Jeff: Hey guys, welcome to the Get the Phone Ringing Show, where small businesses come to copy success in 45 plus categories. I’m your host Jeff Wilson very, it’s nice to meet you man and today’s show is a cool one, it’s about logo design, branding design and basically how it can make you more money. Specifically later on in the show, Erik our trainer shows you how one branding design change increased his client’s business by 50% and how another one recently got mugged, we’re not sure if we can tie that to Erik’s branding but you never know.

And we show probably the most fun dental logo design you will ever see, so if you want to see something pretty fun and a little [risky] stay tuned for that. Now why listen to Erik Royer, why is he an expert in branding? Well he’s designed I think over 200 websites and brands in the real estate industry alone and he’s worked in every other industry you can pretty much think of. In addition to working for some pretty notable clients like ExxonMobil, Taste of Colorado, Waste Management, American Cancer Society, the University of Wisconsin and on and on.

So folks I think you’re going to enjoy the show, first we get into a lot of teaching on what brand is and what to think about with brands and mistakes and things of that nature and the we get into some really fun examples and you can see real life examples of a change in brand and what it can do. And like I said keep your eyes open for that dental brand, that’s the best thing we’re probably going to show on the show ever, so hope you enjoy it, see you guys.

Hey guys, welcome to the Get the Phone Ringing Show, I’m Jeff Wilson and with me today I have Erik Royer, Erik thanks for being on the show.

Erik: Yeah, thanks for having me, my pleasure.

Jeff: Yeah dude for sure, so Erik is going to tell us a little bit about branding today. Erik, can you tell us what we should expect from the training?

Erik: Yeah so what we’re going to do is we’re going to review branding and we’re going to talk about branding as a whole and then drilldown into mark or logo design and kind of the common pitfalls and ultimately how branding and, good branding can ultimately make you more money.

Jeff: See yeah, I think that part right there, people are going to start listening now for sure, anything where they get to make more money, that like that so let’s jump into it man.

Erik: Yeah great, well one of the things that I think branding is one of those terms that I think a lot of times people are overwhelmed by. You know it’s something that gets thrown around a lot and I think a lot of people probably have misconceptions about what is branding. And so, in starting off, I just wanted to kind of define I guess what branding really is…

It’s a more of a holistic I guess approach and ultimately your brand is the face of your company and so kind of what you’re putting out there to the world and kind of what you’re telling the world about your business. You know it’s the company name, it’s your visual expression, it’s also the communication that you have internally with your organization as well as the message that you’re putting out there to your customers and your clients.

And then it’s also how your company is viewed by your outside audience, you know, what the perception is of your company. I think the term branding initially came way back where it was considered a guarantee or some sort of promise, and so that still applies today where your brand is a message and it’s a promise so a branding promise, so fundamental principles that anybody interacts with your company understands and expects, so…

Jeff: You know one other thing along those lines, I feel like branding is the silent killer, it’s like people don’t realize that a brand that doesn’t fit their target demographic, you know that doesn’t communicate whatever level of professionalism or deliverable they have they lose business without even realizing it. You know I know that I’ve experienced that and I think everybody should be constantly thinking about what does my branding say?

Because it could change, right? Every couple years you might need to update it, your product might change or your competitor’s branding might have gotten better and better and you might need to raise the bar a little bit. But I feel like it’s a silent killer that a lot of folks just, they dismiss because they can’t ever say “this made me this much money.”

Erik: Right yeah, it’s hard to quantify where branding is making or losing you money and that’s what we’re going to try to define today, and I’ll be able to give some specific examples. But also I think you bring up a good point where I think a lot of times, small business owners, they’ve got so much on their plate and so many things that they’re working on and branding is one of those things that they kind of back in to.

You know they’re willing to spend money on product development and other aspects of marketing. But when it comes to really sitting down and getting a good understanding for, okay, what’s going to be our differentiating factor, what are going to be our strengths and weaknesses, what’s going to be our niche that we’re playing to? And really carving out that target audience and then saying “Okay, now let’s really craft our message. You know let’s craft our message with the name of our company, let’s craft the message with our tagline that we’re using, let’s craft our message in terms of our corporate culture and then we’re going to be focusing on” which is your mark or your logo which a lot of times kind of sets the stage for your visual message or your visual language.

Jeff: Yeah.

Erik: So you know that kind of leads me into this next slide nicely and it’s basically just saying that, what is good branding? And so how do you go about branding yourself or just recognizing that “okay I’m on the right path” and I think if you’re doing this, I think a lot of new business owners or business owners will be ahead of the ball game. So it starts by just having a consciousness and an image and awareness of your business and kind of understanding “okay this is the message that we want to put out there.”

I think so many times businesses, there’s a message that they’re sending out that they don’t even realize kind of like what you were talking about as the silent killer.

Jeff: Yeah.

Erik: So how do you go about having this consciousness, I mean how do you start and how do you do that? You know ultimately what you want to do is you want to give your target audience something that they need, something that they’re not getting, something that also that you’re delivering on a consistent basis. So really analyzing your target audience and saying “Okay what are my differentiating factors,” and really having an understanding too of the competition.

And this probably goes down into marketing and just having an understanding and the awareness of your business. And then I would say a big part is really being committed to your branding message and so really being, what I like to call brand ambassador where you drink, sleep what your branding message is and not necessarily shaking from that.

Because one of the things that I’ve heard is about the time you’re sick of your logo, about the time that you’re sick of your brand is when it’s probably sinking in with the target audience.

Jeff: Yeah.

Erik: Really being committed to it and then kind of what I talked about before, just kind of knowing your strengths and weaknesses, oh and then being honest with your brand. So one of the things I guess that I encounter as a designer is I will have some business that that’s understandable when a new business is starting up that they want to appear larger, they want to kind of puffer fish it, they want to expand and look like they’re a little bit larger than they really are.

And I think that’s alright, I mean I think that’s kind of a, that’s a white lie I guess. But you don’t want to be disengenuine and you don’t want to be – I don’t even know if it’s a word but – non-authentic, I mean you want to be authentic in your brand because ultimately, the truth will come out, I mean if you’re doing something and you’re claiming that you’re something completely different, and claiming that you are doing something great when you know that that’s not your strength, then ultimately that will come out and you’ll lose your target audience that way, so…

Jeff: And I think as much as you can use puffer fish in a training, I think everybody wins when you puffer fish and when you reference puffer fishes. But no, I got you for sure, so do you have some tactics here for us on some of this?

Erik: Yeah definitely. So first I just wanted to kind of show some examples, you know these are actual logos I found out there, so this is legit and there were a couple that I wouldn’t even show because they were dangerous. But ultimately it raised the question like what happens if my logo or my mark is kind of sending the wrong message?

You know this first one with the dental, I mean that could scare some people away, it might land you in prison I don’t know.

Jeff: Wow, you could use that logo, I mean they’ve probably reused that logo for other companies that they own, they might have originally designed if for something else and then maybe now it’s dental and that’s nice.

Erik: Yeah dental dams I think was what it was for. Alright, now we’re just kidding. Yeah we’re becoming HR violations here but yeah, I mean, so you can ultimately scare your prospects away and any time that you are inefficient I guess with business, I mean the rule of thumb is that if you’re inefficient then you’re bound to fail.

Jeff: Yeah.

Erik: If you are being efficient then you’re bound to succeed. And the same is true with branding and with messaging, you want to make sure that you are efficient and that you’re making sure that you have a consistent message but also that you’re sending the right message to the right target audience.

And so anytime you have inefficiencies, I mean that’s where you ultimately you can be scaring people away and that’s where you’re wasting money. I mean you can also be, you know you could be confusing people and another quote that I like to say is “your customers are plenty confused on their own, they don’t need your help to be confused.”

And then the big thing too is just appearing unprofessional and I think your visual message is a message that people will have an impression of your business and a lot of times that first impression is based on what they see visually. And so if they see something that looks unprofessional, then they’re automatically going to assume and the message that you’re sending out there is that “yeah we’re kind of a fly by night, fly by the seat of our pants type of operation.”

Jeff: Right.

Erik: This Check Point one, I think is interesting because this is a software security company and then, and this is probably more realistic I mean the dental one is probably more humor and this Check Point thought is I think a real serious violation where you’re wanting to see something secured, this is software security and all of a sudden you have this drawing that looks very childlike and you know when people think of childlike, they think whimsical and playful and definitely not associated with the things that you want in security.

Jeff: Right.

Erik: So yeah that’s the reason that I wanted to show that.

Jeff: Yeah.

Erik: So that kind of brings me in to wanting to train people on being a critique of their own brand and being able to take a look at logos out there, their own and other people’s as well. I mean it’s great to be able to go out there and kind of practice. But looking at the most common mistakes that I think are made with logos and ultimately how that ends up costing you money.

So the first is just looking amateurish, and I think that Check Point one is probably a good example. And just recognizing that you’re sending a message, anytime you put anything out there, I mean it’s kind of like being a celebrity or a star, I guess I look at in that regard and that ever movie that a celebrity does, you know they’re putting their mark on this and you know you do enough horrible movies and pretty soon your brand is tarnished and that’s sending a message out to your audience.

The same is true with a certain regard with business and so you want to make sure to steer clear of anything that’s looking amateurish because it just says you’re amateur. And then the other big thing is something that relies on trends, I found this quote that I really like that “A brand that has no concept of its own identity is left with no alternative but to chase after the latest trends. We must replace the herd mentality with a brand philosophy.”

And I really like that because I think a lot of times with logo design and with mark design, what happens is you kind of look at what you’ve seen out there and yeah “I like this, you know let’s go with that” and this logo that’s on the page right now, with the [scooshes] or kind of the orbits or the rings, you know done a ton during kind of the dot com boom, I mean…

Jeff: Okay.

Erik: Everybody under the sun seemed like had something that looked similar to that and so if you’re wanting your brand to really differentiate you, then going along with the trends is basically like putting a sell by date stamp on your logo.

Jeff: Right…

Erik: Because ultimately going to be yeah out of favor soon.

Jeff: It’s like wearing legwarmers when you used to wear those.

Erik: Exactly.

Jeff: You’re huge into legwarmers.

Erik: Still do.

Jeff: See, you dated yourself, you’re still, you saw that date. Alright so what do we have here? These are new versions of the smashing?

Erik: Yeah, so these are other pitfalls, so the other pitfalls are using like a rasterized image. So you always want to use vector images, so when you have a professional that does your [gramming] or and kind of looking at your own, you want to make sure that they’re using a vector program to be able to create it.

So the most common sort of the industry standard is Photoshop or Illustrator, and you can definitely see when somebody has used an image in their logo where they blow it up and all of a sudden it become…

Jeff: Yeah right.

Erik: So the other pitfall is just steering clear of stock art and this is again having more of a branding philosophy versus a herd mentality. You know in using stock what you run into is you’re not ultimately differentiating yourself and you’re looking like everybody else out there. But the other big thing that people probably don’t realize is that you could be in violation of copyright.

Jeff: Oh okay.

Erik: Yeah a lot of these places where you’re able to purchase stock art, I mean you’re able to purchase it but there are limits to the licensing. And so you just want to be aware of that and there have actually been some problems with some of these companies that do, like your logo works. There is a well known designer out in San Diego and his company is called Mobile Motion, you know ultimately he was finding that a lot of his designs were being taken and just kind of modified very slightly and he ended up suing them for I think something like 15 or 20 copyright infringements kind of like…

Jeff: Oh wow.

Erik: …violations, just because what those companies do with crowd source design work is ultimately, they hire a bunch of small people or individuals that literally just put together whatever and throw it at you. And so who knows where they’re coming up with this stuff and if it’s actually original or if it’s actually unique. So that’s just one of the pitfalls I think too to always be aware of.

Jeff: Okay. So… and as a heads up, we’re at about the 15 minute mark right now, so as we get through it.

Erik: Yeah.

Jeff: ‘Cause I know you have a lot of good stuff to share.

Erik: Yeah, I’ll cruise through these last ones I’ll just make it pretty quick, so designing, so this top one here, this one I mean a lot of times what you’ll see is just getting into like the ego of the designer where they’re more interested in kind of making something look cool versus really trying to hit the target. Something that’s going to be too complex where if you shrink it down, you want to make sure that when you blow it up it looks good but also when you shrink it down, you want to make sure that you don’t lose it.

Jeff: Yeah okay, yeah it’s a good example right next to it, shrunken down, only see is an S.

Erik: Yeah exactly so you don’t see this thumbprint that’s cool yeah, and then a lot of times what I’ll do with design is I’ll design in black and white first, just so that I’m not running into this pitfall here where I’m relying on color and that the logo falls apart when color is taken away. Because nowadays you’re going to use your logo, you’re going to use your mark on print work, on facets, you know things that are going to be black and white. So you don’t want it to be so dependent on color.

Jeff: You know Erik I’ve read about that before, the idea – from a designer standpoint – of dealing with, actually I think it was in the book Built to Sell that he was talking a design firm and how they turned it into a logo shop, you know as just a fictitional story. But they were designing in black and white so that the client wouldn’t make decisions off of color.

Erik: Right.

Jeff: I like that idea, I think that’s really smart.

Erik: Yeah, well and color is one of those things that if… once you have the design, you’ve got the composition and everything that you want, it’s easier to modify and it’s also one of those things that very slight modifications can kind of change things drastically. So you want to make sure that it works in black and white first.

And then fonts, font selection is a tricky thing, I mean even as a designer I mean kind of the marriage between the symbol and typeface that you use is kind of a fine balance and kind of working together. Sort of the rule of thumb when it comes to fonts is not using anything that’s going to be I guess not sort of a professional font. I mean typically you want to use something that is going to stand the test of time and not something again that’s going to be real trendy but also something that you want to make sure that it has a professional feel.

Jeff: Like Comic Sans or something.

Erik: You don’t want to be using hobo font, yeah exactly.

Jeff: Wingdings, Wingdings use that whatever.

Erik: Just yeah exactly, just have the name in Wingdings and have people translate a whole key next to it.

Jeff: That’s hot.

Erik: Yeah, so those are sort of the main pitfalls that I would say and then I wanted to show actual examples of some clients that I have worked with that did a rebranding and sort of where they were running in to problems and ultimately how they ended up making more money once they did a rebranding. So this first one is a guy by the name Marty Wolf and his logo if you look at it I mean almost looks like something out of medieval times, I mean.

Jeff: Not almost.

Erik: Yeah.

Jeff: It doesn’t almost look like medieval time.

Erik: Yeah I didn’t know if he was a stagehand for Braveheart or what that was but, and even the font selection for the PosiDyne Process. But as I talked to Marty and got to understand his business, you know what he does is he does sales training.

Jeff: Okay.

Erik: And the compass was a real big part of his business and he talked a lot in his field about you know having direction and so he really wanted to keep that compass, and that’s actually what this thing is, it’s supposed to be a compass. But you lose, you can’t even read PosiDyne in here and the compass I think is lost because you don’t know what it is and so this is what we did in rebranding it.

These cards really turned out nice, this is foil stamp here with the actual compass that I think turned out really well.

Jeff: Yeah I like it.

Erik: And he was all about the map and direction and so this is just an example of where, I don’t think he was looking as professional and I think people were not understanding what his business was about because his visual messaging was off. And so after we did this rebranding, his business actually increased 50% because I think it was much more directed, his message was much more directed, his message was much more consistent with actually what he…

Jeff: Yeah.

Erik: This next one and I was just watching the news last night and saw this guy on the news Les Harrell he had gotten robbed.

Jeff: Oh.

Erik: But anyway…

Jeff: Because of the logo? Do you think? People thought he was just too affluent?

Erik: Business just started exploding but he was a good example of somebody who has a differentiating factor that wasn’t showing it and, so Les’ business is, it’s a gold exchange but it’s different than other gold exchanges in that what he does is he has a host, host a party and I like to call it sort of a reverse Tupperware party where everybody brings in their gold and that’s common with other gold exchanges.

