals.

In This Episode

Before starting his full service marketing agency, Matt Coffy began as a consultant. Today, his company has reached seven figures working with clients on executing their marketing strategies. Now looking forward, Matt’s goal is to combine his two passions of music and entrepreneurship. In this episode, he shares why taking chances pays off, how delegation leads to growth, and how great work and reviews will lead to more customers.

Topic Timeline:

1:00 The Three Key Components

Matt started a full service marketing agency that helps his clients get to the next level with a turbocharged profit engine using these three components: the offer, landing pages and conversions.

3:05 Documenting What Works

With journal and video entries dating back to the beginning of his business, Matt now uses his documented journey to offer advice to other entrepreneurs  — “Stay the course and take a chance.”

4:19 A Bottleneck

Once you realize you’re the one keeping the team from growing, you can begin to refocus to systemize and delegate tasks to your team. That’s when things start getting solved and growth happens.

5:12 Taking a Chance

A music festival approached Matt to help them bootstrap their marketing efforts with only six weeks to go. His team went above and beyond, which led to Matt’s band opening for  George Thorogood.

7:16 An Entertainer and Storyteller

The trick to having people engage with you is telling a good story — make the information entertaining and connect on an emotional level.

8:03 Do Good Work and You’ll Catch the Falling Gold

When you have enough reviews and testimonials that speak to the good work you do, your potential clients are more likely to trust you and turn into customers.

10:23 Follow Up With Leads

Matt’s current focus is to find a way to support his clients in closing the gap between capturing leads and closing deals.

12:16 Combining Passions

With a talent for music and entrepreneurship, Matt hopes to bring together these two passions and create high-level, fun and educational events.

14:04 Find Your Message and Build Your Brand

Now is the time to create your personal brand. Figure out what your message is and how you can build something that is important to you.

– Matt Coffy

Show Transcript:

LR: Welcome to Modern Ontrapreneur. Today, we have Matt Coffy, who founded CustomerBloom in 2010. Seems like an eon ago. It is an international digital marketing agency specializing in profit engines, which is a proprietary sales funnel marketing platform. Coffy recently built and launched PracticeBloom, a marketing agency for medical practices and the healthcare community. He’s appeared on CNN, speaks at numerous industry events yearly, has a podcast, and news articles that reach thousands monthly. He’s also a seasoned guitarist and a lead singer and songwriter in his rock group, the Matt Coffy Band. He shares the stage today with national acts at major music festivals. Cool. Thank you so much for being here.

MC: Yeah. It’s a lot of fun. Yeah. Thank you for having me. We had a great event this morning with great talks, so lots of participation. Your crowd is super engaged.

LR: Yeah. They’re good people. Well, tell me this. First of all, tell me more about what this profit engines platform is all about.

MC: Yeah. Super easy. You know this business. It’s full-circle marketing. You talked about it this morning, which is that it’s the journey of the clients’ clients, typically, in our case with an agency. We’ve designed a profit engine which is a really articulated sales funnel. It just has all the components, builds in all the automations, super turbo-charged with all the little things that bring people from here to here to here, which is offer, landing page, conversion.

If you can get those three things figured out, put them into a sort of hyper bull mode, which… for our profit engines, and what we try to do for our clients is we get them to the next level, which is to get them into a very sustained, kind of over-the-top strategy of sales funnel, like all the articulations that they don’t necessarily want to know about or need to know about. But we build all that infrastructure in, and then they just make profit. So it’s perpetually building profit for their clients and for their journey of their patients, in the case of the medical, or regular customers in our CustomerBloom pile, which would be our CustomerBloom business.

LR: Yeah. Gotcha. Is this a software platform?

MC: No. Tech stack.

LR: Tech stack.

MC: Yeah. We’ll stack whatever needs to be stacked together for the clients.

LR: Got it. So you’re working on the content, primarily.

MC: Sure.

LR: And getting it all wired up.

MC: Content, ads, copyrighting

LR: You’re doing the ads as well?

MC: Yeah. We do all the mechanics.

LR: Full-service agency.

MC: Full service from cradle to grave to actually now getting inside the clients and helping them with processing their own orders and processing their own clientele because we found out, which you mentioned this morning, if you take the task and the things that you can do, which are secret little hidden gems within some of these platforms, you can actually help a client move from not only getting them the lead but helping them follow up the lead and get them through the process of building the infrastructure to help them be a better client.

LR: Yeah. Got it. So you’ve been at this for a while now. We’re in 2018, towards the latter bit, and you started in 2010. So you’ve certainly had your experiences along the way. If you could go back and give yourself a piece of advice as you were starting out that would have made the road smoother or less painful, what would it have been?

MC: It’s interesting. I’ve documented my history.

LR: No kidding?

MC: We started in 2010, but I was just doing consulting. Around 2012 or ’13, so really about five years ago, is when we really started to get the agency going. But I’ve documented it, not only video, but I’ve documented it on paper. I’ve written almost every other couple of days a journal post. So I’m actually taking that out, and we’ve got a great little community of people who are interested in us because we just passed our seven figure mark as an agency. So we’re sort of now becoming that next level. We can go back and tell other people, just like you’re saying, “What would I tell them?” I would tell myself in 2010 when I first started, “It’s going to be a long journey. However, stay in the game, and don’t be afraid to take chances.” That’s where everything’s come for me … when we took the next-level chance and figured it out.

LR: Yeah. So there were times when you felt like it was too hard? You were going to quit? You drug your feet? Or it looked too scary? Or what was the problem?

MC: I don’t think I ever got scared. I don’t think I ever wanted to quit. But I think I got frustrated to a point where I started to point the fingers at my team. And I learned pretty quickly that it’s not the team. It was me who’s been the bottleneck, and I still am the bottleneck. It’s, how much can I remove from what I’m doing and then systematize it and get the team to do it? That’s when things get solved because I’m literally the problem in the company, which is that I’m taking on always too much responsibility: emails, Slack conversations, writing, all the things that I keep doing that I’ve got to release to the team and let them do it and let me do stuff like we’re doing today, which is to share some of the experiences and give better insight to other people looking to build their own businesses.

LR: Yeah. So stay the course. Take chances. Tell me about a chance that you took that you were concerned about that worked out.

MC: Well, this is one of the stories I told this morning which was, I think, appropriate. I think a lot of people liked it. When we started doing these profit engines, we were looking for good candidates to run these … I guess you could call them mechanical automation profit centers for clients that necessarily don’t have them started today but need them. We were approached by a very large festival, music festival, to help them with six weeks to go before a festival for 175,000 people.

LR: Whoa.

MC: Right? They were way behind. They said, “Look. We know you. We’ve learned about you. We need you to help us bootstrap and get a bunch of stuff done really quickly.” They gave us six weeks to build campaigns and funnels and systems, and that’s really … I mean, talk about short. That’s six weeks before a concert festival. We were able to sell about $83,000 of tickets in that six weeks on a $3,000 budget. We basically crushed it for them and showed them that it was possible in a short amount of time to provide them with what they needed. And that chance for us to actually step up and change our resource allocation to say, “Hey, guys, we need to help these guys out because it would be really cool,” and we have it as a case study now. And what ended up happening, that festival had my band play there as well. I warmed up for George Thorogood at that festival because they were so happy with what our results were. They’re like, “Look. What can we do? You’ve done way and beyond what you can do.” I said, “Put me in.” So we ended up playing there at the festival.

LR: Cool.

MC: Yeah. Monster event, and stage size … Roller coaster looking down at that … 40-foot stage when you’re in that type of environment is kind of cool.

LR: Yeah. Insane. So tell me what you think your unique skill set … Apart from the guitar, what do you feel like your unique skill set is?

MC: I’ve been told I’m an entertainer. I think that’s my skill set.

LR: How does that translate to business?

MC: Well, just like today up on stage, I think I told a really good story. And I think people engaged. At the end, there was Q&A. A lot of people want to now engage with us, post this conversation. But it’s the information built into that entertainment so that people have got … Not only they are listening, but they’re engaging because I’m getting their senses started. So we’re starting this sort of educational infotainment strategy in our business, as well, to try and get people a little bit beyond the normal logical level and get them into an emotional level where … That’s where I think some of the things that we’ve done have been supportive to that.

LR: Where does most of your business come from? Is it from networking stuff like this, or do you have other strategies for growing your business?

MC: Good question. I think this is a big question for a lot of people, which is why they have problems with their sales is they don’t have enough bandwidth, and they haven’t done enough acumen on getting their reviews done. We have a lot of people come to us because they see that we have 75 reviews on our sites. They’re pegged with five-star reviews. We’ve got video testimonials. We’ve got tons of back-end third-party proof.

In the first indication that someone comes to us, they have a trust factor from a third party level. So that helps from the very beginning, but we also have other parties like yourself and other vendors who continually recommend us. It comes down to doing good work. If you do good work, you never really have to do much more than just be there to catch the falling gold, I guess you can say, right? So we literally haven’t started even our own marketing campaign yet for ourselves because we’re so busy with just inbound leads. But that’s mainly just from good work. The one thing we’ve figured out is that as we’ve now built a new medical side of our business … So we started CustomerBloom in 2000 and, really, 12. PracticeBloom was started last year. We are going to market that as a single entity, and this year will be our first year having a real, “Okay, let’s do profit engines for our company. But let’s niche it down so we can repeat processes and make it easy and have the systems all the same.”

LR: Yeah. That’ll be exciting to see how that goes.

MC: Oh yeah. I’m excited because it’s one of the things that we’ve talked about to market ourselves forever. We didn’t do it with the original brand because it was so wide. We’re like, well, who do we market to? Who’s our avatar? What do we do? Now that we have a medical brand based in some very special medical, let’s just say, verticals, we have targets. We’ve got avatars. We’ve got ideas on how we’re going to now build it so we do it the right way. I think that’s one of the challenges we find with the marketing in general … if you’re not specific, it’s just meaningless. If it’s very specific to somebody’s ears and they know what they’re looking for, your chances of conversion are a lot higher. So we’re going to use our own resources to develop our own marketing plans, to finally do our own profit engines for PracticeBloom.

LR: There you go. You take your own medicine, finally. I hear that. So what do you feel like your cutting edge is right now? What are you learning about? What’s most interesting?

