Podcast appearances and mentions of steve awesome

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Best podcasts about steve awesome

Latest podcast episodes about steve awesome

Marked Out Wrestling Podcast
E466: MURPHY BUDDIES UP WITH SETH

Marked Out Wrestling Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 14, 2020 63:40


Adam, Brian and a returning Steve Awesome (filling in for Roadie Rob) give their opinions about Smackdown and Monday Night Raw, as well as some thoughts on NXT Blackpool 2.  _____________________________________________________________________________________ Use discount code MARKEDOUT at collarxelbowbrand.com for 10% off your entire order! _____________________________________________________________________________________ Use discount code MARKEDOUT at markedoutgear.com for 10% off your entire order! _____________________________________________________________________________________ RATE________________________________REVIEW_________________________________SUBSCRIBE Twitter: @smartmarkshow IG: @markedoutwrestling FB: MarkedOut1  

Sales Funnel Radio
SFR 217: The Least Controversial Path To Becoming An Expert...

Sales Funnel Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 15, 2019 27:04


I KNOW this is how and why my business blew up so fast. The answer isn't what you think but I was careful to continue this practice each and every week for the last 3 years…   Today, I'm gonna teach you the most legitimate path I know to become an expert.   There’s a question that’s starting to come up more frequently when I jump on interviews with people, and that question is: “Steve, how do I become an expert?”   I believe that if you seek to become an expert, that can sometimes lead to some weird scenarios.   Someone taught me once:   If you want status, then don't seek it. If you want credit, don't seek it.   And that's kinda the formula I follow, I’ll explain more later...   However, there is a path that you can follow that’ll shortcut your journey to expert... if you have the right intention. BECOME AN EXPERT     I really don't read as many books as I think people think that I do, but there’s something very specific that I do, pretty much every week, which keeps me sharp... and keeps me on my game.   In my mind, it’s also the most legitimate path to becoming an expert in whatever you're doing.   I'm NOT saying you have to become an expert. You don't! But if you want to, this is how you can fast-track, establish credibility and gain expert status without having to learn, read, study, and deep-dive 24/7.   ...And it’s why my stuff has blown up so much in the last two years! COACH STEVE   I coach a ton! You probably have no idea how much.   Every Friday, I wake up and do two hours of open mic Q&A with the Two Comma Club Coaching group. Specifically, I'm coaching them on their offers and their sales messages.   At 11:00 am, I immediately jump on the One Funnel Away Challenge Where I do almost another hour of coaching.   Two Comma Club Coaching is usually for slightly more advanced people whereas the One Funnel away is targeted at newbies. After that, at 12 pm, I go live with my MLM group (Secret MLM Hacks) where I typically coach a newer person to funnels. Which is fun.     At 1:00 pm, I have about an hours break, and at 2 pm, I go live again to my OfferLab group, and then, sometimes, I'll go back to my FB page and so another open mic   Every single Friday is at least five hours of coaching almost non-stop.   I’ve spent a lot of time coaching people!   It’s one of the ways that I got so good, so fast. Sometimes, when I say that, I think people are like, “Oh, that's cute!”  But, NO!   I spend as much time as possible with my customers.   GET a coach and BE a coach is how I've advanced so fast! I know that's the reason.   YOUR PATH TO SUCCESS   So if you're like, “Hey, how do I get better at my craft?” The answer is, you need to spend MORE time teaching your thing. I don't care if you’re in info products, B2B, or retail...   Drop every book and just coach people...  and you’ll be guided to what it is that you need to get done.   When I first started the Two Comma Club Coaching, I did live open mic Q&A for four hours every single Friday for a year and a half. I was the only coach, with 675 students   Do you know how good you get when you coach that often... and when you're answering questions throughout the week too?   If you want to get good real fast stop burying your head in a book and just answer people’s questions. Just add value.   I don't read that many books... but that's NOT a badge of honor.   I read books and I listen to podcasts with the intent to hunt answers. But when I want to get better and more fine-tuned on my craft, I coach!   That's the BIG Secret... There’s NO secret!   HOW TO ESTABLISH CREDIBILITY   l have people come and ask me, “What are the top books you’ve read?” I’m like, “I could tell you that... but at what cost?”   If you're reading with the intention to distract yourself from actually spending time with your customers, it's gonna be an issue.   It's gonna be a major, major issue.   When I feel that I'm starting to lose my edge,  the thing I'll run to is coaching. I'll spend MORE time on ground-level with people who have questions.   ....And because of that, Russell ‘the man’ has told me many times, “Stephen, you have spent more time with the customer at the ground floor than anyone else.”   Guys, that's how I've gotten the edge. That's how I've gotten where I am! I know that's exactly the reason why!   So, if you...   Want to get better?   Want to go faster?   Want to add more value?   Want to get known?   *ANSWER QUESTIONS* That's it!   JUST DO IT   Set a time every single week to go live in front of your group. Say, “Hey, I'm here because Steve Larsen told me I should answer more of your questions. What are your questions?”     ...Just have people ask their questions.   Do you know how easy it is for me to figure out what to sell when I answer a lot of questions? The image comes clear really fast. It's actually faster, and in my mind, more effective than an Ask campaign.   I start to see that twenty people are asking something similar... “Huh! What if I made a product about that?”   You know what I'm saying?   It’s waaay easier, MORE secure, and it helps like crazy… and it makes YOU better.   If you don't know the answer, just say, “I don't know the answer.” And go figure it out!  If you think you might have an idea of what the answer might be... just be honest.   CHARACTERISTIC OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP   One of the sessions I did on the Two Comma Club Cruise was all about  how the red ocean builds the blue, and how your red ocean helps decide what you build in your blue ocean! It’s fascinating.   As I was talking a lot of questions started popping up...   Over the last three years, I've spent literally hundreds of hours coaching … (It's probably near the thousand-hour level now).   The core of my business is content and coaching.   One of the things that I’ve got good at seeing is, “Does this person actually have a question about this... or are they asking me a question because they want me to make decisions for them?”   Identifying that split is what’s made my coaching so effective in the last six months.   I have to help that person's brain to understand the issue in the exact same way as if I'm selling a product to somebody...   When you sell a product there’s a series of beliefs and belief gates they have to walk through... and they're sequential.   THE VEHICLE: Once they understand, “Oh, my gosh, there's a possibility this vehicle could work.”   INTERNAL BELIEFS: I’m able to pull this off.”   EXTERNAL BELIEFS: I have the resources (external) to get where this vehicle is promising I should go.”   As I watch the questions that people ask, I'm asking myself these questions:   Does the question represent a hang-up?   Is that person trying to get me to answer something for them that they should have the power to answer on their own?   Is it a legitimate question?   ARE YOU SCARED?Most of the time, I find that people have enough knowledge in their noggin' to be able to go answer the question on their own.   They know enough to answer the question... or at least take the next step.   So, is the question   Seeking a Distraction - so they don't have to take action?   Legitimate?   If I can tell an individual is seeking distraction for the sake of NOT having to take action, I know that I need to work them through vehicle, internal, and external beliefs in themselves before moving forward!   If I can tell they're asking the question because they want:   Distraction,   The semblance of motion.   To feel that they’re making progress in something.   To just ask the next thing... and the next thing. I know that there's a little bit of a dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins hit with me answering their questions.   This is BIG to understand.   ...Because, once you understand you’re ask questions for the sake of feeling momentum, then you can also know that the truth is:   You know what you want to do.   You know what you’re supposed to do.   You know enough to take action     ... BUT you’re scared, and you don't want to move forward.   To avoid this fear, you distract yourself with further education that you really don't need right now… “Stephen, I have a few questions!”   You see what I'm saying?   It’s a HUGE deal.   ARE YOU SEEKING DISTRACTION?   So when someone asks me,  “Stephen, how do you send an email?” I'm like, “Do you really have a question on how to send an email… or could you figure that out on your own... and you're just trying to distract yourself?”   YOU NEED TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY AND SHOW UP FOR YOURSELF!   THIS PISSES ME OFF!   Part of my content strategy is to do interviews every Tuesday morning. I don't care if your a newbie and I'm your first episode... or if you’re experienced, and I'm the next up…      I set up InterviewSteve.com because I get interview requests a lot. If you want to have me on your show, you can jump on and set a time in my calendar.   But, if you set it up, show up... because I'm going to. But will you?   I’ve been stood up two times in a row recently because people said, “I'm NOT ready yet.”  That drives me up the freaking wall! I can't even tell you.   I’m a Time Nazi.   It's one of the reasons why I am where I am. I'm NOT saying I don't take breaks, but I'm a freakin’ Time Nazi, man!   When someone messages me the night before... or five minutes before the appointment... (or they just don't show up)...  And they're like, “Stephen, I'm not ready yet!” I wanna shout, “Get ready, why'd you sign up! What are you doing!”   Coulton's like, “Yeah, man, it’s been shown that it takes  someone 20 minutes to switch tasks efficiently!”   It drives me nuts!  So I did this...   So if you want me to be on your show I'm happy to do it... BUT Show Up!   I'm all jazzed up. I got everything set up. I got my little Diva light, I'm ready to rock! There's a mental prep that goes on…   So, here's how you get ready:   You take Expert Secrets, and you open up to Page 114.   It's called the Epiphany Bridge Script. There are your questions! That's all it takes! Ready! Okay, there we go! You know.   Oh, man, I can't tell you how much it pisses me off when I get stood up!   I get it because it's booked out quite a way in advance. So people signup just out of the fear and the scarcity of, “I'm never gonna be able to interview Steven.”   ...And then they DON’T show up. “Man, I am so much less likely to get on an interview with you in the future if you do that to me.” I’m a pretty chill dude. I'm aggressive, but I'm chill; it's a cool combo. “ BUT, set me off... my eyes gonna twitch. I'm gonna go nuts!   JUST GOOGLE IT!   I’m always looking for the split between legitimate questions  and distraction questions:   If someone asks me EVER again, “Stephen, how do I add funnel?”   Click add funnel, baby, it's right there! Add funnel, you just click it! You know what I mean? You have got to learn how to answer questions on our own! That's the name of the game, my friends.   Welcome to Entrepreneurship! You’re gonna have questions all the time…   Yeah, duh, we all do!   How many times do I wake up and NOT know what I'm supposed to be doing that day? It happens more frequently to entrepreneurs than most people probably know.   Anyway, back to my no-shows…   Instead of totally wasting my time I hopped in my FB Group and did an open mic Q&A to answer some legitimate questions   SOME LEGITIMATE QUESTIONS Sonia asked: How to tell the difference between a distraction-based question versus a real question?   Steve: Usually, by the follow-up questions... they're trying to find a way to logically release themselves from having to do what the answer was.   Meaning, if someone's like, “Stephen, how do I add a funnel?” I'm like, “Well, what you're gonna do is click add funnel.”  If they say, “Okay, I get that, but what if it's a Tuesday, and I don't have any time?”   I'm like, “First of all, that's NOT for me to solve. Pony up, and make some time in your life.”     Number two: They’re trying to figure out how to logically release yourself from the pressure of taking action. They want release. ...And so, if somebody starts asking me questions where I can see they're trying to release themselves from the positive pressure of taking action, that's when I'm gonna call  them out:   “Something's up? Why are you not taking my answer?”   Why are you backpedaling? Why are you trying to get me to say, “Oh, you know what, in your scenario, you're right, you don't click add funnel?”   They want me to give them permission to not take action, and I will NOT do that.   It's part of what's made me a very forward coach, and sometimes, people don't like that... whatever! I don't care. I'm about getting people results!   FB COMMENT: Hey, Stephen, you keep me motivated and moving forward.   STEVE: Awesome, that's great. Just make sure you turn it into discipline, motivation is nothing.   FB COMMENT: What do you do when you don't know what to do next? That is a legitimate question. Does that even happen to you? You always look like you have everything completely figured out.   STEVE: One of my little tactics is to stay booked up as much as I can. I know that a percentage of the activities I'm doing right now may NOT be what I'm wanting to do 20 years from now.   I set my goals, and then I map out as best I can, the things that I think are gonna take me there. And then, I act! I just run…   I had 17 businesses that were failures. Now, number 18 would NOT have been a success unless I had done those other 17 first.   On the flip-side, thank goodness those 17 tries did not work!   .Otherwise, I'd be doing those businesses. You see what I'm saying? All of those things prepared me for the thing that was coming with number 18. BAM!   So, there are two things going on in my head.   I just have to book myself and just run, and do stuff. Just take action! Big, Massive Action.   In the last six months have I gotten good at,  “Okay, only these activities will take me to where I want to go.” However,  I still know that there are things I'm doing that I shouldn't be... or that things that don't take me where I'm trying to go. So I have a few options:   Stress the freak out over every single action I take. Oh, my gosh, that gets so stressful.   Just do stuff.   So sometimes, especially when I was just starting out, (not so much anymore)….but a year ago, there were many times I woke up and was like, “I have no idea what to do next?”     ...And that can be stressful.   RED DOT, GREEN DOT   So I think to myself, “What’s the next move I can make that makes money?”   Just that one question.   What is the next path to cash and how do I get there? Then I list out all those things.   And then I'll list out all of the things that I think I need to do to make money, and I put a big green dot next to the things that are massive revenue generating, but mentally taxing (like building a funnel, writing a sales script).   Then I'll put a small green dot next to the things that are revenue generating, but not as revenue generating in the moment, or are mentally taxing (like creating a relationship). It can make money, but not at the moment.   Next, I put a big red dot next to the things that are not revenue generating. Then I erase all of the red dot tasks.   I do the big green dots during the time of the day when my brain is most fresh... which for me, is usually 7:00 a.m. to about 1:00 p.m.   Even if I stay up late, I have a hard time sleeping past seven. My brain just wakes up... so I'm gonna do the big green dots during that time of the day.   I focus on the small green dots during the rest of the day...   And I will NEVER do a red dot.   A business that’s NOT revenue focused dies.   As the entrepreneur, I'm the only one who cares about my business in the way that I do. That's just the way it is. There's nothing wrong with that, that's just the way it is. It's your baby, don't expect it to be someone else's baby.   I'm the only one responsible, the buck stops with me on making a buck.   The buck stops with me on moving forward. The buck stops with me on going and getting the new client. I can go get closers. I can go get phone people. I can go get funnel builders. But, it's ultimately down to me if something does or does not happen in my business.   So I answer the questions:   How do I serve?   How does it make money?   Once I figure that out and I do red dot/green dot, and that helps like crazy.   Hey, just real quick:   A few months ago Russell asked me to write a chapter for a secret project he was doing. I had to write a chapter for a book, this was the letter I got from him.   He said:   "Hey Stephen, let me ask you a quick question...   You suddenly lose all your money, along with your name and your reputation, and only have your marketing know-how left.     You have bills piled high and people harassing you for money over the phone.   You have a guaranteed roof over your head, a phone line, an internet connection, and a ClickFunnels account for only one month.   You no longer have your big guru name, your following, your JV partners. Other than your vast marketing experience, you're an unknown newbie...   What would you do from day #1 to day #30 to save yourself?   Russell Brunson   Hey, if you want to see my answer and a bunch of other marketers who also answered that in this amazing book and summit, just go to 30days.com/stephen.   You can see the entire summit, you can see the book, you can see what we wrote in there and each of our detailed plans. Just go to 30days.com/stephen.

Marked Out Wrestling Podcast
E365: Royal Rumble Reaction

Marked Out Wrestling Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 28, 2019 60:03


Happy 3 year anniversary to MOWP! Cast includes.. Adam, Rob, Brian, Medine and Steve Awesome

royal rumble medine steve awesome
DYB Podcast
EP21: Marc Miles Discusses 7 Things Every Painting Contractor Must Know To Protect Their Business