But then what he does is he takes a percentage of the proceeds and donates it to the charity of the host choice.

Jeff: Okay.

Erik: So everybody walks out there feeling like they’ve donated to charity and also walking out of the party with money in their pocket. And so I thought that was a real unique differentiating factor and something wasn’t being displayed in his current logo. I mean his current logo really looks like a pawnshop I thought.

Jeff: Yeah.

Erik: And so we changed it, we created the tagline, “the gift of giving” you know created the exchange here obviously that forms the heart and obviously his business has been doing really well probably getting too much attention…

Jeff: Yeah he’s getting robbed nonstop now he’s doing so well. So I mean that’s a lesson for people right? Like you want a logo that helps you do better but not too well.

Erik: Right.

Jeff: Because then you become a target for violence and just…

Erik: Right you don’t want it to be too good.

Jeff: Yeah.

Erik: This next one was another one where it’s probably a good example of somebody that was using stock photography or stock art that was used I think by a lot other chiropractors, so not differentiating yourself either and really not showing what her specialty is. So from this logo that you’ll see at the top of ‘before’ she was getting lot of sports injury stuff which I think probably make sense, I mean that kind of looks like a sports injury type of logo.

Well what she specialized in and what she really her specialty and who she treated best were children, she’s trained in this technique called Webster Technique of Chiropractic which applies only to small infants and pregnant.

Jeff: And uses dictionaries.

Erik: Right, yeah she stomps on their backs. And so we wanted to change it up so that her logo felt more childlike. I mean felt more indicative of the clients that she serves best and you know with sort of the esotery thing or surreptitious thing here is the fact that her last name is Orchard. So I thought having a little tree, this kind of whimsical tree that we have the trunk is sort of the S curve of the spine, I thought I was really clever there.

Jeff: Yeah, when you did this one, did you slam it down on the table and say “that just happened” when you gave it to her?

Erik: I just slammed it on the table and I walked away and I was like “I’m done, this is genius.”

Jeff: What more can I do?

Erik: Right, exactly. So the bottom line in these rebranding cases is that their visual messaging needed to be in line with their business and really send the right message to the right target audience versus sending the wrong message to the wrong target audience or even sending the right the message to the wrong target audience. Either way you got inefficiencies and ultimately that’s what’s costing you money, so…

Jeff: Have you drawn up a quadrant for that, the right message to the wrong people, the wrong message to the right people, the right message to the right people, the wrong message, maybe…

Erik: Yeah. We’re working it to a graphic.

Jeff: Yeah you can write a cool graphic on it. Do you have any other examples?

Erik: No, that’s it for examples, I mean I’ve got plenty more examples that’s for sure.

Jeff: No, I just want to make sure. Hey dude, I appreciate this, it’s nice to see actual examples of before and afters where you can see all of those mistakes like put into…

Erik: Right.

Jeff: Into visual form, for folks that find that they’re at this stage or they now realize that they have four of the six mistakes in one logo of their own, I mean how might they work with you to, or reach out to you in terms of kind of taking a look at their branding, what should they do?

Erik: Yeah, well I work with clients in all different capacity, so I would love the opportunity to work with anybody that’s kind of at a point where they feel like they are pigeonholed into it in a certain area and they’re kind of at wits end and usually the time you recognize that you know yeah “I really need to rebrand, it’s obvious and it’s evident.”

And so the best way to get a hold of you would ultimately either go to the website or I’d be happy if people wanted to give me a call.

Jeff: Okay and we can put that information in the show notes below the video, that way in case this video lives on and your phone number changes for some reason, that contact information can follow the video around. So for everybody who’s watching this right now, crumbling your business card in your hand and kind of sobbing gently and softly so your family doesn’t hear you, we appreciate you watching the show. We’ll have resource information that Eric shared below as far as his website and any other contact info and then for any of you watching this, any business owners that have gotten some value out of this, if you think there might be a few other business owners that could get value out of this.

Maybe spread the love a little bit and share this with a couple and then also if you want to get these shows sent to your inbox, then you can sign up in our box probably below this or to the right of the video and then we will send you shows as they become live right to your inbox and you won’t have to come scour our website everyday like I’m sure that you would. In anyway Erik thanks so much for being on the show man, appreciate the time.

Erik: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Jeff: You bet, and thanks everybody for watching and Erik I heard your dog barking so I think it might need to be let in if you get a chance.

Erik: Yeah.

Jeff: Alright, see you man, take care.

Erik: My dog bark.

Jeff: Hey guys, welcome to the Get the Phone Ringing Show, where small businesses come to copy success in 45 plus categories weekly. I’m your host Jeff Wilson very nice to meet you. Today’s show is going to take you from rah rah I have a website, to actually having a website that gets people to take action. Whatever action you want them to take.

And our expert Kyle McCall has been designing websites since he was 14, he claims it was because of curiosity, I claim it was because he didn’t have cool enough hobbies. At any rate it’s to our benefit, because since then Kyle has helped several hundred businesses. He’s actually helped three businesses launch up to the $15 million range and several more up to the $1 million range.

Kyle specialty, getting people to do what you want them to do when they get to your website, now Kyle takes us through a ton of examples today, shows us a lot of cool visuals befores and after, all that kind of stuff. So it’s really fun to see how a website can actually start converting for you. And for those of you who think “My website is just fine” I don’t think you’ll feel that way after you watch this show. You can prove me wrong maybe. So without further ado let’s watch the show now.

Hey guys, welcome to the Get the Phone Ringing Show, I’m Jeff Wilson and with me today I have Kyle McCall. Hey Kyle, how are you doing and where are you calling in from?

Kyle: Good, thanks for having me Jeff. I’m calling in from Phoenix, Arizona.

Jeff: From Phoenix, Arizona and as we can clearly see, Kyle is in the Playboy Mansion, that must be in Arizona now ‘cause he’s got the nice staircase back there. We’re looking for some scantily clad bathing suits to run behind him in his lavish abode. Hey Kyle, you’re going to take us through some web conversion stuff today, so go ahead and just take us through it.

Kyle: Okay, basically what I want to talk to you guys about today is how you can get a return on your investment after you have a website already designed and how you can also implement landing pages in addition to your website to get even higher return on investment and engage with your customer base.

Jeff: Hey Kyle, so when, as we get into this, some folks might not even know what a landing page is, so definitely make sure when you’re showing it to us, you’re kind of calling out, hey this is a landing page and this you know just website design.

Kyle: Sure alright. Well a good example I guess of a landing page would be this one. This is the Cartoon Network, as you can see here this guy is all over the board. While it might be exactly pleasing, you don’t know where to look, where to click, you don’t know what they want you to do. And they probably don’t know what they want you to do either.

This is not a very good website for a small business. If you put all your information in front of the customer at once, they’re not going to know what to read or how to contact you. So you end up with information overload, the consumer just gets lost. They don’t have a call to action, it doesn’t say “pick up the phone, give us a call. Come in and see us” you’re not selling any particular product, consumers will typically just fall off the site, never come back to you and you have a lost opportunity for some ROI from your website.

Jeff: Yeah this stresses me out just looking at it. Like it makes me want to crawl up in a ball and maybe suck my thumb for a little while and just hope it goes away.

Kyle: Yeah this is a bad example. So an example of a landing page for those of you that don’t know, it’s not a full website. It’s a single page with one call to action that is clearly defined. In this example here, you can see the call to action is to watch the video and submit your name and an email address here and hit sign up now.

This is excellent for small businesses to use because they can gather customer information and call them email them, grow their subscriber base, whatever you really want to do. You can implement the same technique on products, if you want to sell one product in particular, instead of putting a video over here, you can list a product or a service, a little bit of information and a big ‘buy now’ button.

That way anybody that comes to that site can read about what one product you want to sell and how to buy it and you can always put a link on the bottom of the site that says ‘do you more of our products?’ But the people that come to that site will probably be looking for your type of products, it was a gym, a fitness membership. You can pitch why your gym is better than everybody else, you can sell your membership and if somebody wants to learn more about how you got started, you could put an ‘about’ button down here at the bottom.

But it’s not the core focus of why the consumer is there, they might just want to see the fitness machines, find out what your price is and then decide whether or not they want to buy it.

Jeff: Yeah and almost any small business from a landing page perspective could use something like this to just say “Hey, come in for a free month membership, a free trial.” Come in for you know “Click here for a 50% coupon” and one of the things that I’ve noticed on this page too is that you’ve now gathered their information in this case and now they’re on your list which you know a lot about and might touch on a little bit here today.

Kyle: Yeah, I’ll actually go in to a little bit more with this right now in the landing page side of things and show you a real example. This year obviously taxes were due and I wanted to find a CPA in the Phoenix area. So I went to Google Maps, I typed in ‘CPA’ and my zip code and these are kind of the results that came up.

Now I went through all these guys and these are just map listings. A lot of these guys have general sites, like jacksonhewitt.com that doesn’t tell me who in particular I’m going to be working with. Now since I’m a small business myself, I typically like to have one or two CPAs that I can sit down with and work with on my specific tax returns.

Jeff: Yeah.

Kyle: So here are two examples of CPA websites that I just clicked on from this Google Maps result. This is the first one, now it’s in Spanish obviously I’m in Arizona. But aside from the language, it’s not a very good website. I see the phone number but it actually fades out which I find very odd.

Jeff: Call us, call us, wait, wait don’t call us, don’t call us. Okay, call us, no, no, don’t call us…

Kyle: The menu is rather small up here and the only thing that they have on their site are questions. They have five questions, they don’t have anything about them, I don’t know who I’m working with, they actually are using a stock photo that they haven’t paid for, I mean it just gets better and better.

Jeff: It’s awesome, yeah could see the X crossed, that’s solid.

Kyle: Yeah, so the first thing I think obviously is I’m not going to work with this small business. They don’t have a web site, I’m going to look elsewhere. So I come down from the Google Maps result, I click here, and I’ve already loaded this page up over here. Now this is a much better website, it’s clean, it’s focused, it gives me just enough information down here that I can read about what they do.

They focus in small business accounting, they have tax saving advice now for additional business consulting services. If I want to get in touch with them, they have a non fading phone number right up here that I can clearly see and read.

Jeff: Hey Kyle, is that one of your biggest tips, to have non fading phone numbers? Would you…

Kyle: Yeah.

Jeff: Is that like a top three?

Kyle: Yeah, have a non fading phone number, that’s a huge plus. If you’re going to do any type of an animation, just make it an animation that calls for your attention. I’ll show you an example of that actually. Now here’s an animation that you can incorporate into your website that isn’t a fade out and isn’t going to hurt your return on investment for any traffic. It’s just a simple little animation that tells a person “this is where you want to go next, you can click the continue button.” So this is a good implementation, this is a bad implementation.

Jeff: Maybe that will be, maybe that could be your next eBook.

Kyle: Yeah.

Jeff: Fading phone numbers, when not to use them.

Kyle: That’s a very good point, now onto maximizing your return on investment when you buy traffic. Let’s actually talk about traffic first ‘cause a lot of small business owners think that if you just put up a website, you’re just going to get loads of traffic and unfortunately that’s not true. If you go to Google and type in any keyword, you’re going to find millions of results. So you typically end up having to pay for the first couple rounds of traffic to get your website on the map and to see traffic coming, to get some business and then eventually, in the course of six to twelve months, your website will start to get noticed by Google and Yahoo and those other companies.

They typically have an algorithm that states ‘any new website is irrelevant,’ you have to be around, you have to have some street credit so to speak where they’ll put you on the map.

Jeff: Okay.

Kyle: In the first six months to 12 months, you want traffic, you obviously don’t want to sit around for a year with nobody coming to your store. So you buy traffic on the internet, one of the most common things for small businesses to do is use pay per click traffic otherwise known as PPC.

Jeff: Okay.

Kyle: And for anybody who…

Jeff: And that’s pay, as in pay money per click. The reason I say that is because I’ve talked to folks and not making fun of them but people literally thought I was saying paper click.

Kyle: Yeah.

Jeff: As in a piece of paper click. And I’m like I don’t understand how paper, and you can click on it, I don’t understand how that helps me and it took us like 20 minutes before they realized what I was talking about. So PPC is pay-per-click and traffic is the people that come to your site, for those that are, the uninitiated okay.

Kyle: Great, yeah thanks for pointing that out. A lot of times I throw these lingos, these terms, the lingo and I don’t realize that some of these people might not catch this.

Jeff: Yeah same for me, I do it all the time, okay.

Kyle: So an average pay per click situation, you might have to pay Google or Yahoo up to 70 cents or even a dollar for every visitor that they’ll send your way. Now this is becoming more and more expensive as time goes on, years ago it used to be 30 to 50 cents in, just in the past four years it’s skyrocketed it’s because more and more people are bidding on these terms and those search engines are growing more popular by the day, so…

Jeff: And you know Kyle I have a direct situation with that where 70 cents a click is even way low, like that might be an average right? But like in the plumbing industry where we do a lot of pay for performance with another business and we’ve looked into pay per click and some of the keywords, keywords is a search term that people search for right, for folks that don’t know that. Some of those search terms of keywords were $10 plus per click for a local business.

And so the idea of convert and making your website very conversion friendly is obviously huge ‘cause you might pay literally several dollars for a click, meaning somebody just to come to your site, that’s not even calling you or anything else.

Kyle: Yeah exactly, I would not recommend, even with as nice of a site as this is, I would not recommend spending 70 cents to a dollar or more to send traffic to this website because your call to action isn’t clear enough.

Jeff: Yeah.

Kyle: You might, customers will find my phone number, they might not. They might want a different piece of information, you know this was what I was looking for but if they have a hundred visitors and only one or two are looking for it. You know they spent $70 to $100 for just me and that might not be a good return on investment.

Jeff: Yeah.

Kyle: So the biggest thing I want to touch on with this is when you are building a website, upgrading your website, or considering building an additional landing page, is to define their goals before you do anything. It’ll help you in the development cycle because you’ll be able to tell the web designer what you want them to accomplish. Make the ‘continue’ button, the ‘buy now’ button and ‘sign up’ button, the phone number, whatever your goal might be.

That’ll be forefront in the designer’s mind when they start coding your website and you will see more and more people taking the action that you wanted to because you defined it up front.

Jeff: Which is not nearly as common sense as a small business might think, they might think “I get a website and it’s set up to convert” and that is just not the case.

Kyle: That’s not true, most people are thinking that people want to find all the information about their company, who the owners are, they don’t really want that information. Typically they want to know how much is it going to cost me to join or buy your product or service and what’s in it for me? That’s really all they want to know, they don’t want to know about the nice building you have and how nice the drywall is or any of that other stuff that you care about.

Jeff: Yeah.

Kyle: They don’t even know how profitable you are, they just want to know that you’re going to give them a bang for the buck. So you really have to define the goal and the customer view, why are they coming to you? Why should they pick you over your neighbor, it really, it’s an outside in perspective that you have take when building these sites.

Jeff: Yeah.

Kyle: And then after you define your goals, I’ve already touched on this but design your landing page or your website to meet those goals. Make your phone number big, make your ‘sign up’ button big, your web form, that needs to be right there core focus. And the first design unfortunately is not always going to knock out of the park, you really have to focus in optimizing and tweaking your design to beat your goals. If you really want to see a higher return on investment, you have tweak, nothing is… I mean there are homeruns.

Sometimes you build a site and it just flies, you might have a conversion rate, everybody that comes to your site, you have a 40% conversion rate. What that means is that 40% of consumers who come to your site end up buying your product or service, that’s fantastic. But what if you can get that at 45% or 50%? You could have a much bigger year, 10% doesn’t sound like much but over the course of the year, it’s a lot of money.

So we want to optimize your website and a great tool that I am not affiliated with in any way, I’m serious I’m just a big fan of it, it’s called Optimizely optimizely.com now what this tool does, I think it’s like $50 or $70 a month. It allows you to make your site a drag and drop interface. That you can move content around.