MC: You brought it up this morning, which was that I think it’s the post-process. We can deliver leads to any client, no problem. We’ve done that for years. But what happens to those leads? Do they follow up? Do they close them? Nobody’s going to give us their books to go check their revenue. “Oh, here’s your … Here’s how …” But they are going to allow us to go back in and track and do post-sale. So they came in. They have a lead. They became something in your system. Now what did that person do with that lead? We’ve tried to figure out a way to do that, and just like you said, it’s tasks. It’s minding those tasks. It’s managing the tasks and then having a responsibility from our side and their side to say, “Look, I know this is going to get confrontational. You’re going to need to show up,” meaning that it’s just not us. You’re going to have to come back and show up, and you’re going to have to tell us, why did you not follow up on all these leads that we just sent you? Why is there no task?

That’s the hardest part right now that we are trying to solve, which is to have someone who’s going to be on our team who’s going to be responsible for that confrontational discussion. That’s when the owner of the business is going to come to us and say, “If I need to potentially even let people go because they’re not doing their job, I want you guys to let me know this,” because that’s where we’re getting to, which is we’re finding the resources that the other clients that we’re working with who’ve come back to us and said, “We’re just not sure if this is working or not because we can’t really see. We can see that you guys are [inaudible] leads, but we don’t see the revenue.” And we’re like, “Because you’re probably not following up on anything,” and go, “We can build all the automation. We can do all the things that we support. However, a human being has to close deals for clients.” So we’re working on that piece, which you eloquently put out today, which is that’s really the bleeding edge for everybody now, is how deep do you want to get into the business and help your client succeed?

LR: Yeah. Awesome. What do you hope that your legacy will be when you come to the latter stage of your career?

MC: Interesting. Musically-wise, I’ve thought about that as well. So business and music all together. Somehow combine the two. Someone will say, “I remember that guy whose band played in Ontrapalooza. Then he spoke.” [Landon] was like, “Yeah. This is awesome. We finally have a band at Ontrapalooza.” So I think it’s more like putting together the two resources of really good information, really good emotional ties back to an experience, a mutually shared experience. So someone can say, “That was cool. I really learned something, plus I was entertained.” I think that’s when my worlds become together and the legacy would be something I would like to do.

LR: Something new and unique and memorable?

MC: Something that I haven’t seen anybody do yet. I mean, I’ve seen some iterations, but no one’s done it to a point where I think I have the two skill sets to provide. So I hope that that would be things that, as I get more and more involved in these events like this and more higher-level music stuff, that I can bring it together. And we’ve done that at our event. We’ve had an event, as well, for the company that we just had a mastermind. I brought my band down and we had an event. It was a lot of fun, and still we had information as well. So it was kind of like a concert plus a party plus an infotainment. It was like a lot of the things combined together that, hey, it was fun and people talk about it to this day, how much fun it was. And the example of that is sort of where I’d like to be from the legacy standpoint to say

LR: Cool.

MC: “That guy combined all this stuff together. It was really awesome how he figured it out.”

LR: Yeah. Cool. What do you think it means to be a modern entrepreneur? We’ve got this unique moment in history. Things are different than they were in the past. What is unique about today in entrepreneurship?

MC: I think it’s the chance of a lifetime at this point to become a personal brand. To me, I look at this and go, we’ve got this short period of time in history where if you are not now taking advantage of building your own personal brand and building a strategy around building your gravitas, you’re going to be bummed out five years from now when all the platforms are so mutated so that they’re all paid ads and there’s no organic. And it’s like we can just see it coming, like Facebook and Instagram. I mean, you have the scale, these video cameras here today. You can scale yourself and get visibility. The question is, what’s going to be your message? I think that, at the end of the day, that’s the interesting point. So that’s the two-part piece of this, which is that … Don’t miss the opportunity to build your own personal brand and to build something that’s important for your legacy.

And then the second thing is, what’s going to be the message of the brand? What is the point? I think that probably is something that a lot of people are still trying to figure out. It’s like, what do I want to be when I grow up? I think, for me, it’s always been, hey, what’s going to be cool that’s going to make people happy and get them through their day and get them more productive? And what can we do to help solve a lot of the pain, which is, especially entrepreneurs, how do they get through that initial stage of going past the seven-figure ceiling or even the $500,000 ceiling? How do they get out of lift-off, past gravity, go beyond where they’re not going to sink back into challenging, go back to have to go get a job? But the entrepreneurs who can go past that threshold go into orbit. I think that that piece is where I’d like to have some sort of dialogue, entertain, and give people emotional security that they can do it.

LR: Cool.

MC: And it’s not like I am some kind of rocket scientist. I just kept doing it and kept doing it and kept doing it, and here I am.

LR: Yeah. Awesome. Well, hey, thank you so much for being here.

MC: Thank you.

LR: Really interesting conversation. Would you sign our wall?

MC: Yeah, sure.

LR: Appreciate it. Thank you.

Want more Modern Ontrapreneur Podcast?

Check out the previous episode featuring Digital Strategist and Brand Consultant, Shane Barker.

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Shane Barker was recognized as one of the 100 most influential people in influencer marketing, alongside Kim Kardashian, Gary Vaynerchuk and legendary PR leaders such as the CEO of Edelman. He’s also an instructor of personal branding and influencer marketing at UCLA and a contributor at Inc.com, Huff Post, Forbes and Salesforce. He’s also an international keynote speaker with over 20 years of consulting and has been a driving force in the influencer space for over six years.

In This Episode

“Influence marketing found me,” says Shane Barker. He met Zoe, who had a large social following on instagram, when she approached him to help her become an influencer, and together they built her brand that now generates a million dollars a year. Shane has built a team of 31, who have mastered the process of content creation and processes. In this episode, Shane, an expert in SEO and digital marketing, shares about the importance of mentorship and networking along with the challenges of starting a business in the competitive world of digital marketing.

Topic Timeline:

0:50 Accelerate with networking

Shane shares the two things he wished he had done from the beginning — networking and building relationships. He now passes this wisdom on to his son and hopes he will learn from his mistakes.

2:11 The technique that’ll inspire someone to mentor you

Value people’s time, build relationships, and offer them cash. When Shane started looking for mentorship, he never assumed anyone would help him for free. Now he is on the other side of it and is happy to offer his mentorship and knowledge to others.

3:49 Get into their rolodex

You can get referrals through your mentors that otherwise wouldn’t have been available. You also want to find a mentor who is interested in what you’re doing and really wants to work with you to build that trust and ongoing relationship.

6:19 A people person kind of guy

Shane has a natural aptitude for assessing and engaging with people. These leadership and management skills have helped him build his 31-person team.

7:14  An educator on branding and influencers

When Shane isn’t at the office educating influencers on how to work with brands and teaching brands how to work with influencers, he is teaching classes on personal branding and influence marketing at UCLA.

8:50 It isn’t about early retirement

A misconception people have about influencer marketing is that you will retire early and be drinking coronas in the Cayman Islands. It’s takes time and effort to build your brand; in most cases it can take years.

9:04 Scale with content

With the right processes in place, Shane’s team has fine-tuned the art of creating content.

9:45 Influencer marketing found me

Shane was approached by Zoe, who had started building her following on instagram by posting about her workout journey. Shane saw an opportunity and, with his team, they helped grow Zoe’s business to one million a year.

10:40 A one-person sales team

Laying the foundation over many years, Shane is a one-man sales team generating enough leads through inbound marketing efforts to run his thriving business.

11:45 Overnight success doesn’t happen

It takes time, effort and years of creating great content to become an influencer. Shane talks about how a big part of Zoe’s success was because she happened to have the right product, at the right time.

14:29 Systemize your processes

Don’t get sucked into all the new trends. Think about how to make the best systems and processes that free up your time to work on the most important projects..

16:10 Thinking forward and looking back

Shane had many businesses that failed in the past, and he wants to help people avoid his mistakes by giving back through mentorship. He is always striving to keep things positive and keep things moving.

17:06 Easier tools but more competition

Being an entrepreneur is challenging even with opportunities and software to help. Where to start and how to deal with competition can be confusing.

18:54 Treat them all like gold

It can be an uphill battle when you’re starting a business from scratch. A good rule of thumb, treat all your customers like gold.

21:28  Get your ducks in a row

There is always something new and shiny. Figure out what to focus on and make sure you are prepared.

– Shane Barker

Show Transcript:

LR: Welcome to Modern Ontrapreneur. I’m Landon Ray, and today we have Shane Barker who was recognized as one of the 100 most influential people in influencer marketing, alongside Kim Kardashian, Gary Vaynerchuk and legendary PR leaders like the CEO of Edelman. He’s also an instructor of personal branding and influencer marketing at UCLA and a contributor at Inc.com, Huff Post, Forbes, and Salesforce. He’s also an international keynote speaker with over 20 years of consulting and has been a driving force in the influencer space for over six years. Thank you so much for being here. Does this sound like you?

SB: That was impressive. I want to be that guy when I get older. That’s awesome.

LR: Awesome good. Well, let’s talk about how you can be that guy.

SB: Yeah.

LR: Tell me about actually that exactly. If you could go back a bunch of years – you’ve been at this a long time; you’ve gotten to a place where people listen to you and care what you have to say – what would have made that path smoother or faster for you?

SB: Yeah, it’s funny. We were just talking about this earlier. I’ve been doing it for 20 years, in the digital space at least. I was actually talking with one of your interns and telling her, listen, I never did an internship, and I never really had a good network of people that I worked with. I never tapped into my network the way that I should have. I didn’t really appreciate the network side things until probably ten years into my career.

My son is in college and I tell him, hey listen – he went to Jesuit High School – I said, “Listen, the reason I had you at Jesuit … Your mom is one side of the reason you’re at Jesuit, my side is the networking. So really getting to know those people that are there. They have businesses. They’re successful. Putting yourself in those places and getting to understand those people’s businesses and how they work and how they do life.” So that’s been, for me, that would have been something I would have changed. I’m real happy where I’m at today, but I feel like I probably could have cut off five years by looking into mentorship or looking at other people to help me accelerate my process or get me to where I want to be. So I think that, to me, that would be the big thing.

LR: That’s interesting that you say that because the very last interview we did in here, the woman basically said the same thing, that she would have found mentors earlier. So I’ll actually ask you the question that I asked her which is, how do you sort of inspire mentors or somebody who’s … if they’re successful, time is precious for them and they’ve probably got a lot of people asking for their advice, or to use her words, to pick their brains … how do you inspire that person to spend any time on you?