DYB Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 27, 2018 57:14


EP21: Marc Miles Discusses 7 Things Every Painting Contractor Must Know To Protect Their Business SUMMARY: In this episode of DYB Podcast, Steve interviews Marc Miles, his business attorney based out of Venice, Florida specializing in defendign against IRS and state collections. Marc shares a plethora of useful knowledge about finding real solutions to the unknowns that could potentially hurt your business. From employee timesheets to written agreements, Marc talks in-depth about how to navigate the different undesirable situations you and your business may face. _______________ WHAT YOU'LL LEARN: -How to protect yourself and your business from unknown factors -The legal standing of your business and your money -Understanding the goals of your business in advance _______________   QUOTES: "If you do have something in writing, you’re bound by it, so you need to make sure you’re comfortable with it." "If you’re going to form a business entity, 95% of the time, LLC is the way to go." "A written agreement isn’t ‘I don’t trust you,’ it’s clarifying expectations and giving yourself a chance to void if something unfortunate happens." "If you want just your books done right, and you have no worries, your EA is irrelevant." "When you form the business, think about what your succession plan is going forward." _______________ HIGHLIGHTS: [03:25] The big unknowns that can hurt your business and how to prepare for those unknowns [09:33] Proper ways to protect yourself from false claims from employees [15:14] What to stay on top of regarding the IRS and what to do when dealing with tax issues [26:16] The difference between sole-proprietors and corporations [34:15] Partnerships, establishing trust, and understanding what your expectations are from the beginning _______________ LINKS & RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: [APPS] TSheets DYB App [GROUPS] BNI The Florida Bar DYB Coach Special Offer Contact Miles Join DYB ADDITIONAL FREE RESOURCES: DYB System PDF EP01 9 Steps to Doubling Your Business Part 1 52 Blog Post Ideas PDF YouCanBookMe VIDEO Pre-qualifying Questions PDF Video Testimonial Checklist PDF 3 Steps To Get Leads From FB PDF 11 Interview Questions PDF 9 Ways To Get HOA Work PDF  -------------- Connect with Marc Miles on Facebook here Connect with Steve on Facebook here  -------------- Press and hold to visit the page Show Page Notes -------------- Thank you very much for joining us today! If you received value, would you take a quick few seconds and leave us a review on iTunes, please? _________ STEVE: What happened? MARC: So, I had this client, he was behind on his IRS payments, he had an ex-wife and had some issues, things didn’t work out well, she left him high and dry, he was in another relationship, he was trying to make that relationship work, but the IRS kept following him, he had a car, he had a business he was trying to start and his soon-to-be wife was like, "I am not marrying you till you get this fixed, if you don’t get this fixed, I am leaving you," so he is like, you’ve got to help me, I said I can do that, so he comes to me, he said, where are you at, we took a look at this whole situation, we said no problem, we can do this, this and this, we set everything up, I talked to the revenue officer, she was fine, we submitted the paper work and he ended up paying about, maybe $8,000 on what had been a $110,000 liability… And his girlfriend at the time married him afterward, saying we got together and if it hadn’t been for you, while I was doing this, she would not have stopped there… STEVE: Woah, okay… Hello and welcome Marc Miles of the law offices of Marc J. Miles P.A, welcome to the show. MARC: Thank you, Steve. STEVE: Marc, what does P.A mean? MARC: P.A stands for Professional Association, and it’s a designation that is able to be used by individuals who are licensed by the county moral of the States, when they formed a business entity that says, they can only practice with the entity that which they are licensed for. So, if you see a lawyer with P.A or PLC, you know that is their business, all they do is the practice of law, they don’t serve Mc Donald’s fries on the side… STEVE: Ah… okay, glad to have you on the show. For everybody listening, Marc Miles is our business attorney, and he has been, for years, he helped us when we were at Burnett Painting, he wrote the agreement when we sold Burnett Painting and he has worked with us ever since, for everything we’ve done, without going in details… and Marc is outstanding keep him close cause he’s a great guy to know and I was kidding around with him before we get into this. Marc, you are too big to be an attorney… it’s not hard and I kind of wonder how you got into this industry… But, fortunately, he is really good at what he does and so I thought, Marc, we’ve got to get you on the show and let’s share somethings that some business owners, painting contractors out there need to know, to protect themselves, protect their businesses and the unknowns right, so we know, what we know and we don’t know what we don’t know, that’s really the dangerous part huh… MARC: And that’s what I try to help people to say, here’s what you are not aware of, let me ask these questions, you decide, but I hope you can get there so you can think about these things that you might not otherwise think of. STEVE: Hmm… Absolutely, so for example, what are some of the big unknowns? MARC: Okay, so the big unknown… the biggest thing especially with trade contractors and painters is, whether your clients are going to pay you or not, a lot of times whether or not you are having an agreement or non-agreement to sign, that states the payment terms and other terms of agreement, you have no idea what the client is going to go, are they going to try to want to stiff you, do they want to change? Do they say no? I am not paying until you repaint the whole thing? So, one of the biggest unknowns is try to eliminate the ways the client has not to pay you. STEVE: Uh… Okay, now this is really good, this is especially used for high contract or long contract work like commercial, industrial or even residential for your construction, absolutely… So, what are some ways? How can you…? MARC: The first is, you put the total price in the writing in the contract, not just a quote, the quote says, here’s my estimate, here’s your price, but when you have them in a contract say, this is the price and what’s paid, you are also saying what you do it for, and you haven’t signed, people don’t think an estimate is binding, people sees a paper says, estimate, sign, yeah, I agree to that amount, but they don’t see it as, this is a contract I am… subject to, there are legal remedies to it and that’s one of the easiest ways to sort of… that’s how you do it, so you have a little, it doesn’t have to be a 10-page contract, it can be a 1-page contract, but it looks like a contract, so it impresses upon them, the seriousness as opposed to, here is my quick book invoice, sign here, that says I agree… STEVE: Uh, woah. Okay, so this is a really good point is and I know opinions to this is very common practice, quick books, invoice, estimates, whether it’s an estimating program, they all say estimate stuff. If I heard you correctly, you were saying it should say, to set the it should say contract, what about agreement? Can it say agreement? MARC: Absolutely, you could say agreement, no problem. And then it should contain a couple other things that… you people have seen in contracts before, you’ve seen references to if the contract is breached or if not paid in x days or you know, choice of law, if we disagree, we go to court here, you know… throw some of those things in there, you know… Now, don’t be smart about it, don’t put something that is going to hurt you because you don’t really know what it is, but throw some other things in there, so it looks like an agreement or contract, more than just an estimate. STEVE: So, silly question here, I put this together when I was in L.A, is if we should have a lawyer take a look at it? MARC: Have someone take a look at it, over, just see it and ask some questions, yeah. Because every state is going to be different and some things you maybe find difficult to put in one state versus another, so… STEVE: Okay. Thank you. What are some ways that business owners… because you know, I mean you run your own practice, it’s a ton of work and you take all the risk? Now if something happens to you, you can sue them for free, and if something happens to us, the owner… how can business owners protect themselves against faulty claims. Like here is an example, I was talking to a friend of mine and he had paid on of his guys an extra day, it was a holiday or something and it ended up being 48 hours and he isn’t paying five and a half and there was a day he didn’t even work, he was just being generous and paying the next 8 hours, well he came back and sued him, ended up causing him $30,000, because he didn’t pay him five and a half for that extra 8 hours that he paid him… MARC: And he brought the state in as well, I am sure, because the state came in and probably said, let’s take a look at your records as well… Absolutely, so yes, so one of the things you want to do is, some people use independent contractors, while some people use employees, and there’s two different ways you have to handle it, you have an independent contractor, you need to clearly meet… First of all, if you are using an independent contractor, you need to have an agreement, end of story, why? Because if you have good insurance, your insurance might have clause for not having an agreement. I’ve got a situation right now, a client of mine that is relatively large painting company has got major insurance, that’s $100,000 job, $300,000 jobs, had a job where the sub he used, ended up screwing up, causing maybe $1,500 or $1,900 worth of damage, but if he wants to go through his insurance, they are like you didn’t use sub-contractor agreement, even though I drafted one for him. And now they are saying, if you are going to use the insurance, it’s going to cost you $15,000… So, now he is going to pay it out of the pocket or pay the $15,000. So, if you are going to use a contractor, make sure the insurance always have an agreement, even for that reason, but the agreement contains a schedule, the schedule says, here is how I pay you, and you will be specific in that schedule, this is how I get paid and then you only pay by that schedule… that’s for contractors STEVE: For sub-contractors, so if you are working with subs, you have subs, make sure you have a written agreement? MARC: Yes, absolutely… STEVE: Okay, what should be in that agreement? The schedule? The payment schedule? MARC: The schedule, their insurance and their compliance with the law basically says, you agree you have x amount insurance and your license etcetera, whatever you have with the state, failure to do so is a breach. As well as the fact that if you don’t get paid, they don’t get paid, so you want to make sure that if you are doing the job and your sub and you get stiffed by the owner, you are not going to have to pay your sub out of pocket or not. Now, some people, they say that’s a little hard to get, maybe fair, but if you take a look at almost every big GC contracts that’s out there, from the big players, I would guarantee you that is in there. STEVE: Hmm… I wouldn’t be surprised actually… So, what about employees, what are some proper things, what are some, things we need to be doing to protect ourselves, faulty claims against employees, just making sure all our basis are covered? MARC: The biggest thing to do is, the time-tracking of hours, you have to have a system where their hours are tracked and you can see that, relatively easily… STEVE: Okay… MARC: Then the best thing to do is, if you are doing payroll, maybe you have someone else doing payroll, maybe you are doing it yourself. If you have someone else doing payroll, they will automatically know the hours when you calculate to get to know, are we yet over-time? Is it a holiday? Do we pay 5 and a half? Now, if you use QuickBooks payroll, it will usually do the calculation for you, but if not, they will know, it will let you keep track, because once you get that 40 hours, the rules change, once you hit the holidays, the rules change, and they are different in every state, but wherever the state, you need to know that. So, you need to be able to keep track of hours because what happens if they put, we’ve worked this time and you are like, hey you’ve worked 42 hours already, based on this job in here, you only really worked 32 hours, you know, something… I don’t know, I mean God forbid… few hours here and there a day. Track hours to be able to track the hours consistently, that’s number one… STEVE: There is an app we like to… that we used with Burnette Painting and that many DYB use, we call it T-sheets, I don’t know if you are familiar with it, but… MARC: Not a lot but okay… as long as it is hours that are recorded and you can see those hours on a regular basis so that you can catch anything, you have to still review and catch everything at a time, because what a lot of people do is, they think overtime is time and a half, that’s the only thing they think of, they don’t think about, sick or vacation, whether it’s state mandate, certain things, and that should be talking to… even talking to a payroll person they know, you know good idea of that, if a not local attorney is what makes that. And that’s just actually a brief conversation just to get some conversations to help make sure that you don’t blow that. The other thing is don’t do a written agreement, depends on what state you are in, lots of state are at will, which means as long as you don’t have it written, you can sort of do what you like with their employment and how they are employed and how long they are employed. So, very few rules such as over-time, wages, etcetera, but if you do put something into writing, you are bound by it, so you need to make sure you are really comfortable with what you have, if you have something in writing. STEVE: Interesting, so you have more liability with the employee… MARC: Potentially it is because you can be held to everything that you held them to, you can be held if you don’t do it, so you have 6 employees, and the rule states that employees do not get vacation until they have worked at least 3 months and ask for two weeks in advance and you let one guy have his one week in advance, now everybody gets to have one week in advance because you let them do it, despite the fact that the agreement, Emmanuel or whatever says two weeks STEVE: Hmmm, now you mentioned at will, can you impact that for us please? MARC: Sure, absolutely I will… STEVE: Okay MARC: So, a lot of states… actually I am not sure, I think it’s less states… at will, which means, whenever you go to work for somebody, there are no set terms, there are no set agreements, you can work whatever you agree to, if it’s in written then it’s a great upon, if not, it’s really tough and you can let them go at any time for any reason, subject to of the course federal discrimination, you can’t let the person go because they are black, you can’t let them go because they are female, you know, those kind of stuff you can’t do, no matter what, that’s a federal law that overrides. But if you don’t like the way the person drives his car, you don’t like the way he looks on the job, done… goodbye… STEVE: About tattoos… MARC: Absolutely… Sorry, I don’t like tattoo, done… You don’t have to give him a chance to rectify, you are done, goodbye… STEVE: Okay… MARC: So, everybody needs to find if they are in at will state or not, so if you are, great, if not, then you need to check with the local attorney there, because I can’t tell you what some of the restrictions on firing somebody can be, sometimes you have to give them notice, you have to give them opportunity and it just depends on that state. STEVE: Okay, makes sense, interesting. So, how about IRS? What are some?… I don’t know if I can ask you this… MARC: You can ask whatever and I have to answer it… STEVE: How do you feel, like where does the IRS ranks and your Christmas card list? MARC: Actually, believe it or not, the IRS ranks decently, the problem is congress, they are the ones, that are so low, I am like don’t ever pay them in front of me when I have a baseball bat… Because all of these since about say 1999, most of the issues we really have with IRS, is really congress issues, it says, you know what, we have come up with this plan, we are not going to spend a lot of time specifics here, you, IRS, figure it out, if we don’t like it, we will tell you, you are wrong and then go implement it without any real guidance from us and then when people complain, deal with it until they complain too much then we will try to address it, and that brings the IRS into doing things that they really shouldn’t be involved in, and having to make decisions that really shouldn’t be made by them, but congress doesn’t do it, so… STEVE: So, IRS has been taking the wrap the whole time MARC: They take the wrap a lot of time. Now, back in the early 1990s and late 80s, IRS deserved the wrap, they were doing stuff, it was like, we don’t care about you, you aren’t human, done, done, done… Now, it’s a little better, I mean most of the people I work with at the IRS are very reasonable, they are not push-overs unfortunately, but they are reasonable, at least, so… STEVE: So, what are some things that we need to stay on top of, to protect ourselves with IRS? MARC: The biggest, most important is if you have employees, you need to make sure you are paying those payroll taxes on time. So quickly, when you have an employee, you pay them their wage, you withhold a certain amount based on their W4, plus you pay 7.65% of the social security at one point, something percent, whatever… 7.65% total between the two and social security, Medicare, that federal withholding plus the Medicare and social security withhold from the employee’s pay, is not your money, that’s their money that goes to the government, failure to pay that, and the government can come after you, personally for that amount, regardless of what you think you set up, business protection-wise. STEVE: So, are these the 941s that we file? MARC: Yes, everything you file, the 941, the payments you are making, the 941, you need to make sure you pay those employee taxes first and foremost, end of story, pay those, it’s not your money, people try to say, I won’t pay this week and I will try to do next week and catch up, they can still be very, very dangerous game, it’s sort of like gambling, like oops, I didn’t hit black this time, I will get black again, alright Mr. black, I will bet it one more time, maybe eventually I’ll get to black and try to win. You know… do you really want to take that risk? You probably don’t. Number two is, for those in some states… if you have sales tax, file and pay that sales tax as quickly as possible. In Florida, I tell people, if you are a Florida resident and you don’t pay your federal taxes, IRS can come after you and take 90-120 days, and they will start coming after you, Florida department revenue… 90 minutes if they get serious… the state can move like that, and most states can move like that, most states have far more strong to grab and attach to people, for non-payment of state taxes than the IRS does. So, whatever your state tax is, if you have sales tax and… or similar collection taxes, pay those, because they are the people that can go after you ASAP. IRS, you can buy time, you can do stuff, a lot more than you can with the state. STEVE: Okay, that is really good to know. Now, what’s the first thing somebody should do if they received one of those dreaded letters from the IRS? MARC: The one that says, we think you owe something? STEVE: Yes, that one… MARC: Okay, there is a lot of letters from the IRS that people dread… So, there’s two types of letters, there is the one that says that, excuse me, we want to look at your return, because we don’t like this $200,000 in supplies that you put and then we know you owe us money, now if you don’t do something within 30 days, we are going to take action. So, there’s two different letters, one is on one side and one is on the other, if you get that first letter that says, we don’t like this on your return, go back and make sure you check you have your receipt and your documents, in that statement. Once you have those, then decide, do I want to talk to my CPA if my CPA can help or if it is something simple. Sometimes it’s as simple as, we just need to see what your travel is, and your travel was, for example, that year was just twice as large, because you went to two more conferences and you’ve got plane tickets and the thing, you probably have to go and say, here, sure, no problem, plane ticket… here and as long as all your receipts match up to what’s on the return, you know, you are probably fine. Now if they go and say, we want to see your bank statement, everything on the return, now you probably need to talk to that CPA, because they need to know what limits there are, when they are doing this, not you. STEVE: So, that’s a great point, CPAs…  about Florida, that’s fantastic. What does somebody look for in a CPA? How would somebody know a great CPA from a forum floor? MARC: The first thing usually is to check whether they have the CPA designation, those that have CPA, which means they’ve got the license, have undergone a higher level, 99 times out of a 100, a higher level of training education to know what has to be done. Now, does that means they are going to form that they have education? No, obviously not, so the best thing to do is have an interview with them, phone or face, it doesn’t matter, and then ask them questions about your stuff. Say, what can I do about this? What can I do about that? And see how they answer, and if they are one of the people that goes, oh you can do A or B, and that’s it… and they are probably one of these people that is following up on the forum or it depends, like what are we looking for, or they can give you a little more and say, well, what are you trying to achieve? They will ask you, what are you trying to obtain? What are you trying to achieve? What’s the ultimate goal to fit it in, that’s one part, instead of saying, just oh, well, keep your receipts or make sure the mileage checks, those one line answers to three or four questions indicate the person is probably not, either is engaged and they are going to give you the time, or they are probably more about, here it is. STEVE: Okay, so this is really good, we are going to pause here for a moment, because… this is really good, if I heard you correctly, what you are saying is if they have a simple A or B answer, that’s no good? MARC: Usually, yes… STEVE: Okay, usually… these situations are dynamic… MARC: Yes, and they depend on the overall… So, obviously once have a CPA in your account say, hey, Marc, can I deduct this? And he goes, no, that’s okay, that happens, this time you are not asking stuff, the answer is simple, no you can’t, okay do this, yes you can. But when you are interviewing a CPA and in this interview, don’t just say, oh, I know somebody, okay, here you go, stuff… talk to them, interview them, so, I say interview attorneys too, don’t just… whenever you have a professional, especially a professional, interview them and talk to them, make sure you think that they can do it, they are engaged and you can work with them. STEVE: Fantastic. What about these small shops who… maybe just a couple of employees, but the and for one thing I know about myself and I know about most entrepreneurs is, we hate the books… MARC: Yes, so that is why you have a good CPA or a book keeper and ask them to do a monthly or quarterly book keeping and here is the thing, they are going to give you a quote, they are going to ask to see some stuff that can give you a valid quote of how much it is going to cost per month to do everything. And what you do when you get that quote and you shop around, you go to a couple of different accounts of CPAs and get quotes, then you ask yourself and you do an exam that I am sure you tell everybody to do, how much time does it take you, as the business owner to do this, this and this and you add up all these hours to do all these stuff that they are doing in this proposal. Now, ask yourself, how much money you could have earned with those hours in your business, which is what you are good at, as opposed to doing this and work it out. STEVE: Absolutely, we have a video, we have a link to it in the show notes called “Ownership Responsibility Value” and work through that exact formula. So, that’s great, how would… how does somebody know, so okay, find a couple of 2, 3 book keepers, how do you interview them and what do you do to open up your books... do you say what do you think? MARC: No, when you go to them, you talk to them, you ask them a little bit… hey Marc, how have you been down here, how long have you been doing this? You know if they are a CPA, you know how long they have been a CPA… and then they say, so, here is my situation, give a brief overview of my situation, I have this, I do that, and see what they say, some people may go straight to, hey, can I see the tax return? Some people may ask questions, there is really not a right or wrong there, because especially if you start getting a little long-winded, they are going to say, just give me the tax return, at this point you are explaining all that stuff and it’s like you are probably going to a little more extraneous details than they actually need… STEVE: Okay… MARC: But, bring the tax returns, bring the bank statements and you ask them questions about… do you feel comfortable with them? Ask them some basics, hey dude, do you… how many other painting companies do you deal with? How many of your clients are under 3 employees? How many of your practice is business versus personal? Because all CPAs do 10, 40 individual tax returns. So, how much individual do you do? If the person does 95% individual and has 3 businesses, maybe you say, okay, may we look at someone else, maybe you are like, hey I am going to be the forth, I don’t need a lot of handholding, okay, or you can go to someone who’s got 85% of the businesses and most of the individuals in the business. And then, the thing is more of a judgement at that point, how much does that matter to