So for example, I don’t think they have a live example on here, let’s see features, good to have it, not anymore so I’ll just show you. For example, this site right here with the Optimizely tool, anybody without coding experience would be able to take this slideshow and click and drag it down and then move this content up.

And you might not think that’s a big deal but suddenly you have a phone number, your information up here and images down here. You might run some traffic to it and see you get a 1% to 2% bump in conversion rates. You might find you get a 10% drop in conversion rates. But then you know this is the best layout for my website. Simple small updates and tweaks that anybody can do without having coding experience by open tools like this for $50 to $70 a month, fantastic tools.

Jeff: And a note on conversion, Kyle had talked about conversion being them buying your product or service but other forms of conversion are just really whatever action you want them to take which a lot of the things Kyle you’ve done, the conversion, the action which is literally for people to sign up with an email and for us with the plumber pay for performance things that we’ve done.

The conversion is to get them to make a phone call right? It’s literally not, obviously you eventually want them to buy but they’re not going to buy over the phone for that and we don’t want an email in that case. We’d rather have them pick up the phone because usually people are [hot]. Each business has different conversion goals which is what you’re talking about like you design your site based on what’s the one goal I want, you sort of start there and then design out, so just so many people don’t do that.

Kyle: Exactly, that’s the big thing. Let’s see here, I’ll show you one more example, a company Stevia the sweetener, they recently hired me to build them a landing page for a sweepstakes they’re doing, in their case they called it a sweets takes instead of sweetening product.

Jeff: Nice.

Kyle: And they came to me and they said “Kyle, we want a landing page that’ll announce the prize that we’re giving away.” They’re giving away almost $4,000 worth of products, a bike, a grill, KitchenAid blenders, gift cards, all sorts of stuff that you can see down here. But aside from that, they wanted their customer’s contact information, they wanted to have names, addresses, city, Zips, emails. They wanted that information because they could eventually use it to target market their core audience.

So for them this is their conversion like we’re saying, this is what they want out of their website and so I built the website with this above the fold meaning you don’t have to scroll to see it. You have a big arrow pointing to it and the ‘sign up’ button is one of the first things you see after you look at this bike and maybe a couple things that are up here, giant register nets, your eye will see this in the top five things you see on this page.

Jeff: And I want to touch real quick above the fold ‘cause that’s a conversation I’ve had with a lot of small businesses too. The above the fold originally, that naming came from the newspaper industry and when you get a newspaper and it would fold over, anything above the fold was what you would read and see and ads and things like that. If your ad was below that then it would cost less.

Well as Kyle just touched on, above the fold in the internet and on websites means on most, ‘cause there’s all sorts of different sites, screens and browsers and things like that but on most screens is your main call to action, that main conversion point is it above where somebody would have to scroll down.

So say somebody had a really tiny screen, Kyle would design this so that site out now is still above where they would need to scroll down, and that’s what above the fold means from a business owner standpoint and so many businesses just totally miss that too. They just… the call to action, they don’t get around to it till the bottom of the screen or something.

Kyle: Exactly, now this size right here, I’ve done this so many times I have a rough idea, this size right here is what you’d see on those old monitors, you know the projection monitors the… this is what those people would see on that monitor. So as you can tell, this registration form is still above the fold, the prizes are still above the fold, the picture is still above the fold.

If somebody scrolls down, the only thing they read about are the terms that this bike is worth $2,200 the grill is worth $350. So the most important stuff is above the fold for the oldest of monitors and computers and then a larger screen like I’m using here on a 17 inch monitor it’s all right there for me too. So it’s a universal design I guess.

Jeff: Yeah that’s good to show that because then people can get a sense for not just designing for what they see on their screen, yeah.

Kyle: Yeah there’s a big, big variety of browsers and monitors and everything. You have to take them to consideration. And actually that leads me into the next point of doing web development. Now a lot of small business owners might have a small budget and they might not think that they can hire a graphic designer or a web designer. So a lot of them embark on doing it yourself. Now web development as we’ve already talked about, it’s a lot more than just getting a site online.

You have to take into consideration above and below the fold, the goals and objectives that you have, the aesthetics of the site and graphic design elements. Does your site come across as professional like this one or does it come across as this? A lot of standard out of the box HTML packages that allow you to design sites for $5 or $10 a month, end up looking like this.

Jeff: Right.

Kyle: And you spend hours trying to make it look better, it just never does.

Jeff: That’s right, this probably did take somebody hours to get to this point.

Kyle: Yeah, the layout in everything is probably all they focused on, I mean they spent hours probably looking for that photo.

Jeff: They’re like “yes, nailed it, that’s it. Hand coming out of the paperwork, that’s it.”

Kyle: So you might want to consider contacting a professional. If you don’t have an artistic touch, because graphic design does take an artistic touch believe it or not, it’s like painting, not everybody can paint well. Some can and if you can, do it yourself, if not seek outside help maybe it’ll make your business more professional.

And then cross browser compatibility, now everybody has their own personal choice. I personally, I use Safari and Firefox on a Mac and that’s because I’m a developer. Now Jeff you’re on a PC.

Jeff: I use Chrome.

Kyle: Yeah I know tons of people that are in Chrome and Internet Explorer, they use Firefox on Windows and Firefox on Mac, totally different. So you have to imagine that even if it looks good on, even if the website or landing page that you build yourself, looks good on the screen you’re looking at it on, have you tested it in Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8 and 9? Four totally different versions, Microsoft did it, I have no idea why.

But they all interpret your website differently, and same with Safari and Firefox and Chrome. So you really need to take the time to download all these web browsers and test it if you’re going to do this development work yourself.

And then the coding side of things kind of ties in with the cross browser compatibility but if you’re going to code it yourself make sure you can code well. Dirty code is slow code, meaning if you can write basic HTML your site might pop up, but if you have bunch of out of date tags or anything of that nature, your cross browser compatibility, it’s going to go down really quickly.

It’s not going to display properly, it’s going to be slow loading and that leads me into the five essential elements that I want to leave you guys with of what you should do if you’re going to do this yourself and what to look at.

So design, you want to minimize those distractions, make sure your call to action is clear, your goal, your telephone number, your signup form, your ‘buy now’ button. Make sure your conversion point is forefront your design and minimize the distractions that you might have. Because again you don’t want to end up looking like this, nobody knows what to do on that website.

The second is tweak. After you’ve designed it, play around with it, make sure it loads on all those different browsers or computers that I was talk about. Pull it up on an iPhone, an iPad, an Android, pull it up on your laptop, your desktop, whatever you can get your hands on, make sure that it loads in under eight seconds.

Typically if somebody finds your ad or sees you on Google, clicks on your link, they will wait eight seconds for your website to show up before they close out. Now I didn’t make up that statistic and I didn’t do the research on that statistic. So it might be seven, it might be 10. But I typically found that more and more people agree that eight second is the time window you have to sell your customer and not just have them look at a blank white page.

Jeff: Hey Kyle, along those lines I heard somebody give a training one time about, they were split testing a landing page and I think they’d had, it was a landing page or a webinar page and they found that when they were able to maximize their upload times or in this case what do you call download or upload?

Kyle: Download for…

Jeff: Download time and they actually saved it, they actually cut off a second and they said their drop off rate was, like went down by 25%, like literally it loaded a second faster and it was already a fast loading it was like priority loaded it like eight seconds and it started loading at seven or six seconds and they said they literally, it went up, like they couldn’t believe how much it affected it.

Now that’s not going to be true all the time, but it definitely was true for them so I’ve definitely heard and I don’t know what the number is but I definitely, that’s usually the benchmark right, don’t wait any longer in the seven or eight seconds to have it up there.

Kyle: Exactly and the big thing is, I mean think about that, on your iPhone say you’re on 3G right? Your 3G speed is slower than the cable internet at your house or what about grandparents or parents that are still on dialup and don’t have cable internet. Everybody is connecting to the web in a different manner at different speeds, sometime 4G, 3G cable, dialup, so that eight second rule really opens the door for everybody. Because somebody on dialup is used to a slow load time, eight second website will typically load in about 10 to 12 seconds on dialup.

But it will load eight or less on cable, so you still have the opportunity to serve those clients. And some of the things that go into the loading times are the image resolution and the size of your images. Make sure you optimize them, if you have Adobe Photoshop, if you’re one of those guys, use it, do a save as or web, it’ll reduce the size that your phone can be posted on the web with while maintaining the integrity and look and feel of it. So it’ll download faster basically.

Jeff: Yeah.

Kyle: If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you might want to seek a professional photographer because they could help you out with that.

Jeff: Yeah.

Kyle: JavaScript and clean code, JavaScript is something most people are not going to mess with but use these three things when you’re talking to a professional designer. For a person doing it yourself, you’re probably not going to understand it but clean code, minimize JavaScript that is slow or has open loops and optimize your image size and resolution. If you tell a designer to do those three things, they’ll typically produce a website that loads quickly for you and you won’t have to think about anything. But that the lingo that a designer needs to hear, resolution, JavaScript and clean code.

Then next, after you’ve invested your time and your resources whether it be your time or your money in a professional to do it for you. Make sure you invest some money, set aside a thousand dollars at least to do some pay per click, to buy some traffic by displaying your banners on another website. To do an email blast, to generate email newsletter subscribers, anything that somebody tells you to do whether they’re professional or maybe a friend that had some success, it gives you some advice on where to get some traffic for your website.

Set aside money so that you can test your website and see how your customers come in your website engaged. You don’t want to have all the, you don’t want to spend a month of your time and a thousand dollars in building this awesome site and nobody ever sees. Make sure you set aside something to test it and get some money back…

Jeff: Oh yeah.

Kyle: That’s a big thing a lot of people misinterpret that “I don’t want to spend 70 cents on a click from Google, but I just spent $3,000 on a website” it’s like well you’re never going to get any of that money back if nobody sees your website.

Jeff: Yeah.

Kyle: Invest in your success. The next thing, monitor the results, Google Analytics, I’ll say that again Google Analytics, it’s a free service, anybody can sign up for it, it’s a simple piece of code you add to your website and then you can login to Google Analytics at analytics.google.com and you can browse how all users or how the visitors on your website are interacting with your website.

It’ll show you where they drop off, where they click, how often they click, it’s a really powerful tool and it’s absolutely free. So you should use it…

Jeff: Yeah, it’s pretty simple to use, Google has tons of videos to show you how to do it, so if you’re kind of afraid of it like most people would be. But man once you get the dashboard and you get to see you know what people do on your site and where they’re going or how long they spend on your site. You’ll start to realize you need to work on conversion.

If you haven’t done the design yet and you just put on your existing site, you realize “hey people leave in four seconds.”

Kyle: Yeah.

Jeff: Clearly you’re not getting conversion.

Kyle: Yeah it’ll show you where everybody drops off to, you might have a great homepage that everybody clicks on, they visit another page but then you might have one sour page on your site that a lot of people click out of your site and they don’t want to read about your product anymore and you know you just have to spend time fixing that one site or that one page to get [users] to stay on your website. It’s amazing what this tool can do for free, highly recommended obviously.

Jeff: Yeah no doubt.

Kyle: …lies my fifth element to success online is so this every six months. I’m not saying redesign your website every six months, I’m saying make sure that you tweak your design, you define your goals and objectives and you monitor how your changes are effecting the performance of your website.

If you do this every six months, you will find that you have a much more successful year as a small business owner with your internet presence. The reason being six months, sounds like a short amount of time, but in the internet it’s amazing, it’s the same, the internet is the same as the computers and hardware coming out. You know every six months or every 12 months, it’s outdated technology, the same goes for web design.

In the past four years we’ve seen primitive websites now turn into dynamic ecommerce solutions that people can interact with and virtually build a house or go on virtual real estate tours, there’s so much more you can do with the internet now that computers are getting more powerful. So every six months take a look at your website, see if your goal is still the same and optimize and tweak your design – excuse me – to make sure that you’re achieving the goal that you want.

And that really is the core five elements I think that anybody, small business owners in particular should look at when they’re considering investing their time or resources into web development.

Jeff: Yeah these are honestly no-brainers it’s just that people don’t… they don’t recognize the importance, hopefully they have after this training. Kyle for folks that want to… are now panicked and realized they’re in more trouble than they realize or they now actually feel like hey they’ve got somebody that could maybe help them, we’re going to obviously include your website and things like that in the show notes below and links to Optimizely so people can check that out, Google Analytics, things of that nature. Can people reach out to you and work with you in some capacity, what do you recommend?

Kyle: Sure yeah, people can contact me on my website, supertechmedia.com you could see it right here.

Jeff: Okay.

Kyle: And they can pick up the phone and call me anytime 561-200-7888 you can browse my full portfolio of work I’ve done on supertechmedia.com you can read about my background, my bio, my team and I are ready to assist anybody that wants to have a professional manage their online web presence. Whether they just want a landing page developed, they want some Google Analytics integrated to their website, they want to start collecting email addresses of their customers. We have packages that’ll suit just about any small business owner because that’s our core market.

We help small and medium size businesses take it to that next level on the internet. And we don’t like our customers to be spending money unless they’re seeing a return on their investment. So the core thing about Super Tech Media, when I started it, I wanted to make sure that every customer that built a website through me, earned back at least double what they invested with me and pretty much all my customers have experienced that and that’s why I’m still in business four years later, I’m doing this fulltime and I absolutely love it because all my customers are making money on what they’ve invested money in, so that’s a great feeling.

Jeff: Yeah man for sure. Well hey thanks for being on the show and taking the time to walk people through this. To you this is easy but to other folks this is a whole new world, and everybody thanks for watching today. If you’ve gotten some great info out of this today and you feel like this is going to help your business. Just share this with, I don’t know, maybe 500 other business owners today and just spend maybe the weekend just going through it and share it all over the place.

Or if you feel like you’re not up to that task, maybe share with a couple, we sure would appreciate it and if you want to get these shows sent right to your inbox, we have multitude of opportunities for you to sign up on our site and we will send the new trainings as they come live right to your inbox so you don’t have to scour our site everyday like I’m sure that you all would be. And Kyle thanks again for being on here, thanks everybody for watching, we will see you on the next show. Take care, bye.

Kyle: Bye

Jeff: Hey guys, welcome to Get the Phone Ringing Show where small businesses come to copy success in 45 plus categories weekly, I’m your host Jeff Wilson, it’s very nice to meet you. And our show today is about stopping spending so many hours on your business and start making more money all through pricing adjustments, yes pricing.Now you may be thinking “I can’t adjust my pricing, my pricing is what my pricing is” well we beg to differ and our expert trainer today Brad Farris will show you how to think about your pricing. Literally you’re going to watch him, in essence over his shoulder as he would consult a client to start thinking about who their top clients are, how their pricing models can be adjusted and really how to make more money and spend less time on your business doing it.

Or spend the same amount of time and make a lot more money. It’s actually pretty simple when you go through it and Brad’s written an eBook just for this topic and this training touches on the overall principles of that eBook, then he’ll give you the eBook at the end of this, you can find that on the show notes. So Brad Farris, why listen to him?

Brad has consulted over 100 small businesses in the Chicago area, so he’s seen every industry under the sun and he’s applied this pricing model to just probably about every industry you can think of. So if you’re kind of wondering “could this really apply to my industry?” Again I think you might be surprised. Anyway don’t take my word for it, why don’t you watch the show and see for yourself, I’m really excited to share it with you, we will see you inside the show, thanks bye.

Hey guys, welcome to the Get the Phone Ringing Show, I’m your host Jeff Wilson. I’ve got a fun guest with me today that’s going to talk a little pricing, his name is Brad Farris, Brad thanks for being on the show today.

Brad: Hey, I’m happy to be here.

Jeff: Hey Brad, where are you logging in from?

Brad: I’m logging in from Chicago, Illinois, it’s a beautiful sunny day.