SB: Cash. Cash always works. It seems to always work when I offer money. For me, I usually don’t ever ask for anything for free. So for me, I’m like, hey listen, “I’ll pay for your time, whatever your hourly is.” The idea for me is to build a relationship and then maybe over time they say, “Hey let’s go do coffee,” or I’ll buy them dinner or whatever that is. In the beginning, I value people’s time so I don’t ever ask for anything for free.  

Now, it’s funny. On the opposite side of that, I meet with people all the time for free and I don’t ever charge people because I want to help people. I feel like there’s certain things that I have learned in the business, and just through life, that is extremely valuable to people. If I can help you cut off two years of “don’t do this” or “don’t spend money doing this”, or whatever I can help educate them, I want to be able to do that. But on the other side of it, I don’t want to assume that people aren’t willing to … They shouldn’t be paid for their time. So I look at it the opposite. I go, “Hey,” – maybe after meeting five or ten times –  “You seem like an awesome guy … or maybe not an awesome guy, or whatever the deal is. If you are an awesome guy and think that, then we should move on and maybe we can do some stuff that’s more of a social type thing and less of a paid type thing.” I assume that everybody’s time is valuable.

LR: I’ve always found that advice taking is challenging. Typically, my experience with mentors has been that they don’t spend enough time to really understand my challenges, or at least I feel that they don’t.

SB: Yeah.

LR: So I basically will tend to not value what they have to say because they don’t really understand. It’s easy to not sort of take that advice when you don’t value it a ton. So how would you say it’d be useful to go about getting advice that you’ll actually act on?

SB: Yeah. I think it really depends on the types of questions. We talk about a mentorship or somebody that would help you, they’re obviously probably not going to understand your business as well as you do because you’re in it on a daily basis. But when I talk to mentors, and even when I go and see other people’s speeches and stuff like that, for me I just want to be able to get one or two nuggets from that. So, if I go and see an hour speech, I don’t expect for the whole time to be riveting. I want to be able to pull out a great website or pull out what I call an aha moment of like, “Oh I didn’t even think about that.” So the same thing with mentors. I look at it like … I come and say, these are some of my issues or certain things that I have. Maybe through the whole hour, maybe there’s only one or two things that I really go, “Okay that was extremely valuable. This is something that can change.”

Or really, what I do with mentors is try to jump into their Rolodex if possible because that’s the idea. It’s like, “Hey, if you have a great accountant that’s rocked for you for 30 years, I would like the introduction.” I don’t want to have to go through these other 15 accountants to find the one that absolutely understands business and is always being proactive about stuff. So I look at it more that way, like once you trust me and once I’m in your network, not I’m in the trusteree, whatever you want to call it, this network of people. I think that, for me, is where the value can come in.

Not every mentor is going to be super awesome. You have to kind of evaluate that as well. I think that’s where the paid thing works for me. It’s an interview. As much as I’m interviewing them, they’re interviewing me. It’s both. So for me, even though I’m paying, I still have to figure out where I should be spending my money. If I’m asking you certain questions, if you’re very basic, you’re not engaged, then there’s no reason to continue. If you go, “God I’m really interested in your business model, things that you’re doing.” That’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for somebody that wants to work with me and this is hopefully down the road. I’ll continue to pay, if my mentors are watching this, I’ll continue to pay you. But if not, then there’s also that side of it like, “Hey, let’s develop a deeper relationship and something down the road.”

LR: Yeah, awesome. So tell me what you feel like your unique skill set is.

SB: I don’t know. I can create content. I have a 31 person team. We produce a lot of content, writing blogs and stuff like that. So I would say I’m a pretty good people person as well. It’s not anything I learned in school or through life, just engaging with people and having good conversation. So I really enjoy that side of it. Speaking is obviously a lot of fun, and obviously being here is super awesome. I just enjoy engaging with people. I think that’s where I kind of have that natural …  I was actually in GATE, gifted and talented education. Leadership was one of my strong suits for me. They recognized that in second grade.

LR: So, who knew?

SB: So we don’t know where I fell off, but we just know early on they were on to it, and somehow I went left, or right, either way. Yeah, I would say that’s probably it, all joking aside. Probably leadership, just being able to evaluate people and assess people, and have a good management, the way that I handle things in assess situations.

LR: Yeah. So tell me more about your business. You’re doing influencer marketing. So how does that work?

SB: For my business, there’s two sides of it. We have influencer marketing that we do for clients. I’m actually creating education now, so courses. So what we’re doing is how to educate influencers on how to work with brands, and then also for brands how to work with influencers. I teach a course at UCLA, so that’s what it is. It’s a personal branding course on how to be an influencer and, once again, on the other side of the other quarter, because it’s a quarter system at UCLA. Then we have the other stuff; we’re teaching, the brands how to work with influencers, because there’s just a disconnect there.

They want to work together doing this, but there’s just certain guidelines and stuff that they don’t put in place. So I love influencer marketing. It’s a little difficult to scale because there’s so many variables to it, unless you find great influencers that you can use all the time. I enjoy this space, but really where we’ve excelled is the content side of things, where we have the team, have editors and writers and stuff. We write for a lot of the bigger websites, so we can see a good PR push for companies that are looking for that. So, for me, that’s scalable because it’s just finding good writers.

We have good processes in place. You talked about that on the stage early about processes. The content side of things, we have good processes. Always need to be improved of course. With the influencer side of things, we have some processes, but you have a lot more variables that are potential issues. For us, we know how to find great keywords. We know how to look at the competition. We know how to look at great titles. We know how to put great content together with great graphics and all that. We have good systems in place.

But with influencer marketing, I can go reach out to 30 new influencers and I don’t know if they’re going to be good or bad. You have to evaluate that, so it’s a lot more time consuming. I think people think that it’s a lot easier because, hey you just reach out to somebody and they post a picture. You give them some money and you retire, and you go to the Cayman Islands and drink Coronas and you retire. But it’s not that way anymore. There’s a little bit more to it these days.

LR: Interesting. So you’re producing content on behalf of brands, as well as helping them to contact influencers?

SB: So we work with a lot of SAAS companies. There’s a number of different companies we work with, but really the goal of this is that we say, “Okay you want to produce whatever, one blog post, two blog posts, three blog posts, and you want to go after keywords. Let’s say your competition is crushing you for whatever this is.” It’s process automation, or let’s say it’s something like that. What we would do is we would go in and take a look at the competition, see how difficult the keywords are, and then produce some content around that. Then, after six months, hopefully be able to take over for those certain keywords.

LR: Almost SEO.

SB: Yeah, absolutely. My background’s in SEO. So, that was … Influencer marketing kind of found me. There was a client that came to me and said, “Hey I need some help with social media marketing.” I said, “Yeah this is interesting.” That’s what I talked about on stage was her. She was making 400 thousand dollars, 22 years old, as a fitness influencer, 180 thousand followers on Instagram, and she was crushing it. She was like, “I don’t feel like I’m doing that good.” I’m like “400 thousand dollars. You’re 22 years old. You have a gym membership as your overhead. You’re not doing too bad sister.”

She didn’t really get that. For me, I’m like, you have a $65 gym membership. Literally, that’s your overhead, and rent. She ended up buying a house and we got her to a million dollars. She was making a million dollars a year off of fitness ebooks. I mean, who knew? It’s crazy, crazy, crazy.

LR: Yeah, I should be in that business.

SB: Yeah, that’s what I was going to talk to you about. I was like…

LR: That guy looks really fit.

SB: Yeah.

LR: I’d like to follow him.

SB: Build a better booty. That was the program, so I don’t know if you’re into it. I’m not here to judge. If you are, that’s cool.

LR: So you have this agency. You’ve got 31 employees, it sounds like. So you have to keep a stream of business coming in.

SB: I do.

LR: How are you making that happen?

SB: We’re not. We’re not. We’ve got about two months left. No, I’m just kidding. We can cut that. No, it’s funny. I talk about this on stage. This isn’t something I’m bragging about. I’m the only sales person, and that’s not to brag because I really probably need sales people. So, if you guys see this video, please send me your resumes if you’re a good salesman. If you’re not good, then we don’t need you.

Yeah, so for me, the speaking engagements help. The writing stuff that we do, I still write a lot. My team writes a lot. So it’s all inbound marketing for me, and that’s because of what I’ve built over the last five or six years. So I don’t need to do any outbound. I’m not saying I shouldn’t. We do some Facebook ads and stuff, but mainly it’s because of what I’ve built from the inbound. So now it’s those leads coming in and the automation side of it, right? Obviously you go in and qualify the lead and figure in that. So the people that come to me are, the ten people that come in a day, I have that one person that would be somebody that would be a good potential client for us.

LR: Sure. So that sounds like pretty traditional modern marketing, build a content engine and drive leads. How long … Our process to build all that has taken a long time, years. How long do you feel like, if somebody wants to build a better booty business and they’re like, I’m starting out, what does it take to build that edifice do you think? How long does that take?

SB: A long time. Zoe was the right product at the right time for the right audience. It’s not always that way. So, with Zoe, her thing was that she was a runner. So she was pretty skinny. Then what happened was, because she’s very passionate about what she does, she quit; she didn’t run that much. She just started building muscle. So for her, her audience saw her literally from having no booty to what I call her inner J-Lo two years later, her booty popped out because she was doing her exercises.

LR: I see.

SB: Yeah, I’ll give you a copy of the e-book. You’re welcome. So that whole process there was like, the girls that were following her, because she had a heavily engaged audience, said okay this is me today and Zoe two years ago, and look what she built. That’s what I want. So the before and after pictures were like instant gold. So what happened was what we did is, when Zoe ended up hiring us, we ended up revamping everything and making it so in the beginning you take a picture of yourself so you can compare it to the you today. Now you have Jennifer 2.0 down six months, or whatever three months. It’s a 12 week program. Then you can go and see the difference in the results.

So that was the winner for us. If people want to go and have that type of success, it’s going to take a lot of work. It just is. Zoe hit at the right time, had that right audience, and was already kind of building that up. So we got very fortunate. If somebody came to me and said, “Hey I want to be a fitness influencer and I have one follower,” it’s going to be a long journey. It is. There’s definitely ways to do it and there’s things that you can streamline that, but assuming you want to do it full-time and make the kind of money that influencers make, you have to put in the time. You’ve got to put in a lot of time, a lot of effort.

LR: Years.

SB: Years, absolutely. Yeah, it’s like anything else. You think you’re going to get overnight success, that’s just not going to happen. You really have to … You probably want to make it a side gig, and then once you get to a point you get some brands involved, then you can start producing content. There’s multiple revenue streams you can do through that.