you? What’s the feeling you got from that? Because there is no right or wrong answer at that point, now you sort of feel, what are they doing in there, in their field and then how many employees they have, because if they’ve got several employees, the chances of you actually getting to them or them actually really looking at your stuff are probably slim than none and they may be awesome, the junior who they’ve hired, may not be at the same level that they are, and if you are going to get junior doing your tax return, do you have the same confidence that… you know… STEVE: And would you say it’s just as important to check and refer us as we would prior an employee? MARC: Absolutely… who we know, if you go find a CPA, have 2 or 3 people, that’s why I like BNIs, it’s a great resource, because most probably if someone isn’t BNI, they’ve got testimonials, hope… if nobody is giving testimonials then there should be a problem, they should begin there, that’s the start, so if you can get testimonials from people, ask people, if you know somebody says here, go and ask on… or do the whole Facebook recommendation thing, go and ask Facebook, what is recommended for CPA and see who comes up with it, if you got somebody come up with 6 names, then name 17 times out of 40, that’s probably a good one to start with… STEVE: Yeah, absolutely. Now, what is an EA? And how important is that a CPA is an EA? And I believe you are an EA MARC: No, I am not… An EA is an Enrolled Agent, and that is an individual who has taken the exam that the IRS puts out, to be able to practice before the Internal Revenue Service. Me, being an attorney and CPAs being the CPA are automatically granted that by right, nature of our license to do so as long as we are in good standing in A state. STEVE: Interesting, that’s why I though you are an EA MARC: Yeah, because I can do it. So, if you want just your books done right and you have no worries, your EA is irrelevant, because the EA is when you have tax issues and need them resolved. Hopefully you are not getting to that point… STEVE: Okay, absolutely… let’s circle back a little bit… we talked about corporations, what is the difference between sole proprietor, LLC, S-corp, C-corp and impact this slowly for us, for those who want to know if they are in the right one or they should make a shift MARC: Well, and that’s going to be after some consultation, that’s really hard to make, a sole proprietor is somebody who has nothing, but use their name… Steve Burnette painting, not Burnett 1800 painting, Steve Burnette painting, Donald Robert CPA, those are sole proprietors, they don’t have any requirements to deal with bank accounts or whatever, they do have to get an EIN, if they have employees, and everything they earned on their profit is subject to self-employment tax, which is an extra tax above income tax… On the net profit, corporations and LLCs are business entities, why do people say C-corps, S-corps… at the state level, it is a corporation, you form a corporation or you form a limited liability company, and people form these for two reasons, tax or protection, 99 times out of a 100, there are some exceptions to the rule and each day it is a little different, but a corporation is the vehicle designed for large companies, they are going to have public shareholders, make large amount of money, have a lot of certain deductions and have to pay out to the members and there was a way to keep the protection inside the company, so that members that were buying in weren’t at risk. The cost of that was paying an extra inside tax on the money, before the money got out to people, who received it and had to pay their tax, so S-corporation decided to say, we are going to make a difference, we are going to give you the corporation and give you the protection but the income will just flow out so you only pay tax once. But there are some restrictions on that, for example, you can’t have two different classes of stock when people invest, like you had a preferred shares, but you can’t have preferred shares in this corporation, you can’t have more than a hundred people, you can’t have a non-US resident, alien or citizen be a shareholder and the most important in an S corporation, if one partner takes money out, the other partner has to take their share out as well… STEVE: Interesting… MARC: Whether you like it or not… STEVE: What’s the difference in protection between S and an LLC? MARC: Okay, whether it is S or C, protection on the inside level doesn’t matter… so, corporation and LLCs, doesn’t… corporation… when you hear S or C, that’s a federal, sometimes state tax issue only, it has no effect on the protection of a corporation or not, whether it is C or S, the protection from the corporation, from a legal stand point is the same, no matter what… So, there’s two types of protection; inside and outside. Inside protection is simply that you are doing something on the job, within the job… something goes wrong and you get sued and that keeps your personal assets from being attached, you close down the business if you have to, but walk away, that’s within the business, no matter what, you are covered, you are protected, that’s what we call inside protection, there is no difference if you do it right between a corporation or an LLC, you get the same either or…. It’s the outside protection that there’s a huge difference, so outside protection is, something happens to you outside of the business, such as you many have back alimony you haven’t paid or child support that you haven’t paid, your behind done or you have a judgement from when you were trying to get your life together, say you have your house closed, they are not going to forgive the loan and they are still going to come after you for the money, it is outside your business, but they are going to come after you. A corporation does to protect you from that, your corporate shares are assets and they can attach those. STEVE: Okay, but how relevant are corporate shares to a painting company? MARC: Really, because most states require shares to be issued if you have a corporation and your share is your evidence of ownership, so if you are the 100% owner, you are supposed to have shares and if you have shares and they get attached, guess who owns the company, the corporation now, not you, your creditor… (After the Break) STEVE: How much protection does a sole proprietor have? MARC: None… Zilch in any which way he performs, no inside, no outside, end of story. STEVE: Okay, so if somebody started a painting company and maybe they are a sole proprietor, they are just getting going, should they go? What should they do? Should they… I heard you say it was dynamic… MARC: Yeah STEVE: So, any guidance what they should do? MARC: Yes, so basically, look about… first and foremost, if you are just starting, are you going to have employees and contractors or not? If you are going to have employees and contractors, most especially employees, form an entity, end of story. No matter what, form the entity, it’s not a question of anything else, because if that employee or that contractor does something wrong and you get sued, no entity, no protection… STEVE: Okay MARC: End of story, if you are not going to hire or use anybody else, it’s just you and your truck and your paint brush, your ladder, it’s probably cheaper to just get some insurance for what you are doing and make sure you have some decent insurance, and go forward… STEVE: So, just some liability or… MARC: Yeah, liability insurance, or if they don’t have an umbrella policy, if they are on the house, once they get an umbrella policy, because if you are just one person doing everything yourself, you don’t really get much protection from the company and what are you really going to do to cause the damage as obviously as the painter, I mean at what point are you going to cause more than two million dollars for the damage, it’s pretty hard, as a sole proprietor, just going around. Now, once you have contractors, a lot of the people, they are driving around or they are doing different things, and their effect is going to affect a whole lot more people rather than you, now you are going to get more risk. STEVE: Okay, you’ve mentioned partnerships a couple of times, so partnerships can be sticky for example… there is a common statistic that marriages will have 50% chance of ending up in divorce, what is it for partnership, do you know? MARC: No, I don’t have a number, sorry… STEVE: That’s okay, I was just curious, I didn’t think there might be one, but what are some things… I think it was just the last episode, we had four brothers on and they are partners, unfortunately they are brothers and they are just awesome Christian, so they’ve got a strong understanding and character and values, but that’s not the case for most partnerships, right? They all started off great, hey 50-50, it’s going to be awesome, we are going to make a ton of money, it’s will be great… MARC: Correct, so there’s two part to it, one, there is a part that is themselves and there is a part after… So, let’s take a part that is themselves, you are going to go into business with somebody, could be your wife, significant other, it could be your brother or somebody you have just known for 5 years that says, hey, let’s walk together, the biggest thing in the world is expectations. Before you can get started, what are your expectations for the company? And what are your expectations within this company, what are mine? What’s the work load split? How much work are we putting in? how much are we expecting? Can I afford to live on what we have as a budget while we are putting this together, before it grows to be the next billion-dollar company? Set those expectations down and talk about them, you don’t even need to get the attorney involved yet, because if you don’t agree that, hey, I thought you were going to put in 50% of the money and I am going to put in 50% of the money and you are now like, no you are going to put in 90% and I am going to put in 10% and I was going to work this amount. Well, that’s a direct split you can’t reconcile, end of story, you don’t even need the attorney, so expectations starting off, what are the expectations to find them? And then what’s the work load going to be? As an example, I had somebody call me, he was like, hey, my friend wants me to go and work for him, he wants me to be a partner in his business, and I would handle the finance and the contract etcetera and he would do the marketing and customer and actual web production, he was like, but I don’t trust him, he was like, because I don’t know if he is going to be straight with the money and I tell him to stop, my first response was, don’t go into business with him, he was like, no I want to do this and I said okay, fine, I will draft a disagreement, he is like, okay, no, change it, I want to do a new LLC and I am like, really? I am like, I can do this, but I am telling you, from your friend and as a client, it’s not a good idea, so I went and did it, he’s like, okay, let’s work on this, he comes back to me and says, no, I changed my mind, I am not going to, after realizing. You have to be able to trust this partner, I tell people all the time, you are going to business with this person, okay, do you trust them with the key to your house and with your wife and child? If the answer is no, you need to rethink this, or at least think it over seriously before you move forward… if you don’t trust this person, it’s ultimately a matter of trust in the beginning, do you really trust this person? Now, people change and you don’t know, but you ask that question, you could think you trust this person, but again, we don’t know what happens until the going gets rough sometimes, when people show what they are made of, that kind of stuff… STEVE: Absolutely, that’s really good… So, expectations, and do you trust them enough to keep them with your wife and children… MARC: Yes, once you’ve got to that point and you are sure, that’s when you go to the attorney and you say, we want this and we want this, in writing as to what we are going to do, well, is this a corporation which has a shareholder agreement or an LLC which has an operating agreement? You can put this stuff in there, now what people don’t realize is corporations, generally, people hear corporations, they hear bye-laws, bye-laws don’t address all these issues that I talked about and in an LLC, you have to do an operating agreement, that has addressed everything, you address those if you do it right. Of course if you don’t, if you put a trained monkey don’t do one, you basically got nothing, but if you put a you can do a shareholder agreement to address all these, an LLC will not need to address everything and if you don’t address it, I tell people, if you don’t address it with your business partner now, you are going to end up paying ten times what it would have cost you to have done this right in the first place, to have the courts tell you what you are going to be doing. And most people don’t usually like that, that’s not a win-win situation… STEVE: Speaking of win-wins, most partnerships start as 50-50, why might that be a really bad idea? MARC: One of the reasons is because a lot of partnerships are like 50-50, but at the end, we are going to go vote, and are going to try to make decisions, at 50-50, you are deadlocked, so how do you break that deadlock? And if you can’t break that deadlock you can’t move forward. So your company can stall without proper mechanism; 50-50. Second, a lot of people want to do something where they can get minority preferential treatment in bids and contracts, if it’s female or other minority owned, so all you can do is make a 51-49 or 60-40 split, but if you create an LLC, you can put all these protections in, just because you are the 40% person, you are not getting screwed by the person that has the majority votes, that’s one of the things that I love… I am doing that for a company right now, he’s got this product that he’s selling out, you know he wants to get the minority preference, he wants to put his wife as the majority owner, he wants to preferred himself in case of anything happens with him and his wife, that she runs the company and makes all the decisions, and she doesn’t really get the company. So, I as a good attorney can fix that, you can play with that, in an LLC, it’s a lot harder in a corporation. STEVE: So, somebody should have insured a majority, but just because you get the majority doesn’t mean you can’t protect yourself. MARC: Correct. And sometimes you can say, you know what? There’s a majority for voting, there’s a majority for money, so in a corporation, you are sort of stuck, but in someone, especially if passed to an S-corporation, but in LLC, you could say, listen, you are going to put in more money in, fair enough, we will give you more money back out, ahead of me, but I want 50% control, so we have to agree, or 51-49 and I want the control, you can do that split. Now, a lot of times, what I do, I tell people, if you have the deadlock, I put in the agreement, you find the third party that knows that area and ask him, because people go, oh, let’s come to the attorney and I am like, well that’s all fine and good, but if you guys are discussing a painting issue or growing your painting company, why are you coming to me to ask for expert opinion? I don’t know, I don’t know about painting, like I am not going to help you out on that, go to somebody else that knows that and ask them. Now, legal stuff, yeah, come to me and ask, and say hey, we need financial advice? Come ask me, but… so, I say, find an expert and talk to them… but if you don’t put anything in, then you are going to be screwed, because then you can’t make a decision, and essentially if you don’t agree, you have no recourse but to go to court… STEVE: That’s awesome, that very helpful. Now, selling a company, what does somebody need to know, how do they prepare, what… so Marc I come to you, say Marc, we’ve got this… April and I had this weird idea, we are going to sell our company… MARC: Okay, so first thing I ask is, how much are you going to sell it for? Then I say, where did you come up with that number? Because, what’s going to happen is you need someone objective who knows what they are doing, to look at your books and say, this would merit a price increase of x or a price of y, to sell the business, all things been equal. Now there’s always certain things that are out of the box, that you have this unique packing system, that there is a big craze for? That hey, that has the value that you are buying the business for, for that, as opposed to the business, as a business-operating-bringing-cash. So, actually the first thing I do is, I tell people, when you formed the business, think about what your succession plan is, going forward, what’s your ultimate goal with this business, do you want to be a 100? Do you want to sell it out to somebody else? Do you want to give it to your kid? Because based on that you need to prep, I usually prefer, when people want to go sell their business, start prepping, a year to two years in advance, because as we know with a lot of the trades and restaurants, cash flows through, cash doesn’t always get recorded on the tax, right or wrong, we all know it happens, cash is king. Well if a lot of your cash is king, then you can be very hard to ask for a price on your business, because people look at your numbers and say, why do you want this? Well, I take $40,000 of cash in a year, well, okay, do you want me to believe that, I tell you one horrible story, one restaurant here in Venice, the individual who sold the restaurant was putting money in for fake sales, paying the sales tax on it, so the number looked higher for the buyers. And the buyers bought it and paid more because they thought the sales were higher than they actually were… STEVE: Oh no. That’s bad MARC: Yeah… So, that’s why you do your prep, you do your work, so you can be prepared to show, this is why I deserve what I am asking for… STEVE: Okay, NDA; how important is NDA, what is an NDA? MARC: So, an NDA is a Non-Disclosure Agreement, it’s different from a Non-Compete, which is different from a Non-Solicit, people use these terms interchangeably and they are not. One, Non-Compete, the person who works for you cannot work in the same field at a certain period of time, doing what you do, Non-Compete. Non-Solicit, whoever leaves you cannot come back and go after your clients. STEVE: Interesting, so that one is not very popular or common? MARC: No, not common and then Non-Disclosure means you cannot disclose any information you obtain for any reason, except for the purpose you’ve received it, this is used often when people are looking into buying or selling a business, you sign a Non-Disclosure, hey, let’s see the financial so we don’t use it, etcetera. But you can also use it, if you don’t have the proprietorial system, such as a DYB coaching for example and someone is interested in the coaching program, you want them to sign this Non-Disclosure because if they decide not to buy in, and they have gotten some information, you don’t want them going and taking it elsewhere. So that’s a Non-Disclosure, and so you can do an agreement that has all three, but sometimes you don’t need all three, I have had somebody say listen, if somebody comes work for me, I don’t care if he works in a set of shops next door, I just don’t want him to go after my clients, Non-Solicit, fine, Non-Compete, I don’t care if he works for another company, I don’t care if he dissolves the company up, I don’t care, I just don’t want him to go after my clients, that’s a Non-Solicit, so it depends on what you want, what are you concerned about? then you know, get that. STEVE: Awesome. Very good, so as we wrap this up, Marc, this has been awesome, is there a question I should have asked or another point or comment that you would like to share with me? MARC: Yes, two of them actually. One is that, if you are going to form a business entity, 95% of the time, an LLC is the way to go, so picture your state change and talk to somebody, but it’s going to give you more flexibility if you need it for what you want to do, because you can always choose to be treated like a corporation with an LLC, but you can use its flexibility for elsewhere. Two, if you do want to use an attorney, every attorney who is licensed to practice in the state you are in, has to have passed the bar and your local bar has a list of every attorney, so if someone says they are an attorney, or you are looking at an attorney, you can go to your local bar, in this case it is floridabar.gov, you can look up the person, it will tell you how long they have been practicing, if they are licensed to practice in that jurisdiction and it will show disciplinary history, if any. So, anytime somebody says, I am an attorney… look them up on Florida bar or the bar or maybe they were dis-barred and maybe they are retired, I can’t tell you when we looked through sometimes, and I hate to say this but… look through the disciplinary hearings for fun sometime, seeing what people are doing… and a lot of times, what it is, is people are practicing without license because they have been dis-barred and they still continue to take people’s money to quote and do work, they are not licensed anymore, so always go to your local bar, check out say, is this guy licensed? Is there a disciplinary history? What is his story? How long have they been working? And CPA is by the way the same thing, if they have a CPA designation, go check with the state, state has information for CPAs. STEVE: Okay, fantastic, very good. Anything else we should have asked or you like to share? MARC: Yes, last thing, sorry… STEVE: No, it’s good… MARC: License is an insurance, a lot of times, when you use a sub, they are going to ask… you are going to want to make sure they have an insurance, a certain type. Always understand that the first step is asking for a certificate of insurance and don’t let them give it to you, make sure it comes from the insurance agency who has their policy. People take it and modify it and play around with it, and you can’t trust it if it doesn’t come from the insurance agency. STEVE: So, the certificate must come from the insurance agency? MARC: Should come from the insurance agency and you have them send you the certs… STEVE: Become listed… MARC: Yeah, so list the person… so the agency says, here it is, here is the person, it’s valid. Now, again, could they have cancelled that insurance? Yes, they could have, afterwards, but at least it’s not fraudulent, it’s legitimate and a lot of time people don’t realize what it is, so they don’t even know how to give it, but that’s why this part two is have that written agreement, because if you get that insurance and you have agreement say they will keep your insurance and they violate it, now, A, potentially your insurance may say, screw you, but B, you now have them on hook of being in the wrong. STEVE: Okay, fantastic, if there could be one more things that you would have shared, what would it have been? MARC: The last thing I am going to say is, in general rule we all want to believe the good in people, so, we give people chances, we do things sometimes without as much structure, because we don’t think of the negatives and I want people to understand that the reason you go to an attorney or somebody is if something goes wrong, yes it may go bad, go well, nothing ever needs to be done, and that’s great, I hope so, but if it does and things happen, this is what you are trying to protect. So, as much as I like kelvin, the person I am sharing my office with and it might be compartments, our agreements in writing, as much as I like people or certain things, the agreement is in writing, it clarifies the expectations and just in case something happens… what happens if someone gets Alzheimer’s… this person will never betray me, no, now they got sick, now they have Alzheimer or something, now they are doing something that they wouldn’t have done, but they are, so now what? Didn’t expect that? Too bad. STEVE: So, written agreement is not, I don’t trust you, written agreement is clarifying expectations… MARC: And giving yourself a chance to avoid, when something unfortunate happens. STEVE: Okay, very good, that is awesome. So, Marc, I am going to share your contact information here in just a moment for those who would like to reach out to you… MARC: Okay STEVE: But first, how about some fun questions, because… MARC: Sure… STEVE: Alright, you are a dangerous, not just legally but physically and have a black belt in… MARC: …Taekwondo STEVE: How many countries have you lived in? MARC: Lived in? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… STEVE: Five, how many languages do you speak? MARC: How well do I speak them… I have studied six different languages… STEVE: Six different languages, which is the most difficult? MARC: German was the most difficult for me… STEVE: German, interesting… okay, and food. You are a food kind of… I have been trying to encourage you to start like a food blog… MARC: I know and I have been starting and I have… STEVE: You will be the ultimate ABA for Venice, Florida as far as food blogs, I mean like, anytime we have a question about food, I just call Marc, food this, food that… what are some of your favorite dishes or types or styles of food? MARC: Sushi… STEVE: Okay MARC: Duck… STEVE: What’s the strangest thing you have ever tried with all the different countries you have lived in? MARC: The strangest thing was probably eating a fish that’s still living and breathing as you pull the flesh off the bone. STEVE: Okay, that good… that’s awesome. So, what countries? Germany, Japan? MARC: No, Demark, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, United States. STEVE: Awesome, fantastic… Marc, it has been great to have you on... MARC: Thank you Steve… STEVE: For those who have been listening, more to value, we have tons of take away here and looking forward to hearing feedback from this episode, it has been very, very helpful, for those who like to follow up with you, how can they best reach you? MARC: Email is the best way to go, my email should be… I think marcmileslaw.com, that’s the best way, because I am running around, I am not always in the office and stuff… STEVE: So, I have that here, and that’s mmiles@marcmileslaw.com MARC: Yes, awesome STEVE: Fantastic. Marc, thank you so much my friend. MARC: No problem, my pleasure Steve, anytime, take care…