Jeff: Nice, [Chi] town. Hey if you want to just jump in at the pricing stuff, we are dying to hear about it ‘cause everybody wants to know how to price their products for maximum profit, so…

Brad: Alright let’s do it. So first a little bit of background, I’m a small business advisor I work with small business owners, so all the time I’m kind of the trenches with the small business guy. So my clients are usually kind of that 10 to 100 employee small business.

Jeff: Okay.

Brad: And what I’ve found, that kind of surprised me working with these guys and usually this is more on the smaller end but what I found that really surprised me is a lot of the men and women that I’m working with are working really hard, they’re growing a terrific business and yet they’re not making the kind of money that they had expected they were going to make as a small business.

Jeff: Oh yeah.

Brad: So people might be three, four, five years into their business, they might have a business that’s grossing half a million dollars, a million dollars and they still aren’t making as much money as they were making in salary when they were in that corporate job.

Jeff: Ouch.

Brad: Yeah it’s not fun, right?

Jeff: It’s not fun.

Brad: ‘Cause you’re taking all the risk of being a small business owner and you’re not making the kind of money that we need to make. So this presentation is geared toward, and there’s more than I can do in just the 20 minutes that we’re going to be working on this together.

Jeff: Sure.

Brad: But this presentation is geared toward getting the small business owner oriented toward how do I get past this? How do I work less, make more, that sound good?

Jeff: Yeah that sounds perfect, I mean not for me, I want to actually work more and make less but for a lot of the people that are watching the show, they might be interested in it for some reason.

Brad: Alright. So, well I’m going to start off by talking about something I call the U Curve and this is a curve where we’ve got profits on the vertical axis, sales on the horizontal axis right?

Jeff: Yeah.

Brad: So when we start our business, we’re down here, we got neither sales not profits, right? But the good news is that our overhead is really, really low so with just a little bit of sales we can tend to generate some pretty good profits, right. We’re in our basement, we’re working a million hours, we’re kind of a cheap cooking bottle washer, we’re doing the QuickBooks, we’re doing the prospecting, we’re delivering the service, we’re the one man band.

Jeff: Yeah.

Brad: And that can be a really profitable gig, but if we’re good at it and we kind of start to get those profits in, then we realize that this is not scalable, right. We can’t do twice as much business with the one man band, we need to start adding some help. And so maybe we hire a bookkeeper, maybe we get a real phone system or a real email system. Maybe we start hiring some employees, maybe we get an office, right? And all of these things help us to grow our sales but they actually hurt our profits.

Jeff: Okay.

Brad: So as our business grows, our sales can grow but our profits start to drop off and somewhere along here it levels, out and it levels out at whatever the business owner’s tolerance is for not making money, right?

Jeff: Is there a tolerance axis on this?

Brad: Well that’s what this little arrow is, whatever you decide is the minimum that you can possibly live with, that’s where this is going to flatten out.

Jeff: Okay.

Brad: And so for some people it’s 40 grand, for some people it’s 100 grand, but it’s still not great money when we’re talking about the size of business and the risk.

Jeff: Yeah.

Brad: And what I tell people and when you’re at this point, it’s not easy. A lot of business owners at this point say “screw it, I made more money when I was on my own” and they go right back over here. Right, they fire everybody, they close down the office and they go back to making money and then they realize “crap, that didn’t really work, now I’m back to working 100 hours a week and I’m still getting more clients in and I don’t want to say no to them.” So that’s not really a sustainable answer to the U Curve.

Jeff: Sure.

Brad: But what they don’t know when they’re sitting at this point is that the reason I call it the U Curve is ‘cause it does come back up over here right? Because we only need one phone system and we only need one office and we only need one mail server. And so once we’ve made those overhead investments to bring us down the U Curve, then eventually we can start going back up again.

Jeff: Okay.

Brad: The trick is, we want to get through this as fast as we possibly can right? We want our U Curve to look like this and not like this.

Jeff: Right.

Brad: Follow me?

Jeff: Yeah.

Brad: Okay, so what we’re going to talk about next is how to accelerate our way through the U Curve.

Jeff: I like that.

Brad: And the trick to moving yourself through the U Curve more quickly is actually right in the center of this Venn diagram. So let me explain what we got here, obviously we have three circles. The blue circle represents the group of things that you are the best in the world at, these are the things that you’re just fantastic at, that you’re going to give massive value to your clients, you can do it in your sleep, you’re just snapping a lot right.

Jeff: So my blue circle would be really small then? Do you want to like a little separate blue circle over the side and be like this is Jeff’s…

Brad: Well we can just scale it back it up, we’ll just zoom in on yours okay.

Jeff: Yeah just take the corner of the box and just shrink it down for mine.

Brad: So the blue circle is the things that you’re the best in the world that you’ve developed confidence, either you’re really good at and for most business owners, when they get started, this is what they start their business doing. It is the thing that they’re really good at.

Jeff: Sure, that’s usually what they leave their job at right?

Brad: Exactly.

Jeff: That’s kind of how it starts for most.

Brad: Exactly, but what’s interesting is they find that not everything that they’re good at is stuff that they can get paid for right? So there’s a bunch of stuff out here that they’re really good at but that no one wants to pay them for. And so the green circle is the things that you can get paid for. So it’s good that we’ve got a good solid overlap here of things that we can get paid for.

Jeff: So the blue circle might be like I’m really good a foot massages.

Brad: Yeah.

Jeff: But I need to make money as a chiropractor, although actually chiropractor could give good foot massages that’s a bad example.

Brad: They could, yeah so they’d be some overlap there right, but in order to be a good chiropractor you have to do more than just the foot massages.

Jeff: Yeah, okay.

Brad: Okay and then the red circle, the red circle is a tough one, the red circle is the things that we really enjoy doing, it represents our passion, the things that are fun for us to do. And what we find out is, and again this is something that during this U Curve cycle, people are trying lots of stuff right? When you’re growing your business, you kind of follow where the opportunities are and there are a lot of business owners that end up doing a lot of stuff that’s just not a lot of fun for them.

Jeff: Oh yeah.

Brad: And so you’ve seen folks that end up in that situation?

Jeff: You’re looking at one who’s had that situation from time to time. In fact I find that a lot of the, not energy but a lot of the sort of strategy that I put in to the things that I do, is to try to remove myself from the things that I’m either not good at or really don’t enjoy. Even though I might be good at them, they’re just not the kind of things that I get enjoyment out of, so I end up putting them off, whatever. And I think, that was true back when I used to do homework and that’s true you know when you do business, it just is the same thing, you just put stuff off that you don’t want to do.

Brad: Yeah and you put stuff off and then you end up delivering it late to the client and it’s a bad situation for them and the truth is, if you’re doing stuff that you can get paid for and that you’re good at, but you’re not enjoying it, you’re headed toward burnout right?

Jeff: Yeah.

Brad: You can only do that for a certain period of time. And when we’re actually doing stuff that we’re good at and that we love to do, we can work 100 hours and it doesn’t feel like we’re working like crazy right, ‘cause we’re passionate about it, something that we’re enjoying and we love to do it.

Jeff: Yeah.

Brad: Alright, so obviously what we really want to find are those things that we’re good at, that we can get paid to do and that we love, that’s the center part of this circle right here, right. That’s the sweet spot that we want to end up in. And what I tell people, I mean, when I’m working one on one with people, the first thing we do when we get to this chart is we take out a customer list.

And so we take out the customer list and we say “okay let’s sort it from the person that paid you the most last year to the person that paid you the least. So we’re going to start with your big customers first and we’re going to put them on the Venn diagram,” right? And so Mike, we do something for him that we’re good at, we don’t enjoy it and he doesn’t pay us very well, so he’s outside of, he’s in the blue circle but outside of the green circle.

Jeff: He’s in the danger zone.

Brad: Exactly right, Maurice he pays us really well, but we’re kind of making that stuff up as we go along and it’s really not a lot of fun, right. I have one client that I did this with recently, he’s like “no my top three clients they’re out here, I’m not good at it, they don’t pay me well and I really don’t have any fun doing it.”

Jeff: You’re like “well I don’t really know where to start then for you.”

Brad: Well no, I do know where to start…

Jeff: Yeah exactly.

Brad: You need some different clients.

Jeff: Yeah.

Brad: Because in order for us to sustain the business and to make a lot of money we need to be in that center circle, right?

Jeff: Yeah, that’s cool.

Brad: So when we’re looking at this circle, now we can end up with dots that are all over here right. So the ones that are only in one circle or that are in no circle, we know those are not clients that we really want to spend a lot of time with.

Jeff: Okay.

Brad: The people that are down here, I’m going to call this Area One that you really enjoy the work and you can get paid well at it, but there are people that are better at it than you, you need to get better at that right? We need to improve our skills, ‘cause if we improve our skills then we can drive that into the center. So again, those are easy, the ones that we find down there, we’re enjoying it, it’s fun, there are people that are willing to pay us for it, we just need to get better at it, so that’s pretty straightforward.

Area Two over here, where we’re really good at it and we really enjoy it, we got to figure out how to monetize that, right? So that can be a little bit more difficult than just getting good at things. We have to figure out who it is, or how it is that we can get paid to do that stuff that we enjoy and that we’re really good at.

Jeff: Yeah that seems worthwhile and tough.

Brad: Yes, right. It can be very difficult, it can require some creativity, but it’s like you say, there’s a drive there right. It’s something that we know we’re good at and that we enjoy, there’s got to be a way to get paid for that.

Jeff: Okay.

Brad: And the two things that you need to think about are, am I approaching the right clients? Right, so the people that I’m working with right now might not be willing to pay me well for it, but are there other people who are willing to pay me well for it?

Jeff: Sure.

Brad: And then the second thing is, how am I getting paid? Right, and we’ll talk about this a little bit later, some people are getting paid hourly and part of the problem is that hourly doesn’t always pay well because of the dynamics of getting paid hourly especially if it’s something you’re really good at, you do it really fast, it doesn’t make you a lot of money.

Jeff: Yeah right.

Brad: So should it be a subscription, should it be a fixed fee, there are different ways of getting paid that might make this stuff more valuable to us. So Area number Three is the toughest, right. So this is something we’re good at and that people will pay us for but we really don’t enjoy. And the problem with number Three we got to quit doing that stuff.

And that’s hard ‘cause it’s stuff that’s paying and I’m not saying we ought to quit doing it right now, immediately like I’m going to call those people up and say “hey, I’m not going to do this for you anymore.” But we have to create a plan that gets us away from doing this stuff that is over time going to burn us out.

Jeff: Now, I would think that number three would also be a candidate for, if I’m a business and I have that there, that that might be an opportunity for me to outsource or to be a middleman and contract that out, is that also an alternative that you talk about?

Brad: Yeah, as long as you’re not doing it, right?

Jeff: Yeah.

Brad: This is stuff that you don’t have a [bashing] for.

Jeff: Right.

Brad: And so one of the things that we talk about in the book and we didn’t mention this at the outset, but I wrote a whole eBook about this and you can get it at the EnMast site and I’m sure you’ll link it up in the show notes down below. But this is the key place you can, like you say, you could partner, we could outsource it or we could just raise price and use price to control demand, right. So the more we raise the price, the less of that we’re going to do.

Jeff: Right, and then you might start loving it again.

Brad: Yeah, right. There is a price of which it becomes fun again.

Jeff: Yeah you’re like “that’s a thousand dollars an hour, I love this now, God I love doing this.”

Brad: So if we would get back to looking, now that we’ve looked all around, we look at this center, the stuff that we love to do and that is really good for us, this is the stuff that we want to do more and more of. And what I tell people is, the key to getting more stuff in that center triangle here, it’s a little bit surprising, it might feel a little bit backwards.

But when you raise your prices, what happens? When you raise your prices, the people that continue to work with you are the people that love what you do, right?

Jeff: Yeah.

Brad: If you have a range of clients, let’s say you have 20 clients and they’re all willing to work with you at a thousand dollars a pop, if you go to $1,200 a pop, the ones that, “you know what you were doing for me was okay, I liked it but you want to blow my doors off” those are the ones that leave right?

Jeff: Yeah.

Brad: The ones that stay are the ones that are like “Brad, you are brilliant, 1,200 bucks, oh my gosh forget it. An extra 200 bucks, let’s go, let’s keep going” right?

Jeff: Yeah like “I was surprised you didn’t raise your prices before.”

Brad: Exactly, right and so for every business owner that’s out there who’s thinking “I’m working like crazy and not making crazy money,” there are clients that you’re working with right now that would pay you double for what you do. They’re the ones that, for whom you are this sweet spot, right? That you are so passionate, you’re communicating exactly, I love doing this work and I am great at it, there isn’t anybody else that could do this work for you.

And so for those clients, the value exceeds what you’re asking for, right?

Jeff: Yeah.

Brad: So those people were the ones that will pay a higher price. And what’s great about that is most of those clients, if you go down your list, like you saw your list, those are the clients that are already in this sweet spot, they’re the ones that you enjoy working with, you’re having fun with. They trust you, right they don’t look over your shoulders they’re not penny pinched and looking at everything that you do on your bill and saying “hey, how come that took you so long.”

Jeff: Right.

Brad: And you’re really good at it, so they really appreciate it they’re getting a lot of value at it. So if you focus your marketing efforts on the people that are in that triangle, then you can raise your prices and you won’t get the kind of price feedback or price pushback that you’re concerned that you might get.

Jeff: I mean it’s, yeah it’ almost, not almost, this is like a fundamental vision quest that you go on to find out where can I, what does that customer look like, one of the marketing terms that a lot of people use now is avatar, so you create an avatar for who…

Brad: Right, persona.

Jeff: Who that ideal client is and his name is Steve and he’s this old and he does this and this and he’s this kind of client and this is the way he likes personally. It’s almost like you are, not almost I know this is what you’re doing right. You’re basically stepping back and saying what does that ideal client look like. Could we raise prices for the existing ones that look like that and then how do we find more of those, right?

Brad: Right, and that’s exactly right.

Jeff: And I would think one other thing that you may talk about in your eBook or certainly I know a principle that probably isn’t too far away is when you look at that ideal client base and say “how could I design a product that might be even better for them?” That might be even “I could charge more, deliver even more of this type of service or something” where you’d reach out to that demographic and say “well what else would you like?” ‘Cause if you like working with them, they’re passionate about you, they’re willing to pay a premium.

Brad: Yes, well again when I’m thinking about that business owner who’s in this part of the U Curve they’re coming down, they’re in the flat part of the U Curve, to some extent what we do when we’re stuck in that place is we just reach out and we take any business that comes, right? What most business owners think when their profit are dropping is I just need more sales.

Jeff: Yeah, that’s panic zone right there.

Brad: Exactly right, so when you start grabbing things because we think we can get paid for them but a lot of those things that we end up grabbing in that cycle, I mean there’s stuff that’s in this green circle but it might not be in the red or the blue circle, right?

Jeff: Yeah.

Brad: And so we grabbed a bunch of stuff that’s taken us off away from this core center value of the things that we’re really good at and the things that we’re delivering excellent value for. And so putting it on this grid helps us to kind of refocus and say “okay, some of this stuff out here, I just need to stop doing, I need to finish these projects up and then not take more of that work.”

And that’s really scary, when you tell a business owner “yeah I don’t take that kind of work anymore” it makes them nervous like oh my gosh, well then how am I going to pay the bills? Well you’re going to pay the bills because you’re going to get more of this good stuff that’s right here.

Jeff: Yeah.

Brad: And you can look at those clients like you’re talking about, look at those clients and say “what do they all have in common? What is it about them that makes us attractive to them. Why is it that they love working with us?” and then further “how did I meet them, how did I come across them?” So you can focus your marketing and sales process so that even though you’re narrowing your focus, you’re working with a more specific type of person. Your marketing and sales process actually takes less time, right?