LR: Yeah.

SB: But it definitely is not an overnight thing. People think it’s like, “Hey I can just become an influencer overnight.” It’s not. Even then, you have to create great content, so it’s not … It’s a different beast.

LR: It’s competitive just like everything else.

SB: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there’s a lot of competition there. You’re fighting for … I tell the people that I work with, like influencers … I’m like, if you’re not onstage performing, then they’re going to go to somebody else. If you’re not putting on a show, if you’re not putting out content, they’re going to move on to the next person, so you’ve got to make sure you stay active.

LR: Yeah, for sure. So what is your kind of cutting edge right now? What are you learning about?

SB: The whole blockchain stuff and all that, I’m trying not to get sucked into it too much because there’s always more. There’s always so much stuff that’s coming through and AI’s interesting. I don’t know how it’s going to effect content or influencer marketing. I’m intrigued on the influencer side of things on how you can make those processes easier and better, assuming you’re working in different industries and with different influencers. That’s probably where I’ve been kind of spending some of my time. I try to … because once again, it’s like trying to drink out of a water hose, is always the analogy. So I try to … What I’ve been doing to kind of systemize things is, I have a lot of people on my team that will do the research for me, that will come back and say hey this is what we found, this is what we’re looking at. I’m doing podcasts and stuff like that as well, and I have my team. I’m trying to figure out these systems. How can I spend less time doing stuff that I don’t necessarily have to do? So I’m always intrigued by that, about making it so … As an example, two months ago I hired somebody to take over my emails, which was a scary, scary thing. Everything comes in there, right?

LR: That’s a tough one, yeah.

SB: Yeah. I’ve done extensive training to be able to get him where he’s at today and he’s going … Ian. Shout out to Ian … doing and awesome job. He’s just crushing it, and it’s really nice because now I can spend two or three hours less a day on that.

Systemizing stuff that I want to systemize and having the real stuff that I should respond to, the podcast interviews and all that kind of stuff, taking up the time that I want it to take up. So I’m always interested in looking at what I can do so that I’m spending my time and it’s going to be more time that I have to spend on other things, where I can hire somebody else to be able to go do that.

LR: Yeah, exactly. Perfect. So, when you think back, or if you can think forward rather 20 years, and look back on your career, you know what they’ll say about you. What do you hope your legacy will be?

SB: For the legacy question, I don’t know. For me, the legacy side of things, I would be … I want to help more people. I want people to know that I had a good heart. I guess, being successful and making money, I’ve had businesses that were extremely successful and I had businesses that failed miserably. I think through that whole process, I want to help educate people to streamline their process to … Once again, kind of like with the mentorship, where somewhere I feel like I missed out on that. I want to continue that forward and help other people, and have people come to me and say that Shane was a good speaker and he did this, but he also had a good heart and wanted to help people, because I think that’s extremely important. Especially these days with the current climate, I want to keep things positive and keep things moving.

LR: Yeah, awesome. So what do you think it means to be a modern entrepreneur? We’re in this maybe unique time. What does it mean to be an entrepreneur today that’s different than what it might have meant five or ten years ago?

SB: Yeah, I think it’s challenging. Being entrepreneurs is challenging. I’m a marketer. I have a 31-person team and I’m talking about starting … I used to own a bar back in the day. It’s a long story, but I thought about opening a restaurant recently and talking to my wife about it. I have all the tools to do that. I have the knowledge and everything, but even then it’s like that jump is just going to be … For me, the reason why the restaurant doesn’t make sense is because I want to be able to go travel and do more things. I don’t want to be tied down like that.

I think with the modern entrepreneur, the thing is it’s just a little more challenging. This is what’s crazy. It becomes more challenging as there’s more competition, but then you have softwares and you have other stuff that also make it easier. So it’s not quite … You would open a restaurant, let’s say 20 years ago, how do you get the word out. It’s like a flyer or something, right?

LR: Yeah.

SB: So now you go, wow there’s a lot more competition and now you have online, but then there’s also other ways that I can go create a flyer in five minutes online or I can go do this or I can develop communities in different ways. So maybe it’s to have these people come in and this, but now we have proximity marketing where I can go and send a message out to somebody’s phone within a .7 mile radius of my restaurant and pull people in. There’s some really, really cool and creative ways, and that I think makes it a lot more interesting because there’s, once again, different ways to be able to get in front of people. It’s not just a flyer and something you put up on a billboard or something.

There’s a lot of creative ways, but it’s once again, you have to have the time and the knowledge to be able to do that. I think that’s what’s hard with being an entrepreneur is we’ve all had it. It’s like, okay there’s five thousand things I need to do today. Where do I spend my time? What do I do?

LR: That’s interesting you say that because most people, their response to that question is something like, gosh there’s so much opportunity. It’s so much easier than it used to be, and stuff like that. That’s true, like you say, but also competition is radical.

SB: Oh yeah.

LR: I’m curious what you think, if five years from now, what about that restaurant tour who grew up in restaurants, his mom or dad was a chef, he’s been waiting tables since he was 14, and he knows food, and he knows the restaurant business, but maybe was never exposed to online marketing or this kind of radius marketing, or creating communities online and the stuff that we’d probably think of as modern marketing. Does that guy compete in that future world?

SB: Yes and no. I guess it depends on if they have the clientele and they have the people that come in. I think you can … as long as you

LR: From scratch though. Two business from scratch.

SB: I think it’d be difficult. I think it’s going to evolve, it’s going to change. If this was a brand new business and you had experience, and it was a brand new business, I think it’s going to be an uphill battle. It’s difficult because you’re vying for … not necessarily eyeballs, but butts in seats.

LR: Yeah.

SB: That’s not always the easiest thing. If you had a restaurant for 30 years, it becomes a little easier because of

LR: Sure.

SB: They you have Yelp and all this stuff. Because of this stuff that you guys have done, the shaking hands and kissing babies for 30 years when people come in your restaurant. So I think that’s an easier win. If you start from scratch, you’ll see. Restaurants have an 80% failure rate.

LR: Yeah.

SB: There’s a reason for that. It’s because most people are a chef. I can make great food. I can get people in seats because I make great food. They make great food and then don’t get butts in seats, because it’s a different beast. Just because you have great food doesn’t … Just because you have a great product doesn’t mean that everybody’s going to buy it. You’ve got to go find where those people are at and pull those people in, treat them like gold, and then be able to pull them back in again.

LR: Yeah.

Shane Barker: That’s a challenge. It’s not just by … great food is one variable of it.

LR: Yeah.

SB: There’s the other side of it that everybody … We look online, we do this, we do all kind of research. I come to Santa Barbara, what’s the first thing I do. I look on Google, what’s the best restaurants and I have ten great restaurants that

LR: On Google?

SB: Well, on Yelp.

LR: Yelp.

SB: But what’s crazy about it is there were like eight restaurants that had like a thousand plus reviews and they were all five stars, five, five. So I’ve got like eight restaurants to hit in two days. I’m probably going to gain a few pounds, but that’s a side note. That’s okay.

LR: So given that, do you think it’s getting harder or easier to be an entrepreneur. If that kind of stuff is required, the technology … From my perspective, the technology and the skills around how to wield it is not getting easier. It’s getting more complex all the time.

SB: Well I think this is the hard part, and even as a marketer it’s the hard part. There’s always something new and shiny. So it’s always difficult … and we talked about, like you said, hey what are you into outside of marketing. I say blockchain. I try not to get sucked into that too much, and I think this is the hard part as an entrepreneur where you have a great product. You have to figure out where you want to focus your time. So let’s say it’s Yelp and my Yelp reviews. I know that’s going to be a big indicator on whether people are going to come into my restaurant. Then treating people like gold, and what am I going to do to pull those people back. Then trying those different things.

I do think it’s going to be a challenge. Everything’s a challenge. If you go into anything and don’t prep yourself correctly if you’re going to open a restaurant, if you don’t have six months working capital, that’s going to be a problem. There’s certain things that people don’t think about that we would look at and say, okay you’ve got to make sure you have these ducks in a row to be able to go do that. I think that’s the number one problem.

Then the other side of it is, it’s just hard. You have to … It’s like, how do you go hire somebody to help you with the marketing side of things and hope that they know what they’re doing, because you have the restaurant. I’ve got this under control and now we have this. I’ve seen plenty of people partner up with restaurants with marketers who can give you some type of results, but then you’re giving up a piece of the pie, so that’s a variable as well.

LR: Sure.

SB: I don’t know. I love entrepreneurs and I love working with them, but I have entrepreneurs that will come to me and say, “Hey Shane, you’ve got a $500 budget and we want to go do this.” I’m like, “I’ll meet with you for free because I don’t want to take your last $500.” But it is, it’s hard times. It’s hard times when it comes to marketing, but there’s … Like anything else, you get punched in the face a few times, you’ve got to keep going.

LR: Yeah.

SB: That’s the thing. The minute you give up because of finances or whatever, I get that, but it’s not going to be easy. I can tell you, and we all know … I’ve had businesses that were phenomenal, but 80% of my business have failed. That’s where I learn today. So entrepreneurs are … you’ve got to have that heart to get into it. It’s not easy.

LR: Yeah. Good. Hey, thank you so much for coming.

SB: Absolutely.

LR: Really appreciate it.

SB: Thanks for having me.

LR: Very interesting stuff. Would you sign our wall?

SB: Yeah, let’s do it.

LR: Good, thank you.

Want more Modern Ontrapreneur Podcast?

Check out the previous episode featuring founder of Basic Bananas USA, Sue Izzo.

The post Shane Barker: Digital Strategist, Brand and Influencer Consultant appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

A pioneer at the young age of 24, Sue Izzo was the first female sports agent to launch a sports management agency in a male-dominated and cut-throat-action sports arena. For over 20 years, Sue represented world renowned professional athletes, Olympians, ESPY winners, and X-Games gold medalists. Now, as Captain-ess America for Basic Bananas USA, she heads up facilitation of their popular Blast Off Marketing Workshop and other small business growth programs for business owners and entrepreneurs.

In This Episode

Sue Izzo met Franziska Iseli and Christo Hall, founders of marketing education program Basic Bananas, on a random “Eat, Pray, Love” trip to Bali, where the travelers-turned-friends decided to embark on a project — a USA branch with Sue as the lead. In this episode, Sue, a self-taught sports agent, marketer and rebel entrepreneur, shares the importance of mentors and how to get them, what drives her business, and what the Basic Bananas USA team is using to attract and convert more customers.