Sales Funnel Radio
SFR 15: Interview - Jaime Smith reveals his FREE coding secrets in CF Pro Tools, exclusive for ClickFunnels users

Sales Funnel Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 17, 2016 46:18


Click Above To Listen Or Listen In iTunes Steve: All right everyone. I've got a very special guest on with me today. I'm very excited for this actually. I've been looking forward to this interview for a long time. Guys I want to introduce to you Jaime Smith. He's done amazing things with the ClickFunnels community. Jaime thanks so much for joining. I want to talk a little bit about how you got your start. All the cool things you've done. First of all I want you to know, actually Russell and I were talking about you because you've done so many things for the ClickFunnels community. You remember that video, you may not, but I put a video out and I was like hey Russell and I we're looking for some help for some poor things and things like that and you reached out. We were going through this list of people. Over and over and over again I was like, Jaime's the man. Jaime would be the man, Jaime would be the man. The only reason why, I don't know ... He's so good. I think he'll get bored. Jaime: Ah. Well thanks man I appreciate that. I appreciate that, yeah. Steve: Yeah and Russell's saying, hey he's done so much for the ClickFunnels community himself. It's not like we're asking you to, it's not like we've done anything to do extra promotion for you or anything. It's like everyday I see a new thing that you've done for the ClickFunnels community, for all of us non coders and it just blows our minds. It's like black magic to me man. I have no idea how you do what you do. Jaime: Yeah well lots of years of kind of doing some intense stuff. Honestly my background is as a senior web app developer. I've been working since 2000. Started out, my first project was actually an enterprise level project with Eli Lilly. I've always been the cowboy coder writing enterprise level applications. Always web based. I've done desktop software and stuff like that but that's not as much fun for me. After doing enough of those things you learn how the back ends work. I'm able to take some of that experience and see how the front end works, and get into the ClickFunnels admin area and see okay, I can kind of tell from the URLs and the functions that are available how the backend pieces are pulled together. That allows me to say, okay well if the backend works this way, then if I add this to the front end, then the backend should support it. Just having that visibility into both sides of how things work makes it easy for me to go in and know that if I can customize the front end a little bit it'll work with the backend. Also just being able to inspect the code that's being spit out by the ClickFunnels tools on the front end, and add some java script into them that just adds a little functionality or a little style or whatever. It just kinda comes easy so I figure, hey if I can throw some of that stuff out and help people out then that's, I would love somebody to be able to come in and help with all the things that I am not the greatest at. Steve: Yeah. I cannot even imagine what those topics could be because I mean, you've been in the ClickFunnels community for a long time and I have also. I got in right after beta. I was building stuff and it was fantastic, my buddy and I are making money together. All of a sudden I started seeing, whose Jaime Smith? You keep putting things like, hey anyone want some cool CSS that's going to make, yada yada yada. I was like, holy crap I don't know how to do that. Yeah. Then like the next day it'd be like, hey someone else want some java script I wrote that's going to make you're whole funnel act like an e-commerce store. I was like, what? Oh my gosh. It was like over, and over, and over again. I got to tell you, that's one of my biggest regrets. I went to college for, I finished with a marketing degree but before that I was actually a CIT computer degree. I remember I went through one semester, I was sitting in one of my coding classes. Maybe it was the teacher, but I cannot blame it on that with a clear conscience. I don't know what it was but sitting and coding, I remember getting out of there and going, I'm never going to sit in front of a computer all day.  Jaime: Yeah, and now you're doing it. Steve: It's the one thing that I wish I had learned, was how to actually program. My dad was an executive at IBM. He and I, we ran like a 120 port network inside of our house that we built together, running through the walls. We did so much stuff together and it was awesome. I just have never learned the guts of it. I'm totally jealous of your skills man, it's fantastic. Jaime: Yeah, well. Yeah it's a blessing and a curse sometimes because I see some of these questions come up like, hey can I do this? Then it's like that itch that you just have to scratch. Okay I'm not going to rest until I figure out how to do this thing. It's a lot of fun. I think, my background's kind of weird. I don't know what it is. I feel, I was talking with somebody actually I was just out in Boise here last week for an event there with Russell. The Ignite Inner Circle Program. That was great. While I was there I was talking to somebody and just talking about my background. I just felt like, what I said was I feel like my biggest blessing, and I hate to say my genius because I'm not trying to brag by any stretch of the imagination- Steve: Go for it. We'd love to hear it. Jaime: I feel like my biggest area of genius is my ability to extrapolate and apply a concept I've learned in one area to a completely different area. I started when I was young doing mechanical stuff. My family actually owned a hardware store and my dad did a lot of installations, hot water heaters, central air units, and stuff like that. 10 years old I'm installing furnaces, and air conditioning units, and hot water heaters, and running electricity, and doing all this mechanical stuff. Not really any training it was just, hey your dad needs a hand so I'll just watch what he does, he'll tell me what to do, and I'll go do it. I kind of took that and then when I graduated high school I actually went into the army and I was a helicopter mechanic for 4 years. I was able to take some of those mechanical skills and apply it and look at the engineering of things. I always felt like I could tear stuff down and reverse engineer how it worked. Then I've been able to take some of that reverse engineering skill and apply it to technology. That's what programming has been for me. Honestly I've only had a few actual college level classes in programming. Most everything is all self taught. Steve: You're kidding me? Jaime: No. Steve: Oh my gosh. Jaime: Over 16 years of reverse engineering other stuff that's already working or going in and saying, it's always kind of been on the job. Hey, you need to learn this. Okay great let me go get a reference manual and I'll figure it out. I've just been really blessed to be thrown into just a bunch of different projects in different languages, and different platforms, and used in different frameworks and technologies. Being able to say okay, these things all kind of have similar ways of doing things. If I can take the concept from one and apply it into another then it's going to get me to a solution that much faster- Steve: So, I'm sorry about that. Jaime: Oh no. That's what I've been able to do with ClickFunnels is be able to say, okay I know I can take the concepts I've learned from the backend programming and from the front end programming, I can combine them with this online marketing which I've also been a student of for the last going on 12 years now. Just come up with these creative solutions to these problems that people are having, and problems that I'm having. Steve: It's interesting because I was thinking about that. If you can step back and look at abstractly what you're doing with the funnel. I mean that's got to tie directly into what you did growing up. Jaime: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I've been extremely blessed to have some fantastic opportunities to get experience that a lot of people just don't get. Sometimes I have to remind myself, or I have people tell me this, that because I see what I do as just really easy, but then I'm like anybody could do it. In fact I've said that many, many times, I could train a monkey to do what I do. It's not that hard, it's just once you know the concept it really is pretty easy. It's just for me I've been exposed. I don't feel like I've got any special genius or any special intelligence ability that other people don't have. It's just I've had the great opportunity to be exposed to experiences where I've had to make a project work. It's just experiences that the majority of people don't get an opportunity for. I feel truly blessed to be able to do what I do. Steve: Well I think it's fantastic. For those of you who are listening and don't know, what Jaime does is he'll look at what everyone's doing in ClickFunnels and watch the community and the Facebook page, see where people who don't know how to code are running into these walls. He'll just come out there and, hey here's a free tool that I just built, or drop this piece of code in and now ClickFunnels totally changes. I mean it's amazing. It's incredible what you do. Jaime: Thanks man, thanks. Steve: I mean you're obviously working on CF Pro Tools. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. I also want to ask, before we get into that, I don't know. It's a little weird to bring this up. Tell us about your failures you know. I want to know a little bit more, behind every success story there's always like this struggle I feel like. In marketing we tend to take whatever the best case study that we were able to get and market that only. Or whatever the best results are and market that only. The other 90% are like pure crap or it's just this massive, massive struggle. I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about, she the struggle that produces CF Pro Tools. What led you to get there? Jaime: Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. There's plenty of meat there to chew on. Steve: Sure, there always is. Anytime anyone talks, oh yeah there's lots of that. Jaime: Oh yeah. Yeah. Like I said I've really been studying online marketing for the last 12 years of so. Really I've had this passion for hey, I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I guess that's the thing. I never wanted to be the guy that just had a job and just worked my job and just did my thing. Now every once in a while I look back and say, man I worked in a factory building cars for a while. That was kind of mind numbingly nice. It's like hard work, but every once in a while I'd like to go back and just feel like okay I can just do my job and go home and not have to worry about anything afterwards. Steve: Turn the brain off, yeah. Jaime: Yeah switch off and not be constantly on the clock. Then I remember that no, I hated that gig too. It seems like I always do that in the spring time. Be like, oh it'd be awesome to have an outside job putting on roofs or something like that. Then come August in Indiana when it's 95 and 100% humidity I'm like oh yeah now I remember why I don't do that. I wouldn't last very long. Yeah. I've been studying online marketing for a lot of years. Really felt like okay this is my opportunity this is where I can actually make some thing happen and really take a business, I always thought with minimal effort and the right scale I can just make this huge business and live that internet dream, laptop beach lifestyle. It's 12 years later and I'm still not on the beach, and I'm still not working at my laptop. Yeah. I started, and honestly I've looked at so many things, and I'll say probably the biggest failure I've had in, and a lot of people talk about this but it's so easy to get sucked into, is the shiny object syndrome. That's biggest struggle. I'm finally learning after 12 years of doing this that that's been my biggest downfall, is constantly being attracted and constantly jumping ship and moving to the next thing. I've done pretty much everything you can think of in internet marketing, I've tried it. Starting out with running niche ad sense sites and building those up. I had a little bit of success there. I made a few hundred bucks here and there on different sites. Okay that's great. Then you run into a little struggle and you're like oh that doesn't work and you just dump it, you move onto the next thing. In the process of doing that I actually built out, again using my technology background and as a developer I actually built a product around taking PLR content that I was getting in a monthly membership where you'd get 1,000 articles a month or whatever in different niches for free. Go and build your website around these, throw ad sense on it, you'll make money. Great. I did that and I thought okay, I'm going through and doing this and there's got to be a quicker, better way to build out a network of sites. I figured out a way to take word press, and this is back like word press 2 days, to use word press what was called multi user or word press MU, and use that to build a network of these niche sites, just on different sub domains. I figured out how to do that and I actually was in a community similar to the Facebook group, specific to this product, had about 1,000 members or so. Kind of the same thing I've been able to do with CF Pro Tools, just jump into the community, help out as much as I can, show people what I'm doing and how to use the technology to build these sites up more quickly, and actually build a training program. Like 28 videos on how to use word press, and how to use the network, and how to drive traffic, and how to do all this stuff. Put that together and just poured a ton of time into it. That was probably my first little success where I sold like $1,700 worth of this course. I'm like okay awesome, this is going. Then word press came out and changed their version. I'm like I do not want to go back and re-record 28 videos. Steve: 28 videos, yeah. Jaime: It was like 6 hours worth of video training. That's immense, I'm like no. I'm not going to keep up with this. I just kind of dumped it, moved onto the next thing. I probably could have been successful with that if I would have stuck with it. It got hard, there's surely some other shiny object that's easier to do over here, and jumped ship. I just did that repeatedly for the last 10-12 years. Have learned the hard lesson that that just doesn't work. Anyone of the things that you pick you can be successful at online. There's very few things that if you don't ... There's been plenty of plans laid out that will work if you apply the right leverage. I think you just have to pick one and go with it. For me the latest has bee CF Pro Tools and jumping into a community where we've got, what 20,000 plus active members now inside the ClickFunnels Facebook group. We've got ClickFunnels users I think, I heard recently is right around 20,000 active users of ClickFunnels right now. Steve: Yep. Jaime: It's a huge community, so it's a huge opportunity and that's great. That's where my focus has been. I actually enjoy it. I posted on the group not too long ago that ClickFunnels makes what I do easy, the community makes it fun. I do enjoy it. Steve: Yeah. I completely agree with that. I want to go back just real quick to something you mentioned. You just touched on it, and I'm learning this lesson, I don't know I fee like any of us who do anything entrepreneurial we all have learned this less every 6 months. It comes in a wave. The shiny object syndrome. It's huge. What's funny is in college I 100% had shiny object syndrome but I kept telling my wife, no, no I'm just at an age of exploration. I'm going around all over the place like, yeah I'm doing real estate here, writing e-books there, door to door sales here, I was all over the place. It was good for learning, but after a while you have got to drop an anchor and you have to learn to say no. I'm laughing that you brought this up because like 3 days ago I was Voxing Russell and I was like hey man, someone approached and they're like hey got this cool thing, wondering if you want to jump in on it in your free time. Which is kind of a joke. Russell's like, you know what man as a friend, stop. You have so many cool things going on already. He's like don't, just as a friend you cannot say no anymore. By the way, he's like if you have time to focus on 2 things it means you're probably not doing enough in number 1. You know what I mean? Jaime: Right. Steve: I thought that was fantastic that he said that. I have not really ever had success in something until I became a mono maniac. You really have to obsess over it. It's the only thing you think about. All your time is put towards it. You don't go home and just like veg out on the couch. After a couple months then something will blow up. Anyways. I thought that was really key and wanted to just point that out. I remember when Russell said that I laid on my bed like for a long time. Just was like, man he just defined the last 4 years of my life. Why was I so close to it, I couldn't see it. It's so obvious when you hear it but you look at it you're like man, what can I simplify and cut it. That's usually not the mentality everyone's taking on. It's more of a, what can I be a beast at and take on more, and more, and more. It's actually very much the opposite of how you do things. Jaime: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely, yeah. You know when somebody starts a conversation with, hey, as a friend. You know that's probably not going to be what you want to hear sometimes. Steve: No, no, no.  Jaime: That's what you got to like about guys like Russell that can jump in and tell you what you really need to hear, whether it's what you want to hear or not. That's awesome. It's great advice as well. Yeah. Steve: Do you mind bringing us to a little bit of CF Pro Tools? Jaime: Sure. Steve: I'd like to, feel free to go through it. I was wondering also, I probably should have asked you this before but, I mean everyone here obviously we like to hear the numbers. If you wouldn't mind a few things on that or take us through your funnel and kind of how it works. Jaime: Sure. Steve: If that's all right with you. Jaime: Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah it really started out, CF Pro Tools was just, as a I thought through, you know I built out a couple of these custom java scripts. The first one somebody had asked for was the ability to add a checkbox directly onto the buy button. Normally we see this check boxes to say hey I agree to the terms and conditions. What somebody was saying was hey, I added this to my page and it's kind of cutting down on my conversion rate. I'd really like to be able to put this checkbox directly on the buy button, that way they're at least looking at the buy button when they have to check it. Maybe that will help with conversions. Maybe it will be a way to fill the bill of requirement for, you know some processors require that hey if you're going to sign somebody up for a trial subscription you need to have somewhere on the page that identifies that they agree that they're signing up for a trial subscription and they're going to be charged again in 30 days. That really was where the need came from. I thought you know [inaudible 00:19:48] they posted in the Facebook group and said, hey is it possible to do this? I just posted back and said hey it's not possible to do it out of the box but I can certainly add some java script that adds a check box to your button. I dug in the easiest way to do that and make it still flexible with the ClickFunnels editor. You can still edit the button text, you can still edit the subtext which is actually what I used for the checkbox agreement. Basically I just said hey we've got this subtext, I can just pre-pen a checkbox to that event. Or to that text. Then you've got a check box. It's like okay cool that works. It just kind of started there. Then a couple of other things come along. I'm like okay now I've got 2 or 3 of these things. To me, if you've ever used AWeber, and you've heard of Jack Born there's AW pro tools which is AWeber pro tools. I thought you know hey, I kind of like that name. I like the product. I've used AWeber and AW pro tools for a long time. I thought you know that's kind of what I'm working on here, is little pieces that I can add to ClickFunnels that don't come out of the box. When I'm registered, CF Pro Tools. I thought well I'll just throw them in a free membership area and give people access. That way I can kind of keep up to date, add new scripts, I can send out emails, and do all that. Now it's a library of 16 different scripts that are in there for free. I've had over the, well I think I was actually just recording a video early this morning, I think I registered my own account in that membership area March 13th. Just prior to funnel hacking live at the end of March this year. I threw it all together and since then I've had a ton of people say, dude why aren't you charging for this? How much can I pay you for this? All kinds of other things. It was just like, no it's always been my goal, I've heard many, many times. I always attribute this to Frank Kern is probably the person that sticks out the most in my mind as saying, "If you want to help somebody you need to show them how you can help them by actually helping them." I take that as kind of, lead with value. Which complete side note, I was able to register the domain name a couple of days ago, leadwithvalue.com. I thought okay that's what I try and live by. Lead with value, show somebody that I can help them by actually helping them. I thought the best way to do that was to get in front of the community. The best way to get in front of the community is by actually helping them do things. The best way I can do that is just throw some stuff out for free and say, hey I'm going to throw this value out there and there's no strings attached. Just jump in and grab it. It's been hugely successful for me. I always feel like if you go into something and you provide value without any expectation of return, that value is actually going to return to you probably 10 times more than you put into it. Steve: 100%. Jaime: Yeah. That's truly been how this has gone for me. It's been great. After doing this for quite a few months now, just providing as much value as I can. I've finally come up with a few scripts like wow this really is like a major game changer. After building up a pretty good sized library I felt like okay now I actually want to make something work with this, make something happen. I've had enough people say hey I want to pay you, I want to pay you, I want to pay you for this. I fell like you've given me all this value I need to pay you. Please make something available to us as a paid product. I thought well I'll just add on a section to my membership that is a VIP club. Basically where I throw these