Jeff: Oh yeah and I think this is a different topic, there’s a lot of rabbit holes you could go down on this but when you identify that class of customer,

Brad: Yeah.

Jeff: And you really spend the time to design exactly what they want, so now you maybe don’t make them use the product or service that everybody uses, maybe design something just for that demographic. Odds are they have a referral base of folks that are like them that they could refer you to as well right. Like you could find that when you deliver something custom to them, they become a passionate evangelist for your company which you have, it seems, I could see where that would even be less marketing effort right? Because referrals would come easy.

Brad: You know and that’s a great topic, let’s talk about referrals real quickly. When you’ve got a problem, let’s say you’ve been traveling internationally and so you have a problem with taxes and how you’re going to handle your income taxes when you’ve been in three different countries making money in different ways, right?

Jeff: Yeah.

Brad: That’s a really specific problem. And so what you’re saying is you know “I can find a lot of tax accountants but I don’t know if I can find the tax accountant that knows about this international issue.” The guy for whom that international work is right there in the center of their sweet spot, that’s the guy that you’re looking for, right?

Jeff: Oh sure.

Brad: So if he represents himself, if he puts himself out to the market place and says “you know the people that I really love to work with are these expats that are in a whole bunch of different countries and they have really complicated tax needs. But I’ve figured all that stuff out and I can handle it.” When you hear that, you’re like “this is my guy.”

Jeff: Oh yeah.

Brad: Right? So the more narrow, the more focused you can be in describing to the world what this center sweet spot is, the easier it is for those clients to pick you right? The client that’s going to fit in this spot, if you can really communicate that clearly, it’s going to be attracted there like a magnet.

Jeff: Yeah.

Brad: So that’s, part of the purpose of this is that when we’re eliminating all this distracting stuff that’s out here, it creates capacity and that capacity allows us to do more proactive marketing where we’re really reaching out and looking for this ideal client that’s in the center of the sweet spot, that’s going to close much more quickly, that’s going to love what we do and that we can charge them much higher price too.

Jeff: Now some businesses are more set up for this strategy than maybe others, right? Like some, this is like riding a wheel house and other ones they might have as big of opportunity to do this. But do you feel like this, you know in your dealings and traveling with small, medium businesses over the years. Do you feel like this is applicable to just about every business in some way shape or form?

Brad: The people for whom it’s a requirement as service business, right? Any service business, the challenge and opportunity of a service business, is you can do anything, right?

Jeff: Yeah right.

Brad: If I want to be an advertising agency tomorrow, I’ll just go out and find a client who’s willing to pay me to do their advertising and I’m an advertising agency.

Jeff: Yeah.

Brad: So service businesses have this problem in space. Manufacturing and distribution businesses usually have a more narrow focus, because they’ve got capital invested in some way or another. But I’ve done this with manufacturing businesses, I’ve done this with distribution businesses. And you’d be surprised how many of their product lines and you know straying out off into some crazy land and again it’s because we were chasing sales.

Somebody came to us and said “well if you would sell this thing to us but make it this way and paint it brown and package it in this other box, we’d buy it?”

Jeff: Right.

Brad: If they go, “well that’s easy” but it turns out that it’s not that easy.

Jeff: Yeah and it takes their eye off the ball on the other things they probably should be doing.

Brad: Exactly.

Jeff: Which is a cost that you never really, I think businesses never really identify the like lost opportunity of pursuing what they should have been doing all along.

Brad: Yeah opportunity cost.

Jeff: Yeah.

Brad: So let me show you how this works. Let’s say just for instance that we have 10 clients – and I’m bad at math so I’m going to use easy math – at a thousand dollars each right?

Jeff: Okay.

Brad: And so that’s sales of $10,000 right? But if we’ve got our ideal client, it’s the people that really love what we do, let’s say we could charge them $1,200 right? So now we’re going to do that at $1,200. But of the 10 clients, maybe only nine of them are our ideal client right? So now how much do we have?

Jeff: 11,800 right? 10,800.

Brad: Yes.

Jeff: Let’s make it 11,800 that way it just looks better. We’ll fudge the math.

Brad: But even at 10,800 you’ve got more money and fewer clients.

Jeff: Yeah and better customer service for them.

Brad: You’ve got people that love you. You’ve gotten rid of that one client that was chewing on your liver and complaining about the bills and nothing was ever right for them.

Jeff: Yeah.

Brad: And you’ve got more money, what’s bad about more money?

Jeff: I mean I can’t think of anything off hand, can I reach back out to you if I come up with something?

Brad: Yeah we can work on that, why don’t you take that as homework Jeff, you can send me an email with what’s wrong with more money.

Jeff: More money bad, more money bad.

Brad: But here’s the truth, what I’ve found with most of my clients is, it’s not really a 20% difference that we’re usually giving people. Usually when we get to the right price for their services, it’s usually more like a 50% difference, right? And so at a 50% difference, maybe it’s not nine clients, maybe it’s six or seven clients but if you had seven clients now at $1,500.

Jeff: That’s 10,500.

Brad: There you go, your math is faster than mine and I’ve done this a couple times. Now you’re making still more money than you started with, with 30% fewer clients.

Jeff: Yeah.

Brad: So I mean it’s one of those things that is kind of magic, right? We’re making more money and we have fewer clients just by focusing on these guys that are in this center ring.

Jeff: Yeah and then the last thing that haven’t shown there yet but is the idea that okay now you focus on those types of clients and you go get three more of them, now for the 10 clients you’re making 15,000 instead of 10,000 yeah that’s huge.

Brad: Right and that’s just where I was going is that now not only you have, you’ve got fewer clients you’re making more money. But when you get those next few clients, they close faster, you’re running around chasing a bunch of RFPs and going after a bunch of business that you’re never going to get. So what I tell people is that if you stay in this sweet spot in the middle here, you’re going to do things kind of, you’re going to do kind of the same thing over and over again.

I’m not saying exactly the same thing, but your work is going to be more similar than it is going to be different.

Jeff: Sure.

Brad: And so the proposals were to write, the projects are easier to plan, you have more confidence in the deliverables. You have more confidence in the timeframes and so the whole business generally speaking gets easier.

Jeff: Yeah, it’s systematized.

Brad: Right.

Jeff: Yeah for sure.

Brad: You’re making more money and you’re not working as hard.

Jeff: Yeah dude I like it a lot. So do you have anything more on this topic today?

Brad: No, that is good, this is exactly where I wanted to go today.

Jeff: Yeah that’s awesome and so folks we will put some links down here for ways to get in touch with Brad and his company and Brad’s got a lot of exciting things going on, starting a new entrepreneurial community.

Brad: Yeah.

Jeff: He’s got his business advisory and Brad you just want to mention real the entrepreneurial community website.

Brad: Sure yeah, we’ve got a new website that has been up about six that it’s an entrepreneurial community as you mentioned, it’s a place for business owners to come, to meet each other, to get some information like this. In fact, one of the things that I’ll send you Jeff, I’ve got a link to this Venn diagram her that’s got a whole explanation about how to use and everything so people can just pop in, grab it and put it to work.

Jeff: Oh cool.

Brad: And that’s really what EnMast is all about is that through working with the small businesses and my consulting business, I’ve got like a hundred of these things that I’ve done with small businesses over the years, and so we just decided to type them all up and put them in PDFs and we’re going to put them on the EnMast site. If you join as a member, you’ll get access to all the tools and templates that we have and so what we say about it is, when you’ve got a problem, you can pop right in, you can get the tool you need, you can get back to work.

So you’re not starting from a blank sheet of paper, you’re starting from stuff that is time tested and proven so you know it works.

Jeff: Yeah it’s like years of refined strategy.

Brad: Yeah exactly of what’s worked for other business owners.

Jeff: Yeah.

Brad: So that’s the idea of what’s going on at EnMast and then specifically if you want to go deeper on this issue of pricing and focus, we’ve got an eBook that’s up there that’s free, it’s called Getting from Puppy Profits to Big Dog Earnings, if you look, right now it’s right on the homepage, it’s on the sidebar in the blog, you can link right through there and get yourself a copy of the eBook, that’ll take you a little bit deeper into the material that we talked about some more.

Jeff: Okay, that’d be great. So we’ll link up to all that stuff so that’s easy for people to find it. And then we’ll put your Twitter on there as well so people can follow you there. And everybody who’s watching hopefully you learned as much as I did today and as you’ve seen Brad can go a lot deeper with this. So this was sort of an intro to it and if you’ve enjoyed the show and you’ve learned something today and you feel like there might be other business owners that can learn something as well. Then please spread the love, maybe spread it to, if you know 100 business owners, maybe spend the next six to eight hours just sharing this nonstop. If you don’t have that kind of time, maybe share with a couple.

Brad: That’d be good.

Jeff: And if you want to get updates and new shows coming in to your inbox, then you can sign up right below this video or somewhere on our page, we always have it easy for you to sign up and we’ll send you new shows as they become available. And again thanks for watching, Brad thanks for being with us today, we appreciate it.

Brad: No worries, it’s great.

Jeff: Alright, take care guys, bye.

Jeff: Hey guys, welcome to the Get the Phone Ringing Show, where small businesses come to copy success in 45 plus categories weekly. I’m your host Jeff Wilson nice to meet you. Today’s show is a doozy, it’s something that you’ve probably never researched or learned about before. It’s about writing and F*$%’ing Book in your market space which will turn into leads, turn into an authority in your market space, it does so many things for you which we cover in this training that I think you wouldn’t have ever thought of.

Now you’re probably thinking “well I don’t want to write a book, I’m not looking to sell books.” It’s not about selling books, trust me this isn’t a sales book kind of training. This is becoming an instant authority and separating yourselves from your competitors kind of training.

Now Jim Kukral, our expert trainer today has written traditionally published books, actually wrote one two years ago and since then has written I think eight and has another four more in the works to produce. And what he uses them for is to generate some sales and certainly that’s a revenue stream for him. But mostly is to generate passive leads into his business weekly because everybody just sees him as an authority on whatever he writes a book in.

Now there’s a lot of steps that he gives you to go through and consider if this is for you and actually how you would do it. So he really breaks it down, this isn’t as daunting as it would initially seem and there’s a lot more opportunity than I think you would initially imagine as well. So let’s jump into the training, Jim has some technical difficulties today, we didn’t do a webcam and we lost some of our training, we had to do it over again, so please watch this training ‘cause Jim put a big effort in to bring it to you guys and he also tried to take a 40 minute training and break it down closer to 20. So we appreciate him doing that too. Alright guys, hope you enjoy the show, we will see you at the end, thanks bye.

Hey guys, welcome to the Get the Phone Ringing Show, I’m your host Jeff Wilson and I have a really cool guest with a really cool topic today. Jim Kukral, Jim thanks for being on the show.

Jim: Hey man, pleasure to be here today.

Jeff: Jim is going to take us down a world that many of you have probably never even thought of in terms of actually going to do it and execute on it. Jim is going to show us how you can use a book to generate authority in your market space and leads and actually be a profitable thing to do. Jim can you just jump right in to it and take us through it.

Jim: Yeah let’s do it, so I am here to talk to you about why you should write a book and here’s why? You should write it for sales, leads and publicity. If you are in business of any kind, if you are a coach, a consultant, executive, whatever, if you’re trying to find a job, you should write a book for sales, leads and publicity, because that’s the entire point of all of this.

Now I have written, what is this? One, two, three, I can count nine books and the first one is traditionally published, it’s called the Top one and the last is called Attention! This Book Will Make You Money and I have that traditionally published by Wiley & Sons about two years ago.

Now, since that time I have self published eight books and I have four more in the works and I’m going to show you today how I use all of my books to generate sales, leads and publicity ‘cause you’re going to hear me say that over and over and over again but the truth is, that’s the entire point. In the line of writing, that we write in, in nonfiction, we’re not writing so that we can sell millions and millions of books, it’s just not going to happen, okay?

We’re not going to be Stephen King, we’re not going to J.K. Rowling. There’s a very limited audience for our business okay, I write books about marketing and self help the motivational things and it’s just a very small limit to how many people who actually want that type of content. And it’s going to be the same for you whatever niche or genre or industry that you’re in, there’s a small select group of people aka customers who want to read your book, okay.

So why write a book? You write it for sales, leads and publicity you’re not going to make millions and millions of dollars selling your book, okay. You’re not writing a book so that you can have it in bookstores all around the world and be discovered. By the way, that doesn’t exist, it doesn’t happen anymore, the bookstores are all going away okay. You write a book for the reasons I’m talking about today.

You write a book for a better job, a better career. Imagine walking in to that office where you’re applying for a job and they say “well why should we hire you?” And you say well I wrote a book about the industry or the topic that I am applying for the job for” I’m telling you right now exactly what happens ‘cause it’s happened to me when I was hiring people.

The very first thing I did was stick that person’s book at the top of the pile and then when I looked at it and read it and I said “wow this person actually does know what they’re talking about and they took the time and effort to put it together” and this was years ago before it was super easy to write books. This was when you had to get a publisher and contract and all that stuff which you don’t have to do anymore. I hired that person and I didn’t really even look at the other résumés because that person gave me the expertise that’s proof that they wanted the job because they put the [extra tees] in that.

It’s the best business card you’re ever going to have, if you are going out to get a job with a potential client and you’re sitting in an office and they say “well why should we hire you?” You say “well” you pull out a book out of your backpack and you hand it to them and go “well we actually wrote the book on the topic, it’s called ‘Iguana Training 101’ and we’re the best Iguana trainers in the world.”

And the client is going to look at you and at the end of the day, you know this is true, you know it’s true don’t deny it, you know that the client is going to go, “you know what, we should probably just hire that team that did the book because they have a book,” right?

Jeff: Yeah.

Jim: They put it there, so you know that’s true. The problem is, is that you realize that a book is a lot of hard work to do, but we’ll get into all that. It adds instant credibility to you, so I don’t have a lot of time today, so we’re going to roll away through some of this. Why can’t you write a book, well who can write a book?

Anyone who knows a lot about something, if you know a lot about something, anything you can write a book. If you are in the business of social media, then you should be able to write a small book on Social media. If you’re in the business of how to train Iguanas, you should be able to write a book about how to train Iguanas.

The problem is you’re probably devaluing what you know a lot about, you sit back every day and you’re like “Well I don’t really know a lot about anything Jim” well that’s absolutely not true, if you have a job, you probably know a lot about that industry or that job, about how to do it. If you’re an organic chef, you know how to cook organic food, you know how to teach other people how to become organic chefs. Stop devaluing what you know a lot about.

Jeff: Hey Jim, along those lines, anybody listening to this training right now on our show, owns a business probably or is considering it or whatever. They clearly have to be an expert because they’re running a business every day, right? So along your lines, like you can’t do what you do, you could even have a job and sometimes not be an expert. But if you own a business you pretty much have to be just to stay alive.

Jim: Well here’s what I always tell people, I say “look if you can’t sit down and answer 20 questions or a hundred questions from potential clients about your industry or your business, then you probably shouldn’t be in that business, right?

Jeff: Yeah.

Jim: I mean if you don’t know what you’re talking about, what the heck are you doing in that business. So basically all you have to do is sit down and answer questions. What are the best ways to write a book? It’s just go out there and find the top 20, 30 questions that your customers always ask you and guess what? Answer them and that’s your book.

Jeff: Yeah.

Jim: So who is this book for? Who can write a book, coaches, executives, job seekers, anyone owns a service business consultants, agency, salespeople, small business owners, anyone who’s a subject matter expert.

Jeff: Okay yeah.

Jim: Now when my first book came out, Attention came out, I spoke a lot of really smart people in the industry who had written books before me and they said “Jim, the very day your book comes out, you should increase your consulting fees by three times and increase your speaking fees by two times, and I did. But I thought they were crazy, they were absolutely crazy, and I did it and I got three times the work.

Jeff: It worked.

Jim: And I got two times the speaking gigs, and I got a 50% at least increase in media requests from people contacting me to be on their shows and TV shows and things like that.