Topic Timeline:

1:19 How Sue Got Here

Sue didn’t get to be the head of Basic Bananas USA from a typical resume and interview. Instead, Sue met Basic Bananas founders on a trip to Bali — and the rest is history.

3:00 A Rebel With A Cause — and a Mentor

Abandoning her parents’ ideals of succumbing to traditional female roles, Sue loved the idea of being a rebel entrepreneur, but having more mentors would have been a great help. Here’s her advice on how to gain amazing, insightful mentors.

6:28 Valuable Relationships Need to be Valued

Sue didn’t have the funds to pay for mentors, but she kept up the relationships, cooked them thank you dinners, and always remembered to value her mentor-mentee relationships.

7:38 A Boxing Agent in the Pre-CRM Era

One of Sue’s favorite books, Robert’s Rules, involved a boxing agent who kept note cards with all of his clients’ personal details such as birthdays or favorite sports team — a precursor to a visual CRM like Ontraport’s Card View.

8:29 No For Now, Not No Forever

A self-taught sports agent, marketer and overall Renaissance woman, Sue says she got here by believing in being a good person, valuing people, and not taking no for answer.

10:07 Blasting Off and Converting Leads

Basic Bananas’ tactics for lead conversion involves a one day marketing tripwire course that nurtures leads into signing up for an 11 month, detailed marketing program for small business owners and marketers.

12:09 – An Uptick on Instagram

While Basic Bananas usually focuses on Facebook Ads and networking to attract leads, as Facebook advertising prices increase, Instagram has become a key player in the marketing game. But how?

14:21 Helping Business Owners Be Business Owners

Sue and her team help clients put the money-making things at the top, and cut out those that are just costing you money. They’re also on a mission to enlighten clients about the cutting edge technology at their disposal, from marketing software like Ontraport, to social media and podcasts.

16:00 Sue Isn’t Giving Up on Her Legacy

Sue hopes to leave behind a legacy where her mentees and clients can take a page from her book and just go do it, and when they’ve done it, they’ll say, “Because of you, I didn’t give up.”

16:38 Here’s the Recipe: People, Time and Resources

We have all these amazing role models and stories to look up to where persistence won. Combine that with a time when we have all the resources we need at our fingertips and we’ve got the perfect recipe for a modern entrepreneur.

– Sue Izzo

Show Transcript:

LR: Welcome to Modern Ontrapreneur. Today we have Sue Izzo. She’s a pioneer at the age of 24. She’s the first women sports agent to launch a sports management agency in a male-dominated and cut-throat-action sports arena. For over 20 years, Sue represented world renowned professional athletes, Olympians, ESPY winners, and X-Games gold medalists. Now, as Captain-ess America for Basic Bananas USA, she heads up facilitation of their popular Blast Off Marketing Workshop and other small business growth programs for business owners and entrepreneurs. Thank you so much for being here.

SI: Hello, thank you for having me, Landon.

LR: Yeah, it’s good to finally meet you.

SI: Yes, you as well.

LR: I want to ask you about X-Games gold medalist, but we probably should skip that for now.

SI: Sure.

LR: Tell us about what you’re up to these days and what’s exciting about that for you.

SI: Absolutely. In 2015, I had merged my sports management company with a larger agency, Octagon, and took a little time off. I had known Franziska Iseli and Christo Hall from Basic Bananas. I met them on a very random “Eat, Pray, Love” trip in Bali over eight years ago.

LR: Oh nice.

SI: I was really a big fan of Basic Bananas, which are small business marketing educators. And they had approached me about joining them and opening up the US branch for Basic Bananas. And, so, I joined them about a year ago and it has been so much fun working with all different types of entrepreneurs and small business owners and helping them with their marketing, and understanding their ideal customer, online offline marketing strategies, you name it, we’ve been covering it.

LR: Yeah, it’s awesome. I have known Franziska and Christo for a long time now and their programs are amazing. They’ve got it so organized and everything explained in a way that basically every small business can kind of understand and get into action around, that I feel like they do a really good job, so it’s exciting to have them over here.

SI: Absolutely.

LR: Actually my sister-in-law now, did you know, is working with you guys?

SI: Yes, my partner in crime, Valerie.

LR: Actually I guess they’re not married yet, are they? My brother’s girlfriend, but hopefully sister-in-law.

SI: She’s pretty much your sister-in-law.

LR: Oh my gosh, she’s been around a long time. So tell me this, you’ve been at this for a long time, Basic Bananas for three or four years or a couple years you said.

SI: Yeah.

LR: And about 20 years in sports.

SI: Yes.

LR: Significant career now. If you could go back and kind of give yourself a piece of advice that would have made the path smoother, or easier, faster, what would it be?

SI: Sure. Probably, for me, I was self taught. I did not go to school to becomes a sports agent. My parents told me to go to school to become a school teacher so when I got married and had kids I could stay home in the summers.

LR: Sure.

SI: Yeah. For me, I love that road, of kind of being the rebel entrepreneur. I didn’t have as many mentors as I wish I had. I think that that’s really important for young people to go find people that have done it before them, to seek advice. Also, I’m 100% Italian so I’m very passionate, so maybe taking a little bit of passion out of or emotion out of business, because when I was going to bat for one of my clients it was anything goes.

LR: Right. Tell me about mentors. It’s an interesting challenge to both find a mentor that is worth investing the time in learning from, somebody who’s actually done it not just says they’ve done it, but then also to get them interested in spending time with you. How do you propose that somebody who’s starting out find that magic balance and get them motivated to help?

SI: Absolutely. I think that people today are so fortunate with LinkedIn. That didn’t exist when I was starting off in business. For me it was just figuring out who a marketing director was and reaching out to them if I admired the work that they did, in asking if I could have coffee with them or what have you. I think in today’s world you want to know what you want to get out of something, like what skills or accomplishments has this person achieved that I want to learn from? And then come to them with kind of your three takeaways that you’d like to develop over time with this relationship. So, I say, preparation of knowing what you want to get out of it. I also think you need to deliver. So, if someone’s going to give you their time and give you this insight you don’t want to let them down. You want to be sure that you’re ready for a mentorship, and that you’re ready to roll up your sleeves and do the work.

LR: You know when I think about somebody approaching me and saying, “Hey, will you be my mentor?” My answer to that would be no. But, “Hey, will you have coffee?” is more likely. And then I can imagine, again, if they said, “Will you be my mentor,” at coffee, I’d be like, “Actually no.”

But if they said, “Hey, help me out with this one problem, or what do you think about this?” And they came back to me and said, “Hey, this is what I did with that information.” And actually just had it engaged in a normal human way, and somebody that actually took a piece of advice or an idea and ran with it, that starts to get engaging and kind of interesting, right?

SI: Absolutely, yeah. Whenever someone calls me and says, “I want to pick your brain.” I just think of like a dead bird and someone plucking …

LR: Yeah, my brains picked all day long.

SI: It’s so picked, forget about it. Don’t ask me any questions after 5:30.

LR: Exactly.

SI: Like I say that’s why the preparation is important. Knowing what you want to get out of the conversations and the relationships. For me, one thing that I did with my mentors when I was first starting off, I was temping in the morning and then I was working on my sports management company in the afternoon and so, I couldn’t compete with people that were paying for mentors or things of that nature. So I showed up, I was prepared and then, as my thank yous, I would cook them a pot of marinara sauce and deliver it to their office, because it was a personal relationship and cooking for me as an Italian is everything. I was really appreciative, and I didn’t want to let them down, and I wanted to make sure to … I always kept in touch with them. Throughout my entire career. I feel very fortunate for the people I have been able to work with, and who have guided me, and took a chance on me.

LR: That’s interesting, and that’s valuable advice to remember to value those relationships and not … I feel like in the social media world many relationships are pretty much throw away. You meet somebody as quickly as you let them go. Not our real life relationships necessarily, but online it can be that way. Yeah, to really turn that into an actual relationship that you value, and nurture over time is important.

SI: Yeah, one of the first books I read in sports management was about a boxing agent. It was called Robert’s Rules. It was so long ago, and I remember he would write out note cards with the potential sponsor or contact’s birthday, anniversary, what college they went to. So every time there was a moment that one of those dates came up or a favorite sports team played, he would reach out because the whole customer relationship. It’s not just when you want something, obviously. It’s maintaining that, and being sincere through that. I have a wonderful rivalry with the head of Nike Golf, strictly over Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, and this has been going on for years back and forth. We don’t do business together anymore but still it’s classic.

LR: Sucks for you today.

SI: Totally. Yeah, the US Open was fun.

LR: Tell me about what you feel like your unique skill set is? How’d you get successful? Now coaching dozens, hundreds of entrepreneurs a year.

SI: I always have believed that in order to be the best professional you needed to be the best person. That’s how I’ve kind of approached everything. When we do that, we kind of give our all, we’re ready to really do the work. I value people. I love investing in people. I think that’s kind of one of my skill sets, being chameleon-like and being able to relate because it all starts with the person. So that’s definitely one attribute I have. And then I would definitely say always curious, always learning. I’m just a dork in general. And also probably ‘no,’ the word ‘no.’ I always said, it’s no for now not no forever. Just didn’t really take no for an answer, very persistent.

LR: That’s good. That’s funny. Lena Renquist, our President of our company, says something similar about no. She says, “No doesn’t mean no. No means they don’t understand what I’m saying yet.”

SI: Absolutely, 100%.

LR: Knowing a little bit about what the process is, the way that Basic Bananas, which is, like we said, it’s a very significant sort of coaching organization in Australia and now expanding to the US. They basically do these intro sessions where they sell I think what? $30, $40 tickets to like a half day.

SI: Yep.

LR: And then they do a bunch of great education and then drag people into their programs. My question is, what’s working today to get people into those intro sessions?

SI: Oh absolutely. So, the Marketing Blastoff Workshop is what you’re referring to, and that costs $27, and we have those workshops going on in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego, and now Austin, Texas; San Antonio, and Houston.

LR: Oh man it’s happening.

SI: It is happening, yes.

LR: Wow.

SI: That three and a half hour workshop is definitely an overview of marketing, everything from taking a look at your brand, your positioning, who your ideal customer is, your online and offline ecosystem. So, it does one of two things. Either you learn something, you walk away with a lot of light bulbs going off. Or, it also reiterates things that you already know that you need to implement, because we know the difference between knowing and implementing are two different things.