kind of high value scripts in there. People can sign up and I'll just throw monthly scripts of these high value nature into this membership and let people join in. I rolled out the CF Pro Tools VIP club. Through, the first script I threw in there was my CF cart mode script which basically takes ClickFunnels which as you know out of the box, the order form just supports adding 1 product at a time to your order. You can have 3-4 products listed on your order form, but you have a radio button so you can only select 1 of those products to purchase. I thought well hey again looking at the structure of the code on the front end and seeing that hey I notice how some of these variables are named, and just from my experience on the backend I know that okay if it's named this way it probably means we can send multiple values into it. Steve: At the same time, yeah. Jaime: At the same time. I determined that hey I could probably send multiple products into the cart and have them process the order just fine. I tweaked the front end a little bit to change those radio buttons to check boxes. That was the first iteration. I tested my order and hey, guess what it all worked. I was able to send in multiple products to the cart and have them process in a single order, as a single transaction in ClickFunnel. I was like, awesome. Then I had people ask hey is there any way that I can have a quantity selector? I thought, hmm. I wonder if I could combine the 2. I made the CF cart mode which is the combination of, it works probably best for say you're selling t-shirts. You have 4 different sizes, small, medium, large, extra large, and you want people to be able to order more than 1 at a time. The cart mode gives you the ability to have a drop down selector for quantity. The ability to add each of the products individually. You could say, hey I want 2 smalls, 3 larges, and 4 mediums and ClickFunnels will process that on the back end all perfectly. It adds up totals, sends everything across to your payment processor as your total amount and then your order confirmation page shows each of the shirts that were ordered. It works pretty awesome. Steve: I'm blown away that, I mean I have an account with CF Pro Tools. I logged in there and I just could not believe all the stuff that was in there. When you look at what, you know ClickFunnels is what people want as far as like the structure and the ease and stuff like that. Then there's all these little tweaks and features, and customizations people need based on what their business is, or what industry they're in. Yours is like, it's the other side of that man. It's like if you've got CF Pro Tools and you've got ClickFunnels, there's is literally no other product on the planet that is like it. It's pretty amazing. I like that you said that though about the bait. You decided for a long time to give tremendous value up front for free for a long time. I kind of came to that realization, I don't know it was like 6 months ago also. It was like man, everyone wants me to build these funnels constantly. It's like the thing that everyone asks me to do. I was like, well I may as well toss all the ones that I've built and make them free and put them in a site. That's what salesfunnelbroker.com is. You go in there and you can download the entire website, salesfunnelbroker.com just for free. The amount of doors that's opened up is amazing. It's counterintuitive because people are like, whoa I don't know man. I could charge 5 grand for that easily, and it's true. It's like ugh. That's kind of the realization I've had recently. What people would normally pay for, go ahead and make that free and you become this rock star in their life and [inaudible 00:27:27] like crazy. I'll get all these personal messages. I'm sure that you get them too, like man thanks so much, this is helping me, I've sold more because of this, or whatever it is. Anyways. I'm just saying I completely agree with that. That's fantastic. At what point did you decide to start charging for all of that? Jaime: Yeah that really was just in the last few weeks that I opened up the doors on the VIP club. Really what it came down to is okay, I'm still working I hate to say a full time job but I had kind of committed to a 25 hour a week job. That was, you know it's what I've always done so it's what I knew. It's always kind of that foundation, that safety net but I thought, this is only going to get me so far. I really need to ramp up and scale up my income potential. People are asking for this, let me just throw it out there and see what works. Finally I just flipped a switch in my head and said okay I need to make something out there. I just need to do it. This is the other one of my big failures, and that has been perfection. Always worrying about, well I'm not quite ready to put it out yet because it's not perfect. I really need to perfect my message, my sales letter, my report, my whatever. I'm working on a book here and I need to make sure it's perfect before I can roll it out. One motto that I keep reinforcing in myself and I try and share with everybody that I see having the same problem is, in my opinion perfection is the enemy of progress. Steve: Love it. Jaime: When I'm trying to make things perfect it keeps me from actually putting anything out there that could be successful. I really just, I had written several of these scripts, I had tested several things. CF cart mode was one of them that I built and I tested for myself. I thought okay it's not quite 1,000% ready so I'm just going to hold on to it. I thought, you know what, no. I'm just going to throw it out there. I'm going to put a separate section of my membership up and I'm going to put a sales page up and I'm going to put a buy button on it and I'm going to let people go and buy it. With my goal, within a 24 hour period to go from concept to completion. I did that and I turned on, flipped the switch, and 5 days later I was 5 figures. I was like okay. Now we're onto something. Yeah it was very cool. Very cool. Steve: That. Do you mind sharing with us the funnel a little bit? Or at least the way you bring people through? I mean I've been through it it's fantastic but, squeeze page, order form, whatever. Jaime: Sure. Sure. Absolutely, yeah. Really the first iteration was just to kind of capture the traffic that I already had. I had about 700 members inside the free version of CF Pro Tools. My thought was okay I just need to get in front of those people that already know and love me. I hate to say that in a boastful way but- Steve: It's true though, you're a brand, it's fantastic. Jaime: Yeah. I just kind of want to get in front of those people that are already hot prospects, that already know who I am and already know the value of the scripts. It's a pretty simple process. It's just a video that says, hey I'm Jaime I'm with CF Pro Tools. I'm the creator, this is what I've got for you. I've got a membership area where I'm going to be throwing these high value scripts in a monthly basis. I'm also going to be doing monthly share funnels. I'm also going to be doing some video training. If you want to jump in there's a monthly membership or there's a yearly membership. The funnel is basically that. You're signing up to either pay by the month or pay by the year. I kind of really just throw some spaghetti at the wall as far as price. I put a normal price, in my mind I thought o normal price should be around 67 bucks a month. Then my thought on the yearly price actually came from a guy name Rory Mcnally I did a mastermind session with Trey Lowell and Harold a while back and Rory was there. He shared just this absolutely golden nugget that I will share with you. I give 1,000% credit to Rory because this is just brilliant. He said, in fact he won the prize. Trey did a little contest and there were 16 people or so in the room. Everybody got to give their number 1 tip. The prize was one of those new 360 degree cameras. Steve: Oh sweet. Jaime: Just see people doing all these videos. It's like a $500 camera. He said okay the person gets the number 1 tip gets this $500 camera. Rory won that and his tip was this, if you've got a membership area and you can figure out what your average stick rate is. Say your average stick rate is 4 months. People come in, they sign up, they stay for 4 months in your membership and then they bail. Then really what you want to do is offer a yearly plan at just 1 month more than what their monthly was cost wise. Steve: Oh man. Jaime: You just got an extra month of income out of them that you weren't going to get if you just kept charging monthly and to them when they sign up that seems like a huge bargain. You're getting all the money up front that you can now turn around and reinvest in even more advertising to drive even more traffic to that great deal. It's just the quickest way to scale your business dramatically. I thought, that is absolutely brilliant. Steve: That is brilliant. Jaime: Of course I'm just starting this so I have no idea what my average stick rate is but I thought you know what, I'm going to go on the 4 month premise. I'll just say okay if people were to stick for 4 months then lets charge 5. I just did a hey get 12 months for the price of 5 on my yearly plan. I basically wanted to do right around a 50% discount for the launch. For those people who have been around I want to give them the most value and the most love I can by being huge promoters and supporters of CF Pro Tools. I went with at $37 a month initial price that will go up probably around the first of September. Then $197 which is roughly 5 times the monthly to sign up for the year. I just put it all on a single order form, here's you're 2 payment options. I got a couple of buttons, I actually modeled the funnel university- Steve: Oh sweet. Jaime: The funnel [inaudible 00:33:43] .com funnel. That's what I used there. It worked perfectly. I threw that out there and right away had people start signing up, which was great. The one thing is that I did figure out is that, and I actually have changed the price now a little bit for the yearly plan, was because I was getting everybody into the 197 a year. Which was great to come up with a big launch, but as you're running a membership you kind of want to have a little monthly recurring, right? Steve: Yeah you want the continuity there, yeah. Jaime: Exactly. I thought I'm not getting any continuity here. I literally had like 95% of my sales were for the 197 for the year. I thought, well I've got to be able to support admin stuff in each month so I probably ought to make it a little less enticing to go with the yearly. I bumped that price up to 247. That's kind of balanced things out a little bit more. Whereas I'm getting new sign ups no, I'm getting a little better mix of the monthly versus the yearly. Steve: Man that's amazing. Okay. That's fantastic. I've been thinking of that, we have this thing above the door. Actually I can basically see it right now. The ready, fire, aim you know? Jaime: Yeah. Steve: I think that's so cool. You've just done that. You just put it out there, see what happens, and then tweak as you go. People get so stuck doing the other way around, just waiting, and waiting, waiting. Jaime: Yeah. That's huge. I need to get one of those and put it above my door, above my desk as I'm looking at the wall each day with the computer and everything. Yeah. It makes such a huge difference. I mean you're going to get a result. Tony Robbins talks about this, and I've learned over the years that there are no mistakes. There are no failures. There's only results. That result may not be what you want, but it's giving you a result. It's a lesson you can learn from it. Throw it out there and see what you're result is. You just have to have that sensory acuity, to use one of Tony Robbins' words, that sensory acuity to know is this a result I was looking for? If not, what kind of difference can I take out of this that I can make a tweak and maybe move in the right direction. A little 2 degree changes, expand it out and make a huge difference. Just making little shifts, and make little changes, and keep at it. Eventually you'll find the success you just have to get started. Yeah. It's been very cool and I back into that, just to jump back into the funnel a little bit. I did [inaudible 00:36:05] I got the VIP club. Which a lot of people have been signing up for, I was converting about 10%. Which is really what I was looking for. My goal was to get 10% of my existing free members signed up into the paid membership. That's about where we ended up at. I fell like, okay I hit that target. Really that's just a number that I pulled out that I said I feel like I'll bee successful if I could get 10% of people that took something for free to actually pay for a little bit more. Steve: Now are you currently driving traffic as well? Are you buying adds for this? Jaime: I am not. I have not done any traffic generation other than sending emails out to the existing list. Steve: That's amazing. 5 figures, internal launch, and you just crafted it as you went. Jaime: Yeah. Steve: That's awesome. That's awesome. Jaime: Yeah. I was very happy with it. Then the other layer of it is I thought okay, I've got the monthly membership on the front end. I need to have something to offer on the backend. I want to be able to work with people on a little more personal level. What I did was I'm going to create the Platinum club. Everybody wants to be a VIP and everybody wants to feel important. The Platinum club is again another level of exclusivity. I learned this from Russell, everybody wants, well people will pay extra just to feel a little more special. My goal is always to provide more value. The way I can do that is with the Platinum club we offer monthly group coaching calls. Where I'll get on the phone I'm guessing, we haven't actually done the first one yet. It'll be probably coming up in the next week or so. 2, 3, 4 hours. However long it takes to go through, address the training. I'll be doing training on technical topics, and how to use ClickFunnels, and how to integrate different things. We'll be doing these on a monthly basis and go through all that. Answer any questions that come up during that process, and then also do some coaching. Then also do hot seats where if I've got a member that has a funnel that they're working on that they want to review, we'll pick somebody from the group and we'll go through their funnel and help from a technical perspective as well as just a conversion and just strategy perspective so that everybody can benefit. Everybody always learns from seeing somebody else going through the process. Steve: Oh yeah. Jaime: That's a great way to provide some value. Then I'll also be doing some much more in depth training videos on how I work. I've been completely blessed to work with some of the biggest names in the ClickFunnels world at least. I've worked with Liz Benny, I've worked with Trey Lowell, I've worked with Dean Holland, I've worked with Joel Erway. I've worked with all these people so to be able to see what all they're working on, and kind of be involved in that process, and to help them with different aspects of their funnels. It brings great experience. If I can take and share some of that experience with other people, then I would love to be able to do that. This is, the Platinum club's kind of my way to be able to do that. Steve: That's fantastic. I mean that's exciting. It's fun too like when ... I don't know I just feel like there's energy and movement and momentum is such a huge part of this. Cannot wait to launch forever. That's fantastic. Well hey. Okay. I take notes like crazy. I've got a full page of notes going. Jaime: Awesome. Steve: Just to kind of recap. You said some cool stuff. Perfection is the enemy of progress. Jaime: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Steve: That's huge. There's not failures, only results which is so big. Oh that's such a huge lesson. I mean you think about the mental I don't know, I call it mental shelf space. It's like how much your brain can kind of handle at once. I mean think about how much mental shelf space these people dedicate towards making sure they don't fail. Jaime: Right. Steve: It's very, very freeing to realize there aren't any. Anyways people will pay more just to feel special. I 100% see that all the time. Yeah. I'm pretty sure, because I sell my own funnels also like in the ClickFunnels marketplace, and all over. I think a lot of people don't even use the things that they're buying. They just want to feel like they've made progress. Anyways. Jaime: Yep. Steve: That's fantastic. Jaime: Yeah, that's the other thing too. This honestly, I'm guilty of this myself. I definitely know that people do this, a lot of people do this. It's probably the majority of people do this is, they go into something and they have an itch. They need to scratch that itch. As soon as somebody buys your product, they have scratched that itch. A lot of people will never consume your product because just the fact of purchasing it made them progress towards scratching that itch. That was just all they needed. That's what, get that shiny object syndrome because if we don't actually completely get rid of the itch, we just scratch it for a little bit, it's going to come back. Then we figure well this thing that I just kind of scratched the surface with, it kind of got rid of the irritation for a little bit. Now it's back. I'm going to have to try something else and maybe that will finally get rid of the problem. It usually doesn't because we didn't fully scratch it. People will do that. They'll buy your product and not consume it. It's just part of human nature. Steve: Yeah, yeah. Which isn't always a bad thing. Jaime: No. I mean absolutely not. It served well. As long as you do a good job and do it ethically and actually deliver something that could fulfill their need if they actually followed it, then you've done your job. That's another reason why you don't have to worry about being perfect with everything. You just have to get it out there. You've got a lot more chance of helping people actually be successful if you release something versus sitting and working on it constantly. Steve: Well I'm looking at this huge page of notes. I know you just kind of gave it, but I guess what kind of advice would you give here as we end? As you get started, I mean I'm looking at, you have quite the journey. You have quite the story going on here. This is awesome. Jaime: Yeah. yeah. Honestly the biggest advice is just, stick with it. Here's a little story I've shared before. I love this story. This story actually, I heard originally from Joel Osteen. I just thought it was brilliant and just a huge indicator. To me it attaches perfectly to internet marketing. That is, that there was a psychology study done with some apes. These scientists build this enclosed facility and in the center of this enclosed facility they've got this pole. At the top of this pole they've got this big bunch of bananas. Then they put in these 3 monkeys I think. They put in these 3 monkeys into this enclosure and of course monkeys love bananas. This first monkey runs and scurries up the top of the pole to grab this bunch of bananas. As soon as he got to the top the scientist, through the top of the enclosure, squirted him with a hose. He got doused with this bunch of water. Man he shoots back down the pole, never got the bananas. Gets to the bottom, then he's afraid to go back up the pole. Then the next monkey does the same thing. He's like hey I'm going to go up and get these bananas. He runs up to the top of the pole to grab these bananas and they dump this bucket of water on him. Again he gets doused with the water and back down the pole he goes. He's like, I'm not going back up, scared to even get near the pole now. The third monkey starts to make his way up the pole and the other 2 monkeys grab him and pull him down. Steve: Interesting. Jaime: They do this and they think, okay well let's take one of the monkeys out and we'll put a new monkey in. Now they've got a new third monkey. Again this monkey sees this pole, sees the bananas, goes and tries to go up. The other 2 monkeys grab him and pull him down. Then they thought well okay. Let's pull one of the monkeys out, put a new one back in. They do the same thing and this happens again. They do this again, and again, and again to the point where now none of the monkeys that are in the enclosure have ever been doused with the water. For whatever reason it's become inherent that you cannot be successful at getting these bananas and they all will pull each other down. Now nobody will even try to go up and get the bananas. I see that as kind of internet marketing. You get in it sometimes and you will get excited and jazzed about something. You'll go and talk to your friends, or you'll talk to your family, or talk to somebody else online. They'll say ah, that's never going to work. You don't even need to try. I knew a guy that got into that and he failed. You need to just stay down. People are going to pull you down when you think you've got something, you're going to be successful at. You're always going to have people around you that will pull you down, but if you persist, don't let the doubters, don't let the haters pull you down and keep you from being successful. I did that for a long, long time. You talked to people and they said, oh yeah that's crazy. That's a scam. You cannot make money online. It's just not possible. We see all over the world people that are being successful on the things we want to be successful with it. It's absolutely possible. You just have to stick to it. You have to pick the thin, the vehicle you think that's going to give you the success, and stick to it, and do that. You can be successful. That's one of the big things. Don't let the haters drag you down. You can make it to the top and you can grab your banana too. Steve: That's fantastic man, what a great story. I appreciate that. Jaime: No problem. Steve: Man I don't even want to say anything else because I don't want to ruin it. There's a glow right now. The room I'm in is actually a little brighter. Jaime: Awesome. Steve: Hey where should people go to check out your stuff? Jaime: CFProTools.com is just the quickest way, you can get signed up, get into the free membership area there. Once you're inside there's great buttons if you want to get upgraded. If you're not already in the ClickFunnels Facebook group, jump in there. I'm in there all the time so jump in and connect with me there. I'd love to connect with everybody. Steve: Mr. Jaime Smith you have dropped tons of gold and I appreciate that so much. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this. Jaime: Awesome man I appreciate it Stephen. Steve: Awesome. Okay I'll talk to you later. Jaime: Take care. Steve: Bye. Jaime: Bye. Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Have a question you want answer on the show? Get your free t-shirt when your question gets answered on the live "HeySteve!" show. Visit salesfunnelbroker.com now to submit your question.