Jeff: Were you shocked?

Jim: You know what? I wasn’t shocked but I was just like “wow I can’t believe it” I mean so many people who had done it before me told me it worked, I was shocked that it worked, but when it worked I wasn’t you know… but it does work, it’s unbelievable, it really is. Now this was at a time before self publishing really was easy to do. There was no Kindle upload program where you could upload books. This was the time when you had to still, you were still getting an agent and a contract from a publisher and everything. So there wasn’t a lot of choices in the market place.

Now I use my books specifically to drive leads for my business, I don’t pay for advertising anymore, I haven’t done it for a long, I don’t pay for advertising anymore at all because in every single one of my books, in the front and the middle and the end, there are calls to actions in the book that lead people back to my website that say “how do you like to talk to Jim and get ca free, a 15 minute no cost, no obligation call with Jim.”

And it sends them back to my contact page where they can use a button to schedule and put an appointment on my calendar. You know I’m doing three to five and sometimes more really good leads a week from that. Because people read my books, they come back to my calls to actions on the pages of my websites and they contact me and I get business from that. I’ve seen a 250% increase in my email signup form since I’ve been adding calls to actions in my books saying “Hey come back and get this, and get this” and you use these books to get out in the business card into a potential client’s hands and then they come back to you.

And then you convert them into business, that’s exactly what you do, it’s been going on forever and the beauty of it is, is anyone can do it today because you don’t have to have a publisher anymore, you don’t have to have an agent. Now there’s a couple of people that I want to feature here, we don’t have a lot of time, this person was in the business of collecting money. They knew how to collect money from businesses.

And she went out, she… Michelle went out and wrote this book called Starting a Collection Agency. Again, teach what you know.

Jeff: Right.

Jim: Right? She said “writing this book gave my business much more credibility and because of the media attention, more business. In fact that book is now in its third edition.” Now Michelle has since written 15 books,

Jeff: Wow.

Jim: She’s become so successful as an author that she sold her collection agency and instead making a living selling her books online.

Jeff: Now that’s awesome.

Jim: Teach what you know, do you know a lot about how to run a Subway franchise? Are an expert in this, what do you know? What have you been doing for the last 20 years, 10 years, five years, 60 years that you know a lot about that you can teach other people and putting books for them.

There’s other ways to make money from your books as well from, this guy David wrote this book about managing and he sold $1,600 worth of his books from the back of a room at an event he was speaking at.

Jeff: Oh wow.

Jim: Marc wrote this book called Ask Without Fear and he got recently published which is one example and he sold over 4,000 copies, that’s a lot of books to sell believe me. The average author in the nonfiction space is going to sell 500 books for the lifetime of their book, not a year, for the lifetime.

Jeff: Which is really the paradigm shift in this idea for folks that books never even occurred to them, right? Most small businesses writing a book would never occur to us, right? Because you think “Well I wouldn’t make that much money, I wouldn’t know what to write,” but what you’re saying is this is a total paradigm shift, it’s not about how many you sell, though some people can do that, it’s about what it gets you outside of that book.

Jim: Yeah, the opportunity is here to actually, now you can have an opportunity to make money and have sales as well, but the real reason I believe is to write a book for what we’re talking about today, and this woman Amira, she’s a fashion model, she turned entrepreneur and she wrote this book.

And she says “before my book I rarely booked speaking engagements, since my release last fall, universities, school groups and organizations constantly reach out to book me for events in addition to opening another revenue stream for my business for consultations.” A fashion model wrote a book okay, called Branding. This is one of my favorite ones here, John wrote this book about, and he helped people like do the flow type [tile flow] in their office and all that stuff.

He says “I dropped off a business card after a short interview and did not hear from them for months, after three months went by, I dropped off my newly released book. They followed up with a call and asked me to start consulting there permanently.” So look, walking in with a résumé it’s fine, but guess what you’re one of 10,000. When you walk in with this book and you hand it to the person, the recruiter, the CEO whatever, you get added to the top of the list.

So what’s stopping you from writing a book? You don’t know what to write about, we covered that, you write about what you’re an expert at, what you know a lot about stop devaluing. You don’t know how long to make the book, look the future of books in my opinion in nonfiction are between 10,000 and 35,000 words, in other words, a book that somebody can download on their iPad or their Kindle or read within a short plane ride.

Jeff: Okay.

Jim: You know a plane ride from Cleveland to L.A. right? In my opinion and tell me if you agree, I don’t think that people want to sit down and read a book that’s going to take them six hours to read about email marketing or how to train Iguanas right? People come online to have a…

Jeff: Not at all.

Jim: No, they come online to have a problem solved fast and that’s where they use Google, because Google gives them the solution to their problem fast that they find their solution to their problem and they move on with their day. That is the future of nonfiction books or how to books or books about anything, people want the information quickly and they want it fast and they want it good.

So if you write 100,000 word book that could have just been condensed into 10,000 words, you know you’re going to have – in my opinion – much more success with the 10,000 words. One of the things people love about my books and you’ll see that in the reviews on Amazon on my books they always say “Look, this was a no nonsense, got down to the point, told me what I needed to do, kick in the butt.”

And that’s what people want, they want to read a hundred thousand word vampire book not a hundred thousand word book about how to set up Twitter.

Jeff: Yeah I totally agree.

Jim: So get past that thing that’s stopping you to thinking you have to write 100,000 words, you don’t. You also don’t write a book because you don’t know how to write it. Here’s the truth, open up Word document and start writing, it’s as that simple. The days of having to have special formatting and bibliography and all this crazy formatting stuff that’s what the publishing industry has been keeping us down with for what, 300 years since Gutenberg invented the printing press, is it 200 or 300?

But since that time they’ve been controlling the industry, they said that “you can’t write a book, you’re not the expert, we have to decide that you’re good enough to write it and we know how to format it, we know how to print it.” You know what? Tell those people to go blow because you don’t have that anymore. Anyone can do this, you don’t know what the title of your book, hey look you title the book something that’s going to make people want to find it on Amazon and on the search engines, you title it what the book is going to be about that’s going to help them.

You also don’t know how to make a cover, look you know how many designers are sitting around in their underwear at home right now who have been laid off from jobs? Like people who are really high quality people who would just die to have you give them $100 to work on a cover for them today?

Jeff: Sure.

Jim: And writers, editors, proofers, designers. You know one of the good things for a consumer about a down economy is stuff like this, there’s so many people sitting around who are just dying to take your work. You don’t have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars to get this stuff done. And the other reason that’s stopping you from writing the book is you don’t know how to use it to meet your goals and that’s what we’re talking about today, and you need to get it going. So how do you write a book?

Jeff: You know I have another quick thought Jim on that it’s occurred to me as people, and maybe another block as they think “I’m not good enough to write it or it needs to be this or that or whatever in terms of like quality” right, like you’re not trying to write for some award and I would imagine the truth of the matter is some people depending on the type of book that you write, just having the book is the point, that people aren’t necessarily going to read about plumbing or chiropractic or whatever as far as like the end consumer, they just like knowing that you’re an authority, they might not even want to sit down and read the book is that fair to day too?

Jim: Yeah I mean that’s fair, you do still need to write a good book but…

Jeff: Well I don’t mean, yeah I’m sorry I don’t mean you can throw up [slop].

Jim: I know what you meant, the point is that, it doesn’t have to be like this literary genius okay. I write books like I talk and people love that about my books okay?

Jeff: Yeah.

Jim: I just write like I talk, I don’t worry about all this, everything having to be perfect, you know I use commas in the wrong place and I use lots of exclamation points and I use lots of run on sentences and the editors and proofers can clean that up for you. But, it doesn’t have to be this perfect book, you know so many people don’t write a book because of these things like they’re worried about how long it’s got to be, they worried about what software they have to use to write it in.

They’re worried about it’s got to be perfect, it doesn’t, it just got to be good quality and of course it has to be edited and proofed, so you know, you want to get rid of the typos and you want to make sure that it makes sense. But you can hire people to do that for you and so what I would suggest you do, is just open up a Word document and start writing. One of the biggest tips I give to business owners and anyone who wants to write a book is find out what the biggest questions you have, people ask you about your industry, your business and write those down.

You get 20, 30, 40 ask your sales team “what are the biggest questions we always get asked?” And then guess what, each one of those is a chapter of a book, it’s really that simple.

Jeff: And it will flow.

Jim: Answer the questions.

Jeff: It will flow right out too, it won’t, I mean if you follow your advice and write like you talk, just write like the consumer sitting right there across from you right, that would be so easy, I think people would get hung up on words I know that I would, before I really thought well. If I just started to answer a question, the next thing I knew boom there’s three chapters.

Jim: Well I’m giving you permission, you and everybody else to not get hung up by words, when I had my Attention book done by Wiley, they told me it had to be 72,000 words okay, so I ended up writing 75,000 words. Now that stunk because now looking back, if I would self publish that book myself, I would have made it in to two books volume one and volume two and I think it would have been a better read and I think it would have made more sense but because I’m under a publishing contract, I can’t do any of that.

Jeff: Yeah.

Jim: So let’s talk about this last thing before we, because we’re out of time. The last thing I want you to know is that it’s super easy for you to publish a book digitally and in print nowadays. What I do is I do the digital version first, so I write a book, I go to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, it’s KDP and I log in for free, upload my book, my cover, I put my own price on it, I put my description in, it takes about 20 minutes, 15 minutes to set this up and then 24 hours later I have a book on Amazon that people can download.

Jeff: Wow.

Jim: Now the other thing you should know is that it’s in Kindle form, but a lot of people say “well I don’t have a Kindle,” well guess what the Kindle app, there’s an app that you can put on your iPad, an app you can put on your phone, there’s an app people can install on their Macs on their PCs, so anyone who can download this free app can read your book in Kindle form.

Jeff: That’s a good tip.

Jim: The other thing I’ll tell you about this is, for every 100 print books that Amazon sells, they sell 100 maybe digital books, that was six months ago.

Jeff: Oh wow,

Jim: Within two to three years and my prediction is, within two to three years there will be as many E-Reading devices are there are MP3 players in the world. Think about who you know who doesn’t have an MP3 player built into their phone or an iPod or something. It will be the new norm and this is the way that people will consume content in the future. I do not believe you’re going to be able to walk into a giant bookstore in two to three years from now.

The business model is just not supporting print books anymore, there still will be Indie bookstores and all of that but the truth is that even if you get a publisher and your dream is to get your book in a bookstore, unless you’re Stephen King or one of the people that has proven that they can sell books, your book, they may send one book to one bookstore. But the dream of you walking into a bookstore in your neighborhood and looking at the row of your books in there, is a false dream, okay.

Jeff: Wow yeah.

Jim: I don’t want to crush anyone’s dreams, but that’s the truth of it, okay.

Jeff: Dream crusher.

Jim: Yeah, so the truth of it is that if you want to write a book, you do it for what we talked about today, you put the digital version up first and you use the digital version to get it out to millions and millions of people faster. You know I’ve given away over 30,000 copies of my books in the last six months, and I don’t care about it because…

Jeff: Wow.

Jim: Yeah I want those books in the hands of potential customers who then contact me for business. Now you can do print options as well, it’s called print on demand, and I use a company called Createspace.com which is owned by Amazon. And essentially all you do is go to Create Space and you create a book project, you upload a manuscript copy of your book in a high resolution cover and the beautiful thing is once you’re done, it links it to your Amazon page, so that when someone goes to Amazon, they have the choice of ordering the print version of the book or the digital version of the book.

Jeff: That’s cool, I like that.

Jim: So if they order the print version, the order gets sent to Create Space, Create Space prints one copy of the book and ships it out to them, they never even realize that you don’t have a warehouse full of books sitting around. So you can do digital and print, okay and it’s a great way to do that for the printers because you can have small copies, runs of your print book made for like 2 bucks a piece and then sell them yourself on your website or take them to events and all of that stuff.

Alright so I know I’m over time, I want to show you just one more example as how I do this okay.

Jeff: Yeah please do.

Jim: I wrote a book called ‘Write a F*$%’ing Book Already’ and the people said “why did you put a swear, curse word, sort of [sudo] in the title” and I say “You know why, because there are literally like a thousand other books out there about how to write books and I needed to standout a little bit” and basically I believe in that, I would think that everyone should write a F*$%’ing Book already.

Jeff: But I agree now.

Jim: So what happened was I wrote this book and I put it out there and I got all these people, every person, not every person but so many people who read the book then sent me an email after and they’re like “alright Jim, you sold me, how do I get started?” And I was like “Okay, I guess I got to come up with a training program.”

Jeff: Okay.

Jim: And I actually did, I came up with a training program that I’m actually selling right now, it’s week one of the live training right now but if you’re watching this on a future date, you can go to this web address and see we’ll probably have a recorded version for sale. But basically I created a training program, so people now come to me, ask me to help them figure out how to write a book and I created this simple training program that I’m just recording and I’m going to be able to sell to people over and over and over again as a lead generator from the book, okay.

Jeff: Yeah.

Jim: So this is truly passive income, being able to put expert material out there, using its call to action somebody back to a training program or contact form, this is just another example of how I can do this, how you can do it. There’s no reason you can’t do the exact same thing, because you know a lot about something, you can put it together, train people, you can do this.

Jeff: Now Jim so for folks that are watching this and this resonates with them right, they get okay yeah actually this does fit for me, I would have never even thought to do this, should they go to digitalbooklaunch.com/writeabook/ should they go there to look into your training to see, ‘cause I would imagine it’s sort of hard to figure out where to start right, so you have your book on how to do it and why to do it but your training is to help people I guess accelerate the process. Is that fair to say?

Jim: Yeah, well I mean if you’re not ready to start the actual training and you’re not convinced yet, then just go to JimKukralbooks.com and buy a copy of the book and just read the book. It’s just quick fast read, check out the reviews on the site and if that doesn’t get you going then you know you’re not ready to write a book yet. So the investment for you is really minimal, a couple of bucks to get you motivated and give you more reasons why you need to write a book.

Basically the book is a bigger version of what we just did today which gives you more reasons and tells you more examples about why you need to write a book and more details.

Jeff: More case studies and things like that.

Jim: Absolutely yeah.

Jeff: Yeah cool, well hey guys any of the links and resources that Jim has mentioned, we’ll put in the show notes below this. Jim thanks so much for this training, this is an eye opener for me and I already had a whiff of this, right. I knew that it was coming, for folks watching this, I would think this would be a total paradigm shift for them, are you getting pretty good response from folks when you present this?

Jim: Yeah it’s really amazing and you know in today’s economy and where we are in the world where it’s harder and harder to find good jobs and it’s harder and harder to close business, people are realizing that this is the big differentiator for them and that’s what you got to do to standout. As I always tell people I said “Look you’re going to do it or your competitor is going to do it, the person looking for the job beside you or the person looking to get that client pitching next to you.

But the question is do you want to continue to pay for advertising for the rest of your life, or do you want to finally sit down, take a little bit of time and investment and follow these simple steps to create a book that you can actually use to increase your business, to increase your career and you have to decide whether or not you’re ready to do that. More people than not are saying “you know what? I finally need to do this.”

Jeff: You know I deal in the space or have businesses right now that do this and have done this for the last few years dealing the space of where we help local businesses bring in leads online through Google and search engines and things like that, right. And of the ways I see using a book like this for traditional service business, there’s many way they could use it right? But one of the ways that I see right away is that when folks go online and they search for a plumber, ‘cause we do a lot of stuff with plumbers, and they search for a chiropractor whoever.

And they are evaluating maybe one to three business right, that showed up towards the top, they’re kind of looking at different ones and checking out reviews or whatever. If you have on your website featured up at the top basically in essence “we wrote the book,” right, you’ve instantly set yourself apart. So while that might not be a passive lead generator like it would in maybe some industries, it’s actually probably lead accelerator if you will on a website where people can, they’re trying to differentiate you between everybody else and say everybody else has got okay reviews and you have okay reviews.