LR: Sure.

SI: And then what happens there is that we have our 11-month program, which is the Clever Bunch, and that meets in person every single month. And with that, we go through 43 different modules of marketing in a sequential order. So, we start with the backend of where you’re at right now, what’s your brand positioning, vision, and then we carry that all the way through from everything from your design to what you stand for, what you want to be known for, your perception, pricing pyramids, copywriting, funnels (especially Ontraport funnels, a big fan of that). And we see our business owners thrive when they start working with Ontraport, so it makes life a lot easier.

LR: Awesome. How do we get people in those $30 sessions?

SI: We market heavily through Facebook ads.

LR: Facebook ads?

SI: Absolutely. We’re also aligned with a lot of different organizations. I belong to WISE, which is Women in Sports and Events. Also Elevate, which is another women’s networking organization, so they’re promoted through those as well. And then you can go to our website, which is basicbananas.com/USA.

LR: Yeah. So, in terms of working, it sounds like Facebook ads and networking is the key to the business right now.

SI: Yes, absolutely. It is. And also Instagram. We’re seeing absolutely a big uptick on that, because Facebook ads have increased in price.

LR: Oh my gosh yes.

SI: Yeah. And also our audience, young entrepreneurs are very visual so they are on Instagram. And I use LinkedIn quite a bit.

LR: Now tell me this. So I follow Christo and Franziska. It seems to me that they’re just always posting pictures of themselves jumping in the ocean and …

SI: Totally.

LR: Riding their motorcycles around. How does that turn into business?

SI: I always say to Franziska, “I really want to study your brain later on.” I’ve never met anybody who is so productive like she is. Every single minute of every single day. She just loves what she does, so it’s constant. And you know you look at their Instagram like you’re saying and you’re like, “How are you guys traveling the world, and running this business, and growing it the way you are at this pace?” But they’re doing work all the time. They’re great communicators, and they have built an incredible company culture that empowers the employees. It’s a family; it’s a tribe. And so, everybody is there to lift them up and taking it to the next level.

LR: But specifically like on Instagram, how does a post about Franziska jumping in the ocean turn into somebody going like, “Yeah, I’d like to come to your Clever Bunch, or your intro session?”

SI: Well, I tell you: freedom. Because she’s created a business that she doesn’t have to be locked behind a desk between 9-5, and I think ideally that’s what we all want when we create businesses.

LR: So people they just research her. They’re like, who is this chick? Oh, it’s Franziska Iseli.

SI: Absolutely.

LR: Interesting.

SI: And I think they always provide value. If it’s not through their personal posts, it’s definitely through the Basic Bananas Instagram as well as our podcast, which is Pick of the Bunch, which is amazing, and that’s free on iTunes.

LR: Okay, so podcasting also?

SI: Yeah, podcasting. 02.Sue.Izzo_1.2

LR: And then you have a Basic Bananas feed of its own, Instagram account.

SI: Yes, we do.

LR: Interesting. Okay good.

SI: Yes.

LR: So tell me this then. As somebody who’s building a significant new organization here in the U.S. using this framework that’s obviously been built, that’s just the content, building a business is still building a business out here.

SI: Absolutely.

LR: What do you feel like is your cutting edge? What are you learning about right now?

SI: In terms of growing the business, I think where we go from a $27 workshop to a year long program is helping business owners understand the investment in that. Because when we get into business, we are almost in a reactive state. You talked about it earlier this morning about systems, and we always say that, if you do something more than once you need to write it down on paper what that system is, and have that opps manual. So we try to help business owners understand that the investment of working on their business and not just in their business, that is how you build a business, that’s how you scale. So, communicating that and also accountability in business. That’s something too, where it’s so easy to-do list how we go to the easiest tasks first and put off the difficult and what we don’t later. So it’s helping business owners understand, put the things that make you money at the top of the list versus the things that are costing you money. And I think sharing so much of the technology and programs that are out there for people to use. Because, like you were saying earlier as well, you don’t need to be punching the buttons yourself every single day. There are amazing ways to automate and create systems, so that’s been really fun to be sharing with everybody.

LR: You’ve been at this a while, now you’ve got a whole kind of like new second career.

SI: Yes.

LR: If you think forward 10, 15, 20 years, whatever it might be, what do you hope your legacy will be?

SI: Definitely I want people to say, “Because of you, I didn’t give up,” and take a page from my book, which is just go do it, get it done. But with a little bit more of the ‘how,’ because I think there’s a lot of inspirational people out there, but they don’t tell you how to do it. So it’s really the legacy of caring and changing people’s lives and the ripple effects.

LR: Yeah beautiful. And what do you think it means to be a modern entrepreneur? We’ve named this podcast after this thing.

SI: I love it.

LR: What is unique, you think, about this sort of moment in entrepreneurship that may not have been so five years ago?

SI: I think it’s such an exciting time. Anything is possible and all the resources are out there, so I think it’s just the timing of this, and the momentum of being an entrepreneur couldn’t be anymore exciting. We have so many amazing role models. And the other thing that we have are learning about these role models that tried 10 times and failed, but then finally made it, so that persistence. So there’s amazing stories out there.

LR: That’s interesting.

SI: Yeah absolutely.

LR: Yeah, and some of those stories that was always true, but you didn’t always know.

SI: No.

LR: Now you can kind of watch it in real time sort of.

SI: Absolutely, I mean Sara Blakely with Spanx. If it wasn’t for the production place she went to and the gentleman going home and talking to his daughters about this woman that came in with this concept, he probably wouldn’t have made her Spanx. People didn’t believe in it. So, it’s unbelievable the stories that are out there of how many times people were turned away until they got that break.

LR: And that turns into basically motivation and inspiration, you think, that helps people today, kind of like a support system that wasn’t there not so long ago.

SI: Absolutely. Yep. Exactly. Absolutely.

LR: Yeah, I hear that.

SI: Yeah.

LR: Well cool. Sue, thank you so much for being here.

SI: Yeah, thank you.

LR: Really great to have you.

SI: Yeah.

LR: Would you sign our wall?

SI: Sure.

Want more Modern Ontrapreneur Podcast?

Check out the previous episode featuring founder of Assist You Today, Robert Knop.

The post Sue Izzo: Basic Bananas USA appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Robert Knop is the founder and CEO of Assist You Today which focuses on helping firms gain and retain clients in the digital age. He’s led marketing, sales and social media for B2B and B2C companies from both the corporate and agency side. With 20-plus years of experience he’s had the privilege of working with clients ranging from Fortune 100s to fledgling startups. Today he’s helping change the way the world sells by using digital, mobile and social innovation.

In This Episode

Robert Knop’s quick start into entrepreneurship was not without his fair share of failure. After realizing the sales cycle is a long process and that leads wouldn’t just “rain from the sky,” Knop created a process to build relationships and scale businesses that has helped companies of all sizes use social media to build their brand. In this episode, Knop explores the best way to get started in your business and how to avoid common mistakes like jumping in too fast or creating a desperate, salesman persona.

Topic Timeline:

1:09 Changing the way the world sells

Cold calling and blasting emails is on the out — Knop says social media is the best way to get in front of key decision makers.

2:50 “I thought leads and clients would rain from the sky”

Think about budgets, roadmaps, and the length of your sales cycle before jumping right in — a little more legwork can go a long way.

4:15 Hitting the ground running

Moonlighting, doing your research and taking it slow often leads to a smoother, less stressful start to your entrepreneurial journey.

5:39 Avoid the desperate salesman persona

Being yourself, being authentic, and solving the problems that you can actually solve is the best way to avoid that desperate, salesy state that drives away customers.

7:01 A process that works

Robert teaches people how to use social networks to build a strong personal brand.

7:54 Walking the talk

Assist You Today gets 100% of clients from social media and conferences following the same process they teach their clients to successfully engage and convert leads.

9:10 The pace of change is only increasing

The past 20 years have brought a lot of change, from searching encyclopedias to asking your smartphone. In the following 20 years, change will only come faster, and keeping up is essential for your business.

10:48 Helping the people this company was founded for

Knop missed the opportunities to help his community and work with nonprofits while working for larger corporations. Now with Assist You Today, he’s focusing on leaving a legacy by helping others.

11:38 Crushing it every day

The everyday balance of helping your clients, solving their needs and giving back to your community is the perfect recipe for a modern entrepreneur.

12:02 It’s about them; it’s not about you

Solve problems and add value on a regular basis — that’s what it’s all about.

– Robert Knop

Show Transcript:

LR: Welcome to Modern Ontrapreneur. I’m Landon Ray, and today we have Robert Knop. He is the founder and CEO of Assist You Today, which focuses on helping firms gain and retain clients in the new digital age. He’s led marketing sales and social media for B2B and B2C companies from both the corporate and agency side. In 20 plus years of experience he’s had the privilege of working with clients ranging from fortune 100s to fledgling startups. Today he’s helping change the way the world sells by using digital, mobile, and social innovation and, most importantly, adding value to end clients. Thank you so much for being here.

RK: Thanks, appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

LR: So, we were just saying before we started rolling that you’re now primarily an agency working with B2B companies and helping them connect with their prospects in new ways. Tell me briefly about that.

RK: Yeah absolutely. As we were talking about before, you know really cold calling, blast emailing, every year they become less and less effective. So, we help teach people how to get in front of those key decision makers, actually get meetings in the new digital world where everyone’s just staring at a screen 24/7.

LR: Yeah, and how do you do that?

RK: Well, it’s a lot through social media, you know, channels like Linkedin for example, things like Twitter. People spend over two hours a day on social media, the average American for example. So, we have to go where they are. I mean, I don’t know anyone under the age of 40 that ever picks up the phone anymore when you call them. So, if you want to get in front of these folks, whether in their business life, or in their social life, and in their personal time, social media’s the way to do it.

LR: So you create full on programs around Linkedin?

RK: Yeah, absolutely. We work with marketing teams, with sales teams. You know, the three big things that we do are strategy, sales enablement, and content. So, strategy: Where are you now? Where do you want to go? An actionable plan to get there. Then sales enablement, what we were just talking about, what they call “social selling” nowadays. This is using social networks to build your business and boost your sales, for example. Then finally content, to really feed the beast, because, as you know, content is king nowadays.

LR: Now, taking a step like higher level, you know we’re talking about what you do, how you help businesses, but think about your business itself and, your own career as you’ve gone from kind of whatever you did at the beginning to now, running your agency: If you could think back, you’ve been at this for a while it sounds like, despite the fact that you don’t look like you could have been, if you could think back and give your younger self a piece of advice that would have made the road smoother or faster, what would that be?