Sales Funnel Radio
SFR 12: Interview - Jen Goodwin Gives The Goods On Her Secret Virtual Assistant Empire

Sales Funnel Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 28, 2016 33:14


STEVE: Welcome, everyone. Today I have a very special guest. I'm very excited. I actually have only met her only two weeks ago. It was pretty cool actually. I felt an immediate connection. Anyway, this is Jennifer Goodwin. How you doing? JEN: Good. How are you? STEVE: Fantastic. I'm doing really, really well. I was scrolling through Facebook, it was about two weeks ago, and ... I don't know if I've told you this yet, but I was scrolling through Facebook, and I saw an ad that you had out. It was ad for vets. I can't remember exactly what the ad was saying, but it said something like, "Hey, here is a way for vets to launch their businesses online." I immediately was like, "Whoa, this is so cool. Someone's going for this market?" I didn't know anyone who's been going for that. It's such a needed thing, being in the military myself. How did you even get into that? JEN: Absolutely. I grew up very patriotic. I didn't realize until this year that the veterans were my ideal client. How it happened was, I was always trying to help veterans that were, military guys and gals that needed help with the internet marketing and getting themselves to the next level. Most recently, I was volunteering at a local homeless veteran shelter where some guys and gals were in transition. I said ... Well, a little back story. Three years ago I was on a motorcycle, my first ride, and I was life-flighted off the highway. STEVE: Oh, my gosh. Three years ago? JEN: Three years ago. Twenty-five, 30 minutes into my first ride with a friend on Highway 95. We were set at 70 miles per hour. Road debris came out of everywhere. An 18-wheeler had blown his tire, and we couldn't avoid one of the pieces. It flattened the back tire. Needless to say, I took a nice, pricey helicopter ride to the trauma center, so I actually lost my business. I was down for a lot of time. Financially, physically, emotionally, I had to go through that trauma. I had a lot of time to think through in recovery, and I made a few decisions about my business when I got back to it, which I really just got back to it full-time this past January. I decided that I was going to partner with the right people and never sit on my ideas and make sure that I was launching all the things that I had written down in a book and that were collecting dust. One of the other pieces was that I was going to give back. Even though I was sort of starting over, I knew what I was doing. I had 15 years in the business. I was relaunching, but I still wanted volunteering and giving back to be part of that. I was literally driving to a veteran center in Jacksonville, Florida and just camping out in the chow hall every Thursday and saying, "Whatever you have, just bring it to me. Just bring me your website needs. Bring me your resume needs. You got a new computer and you need to know how to run it? Just bring it to me." Even some of the staff there who weren't veterans would say, "Hey, I'm going for this other job interview," and so I just made myself available every Thursday. It didn't feel like work. Then fast forward a couple months. A friend of mine that's pretty well-known in the veteran space, he's on the History Channel and got quite a following on social media, said, "I've got four veterans that need, like, yesterday." Just working through those clients, it just didn't feel like work. It just felt so easy, because they're so loyal. They're so grateful. Usually what they're inventing, we're writing about, is something I believe in, so I re-branded my business to be all about serving veterans. STEVE: That's incredible. I love that. I've noticed that a lot of the people that I interview, they never ask permission to go do something like that. You just showed up. You just sit down and every Thursday ... How long did you do that before you went to that re-brand? JEN: I only did that for a couple months, because I actually ended up moving out of the area and haven't found a new local shelter to go help with. Let me see. I believe I started ... January, February, March. Probably about two and a half months into that I re-branded. I was also talking with some coaches. Actually, one of the coaches I was speaking with, a female coach, she was a veteran ... or she is a veteran. She said, "Jen, I got my start helping my fellow Army soldiers, starting their businesses when they got out." I said, "This is my ideal client, the more I think about it." I said, "Is it that easy?" She said, "Yeah." Literally, within 24 hours ... I couldn't even wait to re-brand everything. I went to the team and to the social media images, and I started changing it all up. The first batch was a little bit rough and amateur. I just wanted to get camouflage in there. STEVE: Yeah. Yeah. JEN: That's probably one of the ones you saw or maybe one of the newer ones. Yeah, it was pretty quick. STEVE: Yeah. That's incredible. It's interesting that that's the way it worked out. I remember when I went through basic ... I'm obviously business-minded. I really enjoy it. It's my obsession a little bit. I was going through basic training, and it's hard at certain points. One of the things that kept me going mentally and emotionally was talking about business ideas with all these other guys. I ended up having it, and all these guys that would sit around, and we would just talk about some different strategies. To this day, I still talk to some of them, and they're trying to do business stuff. It's definitely clearly an awesome market. A lot of them are go-getters. Anyways, that's super cool. That's fantastic. JEN: Yep. STEVE: One of the things I've noticed too, though, is that immediately ... You were doing the same thing with me. I was blown away with that, "Hey, do you need help with this? Do you have VAs for this? I have teams for this." You are an absolute master with VAs. How did you get that way? JEN: Thank you for saying that. I love helping people. They ask me, what's my agenda sometimes, very few, but I say, "I just like getting a break from the paying clients, who are so demanding." It's like a break to just pull away and just go help people for free with no expectations, so thank you for that. I have been an entrepreneur my whole life. My father was an entrepreneur, made some money in the door and window business. Very early on ... Well, not too early. I guess my late 20's, because I went and got an architectural degree, a drafting degree, from 26 to 28, but as soon as I came out of that, I worked for someone else for six months, and that was it. I had worked for people previously, from 16 to 28, but I knew at that moment I did not want to work for somebody else, and I couldn't work for somebody else. It just felt like my soul was in jail. STEVE: Yeah. I like that. JEN: I left the corporate world, and I was working for an engineering company, and I co-advertised. I didn't even think you could do this, but I rented an exhibitor space at the kitchen and bath show in Orlando, Florida, way back when, and shared it with one of my competitors. I was turning away 95% of my lead. I was so lucky, because what I was providing was CAD drawings and artist renderings to interior designers and kitchen designers. They didn't have anybody that was serving them. Usually people that were drafts people were going to work for architects and engineers, and so the designer industry was left hanging. I filled that void. I was turning away so much business, I knew back then that I had to learn how to scale my business and learn how to use the software that was out there that was going to help me scale my business by leveraging the tools and the people. Very early on I started to outsource to other drafters and just caught the bug of outsourcing and marking up the work and being the middle man really. I was outsourcing right away. I ran with the CAD services for about four or five years. After teaching myself everything on the internet, everything that I could at that time ... The internet was much smaller then. STEVE: Yeah. JEN: It was easier to master. I re-branded into Internet Girl Friday, and I've been doing that ever since. Again, I did lose my business for about two and a half years, but I've been back at it now, and I have virtual assistants and developers. It's great, because in my mind that's the only way to scale your business, is to have a team to support you. That's what we're doing. STEVE: Yeah, and you clearly have that. It's so fascinating, though. I wish I could pull up the text real quick that you sent me. It was a long list of stuff that you were asking me if I needed help with. I was like, "Man, she's got the hook-ups." JEN: Yeah, I would say, if it touches the web, we can do it and mean it. People come to me and say, "Well ..." I have friends that, you know how the friends and family never know what you're doing with the internet, and they don't get it. STEVE: Yeah. JEN: I have a friend that called me. I said, "Listen, I've got 20 minutes to talk. What's up?" He said, "Sounds like you're too busy and you can't take on my work." I said, "No, I have a team for that. I can do it. We can do it." I'm hiring people all the time. There's no shortage of people out there that want to work, whether they're US-based or they're offshore. There's hundreds of thousands of workers out there that ... You can go to Fiverr. You can go to so many different sites and get people to help you in your business, and I take advantage of that. STEVE: That's amazing. When I was in college, that's really when I started getting the bug for this. Well, that's when I started getting traction, I should say. I always had the bug. I went and I started hiring these different VAs. My buddy and I, we were building this Smartphone insurance business, and we went and we hired out this guy. He was just like, he wasn't very good. We paid him $500 to build this really small thing. It wasn't big at all, and we got it back and it was awful, like, "What the heck?" That's why I started using click funnels, so I could do it on my own. Then another time came up and another time came up. I was like, "Man, I'm really striking out with these VAs." I'm curious how it is that you actually go find good ones, because that's a skill in and of itself that I don't think people realize you need to have. Not all VAs obviously are built the same. What process are you taking up? What are you having them do? How are you vetting the VAs for your vets? JEN: There's a couple different ways. I hate to say this, but I don't like the big outsourcing sites. I think it's really hard to find that needle in the haystack, and you have to spend a lot of time sorting through people that are really just looking at the dollars per hour; right? They're like, "No, I can't make anything less than $8 an hour." They overbid. I just don't like those sites. I never had great luck with them ever. STEVE: That's totally the opposite than what everyone else says, so that's interesting. JEN: I've done it for 15 years. If I had an army of 100 virtual assistants, do you know how much money I'd be making? If it was that easy, I would have just hired a team of people from there, but I've spoken to people for 15 years from those big sites. What I find works for me is I enter a couple of virtual assistant groups on Facebook. Whenever I have a need for somebody, I post the job on my blog post, and I'll send a link out to the virtual assistant groups and say, "Hey, by the way, this week I'm looking to talk to people that have skills in ..." whatever skill I'm looking for that week. That's worked out well, because I only get a handful. I might get 10, 15, 20 applicants. It's totally manageable. I have a forum on the blog post. I'm not going to field emails or phone calls or be scattered. I want them to just dump their info into a form, and then I can go back and look at, and I can say, "All right. I'd love to talk to these three out of 10 on Skype," or somehow. They say, "Hire two and fire one." Try a couple people out just on a small ... I work through baby steps when it comes to hiring a virtual assistant. Let's take one tiny task, not, "Oh, I found you. Here's all my money. Here's all my tasks. Talk to you in a week." That will just go wrong every time. You want to start with, "Can you contact me on Skype," because that's a requirement. That's my office. If they tell me they don't have Skype, they're out. It's that simple. You have to work my way in my company with my tools. I'm flexible, but you have to show up in my time zone. You have to speak my language. We start at the very beginning and make sure that those pieces are there before moving on to, "Okay, here's how you get into my project management system, and here's where you find your first task." I work closely alongside them and say, "Stay with me right here on Skype. Tell me, 'Jennifer, I'm starting Task A right now, and I plan to be done in 15 minutes, and I'll ping you back when I'm done, so you can review it.'" It's really micromanaged in the first week. As you get more comfortable and as they're trained a little bit more, then they can work on their own time. I literally do that every morning for about two hours, Monday through Friday, from, roughly, 9 to 11 every day, which is a lot of time when you think about it. I'm also mentoring virtual assistants, so I'm not paying the ones that I mentor that I identify in the group as being really smart and might have come from 15, 20 years of past corporate experience, so they have skills. They just don't realize how to translate them to the internet. Again, I love helping people, so I say, "Come on in as an apprentice. You can follow along. You can invite your friends to sit in your house and watch. It doesn't matter." I've hired people from that group as well. STEVE: Wow. That's fascinating. If the person is good, they might have friends that are good. Might as well bring the friends along and train them too. JEN: Yeah. I tell them, "Listen, I'm looking to build teams, so if you already know someone ..." I had this conversation just last night with one of Filipino VAs. She's amazing. I said, "I'm about to hire a few more, so if you know anybody ..." She's like, "Well, actually, I do have three assistants, and they work in my house with me. It's my goal to help these single moms that need some more income to get going." I said, "Great. Let's ramp them up." Yeah. STEVE: Awesome. That's fantastic. That's amazing. Eventually, what started happening was I was like, man, I literally have spent thousands and thousands of dollars on VAs for stuff that was not very good work. I was not happy with it. I started going through, not the same process at all. That's genius. I'm going to have to ... That's absolutely incredible. I'm going to have to think more about that and try and figure out how I can do that too, or I'll just ask you, hire you to do it. Do you have a particular freelance or VA site, I guess, that you like more than others, Fiver, Freelancer, Upwork? JEN: I love Fiverr. Actually, this morning before this podcast, I was looking on Fiverr for a virtual assistant but only because in the virtual assistant groups that I'm in on Facebook, I saw someone saying, "I'm not getting any traction as a VA on Fiverr. What am I doing wrong?" I clicked on the link which took me to their Fiverr account, and I said, "I'm willing to try you out. Contact me on Skype." Again, that's my first requirement. I use Fiverr for other services. If my dev team is too busy with some bigger projects, and I need to knock out some quick keyword research or a quick image, I can go to Fiverr and I can find it. It's just like any other service where you can see the ratings, but for some reason they have, they've made their user interface so easy to navigate and quickly see, "Oh, wow, they've had 200 projects. They're five stars on all the reviews for all those projects. I'm pretty sure they're returning good work, and it's dollars." Who can't lose $5; right? We spend that on a coffee sometimes. It's different from going to the big sites like Upwork and saying, you have to put your whole job description. You have to say, this is 30 hours a month or 30 hours a week, whether it's permanent. They make you jump through so many hoops before you even find someone. Then you might get a thousand applicants, and you have to sort through all that. It's too much work, where you can go to Fiverr and just browse really quickly and click on someone. You don't even have to click on someone and contact them, but you can just put your mouse over their little portfolio image, and it shows you how many jobs, how many stars. Very quickly you can jump into having an assistant or a vendor. I know there's a lot of controversy with using offshore vendors versus keeping it in the USA, and I do keep most of my work, 99% of my work, in the USA. Even my Indian development team is in the USA, strangely. When you're restarting, which is the mode I'm in now after the accident, you need that payroll break; right? You want to have assistants so you can scale your business, but you can't go out and afford the $25-an-hour United States VA, so it does help to go offshore. I do like the Filipino virtual assistants. They are super-smart, super-talented. Their English is perfect. They are very friendly and very accommodating. There's no language barrier like I've experienced with other countries. They're extremely affordable. Here's a little trick that I've done. I've gone to Wikipedia and typed up, "Countries with the lowest hourly rate," and it's mind-blowing and scary that there's some countries or areas of their countries where 50-cents-per-hour is the minimum wage. STEVE: Oh, man. JEN: That's not saying you can just go there and find a virtual assistant. Virtual assistants have to be a booming industry in a certain country for it to be valuable to you, but the Philippines are great. STEVE: That's incredible. There's a workaround that I have found that helps. I did a whole podcast on this actually earlier, because it's a frustrating thing to go through. The biggest things I've learned from Russell, you got to have people. The biggest things I've learned from my own things, you've got to have people. Otherwise, you as the entrepreneur get bogged down. You can't handle all of the tasks. This is definitely valuable information to hear. There was a workaround that I, to using VAs that I was figuring out too. Do you use Freelancer.com much? JEN: I have, but, again, I didn't use it much. STEVE: Yeah. It's a little bit challenging. There was one feature that saved my butt on a lot of different things, and it was the fact that you can post contests. That's actually pretty cool. I needed all these different images made, or I needed a tee-shirt design. I basically said, "Hey, I really want to motivate people, so here's the prize is $100 and everyone submit your work. I'm just going to choose one guy." It was fantastic. I got 80 or 90 submissions, and the whole week during the contest, I could talk back to them and say, "This looks good but change this." "This looks good but change this." I could rate all of their work, which was public to everyone else. All the work, the freelancers started pushing towards a different path as they watched my comments to other people. That's really the only trick I have for VAs. I haven't done anything else that you do with it. It kind of works, but what you do is a lot cooler, actually. JEN: I don't know. The contests sound pretty cool. I remember seeing them on Topcoder years ago when I was looking to build a software, and someone said, "If you don't have unlimited budget to build the software, present it as a contest." I thought that was fascinating, where they have a contest for one part of the software and a contest for another part. Then they have a contest at the end to put all the parts together. I thought that was fascinating. STEVE: That's incredible. Hey, there's a lot of people obviously who are trying to get into this space who want to do what you're doing. I know you alluded to it before, but what would be the first step to getting a good VA? JEN: I would definitely check out the virtual assistant groups in Facebook. It's a close-knit community. People can vouch for other people. There's some names at the top that know a lot of the VAs in the industry, so they actually have requests for proposal boards that you could sign up to and submit your work. Then you know you're getting a qualified VA, or you can find me and I'll point you in the right direction. I would check sites like FreeeUp. That's with three E's, F-R-E-E-E-U-P.com. STEVE: I've never heard of it. Awesome. JEN: It's new. It's getting a face-lift. The site is only about eight months old, I think. They've got some big plans. Nathan Hirsch, who's out of Orlando, Florida, he's doing very well with it. You can get VAs as low as $5 and up to $50 per hour, depending on what skillset you require. Check out the Filipino ... I can't remember the domain names off the top of my head, but there are a lot of Filipino virtual assistant sites out there that you can just Google it up, and it will pull up some of the top ones. They really are a great crowd for your everyday administrative stuff. I'm literally teaching my VAs now how to set up some of the beginning integrations of click funnel. STEVE: That's awesome. JEN: I have a checklist, and they can go through and connect the SMTP and the domain and do some of the basic setup. Then I can take it from there and build a funnel. STEVE: Fantastic. Just because you mentioned it, how are you using it with click funnels? I went through and looked at your site, and it looks fantastic. It's very clean. HowToGoVirtual; right? Dot-net? JEN: That's the academy site that we're launching. The services site, where all of our clients go through is InternetGirlFriday.com, and we're just like any other entrepreneur. We have multiple different sites. What happened was, I needed to get all of this information into other people's hands. I've got 15-plus years on the internet. Of course, you want to package that up and provide it online as a video course or some type of academy environment. I created a class to teach people the four steps of getting your business website launched, because you know how customers get confused about the internet. The internet is so big now, and there's so many steps, and the algorithms. They get approached by so many vendors. "What should I be paying for," and I said, "I've got to find a way to simplify this." Back in 2010, I think it was, I came up with a 12-step plan. Just a way to categorize everything you do on the internet came to 12 categories. That's it. I just wanted to show people, "Okay, Step 1 is your research and your keyword research and your competitive analysis. Step 12, at the end, is analytics." Everything falls somewhere in between, so that they had something that they could follow along. Not that every strategy goes in order, but the first four I call, "The foundation." You've got to do your keyword research if you're going to launch a website, and your competitive analysis, and you have to know what people are looking for, what your target market is looking for. Step 1. Step 2, building your website in a blueprint first. I think that's so important, because you need to get the SEO and the keywords that were revealed in the first step into your website. If you just hand your website over to someone, they might make it beautiful for the humans, but they're neglecting what robots need to see through Google. STEVE: Right. JEN: That's Step 2, build the blueprint. Step 3, build the website. Step 4, connect it to the search engines and some directories. Now you've got your foundation to go offsite and do all your marketing with whatever strategy you're deploying. I package that up into a course. I'm glad that I had the time off that I did, because when I came back to it, there was click funnel, and it was like, "Ah." Finally there; right? The funnel isn't new. The strategy isn't new. It's a little different, because, again, the internet is bigger and more complicated, but a sales funnel is still a sales funnel; right? We didn't reinvent the funnel. We just put the software together in one place, like Russell. All the steps that you used to have to do, you used to have to literally build a landing page, usually in HTML, because you needed it to be a certain way. If you needed a green check-mark versus a red check-mark, it was all piecework. Then you'd have to go to the next step, and you'd have to connect your email responder. Everything was daisy-chained together. It was so overwhelming, that most people didn't launch, because there was so much work. Even me, who has a team, knew how to do it for so many years, I could never launch, because it was overwhelming. STEVE: Yeah. JEN: ClickFunnels comes on the scene and it's all in one place. I don't use the term, "All-in-one" lightly. I don't give credit to many softwares. It's not an all-in-one where you're billing and all your other things are in there, but for the funnel it's all in one. Everything is literally in one place, and it's been so exciting to set up and to get going and to see that now I can literally wake up at 3 am, have an idea, and within two hours, have it going and some ads going, and it's launched. That's the exciting part. My clients are excited about it to. STEVE: That's so cool. That's so awesome. I remember when I first started putting things together for ... It was an artist actually that built the first site/funnel four or five years ago. I remember spending two hours ... No, it was two days, two full days, trying to make WordPress act like a squeeze page. JEN: I know. STEVE: It was the most hellish thing. It was awful. I remember just settling with something. I can't remember what it was. Neither of us liked it. I'm not a coder or programmer. I can read it. I can edit it, but I'm not at all a programmer, at all. I was like, "This is terrible." I almost gave up on the internet a little bit, because it was so hard. Then when click funnels came around, I remember I saw the presentation that Russell gave mine. I probably shouldn't have done this, but I didn't talk to my wife about it. I immediately bought it, and I started using it and building for other people. I was like, "This is the craziest thing." Now I dream in funnel editor. It's the funniest thing. JEN: Same thing, yeah, because back when you were creating your old landing page, which, again, is just one tiny piece of the whole funnel, I often went back and forth to, "Gees, I've got to hire a developer just to create a landing page page template in my WordPress?" Then that never got done. Then you go over to the third-party platforms that are providing fully landing pages. You're like, "I don't want to spend another $50 a month just to do this one piece, because by the time I'm done with the whole funnel, I'm spending a thousand dollars a month just to get it all connected. Yeah, it's been such a blessing, and I'm so excited. STEVE: I think my record so far with sitting here next to Mr. Russell Brunson, I think the fastest we put a funnel out is 45 minutes or something like that, a full one. It's like there's no way. He and I will still sit back and be like, "I can't believe we have this software," and he's the CEO of it. We'll be like, "Man, look what we just did. Look what we pulled off." He's like, "This little change used to cost me 10 grand. We're going to do it in 30 minutes." JEN: I remember testing my first webinar funnel, and I didn't have it completely set up, but at some point I got my reminder email, and I said, "Oh, look, how cool is that? I'm already getting the emails automatically." I didn't even set up the email, and I clicked on the link inside that said, "Your webinar is starting now." I clicked it 20 minutes late. When I did click it, it went right into the webinar that was playing, at the 20-minute mark. I said, "This is magic." STEVE: Yeah. So cool. I know I said we'd keep it to 30 minutes. You are amazing. I can't believe all the stuff you're pulling off is incredible, manager and builder of teams. I'm looking at all these sites right now. It's absolutely incredible and just crazy impressive. Where should people go if they want to follow you, learn more about you, even obviously use some of your services. JEN: Yeah. If you go to InternetGirlFriday.com, then you can find my social media, which is everywhere. We have Periscope and Instagram and YouTube and all that, and follow me on any of those. We're very active there. InternetGirlFriday.com is the service's site. You can contact me there. You can say, "Hey, I don't need to hire you, but I have a question," and I'll be glad to help. STEVE: Awesome. I appreciate it so much. Thanks. This is spur-of-the-moment, but this has been awesome. JEN: Sure. Thank you. STEVE: All right. Hey, we'll talk to you later. JEN: Okay. Bye-bye.   Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Want to get one of today's best internet sales funnels for free? Go to SalesFunnelBroker.com/FreeFunnels to download your pre-built sales funnel today.  