If you wrote the book, then you’re instantly that authority, so that’s a way I can see is small businesses are watching this right now and trying to find a space for them to use this kind of method, that’s one that I know would work like it would easily pay you back many times over just to have some way to differentiate yourself and basically increase your conversions on your site.

Well hey Jim, thanks so much for your training today man, like I said it’s been an eye opener, we appreciate you taking the time, especially since we had some technical difficulties to start this training today. Folks Jim was very patient, hung around, we had the compute shut down, we lost our whole first part of the training. Jim wasn’t ready for webcam but he still pulled off the interview, so Jim we appreciate you powering through, thanks for the effort.

Jim: It’s my pleasure and I’m glad to do it and everybody go out there and write those books.

Jeff: That’s right, hey everyone watching today, thanks for the time, like I said you will see links to resources and websites that Jim has mentioned and he’s mentioned a few of those and we put a link to his book in there obviously as well, and if you want to see some more of these trainings without needing to run back to our website daily, you can sign up below or on our site somewhere for daily trainings and we’ll send them right to your inbox and also if you learned something today, you probably know 10 other business owners that would benefit from this too. But we’re not going to ask you to reach out to 10 we just want you to do your good deed of the day and maybe share this with two other businesses and we would appreciate it and I’m pretty sure if you learned something, they would appreciate as well.

Anyway buddy, everybody thanks for watching, thanks for being on the show Jim and we’ll see you guys at the next training, take care.

Jeff: Hey guys, welcome to the Get The Phone Ringing Show, where small businesses come to copy success in 45 plus categories weekly. I’m your host Jeff Wilson and today’s show is for you want to get new business on social media. Blah, blah, blah you’ve heard that a hundred times, right? Probably a thousand times, well today’s show promises that within the end of this training, in 15 minutes times you will have found new clients on social media and he says he’s never been proved wrong on this. So you should check it out for that reason alone.

Also why should you listen to this trainer? Well Ross Hair besides as you can see here being the baldest man on real estate social media. Host SMM Camp which brings social media experts from around the globe to teach for free in all day trainings he’s written several eBooks on social media properties, has owned a few social media companies and is just generally a recognized expert in the field as well as a speaker.

Now if you’re thinking, “I don’t know about real estate social media,” trust me this is not about real estate social media as you’ll see when we dive into this training. Now we have quite a few laps on this one and we have a big reveal about where Ross is actually from at the end. So I think you will find some entertainment and interest in that as well. Anyway guys, hope you enjoy the show as much as I did doing it and we will see you later. Thanks bye.

Hey guys, welcome to the Get the Phone Ringing Show, I’m your host Jeff Wilson, I’ve got a cool guest today Ross Hair. Ross thanks for being on the show.

Ross: Hey Jeff, great to be here. Always answer the call when you come calling.

Jeff: I wish everybody said that. Hey everybody, a couple things to mention first, you might have noticed in that little snippet from Ross, he has a cool accent. At the end of the show, we will reveal where that’s from. A lot of you will be able to peg it right away, some might not and also Ross is not on a webcam with me today because he’s having some technical difficulty, so he will be live presenting on his PowerPoint but just not on webcam. And Ross you’re bringing a ton of social media experience to us today. Could you give us kind of a snippet of what we’re going to learn today?

Ross: Yeah Jeff, you’ve told me 15, 20 minutes I’ll show you in that time exactly what you need to do to find new clients and new business on social networks within 15 minutes of getting off this call.

Jeff: That’s awesome, that’s a huge claim, I’m ready to dive into that, so let’s do it.

Ross: Yeah I’m really awesome like that Jeff.

Jeff: I can vouch for him folks, he is awesome like that.

Ross: You know when I was a little boy growing up in Wisconsin, oh was I not meant to say?

Jeff: Yeah, don’t reveal it yet.

Ross: Alright guys, hey my name is Ross Hair just as Jeff said, so it’s H-A-I-R and yes I am bald so I’ve heard lots of jokes about that. I can say that in 15 minutes, I’m going to show you exactly how to find new clients today on social networks. If you listen to what I’m doing and you do the exact steps I’m going to show you, you will find your first clients today. There’s no question about it, if you don’t, you can get in touch with me and tell me but so far no one’s ever done that.

Jeff: Nice.

Ross: So I know that you’ll find them right away. So really we’re going to talk about social media and social networks in particular and I’m not going to explain to you why they work, the thing I really want you to understand is that everybody is online, everybody is on social networks. So that means your customers are hanging out on social networks, it’s that simple.

So, no matter what business you’re in and again I’m talking to a group of small business owners here. No matter what business you’re in, your customers right now are online and they’re in social networks. Okay, so I’m going to show you how to find them, connect with them and just start to engage them and to get their business. So that’s me, it’s Ross Hair, you can see that’s my picture up there, I’m completely bald at the top, I wrote a social media course for the real estate industry. My primary background is at real estate industry, I also do a lot of work with small businesses right now.

So there’s three ways that you can find new people on social networks, new clients. One is you can engage with them alright. Two is you can connect with them, you can connect with them through local community groups and forums and that kind of stuff it’s kind of more of a long term kind of process that we go through and the third way is that you can really just listen to the conversation that’s happening online right now.

So there’s billions of conversations going on and you can pretty much listen to those conversations, you can look for buying and selling signals. So those are the three ways that social media, guys we’ll talk about. I’m only going to talk about this third one today in the 15 minutes that we have because this is the one that will get you results right now.

Okay so like I said, as soon as you hang up the phone on this call and you log off. And if you do what I tell you to do, you will find clients in the next 15 minutes, alright.

Jeff: Nice.

Ross: Yeah, so let me give you a power tip as we start off. If you want to listen to billions of conversations, you better have some kind of social media dashboard that allows you to do that. So just like say the… I don’t know the FBI can monitor billions of conversations, looking for keywords that indicate maybe a national security threat. Well you can do the same thing online with social networks because the… and this is the key part. It’s because the conversations are all in the public and you can see them which is absolutely fantastic.

I use this tool, it’s called Hootsuite.com if you go to RossHair.com/Hoot that would just connect you to my account. So if you ever wanted to make me an administrator in your account that would make it really easy for me. And what I do with HootSuite is I manage everything from there. So I look at all my social networks, I’ve got them all loaded up. Okay I can do RSS feeds, I can listen to the conversations, I can post things and I can do everything I want. It’s just a great tool so there’s a part that [feed].

Alright, so listen to the conversation. The key is this, is that you can filter billions of conversations so right now people are online talking about your business, right? And talking about things that they need that you sell as an example a service that you have. So it’s absolutely critical that you go ahead and you find them and you connect with them.

Alright, so when I went and I did like a little search here which is ‘moving to ‘Niwot’ this is the name of my little town it’s just outside Boulder, Colorado. And I’m looking for people for my real estate business who are moving to Niwot. So I can see when they say things like that online.

Alright, so a couple of keys for you to do is number one, is that open up an account on HootSuite. Number two, add a keyword search for your town because what this does is that you can see I’ve put a little search in there and in that search I’m monitoring any time the word ‘Niwot’ which is my local town, anytime it comes up. And what it does is it gives me all this great local information, alright from what’s happening locally which I can use, and I can re-share and repost and use it to connect with people.

I can also see who’s active and lives in my community so I can connect with them. Now if you’re a local business, your target audience is probably going to be local residents right? So anybody who lives in your town or is within 10 or 15 miles of your town who may buy your product or service.

So you want to be able to find out who they are, you want to connect with them. You want to start to engage with them online. It’s pretty easy to do… so first thing you do…

Jeff: Hey Ross, can I jump in real quick?

Ross: Yeah.

Jeff: This ability to search in this case for Niwot, is this primarily through Twitter mentions?

Ross: It can be anything, in this particular case, this is Twitter. But I can search it on, I use other tools as well that we search on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, WordPress, Google you name it, we can search everything.

Jeff: Oh wow okay.

Ross: And right at the end of this, I’ll give you the two tools that you need to use as well.

Jeff: Okay.

Ross: And that’s it, so basically I’m listening to what people are saying on social networks about things that are of interest to me and the way I do it is through keyword filtering. So number one, set something up for your town, it’s a great way to do it and the other one is to set up things for what we call buy and sell signals.

So buy and sell signals for your industry would be the things that people would say when they want to buy products from you. Right?

Jeff: Okay.

Ross: So those things would be, if you were a plumber it would be something like ‘my drain just burst.’ But here’s the key, alright you have to cater to the interests, it’s not the same as Google. So in Google everything works on keyword searches and that kind of stuff. It’s different with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter because it really focuses around people’s interests. So what they do, is they don’t always go online and say, ‘hey, I need a plumber.’ What they do, is they go online and in a conversation to their friend they say “my basement just flooded.”

Okay so you, and ‘oh I need to fix’ or ‘I need a new car’ or… their keywords are just very different, okay. And so you’re going to track it based on their interests, about things that they are saying not necessarily on things that they want, although you can check there as well and I’ll show you that in just a moment.

So you got to ask yourself and you’re going to write this down, what are your business keywords? What are the things that your customers would say that would indicate that they need your services or your products? Okay and that’s really kind of going to be the key for you, you’re going to have to work that out. Take your time, I mean you know exactly what they’re saying and next time you speak with customers, listen to the conversation they have with you when they walk through your door. That way you’ll be able to make a nice little list of keywords for yourself.

So let me give you some examples like if you were in the real estate industry like I am, home buyer and seller keywords. When someone says ‘I’m moving to…’ so let’s just say you live Pittsburg, if someone says “I’m moving to Pittsburg” that’s a very, very powerful buy signal right there.

Jeff: Yeah.

Ross: That could be a 15,000 to $20,000 commission check on that one little statement right there.

Jeff: Yeah wow.

Ross: For me I can go, right now if I was in Pittsburg I’d find five, six people who’ve said this in the last 48 hours. Okay ‘house hunting’ okay, so house hunting, people when they go, when they start looking for a home, they say “Oh I’m going house hunting this weekend” or “I went to an open house” or “I need to find a new home.” They say things like this, right?

So you start to monitor those conversations, now you know who’s saying them and it’s very, very easy to reach out and connect with them right there on the social network and reply to what they’re saying.

Jeff: Now Ross are you going to show us in this presentation, are you going to show us maybe how to then strike up conversations or is that for another day?

Ross: Yeah I’ll definitely patch on that as well for sure Jeff.

Jeff: Okay yeah cool.

Ross: So a quick power tip then is that people with emotional needs act now, right? So when I say people with emotional needs, they act now. They’re online, they’re spontaneous, they are ready to make a buying or selling decision right there and then. So this again, it’s like somebody with a plumbing issue, alright, when somebody says “Does anyone know a good plumber?” What do you think that means?

That means they got a serious problem right now, the toiled just backed up, they need to get something fixed real quick. The basement is flooded, the toilet backed up, that kind of stuff. You can see people are asking these questions online, they’re saying “does anyone need a good plumber” or “please let me know when you find one who you recommend, I need to find somebody as well.”

If you see all these conversations starting to happen, okay it’s all about people and then they start to recommend people. This is somebody who recommends Killeene Plumbing as an example, okay. So this is a lot of referrals, so you will be tracking your name as well by the way in case people are talking about you online.

Jeff: Yeah.

Ross: But you see ‘anyone know a good plumber?’ Ah what do you think that means? Four question marks, this is somebody that needs a solution right now. Okay.

Jeff: You know what’s cool about that, what you just showed is that somebody could have a pain point, ask anybody else if they can solve it, and then other people start to raise their hand with the same pain point. So in your example one search brought up… could bring up two or three people in one question that had the same paint point.

Ross: Okay.

Jeff: Maybe a plumber wouldn’t be as good an example because that’s maybe more emergency but ‘my back’s been bothering me’ or whatever along those lines. That’s very cool to see that in action right there.

Ross: Yeah for sure, yeah and you can see. I mean this is just a screenshot, I just took a screenshot off. I put in a search ‘good plumber’ and boom look at the stuff that came up from there, right? Or somebody with a damaged phone, let’s say you have a business, you have a cell phone or a communications business, you want to sell people cell phones, cell phone contracts, something like that.

You know if you go and you do a search for something like ‘dropped my phone’ and you go into Facebook and you type that in, in the search box alright, and then you look at all the search results. Well guess, look what the kind of information you get. Here’s somebody “just dropped my phone in water.” Great, okay of course somebody replies “phone working.” See that would be a clever way for you to interact back with them by the way. See it’s a very simple and easy way to start a conversation with this person.

Jeff: Yeah.

Ross: Just say “oh is your phone working” or [commensurate] with them say “oh that’s terrible” and that you can… it’s pretty easy to do all. You can even say “hey, do you need a new phone?” Here we got “OMG dropped my phone in the toilet, thank goodness it still works.” Alright, so it didn’t work ‘cause we could have sold them something right there. And maybe we can sell them a maintenance planner and a warranty.

Jeff: Yeah we should keep our eye on Laurie though, she’s dropped it in the toilet, she’ll probably drop it in the toilet again.

Ross: Yeah “dropped my phone in the toilet” okay and then see people start to respond. It’s very, very easy to communicate with somebody right there. But guess what, you know if we just dig this in a little deeper, this is Kaycee who if I just go back the screen this is her post right there. So what I do is I just go and click on her link if I want to find out a little bit more about her and now I know something about her.

Basically she’s a teenager who works in Subway, alright and I know that there’s nobody with a more urgent need than a teenager who’s cell phone doesn’t work, alright. She isn’t going to wait two or three weeks to resolve this problem, she’s going to solve it right now you know ‘cause she ain’t going to be cut off from her friends for that long, right?

Jeff: Yeah.

Ross: So that’s the kind of thing we’re looking for. You have to tailor this for your own industry, it makes it pretty simple because you have all this information about that person. So again this is Kaycee that you can go across and you can message her directly. You can of course just go, and so you can send a message straight to her, it’s connected right to her, right? Where you can basically offer her a solution to her problem and I’ll talk about how you do that in a moment as well Jeff.

Jeff: Okay.

Ross: Something really simple like this is you can go in and you can just say something simple like, you could put a comment on her post saying “oh that’s terrible, is your phone working?” I mean you will get a conversation out of that unquestionably, right?

Jeff: Yeah.

Ross: “I’m anxious, I don’t know, it’s not working” and say “well I’m sorry to hear that but when I had a problem like this, I got a great deal from this place” which could be the business you’re pointing them to. So if could be your business or you could be selling as an affiliate, as an example as a social media broker for somebody else’s business.

Jeff: Okay.

Ross: And there’s just many, many ways to do that. If you look at stuff in the health industry as another example Jeff, that people say things like “I’m feeling unhealthy, I need to lose a few pounds, I just started a juice fast, I hate dieting.” Right, and what these people are all doing is they’re actively involved in the process where, if you’re in the health industry and you have health products. You can definitely engage with them on this level.

Look here, someone just says “I need to lose a few pounds” you know “I need to lose some weight.” It would be really easy to recommend some product or a gym membership if you were in the gym business or, I mean you name it, anything in the health industry you can do it. “I need to be healthy” see, people talk like this all the time and it’s pretty easy for you to find those conversations and to connect with them, right?

And they’re giving you a lot of information about themselves at the same way, “I don’t want to feel the way I do” would be real, real easy to start a conversation with Leian.

Jeff: Yeah no doubt.

Ross: Yeah and this was a little site that we had called the 60 Day Juice Fast and it was amazing, as soon as we started talking about juicing and losing weight and that kind of stuff. How many people actually contacted us with solutions where they were basically trying to sell us stuff, so people…

Jeff: Oh.

Ross: …are marketing doing this. Okay, but here’s the key, just identify a need, solve the problem, it really is that simple. And so I’ve shown you how you can find what everybody is saying, right. I’ve shown you how you can track the conversation really, really easy with some keywords and I’ve shown you how to focus on their interests so that you can really respond to them and people just have a need.