RK: Well, fast forward back to two and a half years ago, when I first started my agency. You know, before that I was the head of digital marketing for a fortune 500. I was speaking all over the country on this exact topic. I had standing room only. People were so excited about it, coming up to me afterwards like, “You should start your own consultancy, you should do this, you should do that.”

So, eventually I did, and I just thought leads and clients would just rain from the sky. I forgot that in that role, people don’t always have budget. People don’t always have things on their roadmap — it’s booked out for a year or two in advance. The sales cycle takes a while. So if I could go back in time I’d tell myself, let me do a little bit more legwork before you jump right in with both feet.

LR: It’s always a shock, because a lot of us, when we get started, we have this idea, we get all excited about it, and the first thing we do is we kind of like bounce it off our buddies, and our buddies go like, “Yeah, that’s an awesome idea.” In your case potential clients, they’re like, “Yeah, you should totally do this. I’d hire you.” Then you do it, and you knock on the door and they’re like, “Well, I didn’t … I …”

RK: Or it’s like, “Oh, I’ve got budget next year.” I was like, “Wait a minute, next year?”

LR: I’ve got rent right now buddy. So, as you think about making that transition, would you have, I mean, you wouldn’t have obviously not made the transition, right? You’re happy with what you’ve done. So, would you have maybe moonlighted a little bit? Like, taken some jobs on the side, kind of eased into it, or how would you have made that transition smoother for yourself?

RK: Yeah, I think moonlighting probably would have been a good idea for myself, or really looking at those people I thought really could benefit from it, maybe having some side conversations about, “Hey, you know …”

LR: If I did…

RK: Exactly, “If I were to do this, and this would perhaps be the time frame.” So, you know hindsight’s always 20/20.

LR: Yeah. I wonder how you would coach somebody to overcome that, because that’s a shocker. It sounds like you’ve experienced exactly that. I certainly have experienced that. You know, I’m getting a lot of yeses and then, all of a sudden, when I go do all the work and launch the thing, it’s crickets. How would you avoid that going forward, or like, if you had to tell your son how to avoid that, how would you do that?

RK: Yeah, I think it would be to have those conversations ahead of time really, to lay the groundwork so that when you do hit the ground, you hit the ground running. So, you’ve already got one or two clients set up. I’ve talked to friends who have done that, for example, that they didn’t make the leap until they already had secured actual contracts.

LR: Yeah, okay. So, moonlighting is the right way to go. I think that’s a good call, because you know, you probably experienced this, once you find out that it’s a cold world out there, it gets pretty scary, and you’re like, “Oh crap, this is going to be harder than I thought, and I do have rent,” or, “I have a new baby in my case,” or whatever it was, and I’ve found that it gets really hard to sell when you’re afraid.

RK: Yeah, you might come across as desperate. You know I’m fortunate enough that I didn’t have to worry about that. My wife’s an executive at a software company so had a bit of a safety net, which is always fun. But you can tell folks that really need to make that sale, because it comes across loud and clear.

LR: In subtle ways, yeah.

RK: Yeah, absolutely. So, the best thing to do is just to be relaxed, just be yourself, be authentic. Solve the problems that your potential client has. And sometimes it’s going to be a fit, sometimes not going to be a fit, but as long as you’re always talking about their needs, their problems, and how you can solve them in a way that doesn’t come across as selling, I think that’s the key.

Especially in social media. You never want to pitch; you never want to talk about your products and services. You always want to add value. You want to talk to folks about problems that they have or anticipate problems that they have, put yourself in their shoes, and the type of content that you post, the way you write your profile, everything that you do should be solving that without saying, “I’m going to solve this for you.”

LR: Tell me about your unique skill set.

RK: I mean for us, what we do, our unique process, you know it really works. It’s worked with multiple fortune 500 companies, as well as small startups. So, it’s a process. It’s really agnostic towards size of the company. It also works for B2C, although most of our clients are B2B. What we really do is we teach people how to use social networks to build a strong personal brand, how to engage with others, how to reach out in the right way, and then how to build win win relationships.

LR: Right, awesome. But, what about you personally? Like, you’re now the CEO, I presume, of this organization. How did you succeed at that job?

RK: Well, for myself personally, we have a unique model where everyone that works for us is a contractor. So, I’m really the only full-time employee. Everyone else that we work with is on a need basis so we can ramp up, ramp down as need be.

LR: You, obviously, like the rest of us, have to go out and get customers and, you know, it sounds like you don’t have a sales team to go do that. You’re kind of making that happen. What is working for you today to get business? Like, where did your last five significant deals come from?

RK: We get 100% of our clients from social media and from conferences.

LR: So, you’re actually walking the talk?

RK: That’s right. That’s why …

LR: Conferences also? So, networking?

RK: Yeah, absolutely, but conferences, usually it’s not the event itself, it’s the promotion of the event, because here at this event, we’ll probably get what, 500, 1,000 people, but the posts, for example, that I do on Linkedin and Twitter before, during, and after the conference, the people that I reach out to before these things happen, those will get us in front of 50, 60, 100,000 people. So, the event itself is fantastic.

LR: It’s content though for you?

RK: Yeah, but the content marketing around it is really that lead generation engine that turns these types of events into immediate sales.

LR: Then, do you end up reaching out, or are people reaching out to you?

RK: It’s a combination of both. We’ve had people reach out to us in the past that, based on the content that we post, they just reach out and I’ll say, “Oh, well, I’ll put together a proposal,” and they’ll say, “No, we’re good. Just tell us the number, because we’re already bought in. You don’t have to pitch us.” Obviously, that doesn’t happen incredibly often, but it’s happened enough where you know that it’s working.

LR: Yeah so, tell me this. You know you’re building a small agency at this point, you’re just a couple years in or so. What do you feel like you’re learning edge is? What is the next most important thing for you to be working on personally in business?

RK: Absolutely. I think it’s all about innovation. I mean, the world is changing so fast today, and the pace of change is only increasing. You know, about 25 years ago, or 30 years ago, when I was a kid, when I would ask my parents a question most of the time they’d say, “I don’t know, look it up in the encyclopedias.” We had this set of 50 encyclopedias in the back of our family room. It wasn’t Encyclopedia Britannica, we couldn’t afford that, it was like Encyclopedia International or something like that. Some generic one.

LR: The cheap one, yeah.

RK: Exactly, and so, they’d ask me to look that up, and it’s like, what’s the tallest building in the world? You’d think, Maybe it’s the Empire State Building. Let me look under E. Maybe it’s the CN Tower; I’ll look under C.” And, it was just completely pointless, right? Well, nowadays, you know my kids, I have twin eight year old boys, and they’ve grown up in a world where everything they ever wanted to know is on my phone. So, take it even a step further now, you just ask Alexa, you just ask Siri, so in 25, 30 years to go from all of these encyclopedias to just ask some random app the question and it’ll tell you the answer, that’s a monumental shift. And, that’s in 20, 30 years.

Just imagine where we’re going to be 20, 30 years from now. So, staying on top of that, and I want to see the next, biggest, brightest thing, because you don’t ever just want to follow the crowd, but thinking strategically about what will help you, what will help your clients in what you do. I think that’s what really energizes me, and I think it’s what we all need to be doing.

LR: Yeah, awesome. So, when you think about where you’re going to be in 20, 30 years, and you know, closer to the end of your career than the beginning of it, what do you hope that your legacy will be?

RK: Helping people. That’s why I started this company. When I was working for, you know, a bunch of fortune 500s in my career, I never really got the feeling that we talked about the end consumer enough, that we talked about the people we’re actually helping with our products and services enough, and I would love to have that be my legacy, because that’s why I started this organization, to help people, and that’s why I called it Assist You Today. Help You Today didn’t really roll off the tongue so, Assist You Today is what we went with. But really helping those individuals, helping companies. We work with a lot of nonprofits, which is really energizing to me, to really make a difference in your community. I never had that opportunity at a lot of the bigger companies that I worked with. So, I’d love for that to be my legacy.

LR: Beautiful. Now, what do you think it means to be a modern entrepreneur? We’ve named this, this whole podcast. This is now, season three, and our magazine and, shoot, our company, what do you think it means to be a modern entrepreneur today?

RK: Yeah, I think it’s just going out, helping your clients, doing what you need to do to solve their needs, staying on top of what you need to do, just going out and crushing it everyday and at the same time helping people.

LR: I think that’s right. It’s being less focused on yourself, on your products, on, you know, kind of like what’s happening on this side, and really shifting the focus to being clear that you understand what your customers or prospects are going through.

RK: Yeah, it’s 100% about them, it’s not about you. It’s not about your products and services. Frankly, nobody cares about your products and services. They care about their needs, their problems and, if you can solve those, if you can add value on a regular basis, that’s what it’s all about.

LR: Yeah. Awesome. Well hey, thank you so much for being here.

RK: Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

LR: We really appreciate your time, that was great.

RK: Absolutely.

LR: Would you be willing to sign our wall?

RK: Yeah.

LR: Awesome, thanks.

RK: Of course.

Want more Modern Ontrapreneur Podcast?

Check out the previous episode featuring founder of Ghost Flower, Susie Peebler.

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Tara Mohr is an expert on women’s leadership and well-being and helps women play bigger by sharing their voices and bringing forward their ideas in work and life. She’s the author of Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Apple’s iBooks. She’s also the creator of the Playing Big Leadership Program for women, which now has more than 1,500 graduates around the world and a facilitator’s training course for that same program.

In This Episode

Tara Mohr is an expert on women’s leadership and helps women play bigger by sharing their voices and bringing forward their ideas in work and life. In this episode, she discusses universal fear and self-doubt and how she’s created a business that works to defy both. Tara believes that by facing your inner critic, you can overcome vulnerabilities and instead focus on following your inner mentor.

Topic Timeline:

1:11 Teaching What You Need to Learn

Tara went from one-on-one coaching to a group program by finding the problems she dealt with herself, recognizing them in others and then finding a way to move past them.

2:58 Universal Fears

People don’t like vulnerability; they like to stay in their comfort zones — and pursuing our dreams is really scary. How do we let go of that fear and societal conditioning? It starts with inner work.

4:19 The Playing Big Model: Inner Critic

On top of learning to drive and balance a checkbook, accepting and managing your negative, inner narratives is a basic life skill that everyone should learn.