Sales Funnel Radio
SFR 9: Interview - Dallin Greenberg and Kristian Cotta Discuss Their Political Quiz Funnel...

Sales Funnel Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 17, 2016 50:03


Steve: Hey, everyone. This is Steve Larsen and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio.   Speaker 4: (music starts) Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio, where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business, using today's best internet sales funnels. And now, here's your host, Steve Larsen. (music ends)   Steve: All right you guys. Hey, I am super excited. Today I've got two very special, kind of unique guests on the podcast. As you guys know, a lot of times, I record my own thoughts on things that Russell and I are doing to make marketing awesome, but I like to go and interview other people as well. Today I've got on the show with me, it's Dallin Greenberg and Kristian Cotta. These guys have a pretty awesome unique way for building funnels. Anyways, I want to welcome you. Thanks for joining me.   Dallin: Appreciate it.   Kristian: What up.   Steve: Hey. I actually was thinking about it and Dallin, I don't even remember how we actually met. It wasn't that long ago, was it?   Dallin: Ah, no, not very. Just a couple weeks.   Steve: Just a couple weeks ago.   Kristian: I think Dallin met you the way that him and I kind of joke about he's the black box back alley hacker. He does all the ...   Dallin: If there's someone I want to meet, I find a way.   Kristian: He's the unconventional guy. You won't find his practices in a book or a manual.   Steve: Crap, that makes me a little nervous.   Dallin: Yeah, don't mess ... I told Kristian the other day ...   Kristian: Not black hat, black box.   Steve: Yeah. We can call it whatever we want, right? No, just kidding.   Kristian: Yeah.   Steve: Well, hey thanks for-   Dallin: I told Kristian, the other ... Oh, I'm sorry.   Steve: No, no, you get a say. Thanks for letting me wake you up at the butt crack of dawn and still being willing to share some cool stuff.   Dallin: Yeah.   Steve: How did you guys start meeting or working with each other?   Kristian: I'll let Dallin take that one.   Dallin: Yeah. I was working on a kind of unique project. We had a guy up in Scottsdale that owns a software. He's the developer. It's a software that does algorithmic stock trading and he was stuck with his marketing. He's a big guy. He's got a lot of stuff going, but anyway, we were trying to help him get some plans going.     I had actually watched Kristian on Periscope. I'd met a lot of guys on Periscope and one day I noticed Kristian was actually in Chandler, which is only a few miles away from me. Like I said, if I see someone, I'm going to find a way to meet him, so I'll comment in his Periscope a few times and little by little, end up getting his contact info. Day later we're in a Starbucks together talking about a plan that we can do, well I was more impressed with Kristian, what he was doing. My partner that I was working on with this marketing plan for this software developer, we were on kind of different pages. I have a background in sales and Kristian's dynamic was a little more my still, so my partner ended up leaving and I ended up asking Kristian, "Hey, is there anything on the side that you're working on or that I think we can do together?"   Steve: Mmm.   Dallin: Badda bing badda boom. We've ... I feel like it's the perfect love story. We've been hanging out pretty much ever since.   Steve: As long as he says the same thing, I guess that is true, right?   Dallin: Yeah. Yeah.   Kristian: Yeah, no. The funny thing, Steve, about Dallin is I'd been with ClickFunnels, I was one of the first 50 people that signed up for the beta version of ClickFunnels.   Steve: Wow. You're from the dark ages, Man, that's awesome.   Kristian: Dude. Yeah. We were just talking yesterday because we literally I mean the crazy part ... I'd been so resistant to start using Actionetics.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: Until I had to transfer from Infusionsoft to AWeber, AWeber to ActiveCampaign and we're trying to do something and it's like, "Dude, why don't we just use Actionetics?" It's all in here." I'm like, "Fine." We're switching everything over and I needed ... I'd been doing funnels and learning about ... like when I first signed up for ClickFunnels, I didn't know what a funnel was. I wasn't even sure what Russell had explained to me. It just sounded so cool and I was like, "Dude, I'm going to figure this thing out because what he's talking about and the numbers, I'm like, "That's what I need to be doing. That's it." I been doing this for two and a half years, which is kind of a long time in funnel years.   Steve: Yeah. Yeah, it is.   Kristian: It's not really that long of a time in regular terms, but I got on Periscope and started kind of talking about my business. At the time, I was trying to grow this fitness, be an online fitness guy.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: I'd used funnels to grow an email list of 3,500 people and I got on to Periscope and nobody cared about the fitness. They wanted to know how I was growing my email list and how I was doing my, how was I doing this business.   Steve: Interesting.   Kristian: Then I kind of became one of the funnel guys on Periscope and was a speaker at the Periscope Summit. I got this notoriety on Periscope for, they call me the King of Funnels. I'm like, "No, guys. I know some really big funnel guys on Periscope." They're like, "No, King of Funnels."   Steve: Wow.   Kristian: It's been like two and a half years of this little journey of learning funnels where it's been ... I'll tell you the three guys I credit everything to are Russell, Todd Brown and [Lo Silva 00:06:09].   Steve: Mmm.   Kristian: I actually had just finished the PCP coaching program with Todd Brown and those guys. Dallin, when he came to me was like, "Dude, this stuff you're talking about is awesome." I said, "Well, let's, I need a guy that gets it. That is driven and ... " that was Dallin. Now we've got this little, little agency we're trying to scale.   Steve: That's awesome, because good partners are hard to find. I remember I started doing this back in college. My buddy and I were driving traffic for Paul Mitchell and we were doing all this stuff. I ended up firing, going through nine different partners. It's cool that you guys found each other, you know what I mean? That's pretty rare just right there.   Kristian: Yeah. If you go back and talk about Dallin's ... there's a couple of key things that I was looking for, because I have an entire course. You love Periscope. I saw some of your Periscopes on YouTube and ...   Steve: Dang it. Man, those were the new days for me.   Kristian: Yeah. I was a speaker at the Periscope Summit in January.   Steve: Cool. Wow.   Kristian: Dallin's helped me develop this program and it's something that we've rolled out in beta and we're going to roll out as a digital product. It's called the Live Video Funnel. I've been working with Todd Brown and the guys at MFA on the entire sequence and the packaging and all that kind of stuff. They're calling Kurt [Malley 00:08:00] speaking at Marketing Funnel Automation Live in October and one of the things they're saying is that the biggest opportunity of 2017 is, they call it the Facebook Live Funnel, but I'm going to let you guys in on a little note. Facebook Live and Periscope don't work the same way. Even though they're both live video, they're different, so Dallin ... I needed somebody to help me with that aspect. I couldn't ... to be honest, you know this Steven,   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: I couldn't do all that, every single thing, every single aspect of a funnel.   Steve: No.   Kristian: The script writing, the copy writing, the editing, the videos for the VSL's, the strategy, the email marketing sequences, all the social media.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: What I'm really good, compliments what Dallin's really good at, like I said, his ability to get in on Facebook and recruit people. He has this really strong sense about building a team, which is one of those things that ... we both get along with people, but Dallin's good at that recruitment process. When you want to build and scale something and you need the right people, you need somebody like that.   Steve: That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, it's hard to find that stuff. Dallin, you and I, we were talking a little bit about some of the trials you guys went through. Obviously individually you do, but you guys met each other, what have you guys been working on and I guess what was the ... What are some of the issues you guys have run on, I guess, getting to where you are. You know what I mean?     Unspoken stories, you know that where none of us put in our marketing hardly ever unless it's part of our sales letter. "I was in the dumps, but now I'm flying high." These are like, really what kind of issues did you guys run into what you're doing now? What are you doing now, first of all?   Dallin: Well, the majority of our issues actually are from more individual sides. We're actually doing really good with our projects together.   Steve: Mmm.   Dallin: Your typical issues you run in together are testing. That's what funnels are, right, it's testing, testing, testing, testing. There's always that down side until you ... it's just a numbers game, right, until you find something that works. As far as the personal side, because I believe that this kind of runs, this is the fire that's on the inside, the Y factor from what I call it, right. My background's in sales, so I did door-to-door for years. I think, Steven, you've mentioned that you flirted with that a little bit but, I was really good at it.   Steve: Yeah. Yeah. That's like, I'm sorry to interrupt, but that's one of the best educations I've ever had.   Dallin: Yeah. Yeah.   Steve: I've got a marketing degree and I don't know what I learned from it. You know?   Dallin: Well, that's actually just what I was going to say. I was going to school for business and marketing and be honest, my classes were super redundant. I hated them. I was like, "Man, this is for years I've been planning on doing this and ... " Anyway I got into sales and I did pretty good at it. I just kept going. I ended up doing more recruiting and for six, seven years going out on the summers and taking a team out and helping manage and recruit and sell.   Steve: Yeah.   Dallin: You learn so much from just talking to people, the sale cycle, funnels, a different type of funnel, right?   Steve: Yeah.   Dallin: Learning how to build value to the point where it doesn't matter what you ask for money, because they love it so much that they're going to buy. It taught me a lot. Well, long story short, I made my transition. I was doing alarms and home automation. I made my transition with this solar boom.   Steve: Mmm.   Dallin: Solar's on fire and fortunately for us, we live in Arizona, one of the sunniest places in the world. Solar was hot, but a lot of stuff was happening politically. A lot of the utilities are trying to shut down solar here just because of different costs. It's a mess. They succeeded and actually the utility ... There's two main utilities in Arizona. They succeeded shutting down solar where I live.     In order for me to get work, I'd have to go an hour a day just to prospect clients, let alone keep my pipelines, my relationships, my contracts, everything going, because they're longer projects. It was really funny because I was really bummed because I was really excited about this transition. It was a huge jump for me because we were so comfortable with what we were doing, making awesome money and it was kind of just this really big leap of faith. Well, last April, fast forward a little bit, last April, our little girl, our daughter, she was four years old. She got diagnosed with leukemia.   Steve: Oh man.   Dallin: When that happened, we literally were going to leave for another summer, two days after she was diagnosed. It was crazy. Everything was just happening and days and days and days sitting in the hospital. I had always wanted to do something online my whole life, but I didn't want to ... I didn't know exactly what was happening. I didn't know where I wanted to put my foot in. I didn't want to mess with inventory and selling one off things. I wanted to do something on a big level. I just didn't know how to do it.     In the hospital you got a lot of time to yourself and so I'd study these things. I'd start looking at different processes. I'd find patterns. I would sign up for everyone's email list, not because I cared about their product. I wanted to see their system. I wanted to study the funnel. I wanted to study the email sequences and I started seeing the patterns.     That's when I kind of got into a lot of this other stuff with Periscope and live stream. I was like, "Man, this is the future. I get it." I think every guy that's doing any sort of digital marketing has a day where they, it kind of clicks and they say, "Holy smokes. I can really ... This is powerful. This is how you can reach a lot of people." What everyone wants to do is have a voice and do something.     I ended up switching my major, going to school for persuasion and negotiations were my sayings. I was a business communication major and I had that emphasis in persuasion and negotiation. Looking back on everything now, it was just perfect. Everything kind of worked out really, really good. I was kind of like, my little side, so we really hit this kind of rock bottom where it was like ... financially we took a massive hit because I wasn't able to go out, drive an hour and do all this kind of stuff. This last year-   Steve: Yeah. You needed to be home. Yeah.   Dallin: This last year has really been an investment of my time and I just kind of feel like I went back to school. I feel like I'm getting way more out of this school than four years of collegiate, right?   Steve: Easily. Man, how's your daughter now? If you don't mind me asking.   Dallin: She's awesome. She's in a maintenance phase right now, got another year left of treatments, but she's ... hair's back and muscles coming back and went back to school. She's in a really, really good spot right now. Appreciate it.   Kristian: She's strong too. You should see her.   Steve: Really?   Dallin: Yeah.   Steve: That's amazing.   Dallin: It's from everything that she went through. She got down to, had to relearn to walk, lost all her muscles. She was a little skin and bones and now she's this little muscle ball.   Kristian: Now she's a beast.   Dallin: She's awesome.   Steve: I appreciate you guys sharing that kind of stuff. I mean it's ... because most of the ... I've never interviewed anyone on this who hasn't gone through something crazy, you know. It's not like the path is always clear, either. Usually it isn't.   Dallin: Yeah.   Steve: There's a lot of times I wake up and come here, I'm like, "I don't even know. I know I got to work on something, but I don't know what." It's like going through this hazy fog, so I appreciate that. Then there's all the personal side and all the things going on. Yeah, I first started getting into this stuff, little bit similar with door-to-door sales. I started looking around going, "What the heck?" We're driving out and there's all these billboards everywhere. I was like, "People call these things ready to buy." I'm knocking on people's doors all day long and they're not wanting to buy it when they wake up. I've got to go convince people who weren't planning on spend money. Like, "How do I do this?" I start putting ads everywhere and that's how I started getting phone sales and stuff. I was like, "There's something to this." Anyways, I-   Dallin: See, that's funny because I was kind of the same person. All the other managers are, "Dallin, stop trying to reinvent the wheel. It works."   Steve: DS, yeah.   Dallin: DS, this. I'm like, "No, guys. There is a better way." My motto in everything in life is there is always a better way. I don't care what you say and what's working. Something can be tweaked and something can be done to scale.   Steve: Yeah. Yeah, definitely.   Kristian: Which is funny, because Russell always says, "You can tell the pioneers because they're lying face down with arrows in their back."   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: I guess in this case, it wasn't really pioneering. You were trying to find the people laying face down.   Steve: Yeah. Yeah.   Dallin: Yeah.   Steve: Side stepping all the other people who were already face down because they knocked 400 doors that day, right?   Dallin: Yeah, seriously.   Steve: What are you guys working on right now though? You guys mentioned that there's some awesome things going on. What's your current funnel, if you don't mind talking about that? [inaudible 00:18:19] sounds like, maybe ...   Kristian: Dallin said like perfect timing. I feel like it has been. We joke about being a startup because ultimately we are, to the point that we're even in the process of creating our business plans and our SOP's and all that kind of stuff, so that we can talk to some investors. We have some investors that we're talking to in order to really have the capital that we think we need to be able to scale this thing quickly, instead of Facebook ads tested at $10 a day for 50 weeks.   Steve: Yeah. Yeah.   Kristian: Yeah. The whole reason I got into learning funnels was, you guys talked about door-to-door sales and I have 15 years of commercial real estate experience. I worked with clients like L.A. Fitness and McDonald's. I represented McDonald's for the state of Arizona and Burger King and Taco Bell, so pretty big name companies.     There's a lot of guys that would be happy with that, but the problem I had was that I kept looking at the deal size of what I was doing. It was constantly kind of like this feast or famine situation where you either had a huge check or you had nothing. Literally, nothing. It kind of got to the point where I was like, "Man, there's a better way to do this." Very similar. You guys hear the consistent theme here? There's a better way.     That was kind of the first step of me saying, "I'm going to figure out how to streamline this" so that it wasn't even so much ... I just kept seeing all the guys that were buying the properties doing all these big deals. They weren't even in real estate. They had these other businesses that were generating cash flow and here I am putting these deals together that are making, Dallin and I had this exact conversation, making these guys over a million dollars and they're like, "Oh hey, thanks. Here's 40 grand."   Steve: Yeah. Yeah.   Kristian: What's wrong with this equation? I'm the one that did the whole thing, the financials and all that. I just didn't have the money. That was the start of it.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: Then you add on top of it that we got into a network marketing company and did really well, but we got stuck right under about 10 grand a month for like 18 months. It turned into another full time job where I was 40, 50 hours a week at every Starbucks from east to west meeting people. I'm like, "This is not working."   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: Those two combined, I was like, "If I get online, I can figure out how to do both of these. I don't have to pick because I can leverage myself."   Steve: That is kind of the funny thing I learned about ... because I got into an MOM. I went and did exactly what my upline was saying. Got 13 people my first move.   Kristian: Oh, wait, your [inaudible 00:21:42] not duplicatable.   Steve: No. Not at all.   Kristian: I don't care. If I find enough of the right people, it won't have to be.   Steve: Yeah. Yeah. My first month, I recruited 13 leeches. Man, they wouldn't do a dang thing unless I was like pushing them in the back with a cattle prod. I was like, "Ah. There's got to be a better way to do this." That's why I took it online and did a lot better. I definitely relate with that.   Kristian: Yeah. The crazy part about this is, like Dallin was saying, he's, shoot, some of the advanced strategies ... Dallin's has this like ... he understands and can see what the outcome is that we're trying to do. He gets it. He gets the whole flow and process of this, of how funnels work. He's been studying them. I just think for a big part, he just needed to connect certain pieces and be able to see what's going on behind the scenes that you can't see online.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: We talk about ... the hardest part about knowing how to do funnels is focusing because when you understand it and it clicks and you realize what you can do, it's like .... Someone starts talking you're like, "Oh my God. I know how to make money with that. Oh my God."   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: It's like entrepreneurial ADD exacerbated.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: Forget entrepreneurial ADD. This is like an entrepreneurial ADD addiction.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: That's the issue, so we've had to get very focused on okay what's the quickest and most pressing thing at the moment that we can make money with, so that we can reach our long term goals. Like I said, Lo Silva is one of the guys that I credit a lot of what I learned from. There's three little things that I take from them and that's think big, start small, scale fast.   Steve: Interesting. Think big, start small, scale fast.   Kristian: Yeah, that's kind of our little mantra.   Dallin: Yeah. That leads into basically what we're doing now. Our whole plan without getting too much into detail is we have a very, very big picture. Just like a funnel, we have our personal value ladder. Our big picture is more in investments, real estate, things like that. Those are our high tickets. Right.   Steve: Yeah.   Dallin: For the time being, we need to make sure that we couple that with clients, so we have our lead gen system, our agency that's doing multiple things, SCO work and funnels, and social media strategies and management and that way it can help us scale. Our agency essentially fronts the bills and I guess the best way to put it is we want everything that we do to be self-sufficient. If we build something, the entire goal-   Steve: Keep it in hands.   Dallin: Well, yes and no. The entire thing is for that project to sustain itself, so you understand once you get going with your Facebook marketing and such, it gets to the point where you reinvest X amount back into it. Then it lives, it breaths on it's own kind of. It just needs to be monitored, right.   