5:23 The Playing Big Model: Inner Mentor

Once you’ve developed a better relationship with your inner critic, you can start accessing your inner mentor, which helps you develop a really clear vision of your older, wiser self.

6:48 Shifting Your Perspective

The culture you’re in, wherever you are, is not the whole picture. It’s a transformative experience to realize that you’re just looking at the world one way and to then discover all of the other ways from which you can look.

8:00 Gentle, Giving Language

There’s a whole vocabulary for how we talk about fear, how we talk about self doubt that has been very helpful to people. People often use the word gentle to describe her work and approach. She’s like the gentle hug nudging you in the right direction but in a powerful way and will get you there eventually.

9:03 Traditional Books – Are They Still Relevant?

Although Tara entered the blogging world in 2009, she feels her business wouldn’t be where it is today without her traditional, physical book. Books are still relevant — there’s no other way to really reach people in the same way.

11:23 Combining Power and Wisdom

Power and wisdom are not going together in the way they should in our society right now. The question is, how do we change that so that those with wisdom, sanity and compassion, have more power?

12:07 Everyone’s Unique Experience

Part of the excitement of being a modern entrepreneur today is the ability to take your passion, gifts and unique experiences and create something to give the world.

– Tara Mohr

Show Transcript:

LR: Welcome to Modern Ontrapreneur. Today we have Tara Mohr, who’s an expert on women’s leadership and well being and helps women play bigger by sharing their voices and bringing forward their ideas in work and life. She’s the author of Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead, which was named a Best Book of the Year by Apple’s iBooks. She’s also the creator of the Playing Big Leadership Program for women, which now has more than 1500 graduates around the world and a facilitator’s training course for that same program.

She is a Coach’s Training Institute Certified Coach with an MBA from Stanford and a degree in English Literature from Yale. She also has been featured on national media from The New York Times, the Today Show, and Harvard Business Review, and has captivated women from all walks of life. That’s quite a resume. Thank you so much for being here.

TM: Thank you for having me. This is a fun pleasure today.

LR: Good, tell me about this program that you’ve created and what it is that you take women through in this process that you developed.

TM: The program is developed out of the one-on-one work that I started doing as a coach with women, and I know for a lot of entrepreneurs, thinking about scaling, I’m always an advocate of that, start with the one-on-one work with people and see what’s happening in the trenches with your audience. So for me, when I started a coaching practice, I didn’t know what I would focus on, but I saw very quickly again and again, that all of my clients, for the most part, were these very capable brilliant women who I felt so inspired by, and I wanted them to be leading and bringing all of the ideas and innovations into the world that I was hearing about in our coaching sessions. But I was also hearing from them a lot of reticence and feelings of, “I’m not ready yet,” and self doubt and, “I need more education and training first,” and that just became so frustrating to me that I started to focus on how do we help people move beyond that in our sessions.

And then once I really learned what was powerful for my clients and what was powerful for diversity of my clients, I started to teach a group program. That was in 2010, so I’ve been doing this for a while now and continue to grow the program since then. I should also add, ’cause I think it’s important, that I think we teach what we need to learn and so I too at that point was coming into my career as a young woman, had this great education, had every reason to feel confident, but didn’t. So I was quite taken with what’s going on and how do I move beyond those blocks as well.

LR: Yeah, so what is going on?

TM: Well, I think a lot of things. I think there’s a universal level to this and then there’s a place where gender comes in, too. At a universal level, I think for all of us, men and women, we don’t like vulnerability, we don’t like emotional risk, we like to stay in our comfort zones, and sharing our gifts with the world, sharing our ideas, doing what really matters to us, pursuing our dreams is really scary, and a lot of us flee from it. Sometimes I think when that shows up in men it’s maybe not as obvious because when I talk to men it’s often, “I feel pressure to do the prestigious thing or the breadwinner thing, even though what I really want to do is over here.” But men can be playing small by running away from their own authentic dreams for their life in that way.

For women, all of that’s going on and there’s another piece of you’ve been socialized to be a good girl and a nice girl, you don’t see a lot of role models of women leading in the public sphere. All of that conditioning that causes us to not see ourselves as capable as we really are. And so there’s inner work we can do to let go of and moving beyond some of that conditioning.

LR: And what does that look like?

TM: In the Playing Big model, we start with the inner critic, that voice inside of our heads that has all kinds of chatter for all of us, all kinds of narratives, why you’re not good at this, you’re not ready for that, you could never be the one to do that, and we do what I think of as an Inner Critic 101 training. I think everybody, instead of just learning how to drive and learning how to balance a checkbook, if people still learn that or whatever those basic life skills are, one of them should be learning what is this voice in our heads that says negative things to us about ourselves, why does it exist, and what can we do about it.

In the Playing Big model, we do not try and get rid of having an inner critic, we don’t try and become confident, we look at the inner critic as it’s always going to be there if you’re on your edge in your work and in your life, like an edge of your comfort zone. And so it’s about learning how to live with it and know that it’s not the voice of truth, so we teach a lot of practices around that.

Then the next piece of that inner work is something we call the “Inner Mentor,” and that is all about getting a really clear vision of your older, wiser self. So you, like 20 or 30 years in the future, but we don’t just ask people, “So who do you want to be 30 years in the future?” But through like a guided visualization and meditation, really help people get in touch with a deeper wisdom about where do I really want to go? What really wants to come out from inside of me?

And what people find is just through like a 20 minute exercise, they can get a very clear sense of this older, wiser authentic version of themselves. Then you can begin to relate to that self like a mentor. That’s one of the best ways to Play Bigger because you don’t have to work harder or strive harder, it’s not about pushing yourself; it’s about being able to hold that vision and then in any situation say, “How would my inner mentor write this email?” “How would my inner mentor approach this job interview?” “How would my inner mentor move into this difficult conversation?” It’s really a beautiful way to step into your highest, bravest self.

So those are a few of the foundational pieces and then we go on with, there’s about 10 more, but that’s the foundation.

LR: If you’re your inner mentor for your career-starting self, 10 or however many years ago, what would be the piece of advice you would give yourself?

TM: For me what was very transformative and came later, and I wish I had known it earlier, was that that whole culture I was in in school, and even in the sort of prestigious academic environments that I was blessed to get to experience, that that was just one way of looking at the world and one culture. I think I took that way too seriously. That culture was marginalizing of women’s voices. When I was at Yale, 10% of the professors were women, and women had only been at the school for 30 years in its 300 year history. So to really get, this is not yet a place that really knows how to include women; this is not yet a place that’s really nurturing of creativity; this is a place that has really sidelined spirituality to kind of understand what the norms of that culture were and that there were other ways of being in the world and looking at the world.

When I reclaimed those other things for myself, then I was able to integrate all that good intellectual stuff, but in a holistic, healthy way, and I wish I had gotten that earlier.

LR: What do you feel like your unique skill set is?

TM: I love that question and I think we often don’t intuitively know that about ourselves. We have to do strengths finder or get a 360; it’s not obvious to a lot of us, but what I’ve heard from people is one, that I’m very good at giving language to things – that’s the English major side of me – and that in our Playing Big model, there’s a whole vocabulary for how we talk about fear, how we talk about self doubt that I think has been very helpful to people, so that articulation, giving language.

Another thing that people say that always surprises me a little, but people often use the word gentle to describe my work and my approach that sort of I’m not the rah rah go, kick ass of the personal growth world, I’m like the gentle hug nudging you in the right direction but in a powerful way and will get you there eventually. So that’s been interesting to hear as feedback from my tribe and my community and from my world, yeah.

LR: I can totally get that. Tell me about growing your business. You’ve got 1500 students now around the world, and presumably a bunch of facilitators too. What do you do that’s working today to grow that business?

TM: I started blogging in 2009, so I came up in the, “Write online content to let people find you,” and so I did that very diligently for many years, and that worked beautifully for growth. Now, interestingly, most people find me through the book, and so that’s been a huge shift in my business and I do always like to tell entrepreneurs who are thinking about maybe writing a book, there’s often a question, are books still relevant, are traditionally published books still relevant, and I just think there’s no other way that my work could have reached people in the same way, and I’ve really seen that. Now, actually the majority of people who come to us anew, come because they found the book.

LR: At the beginning you mentioned that I think it was our Inner Critic, that voice in our head that speaks up when we’re kind of at our edge, and pressing and learning new things. What is it that you’re learning right now? What is your edge today?

TM: For us, we’re really thinking about growth in some new ways ….

LR: In the business?

TM: … in the business. Just really I think our products are so honed at this point, and we know from the evaluation data how much they’re helping people, and we’re really looking very seriously at how do we move from incremental growth to something more significant and reach more people which might involve changing our products, we don’t know. We’re exploring and learning. My whole team has been finding the book Hacking Growth to be extremely helpful, Sean Ellis, as we explore that. And then for me, I’m always leaning a little bit more into my artist self, spiritual content, just moving more and more into that direction and that always feels a little scary for me when I do it, but I’m doing it anyway ’cause I feel called to do it.

LR: Yeah.

TM: Yeah.

LR: What is the legacy going to be?

TM: The fundamental mission for me is that power and wisdom are not going together in the way they should in our society right now, right?

LR: I can’t imagine what you’re talking about.

TM: Those who have the wisdom, don’t have the power, and I felt that 10 years ago and now I’m like, “If we were unclear on the matter, we could certainly all agree on it now, right?” How do we change that so that those with wisdom and sanity and compassion have more power?

LR: Yeah.

TM: And all of this work for me is about playing some small part with many others working in other ways and making that change.

LR: What does it mean today to be an entrepreneur. What is unique about this moment for entrepreneurs do you think?

TM: All of us here are part of one organism, and that what entrepreneurship has allowed us to do is to sort of more finely and more precisely allow each cell in that organism, each person, to do what their unique genius is to do. That especially small business entrepreneurship and solo entrepreneurship allows one person to say, “What are my gifts? What’s my unique experience? What do I feel moved to bring into the world?” And then to create something to give to the world from that, and technology has made that possible in a whole new way.

LR: Yeah.

TM: That’s what entrepreneurship means to me.

LR: Beautiful, well thank you so much for taking the time, it’s been a total pleasure.

TM: Thank you.

LR: Will you sign our wall?

TM: Yeah, of course!

LR: Great, thank you.

Want more Modern Ontrapreneur Podcast?

Check out the previous episode featuring founder of Build Success, Joseph Hollak.

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