Steve: Yeah.   Dallin: If we have this solid balance between us of we have clients coming to us for done-for-you services, that's awesome. That's cash. That keeps us busy. That keeps workers of ours busy. Then in the meantime, if we can couple that with 40, 50% of our other time for in-house projects, because Kristian and I already have entrepreneurial ADD, we're always thinking of ideas. We always have something going on or a lot of times a client that comes in has something that sparks an idea.   Steve: Yeah.   Dallin: We'll, like you said, we'll keep them in-house and then we funnel them. We get them to the point where they self-sustain and all of a sudden, we have our house projects, our client projects and it's just a very healthy business model. You don't see a lot of very sustainable and scalable models. You know what I mean?   Steve: Yeah.   Dallin: Especially, because I've been with very, very, very big companies with these companies I've sold for and you find ... one of the things I like to do is study patterns and development. I'm really into the business development side of things. You look at the ones that have made it, that have succeeded and that are scaled to the massive, massive billion dollar companies and that's kind of what they do. They make sure they have kind of that happy medium, that solid balance in all these different areas and factors and that's kind of what we're trying to do.     One of the projects we're working on right now is a political campaign funnel. This is just one that's easy to scale and we're just pretty much hacking it and taking advantage events which one of the things coupling social media with funnels is current events, man. That's, they kill. If you can find something trending and good and that has ... that you can milk for a long time, you better believe we're going to find a way to make, pinch money out of it, right.   Steve: Yeah. Isn't it the-   Dallin: I'll let Kristian talk about that.   Steve: The political campaign funnel, is that the one you downloaded I think from Sales Funnel Broker?   Kristian: Ah, no.   Steve: Maybe that was you, maybe it wasn't. I don't know. There's some guy, he downloaded it and came back and he's like, "This is the coolest thing ever." I was like, "Just the share [funnel 00:27:53] free one I got from someone else. Glad you like it."   Kristian: Yeah, no. I got the idea from actually from Funnel ... I got part of the idea from Funnel U. To be honest, as much as we know about funnels, something clicked when I watched Russell's video inside the membership site for the political bridge funnel, where it was like, "I see it." It was that coupled with the, the funnel stacking I got that whole idea of moving them from a front end funnel to a webinar funnel to a high ticket and how you stack those.   Steve: Sure.   Kristian: Bridging and when all the sudden the bridging made sense to me, I said, "Oh my God." Just like what Dallin was talking about here. Ultimately our goal is to, take the same amount of time to do all this work to go and work with somebody and do a commercial real estate transaction, where we're an investor or we're buying the property and people are investing with us, as it does to sell a t-shirt. Just time is time, it's just the size of the value and how you frame your mind around it. We are in the process of growing our agency. The whole point of it is to, if you think of construction companies, really good construction companies constantly have work that's in place to keep their employees working, so that they have the best team, right.   Steve: Mmm. Yeah.   Kristian: That's what they're always talking about is we just have to keep work so we can keep these guys busy. It's not about keeping them busy, but we also want to have the team in place because ultimately when we have our ideas, we can get them shipped quicker.   Steve: Yeah. I've been approached by a few people lately and they're like, "I got these awesome guys. I absolutely love them." He's like, "What work do you have? I just don't want them to go anywhere else." He's like, "I don't care what it is. I just got to bill."   Dallin: That's exactly what it is.   Steve: Yeah, interesting.   Kristian: Yeah. That's the idea, but to get back to what we're doing right now is I got the idea of how Russell explained the political bridge and my dad had ordered 100 t-shirts from my best friend. My best friend did all the screen printing for the Super Bowl in Santa Clara.   Steve: Jeez.   Kristian: He's got one of the largest screen printing companies on the west coast, based here in Phoenix. He has a company very similar to what Trey Lewellen started with Teespring.   Steve: Interesting.   Kristian: He's set in and he came to us and said, "Hey, why don't you partner with me and just handle the marketing on this." He's talked to me about doing some marketing for them for different aspects of their company. Now we're working together and the whole idea came up I said, "Well, you know what? I think I can do it." Before I was hesitant because I was like, "Well, I'm in the digital media space. I'm selling digital products." That was big hangup was I've got to sell to these entrepreneurs.     Then when this political bridge funnel that Russell talked about when he talked about how you move people from this list to this list, I went, "Oh my God. I can build a list in anything. I can just bridge them." It was a combination of that video inside of Funnel U and my participation in Todd Brown's PCP, Partnership Coaching Program, where they were really working on educational based marketing, and script and copy writing. The confidence level in my own ability to write copy had shifted to where now MFA is outsourcing some of their done-for-you client work to Dallin and I and having me write copy and script for their video sales letters.   Steve: What?   Kristian: Yeah.   Dallin: That's real, man.   Kristian: That tells you the ...   Dallin: We scale fast. Remember that third principle. We scale fast.   Steve: Yeah. Yeah. I wrote all those down. That's amazing. What's funny is that people don't realize that it literally is the exact same amount of work to do a small company as a big one.     My buddy, I mean as far as building a funnel and things like that, my buddy and I were building an [inaudible 00:32:11]. It was the first funnel I ever built with ClickFunnels and it was a smartphone insurance company and we were ... we got out of that for a lot of reasons, but it was interesting though because I was building it. We put it all out. That's actually when I got into ClickFunnels and it was right after ClickFunnels left beta. I was like, "Hey, I'm going to build this whole thing out before my ClickFunnels trial runs out." I'd never built one and I just killed myself for the next little while. We got it out.     Then this guy approaches me in Florida. He's like, "I need a funnel for some of my ..." He was selling water ionizers or something. I was like, "Oh man. This is a big company. They're already making a couple million a year." I was blown away. I was like, wait, this is the same exact amount of work as it was for the small little startup. Anyways, I thought that was interesting you said that.   Kristian: Yeah. That's what we talk about is that it's easier to work with those bigger companies. They get it.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: You work with the smaller companies and they're worried about how much money it's going to cost them. The reality is that the more we put ourselves in a position to work with guys like you and Russell and guys like Todd and Lou Coselino and David Perriera and all them at MFA, they're saying, "Man, why are you, how come you're not charging double and triple?"   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: Dallin and I are sitting here like seriously if they're willing to pay us to write scripts for, to outsource their ad copy to us for some of their client work, what's that say? I mean, we're literally working with, doing work for the guys that are considered the best in the industry.   Steve: That's ... Yeah. Yeah.   Kristian: It's just a mindset shift is what it is. That has made it a little easier to have a conversation with someone and say, "You know what? We can take on this project. Here's how much it is."   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: They're like, sticker shock. Well, sticker shock. You can go and just have someone build the pages for you, but it's not going to convert. I know that for a fact because copy os what converts, right.   Steve: You know Tyler Jorgensen?   Kristian: You know what, it sounds familiar. I think I-   Steve: He said the same thing to me. He's like, "You charge 10 grand to build a custom funnel?" I was like, "Yeah." He's like, "Why not 15?" I was like, "I don't know. I'd never thought about that before." I thought 10 was kind of the mark. He's like, "No, no, no, no. I'd do 15, 20, 25." I was like, "You've got to be kidding." That is is just a mindset shift. You'll get better people to build for anyways, whatever it is.   Kristian: The big thing for us-   Dallin: True and at the same time ...   Kristian: Yeah, I don't know.   Dallin: You there?   Kristian: Yeah, you cut-   Steve: Kind of lost you there.   Kristian: The big thing for us is really to build a team, Steve, and to have that team in place and be able to have people that focus on all the different areas of the funnels, so that they get really, really good at that. They don't have to know the whole process because that's what I've spent the last two and a half years doing, right.   Steve: Wow.   Kristian: They can be part of this and be part of building something and helping these clients and really enjoy what they're doing. Then, like I said, when we have these ideas we can ship them. I know you want to know and your audience probably wants to know what it is that we're doing, which is what got you in. I mentioned my friend, Bryant. He's got this company like Teespring. He's got everything in place to roll this out. We had this idea for how to start doing that. We took advantage of knowing that the campaigns going on right now. I mentioned to you I think my dad bought like 100 Trump t-shirts from him. I was like, "Those are really cool shirts." My dad's like, "Yeah, man You should do this funnel stuff and figure out how to sell these to everyone. Look how crazy everyone is about Trump. Trump's going to kill it." At the time, it was still in the Republican Primaries. I'm like, "Well, I don't want to go build a funnel."   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: "Then trump doesn't win the primaries." But as he started pulling away I'm like, "Oh, let's start testing some stuff." We tested one funnel and surprisingly the Facebook campaign got a lot of clicks, but there wasn't a lot of opt-ins and conversions on the funnel. What it did and I think this is one of the biggest skill sets that people who are elite develop versus people that are frustrated and saying this isn't working for me is understanding the information that they're getting and what to do with it. You might not have a winning campaign or a funnel that's making money, but to understand what kind of info you're getting and how to use that to do the next thing is that whole testing process is what separates those that are killing it from those that are getting killed. That first funnel that we did, didn't make money. Not at all.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: I mean it lost $1,200. I went to Dallin and I said, "Dude, this is awesome." He's like, "Huh?" I said, "Look at the retargeting list that we got." Then we went and we tweaked this and I said, "What if we change the front end," and at that time Mike Pence had just been named Trump's VP. I'm like, "Who the hell is Mike Pence? I never heard of this guy before." I started asking people, they're like, "No." Unless you're from Indiana, you don't know who Mike Pence is. I go, "Should Trump have picked Mike Pence? Isn't there someone else." I'm like, "Boom. Is there a vice presidential debate in the Republican Party?"   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: We created a little mini survey around is Mike Pence the right one. First of all, you've got all these people that love Trump and they're hardcore republicans and now you're creating an internal debate. Everyone wants to voice their opinion, but they don't want to be judged.   Steve: Yeah. People get pretty intense about that for sure.   Kristian: Yeah. We created a mini survey.   Dallin: Oh yeah.   Kristian: We created a mini survey and we had this retargeting list from the first time and we started running ads. I didn't expect and I don't think Dallin either, that it was going to do as well as it did, but I mean, we had in less than 12 hours, we had 500 email opt-ins.   Steve: What? Oh my gosh.   Kristian: I was like, "Oh my God." I'm like, "Holy crap." I'm like, "What the hell's going on?" Of course the first goal is to try and get the funnel to break even. What we had to do was we were getting so much information so quickly that we really had to be on our toes and make adjustments and modifications. What we figured out through the first week of testing this is there's so much activity on this funnel. Just to give you the stats, after what was Dallin, really 6 days of running the ads, we got 2,600 email subscribers?   Dallin: Five and a half, yeah.   Kristian: Yeah. Five and a half days, we got 2,600 email subscribers.   Steve: Wow.   Kristian: K, the funnels not at break even, but here's what I want whoever's listening and whoever wants to take this information understand is the testing process. We figured out between two front end offers-   Steve: Which one was the winner.   Kristian: Which one's working better.   Steve: Yeah. Which one's the awesome one. Yeah.   Kristian: It's still not winning. Our free plus shipping is not, it's not helping us break even. The reason for that is because we're getting so many opt-ins. On a normal free plus shipping, you're not getting as many people clicking on the ads, right.   Steve: Right.   Kristian: Well, we're getting 5, 6 times the amount of people subscribing to the email-   Steve: Would you, in that scenario, would you ever try and get even less people. It'd be counter-intuitive maybe, but I would just start tweaking the free plus shipping, I guess.   Kristian: No. No. Well, no. We can't-   Dallin: The strategy-   Kristian: Yeah. We can't really tweak it because it's not like we're going to offer anything cheaper than free plus shipping. When you start looking at all the different things we can offer, there's not a lot of options, but here's what Dallin and I have figured out is that we think we've created a new funnel. It's not really new in the sense of what you and I and Russell and all these other guys think of.   Steve: True.   Kristian: In terms of Russel and [Daygin Smith 00:41:29] coming up with the black box funnel, right.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: It's just soft offer funnel, a front end soft offer. We think that we've come up with what we call a backdoor funnel.   Steve: Interesting.   Kristian: You get so many people on your email list. You get as many people to take the first offer and you get as many people to take your upsell as possible to figure out how close to break even you can get. If you look at 2,600 people, we go back and look at the numbers, only about 115 of those 2,600 ever saw the offer.   Steve: Huh.   Kristian: Now we have an opportunity to present those people with the offer again. Well, how do you do that in a way that's going to get a lot of people to open the e-     All right. Want me to ...We cut off here at the point of high dramas. As I was mentioning, we got so many email subscribers and such a lower number based on the email subscribers because we didn't expect to have that many, that we still weren't at break even, but we have a ton of people that we can show an offer to. It's a little different obviously because our price points ... We're doing apparel and things like that.   Steve: It's like delaying the offer almost on purpose, right. I mean this is ... awesome.   Kristian: Yeah. Remember, we started this whole thing with a survey, right, something that people were very passionate about, so a lot of polarity in there. They want their opinion-     They also want to know what everyone else thinks, where they fall in line here. We thought, "Oh my God. Somebody that votes, that voices their opinion, takes the time to put a vote in wants to know what the results are." We created a results page that shows them the results and has a special offer that all those people haven't seen. When we send it in the email and we tell them here's the results of the survey, the open rates are and the click through rates are sky high.   Steve: How long are you waiting to actually send them this results page?   Kristian: A couple of days, so-   Steve: Oh really. Wow.   Kristian: Yeah. I mentioned Actionetics. The whole reason that we started doing this is because we wanted to ... since we're having people take a survey and we're offering them this gift, we want to make sure we get as many people that take us up on that gift for taking the time to vote. We have a few of those triggers built in there, "Hey, don't forget to grab your free gift. We noticed you took the time, maybe something happened. Go back here and grab your gift." Then we make sure that everybody sees the results page a couple of days later.   Steve: A couple of days. That definitely is a different style for sure. You don't think that hurts conversions at all?   Kristian: No, I mean. It's a survey, right?   Steve: Sure.   Kristian: The point of high drama and the suspense and all that. We're still testing it, again, like I mentioned earlier that the biggest thing I think that separates those that are successful and those that aren't is to understand the type of information that you get.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: We may found out that we need to send the results sooner, but we don't know. We've got to test.   Steve: It's interesting positioning too of you saying, "Hey. It look's like. Thanks for taking it. Here's your results. I don't know if missed this, but just jump back and get that." That's interesting. Like they missed it. They missed the gift.   Kristian: Yeah. Yeah. "You forgot to grab your gift." That's our first step and then in the email that comes after they've taken the survey, "Hey, we're in the process of tallying up the results. We'll send them to you as they're updated."   Steve: Interesting. It keeps the loop open, basically.   Kristian: Hmm-hmm(affirmative). Exactly. Exactly.   Steve: Man, that's awesome. Well, hey is there a URL that we can go check that out on? I don't want to pollute or dilute any of your stats, so if not that's fine, but ...   Kristian: Yeah. We're just running ads to this right now.   Steve: Good.   Kristian: We're in the process of, like I said, this was just an idea that my dad came up with. I've got to give him credit for the initial idea, but now it's turned into kind of a new business entity, right.   Steve: Yeah.   Kristian: We're growing this email list and the concepts that Russell talks about the how to bridge funnels and lists and things like that. We're starting to build a list now in that republican, conservative, survivalist category. We're going to take it a step further and build out a home page and start doing some different stuff with it.   Steve: That's interesting. You're going to go through and who's going to keep opening all the emails over and over again, looking at all the stats of all the people around. These are the hyper active political caring people. You know what I mean? That's awesome. That's a really clever way to segment out those people. That's fantastic.   Kristian: Yeah. Yeah. You never know where your next business entity is going to come from.   Steve: Interesting. Gosh, well, hey, I know we've been on quite a while. Thanks for dropping all the bombs of gold you guys did. I don't know what happened to Dallin, but ...   Kristian: Yeah. He just texted, said thank you. He's trying to get back on, but I know we've got to take the kids to school and stuff, so-   Steve: Awesome. Well, hey man, I appreciate it. Thank you so much and this was awesome.   Kristian: Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it, Steve. Love meeting new people that are doing the same thing as us and glad that we can reach more people that are trying to learn how this works and kind of help them understand the process and that if they just stick at it and keep testing. That's really the big thing I think is testing and learning is how you get better at it.   Steve: You're kind of a scientist going through this, for sure. Going in an industry you know will make money obviously, but whatever you're doing specifically, you might almost always be the first. The think big, start small and scale fast. That's huge.   Kristian: Yeah. If anyone wants to connect with us, Dallin and I are both on Facebook. We mentioned Periscope. I do a lot of broadcasting on there with what I call the Live Stream Marketing Funnel Show. We're rolling, if people are interested in learning how to use live video, we've got that coming out. Yeah. Connect with us on social media. Kristian Cotta and Dallin Greenberg.   Steve: Okay, yeah. Then you've got the Health Success Podcast. Guys, go check him out at Health Success Podcast as well as he said Live Stream Marketing?   Kristian: Well. Yeah. Just go to KristianCotta.com. It'll take you right there.   Steve: Cool. Awesome.   Kristian: Kristian with a K.   Steve: Kristian with a K. Cotta, right?   Dallin: I'm in.   Kristian: Kristian with a K. Cotta. Dallin's in here. He just got back in.   Dallin: Dude, I don't know what happened. I was getting all excited what Kristian was saying and then just cut off.   Kristian: It's the point of high drama, that's what we were talking about.   Dallin: I know. It was. That's what I told Amy. Is it over?   Steve: It is now.   Kristian: Yeah. We're just wrapping it up.   Steve: Awesome.   Dallin: Sorry.   Steve: It's good. Hey, thanks guys so much.   Kristian: All right. Take care, Steve.   Dallin: See you man.   Steve: All right. Bye-bye.   Speaker 4: (music starts) Thank for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Have a question you want answered on the show? Get your free t-shirt when your question gets answered on the live Hey Steve Show. Visit salesfunnelbroker.com now to submit your question. (music ends)