So just go up into your search box and type in “I need a…” whatever your industry is, if you’re a plumber, put “I need a plumber in there” alright. If you were in the car industry, just type in “I need a car” and then look what people are saying. “I’m going insane, I need a car now.” Alright, you think a car salesman wouldn’t love to hear somebody say that to them?

Jeff: Yeah no doubt

Ross: …would jump all over that lead right now okay and “welcome to my life.” So here’s a second person with the problem. Okay this Taylor Sciara whoever this is, he or she probably has that same problem as well.

Jeff: Sure.

Ross: They like that okay, “I need to make some money, I need a car so bad.” This is somebody that needs a job and a car. Okay.

Jeff: Wow.

Ross: You see now you don’t want to see the word broke when you’re looking to sell something to someone, maybe you could sell them a loan or a credit card you know. Alright, this is somebody that needs a car, so you see how simple that is. Now to get the sale, so let’s move to the next part, when you want to get the sale, here’s the tip don’t rush in.

‘Cause if you rush in it just looks like spam, it looks like you’re trying to sell them something. You haven’t taken the time and you haven’t had kind of the good manners or the common decency to kind of say hello first.

Jeff: Yeah.

Ross: Be social right? So do a little social research on it. You can see who they are, go and look at their profile. Click on it, see who they are, see what they do, see what they’re interested in and then just give a very, very soft initial first touch. So for example here’s somebody that’s… actually Joyce who’s moving to Boulder, I just sent her a little message saying “have a great time in Boulder, it’s a great place I know you’re going to love it.”

There’s no suggestion of any sale or anything in there and of course she comes back. She looks at it, she’ll probably look at your profile and anyway she just started the conversation back with me. She says “thanks, I plan to visit boulder too” so this was move to Denver, “I hear it’s amazing.”

So there’s a conversation going there, you just got to be very, very careful not to be too spammy and you don’t want to be creepy.

Jeff: Which is hard for you that’s hard for you in particular.

Ross: And of course, if you look here, here’s two messages, it would be as pretty creepy for an old bald guy like me to send a message to an attractive young woman like that. So you got to be very, very careful not to be creepy.

Jeff: Okay.

Ross: So that’s it, and then the other thing you do is you just need to make sure that you identify an interest on their social profile and make a common connection. So on their profile they’re going to say things like about what they do, who they are, what’s going on with them, they’re giving you all this information about themselves.

So when you connect with them, just find something in common that you can connect with right? So as an example say this person was a big runner, it would be easy to start the conversation talking about running, saying “Oh I see you’re also a member of the so and so runners club, I just did a marathon last week” and that “yeah I also ran that marathon.”

And yeah I’m trying to give you silly examples but the point is connect with them, with who they are and what they are interested in. So forget about yourself and your agenda. Just find a common connection between the two of you, it might be you live in the same town, it might be you have similar interests, so you went to the same high school or you know somebody who went to that school or you read the same book. I mean literally all that information is attached to their profile.

And then there’s two tools that I can really recommend to you when we kind of wrap this up for you. As I also use, so one, I use HootSuite to manage and monitor everything and also to listen to everything. And if I want to listen to a wider set of social media platforms I’ll use a tool called socialmention.com social mention so you can see, here you can listen to everything.
k, Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, Photobucket, Reddit, WordPress I mean you can just see, it’s basically everybody. Google, Twitter, Techmeme, Yahoo I mean you can see…

Jeff: Wow yeah that’s huge.

Ross: And what it’ll do is it’ll just kick out a list for you which is absolutely fantastic. I also use this tool ‘cause it’s also pretty intuitive it’s called Kurrently with a K so kurrently.com and what I really liked about it is that it’s actually an antisocial network tool. It’s been set up by a bunch of guys who hate the privacy issues along social media.

Jeff: Okay.

Ross: They hate the fact that everything is public and most people don’t realize it. So they basically set this up to show people what other people can find out about them. And so it’s Kurrently, but the cool thing is I can go and search for my town as an example, I can find all these people that live in my town, they’re talking about my town, so I can connect with locals.

And again my goal if I’m a small business is generally to connect locally ‘cause that’s where my consumer market is, and I can also subscribe to that. You can do this with basically any of these services. I can do a little RSS subscription, see it over here and then the moment that anybody says anything it’ll basically just punch it through to me and can send it to me either on email or just into a subscriber feed. But basically I can hear it as soon as it’s said, okay.

And then finally all the major social networks have their own search tools, I just wanted to show you that most of them will now allow you to do some kind of proximity or radius search. So I can go in, I can do a search for Boulder, again I live just outside Boulder, Colorado. I can go into that, I can set the info by 15 mile radius, so this is Twitter search tool that I’m using, it’s their advanced search tool.

I can expand that as far as I want, okay so here’s the town of Boulder so we can see it and I can go out and I can search for anything being said within, people within that radius. Now I’m actually searching for them based on where they are located. Okay and this is a search on Twitter but you can do it with the other networks as well and if you just look in here, I can also do an RSS feed. Just wanted to show you as well.

Jeff: Wow.

Ross: These people here tweet from Boulder, Colorado that’s easy for me to reach out and connect with them, grow my network and of course you want to grow your network because everything on social networks are viral. The more people you know, the more viral nature of the network for you. And that’s it Jeff, like I said I’m Ross Hair, that’s me right there RossHair.com if you ever want to get a hold of me or anything like that. Just subscribe to my post, I talk about social media there all the time, here’s a post “4 best ways to find local clients on Google Plus.”

Jeff: Hey Ross, I have a quick question for you, of all those things that you can do, obviously there’s a ton of rabbit holes you can go down right, with social media and in this case all these tools you showed us to track it. I mean do you have sort of a recommended guideline for how much time a local business would want to spend on it. Obviously a real estate agent is in a different place than maybe like a plumber, a chiropractor, dentist whatever. But do you have a thought for hey somebody should expect to spend two hours, 20 hours a week.

Ross: Yeah that would be way too much, you’re not in the social media business right. You’re in whatever business you are.

Jeff: Right.

Ross: This is just a tool for you to find clients and make new contacts. I would recommend to do 15 minutes a day in morning, 15 minutes a day in the evening and that’s the maximum that you should do. And even though there’s much, much more opportunity than that available and you could spend all day just connecting and conversing with people, don’t do it, that’s not your core business.

So 30 minutes a day and the way that we teach all our social media stuff is we try and we teach you how to get really smart so that after a while you don’t have to do anything. There’s kind of that tipping point where everybody else does it for you but that’s a whole complicated out of conversation.

Jeff: Yeah, that’s…

Ross: 15 in the morning, 15 in the evening.

Jeff: Yeah that’s 20 different trainings. Hey Ross, thanks so much for your time today man, this is, didn’t really have much to say, just learning so much. Actually I had no idea that you could do that much searching on there from a local business perspective and for the big reveal what’s the accent?

Ross: Oh the accent, so there’s actually two pieces to it for you to think about. Number one as I was actually born in Edinburgh Scotland so technically I’m Scottish. Although I left when I was very young and I grew up in Zimbabwe and then South Africa.

Jeff: Nice, I’m pretty sure nobody guessed all three of those, if all three of those actually muddle together to make one accent.

Ross: I think I’ve got everybody with that Wisconsin thing right at the beginning.

Jeff: I think a lot of people are leaning mid west and then that definitely put them for a ship. Hey everyone watching today, any of the things that Ross talked about, we will put in the show notes and the resources below so that you can find all those and have to take furious notes on everything. And also if you want to see more of these trainings, don’t forget, you can below here somewhere on this page, you’ll be able to sign up in our daily training email inbox and we will send them right to your inbox when we have new trainings posted. We’ll probably have two or more a week and then if you learned something today, please don’t be greedy, maybe you could share this with 10 business owners or more or maybe just one or two.

And that would be your daily good deed, we sure would appreciate it and anyway thanks for watching, we’ll see you guys on the next training. Ross thanks a lot, we appreciate your time today bud.

Ross: Thanks Jeff, always great to hang out with the guys who get the phone ringing.

Jeff: That’s right, alright, see you guys later, bye,

Jeff: Hey guys, welcome to the Get The Phone Ringing Show, where small businesses come to copy success in over 45 plus business categories, I’m your host, Jeff Wilson, naturally nice to meet you and today we’ve got a show for you if you want your business to worth a [damn] on Facebook, and our trainer is none other than Craig Collins, senior VP of Maximize Social Media. Craig is a nationally recognized speaker.

He started three social media companies, he’s managed high profile social media accounts from folks that we can’t mention maybe he will if you talk to him personally and Craig has come here today to show us what to do on Facebook if you really want to build a little tiny mini community or maybe even a big community. But if you don’t do the things that he tells you to do today, you’re just wasting your time and your money.

Without further ado, here is your show training right now.

Hey everyone, welcome to the show, I have Craig Collins here a senior VP of Maximize Social Media. Craig thanks for being on the show.

Craig: Happy to be here Jeff thanks for having me.

Jeff: Now Craig is going to teach us some Ninja Facebook stuff and he’s super busy, so pay attention because he doesn’t do this very often. So Craig, what are you going to teach us today?

Craig: Well I’m going to focus on driving traffic using Facebook advertising and converting that traffic on the fan page to essentially cultivate an audience that you can later sell to.

Jeff: Okay, so a lot of people right now kind of screw around on Facebook but they don’t really do anything to convert it when it gets there, is that right?

Craig: Yeah, that’s right. A lot of people really at most are going to post maybe once or twice a week. But where they fall short is not in the consistency but it’s in the quality of their post. So that’s what I’m going to share today, is really honing in the quality and consistency of your posting so that you can generate an effective Facebook campaign.

Jeff: Okay, cool man you want to start taking us through it?

Craig: Yeah, let’s do it. So I’m going to start off on my homepage to begin with… so this of course this is my main Facebook profile page and we’re looking at the newsfeed. So as Facebook users, we all know that really this is where the majority of people spend their time when logged into Facebook. So we scroll to the newsfeed, checking out what our friends and our family and fan pages we liked are up to these days.

Now I’m starting here because this is really where all the visibility for a business’ Facebook page is going to get in front of your audience. So now keep in mind that nine out of 10 people who like your Facebook page, are never going to return to it. So if you’re…

Jeff: Wow.

Craig: It’s crazy Jeff, yeah if you’re a business with any hopes of really turning your fans on Facebook into clients or monetizing your Facebook activity at all, you have to show up on the news feed. Now Facebook has an algorithm they use called Edge Rank. So this is what they use to determine which posts are going to show up on a newsfeed. So it’s not like coincidence that we’re seeing the post that I’m looking at right now.

So Facebook really uses their algorithm to determine which posts they’re going to submit on your newsfeed, in which they’re going to hide. So again this is key for businesses to keep in mind and really one of the key factors that Facebook really incorporates in the news, in the Edge Rank formula, is the amount of interaction that a Facebook post receives. Okay, so if you go through…

Jeff: And not just for you, right? So not just you as the user, they’re saying just in general when a post is out there, it’s how many people actually participate, look at it, share it?

Craig: Exactly yeah, and particularly for fan pages. So as you can see as I scroll through, a lot of friend’s post are showing up as an example but when we get down to it, if you’re a fan page, if you have any hope of showing up on the newsfeed, you got to have interaction. You’ve got to have likes and comments and shares on your posts, really if you have any hope of showing up here. So, and that’s really where a lot of businesses fall short is they’re not getting that critical interaction to show up on the newsfeed to stay in front of their audience.

Jeff: Okay.

Craig: So I’m going to share with you Jeff in just a second, the type of interaction that we generate to really get people talking on the Facebook page to even out visibility.

Jeff: Awesome.

Craig: So before we get to that though, I want to address really one of the, I think in my mind the most powerful marketing tool that we have available today and that’s the Facebook advertising. So of course on the right side of the page we all recognize these sponsored ads that show up when we’re cruising through Facebook and these ads are key for business owners because Facebook allows us to target people based on the information they provided on Facebook.

So it all starts with everything from our date of birth, our marital status, our gender, our job title to our favorite sports teams and our favorite movies as an example. So Facebook allows marketers to use all this data to create very targeted ads that we display in front of that specific audience. So we can in a very granular way target folks by specific geographic area. So people that live in a specific zip code or in a specific city and then again by gender, by marital status, by their likes and interests, so by using this data that Facebook provides, we can create these display ads that we’re going to place in front of your target audience with the idea of getting them to take action.

So as we scroll through, you can see that we see there are a lot of faces. So we’ve determined that, of course pictures of women are the best, you want to make sure that you do use up-close photos for the most part, so the two that we see here, these are great examples of Facebook ads that will convert well. In addition to that, you also want to pay attention to headline.

So these are also good headlines in that it’s calling out a specific audience so these are people that want to attract boomers with a question mark. Improve your webinars with a question mark. So this is all great copy that’s going to catch people’s attention in addition to the specific copy that we write to get people to take action. So…

Jeff: And Craig real quick, what we’re seeing here specifically, is this an action with you? You’re a marketer, a social media vice president and these types of ads want to attract boomers, founders wanted, improve your webinars. These are all things that you – odds are – have an interest in?

Craig: Right, exactly yeah. So in this case, these marketers have targeted me based on the information that I have provided on Facebook. So sort of they’re targeting me based on my likes and interests, my job title, my job description and so yeah these are very targeted ads that are showing up now. So that’s an example of the power that you can really use to hone in on that specific audience.

Jeff: Yeah for sure.

Craig: So, one other thing that I want to address is there are unlimited number of sites where you can send your traffic from Facebook. What we’ve found is that when you send the traffic to an internal Facebook page, for instance a landing page on Facebook.

Jeff: Okay.

Craig: Your cost per click is much lower than for instance if you send it to an offsite page like your website.

Jeff: Okay,

Craig: Yeah so Facebook will actually penalize you for sending clicks to an offsite page, like a landing page or your website because of course at the end of the day, they want to keep their users within the Facebook community.

Jeff: Yeah that makes sense.

Craig: Yeah so to give you an example, one of the landing pages that I wanted to share with you, this is a Lasik surgeon’s page that we manage.

Jeff: Okay.

Craig: And to give you an idea of the page that we created, here’s an example of a contest page that we created. So we send targeted traffic in this case, these are people live in Oklahoma City, we’ve targeted people that meet the demographics for this particular client, for this doctor, which are, I think he said males and females between the ages of 35 and 55 that live within the city limits.

So we send the targeted traffic to this page and notice the copy, where we’re immediately calling out people that have poor vision and we’re honing in on their pain.

Jeff: Yeah.

Craig: ‘Tired of poor vision, interrupting the moment.’ And then we’ve got a very specific call to action, so you want to keep in mind, you want to tell people what to do on Facebook that’s true on all marketing. But on Facebook you want to tell them what action you want for them to take. So in this case, we’re telling people to click ‘like,’ to win a free Lasik.

So when they click on ‘like’ of course we have the reveal tab which is the fan gate application and on the following page, we’re giving them instructions for how they can enter into the contest. So we’ve got the big orange arrow pointing to the next step which is ‘enter below for your chance to win a complete Lasik procedure.’

Then again you want to capture the name and the email address, and then integrate that with your email auto responder system you’re using.

Jeff: Hey Craig, can I stop you for a second?

Craig: Yeah, you bet.

Jeff: So you just used a terminology there, fan gate?

Craig: Yes.

Jeff: What’s a fan gate, that’s what we’re looking at right now a fan gate?

Craig: Yeah exactly. So a fan gate is where you have essentially two pages. So the first page is telling the visitor to take a specific action which is liking the page and in order to get to the next content which is to participate in this contest. They’ve got to take that action, so the fan gate is essentially really requiring that the visitors take action in order to see the content that they’re after.

Jeff: So in this example, this is kind of the magic sauce for I guess what separates most businesses trying to advertise on Facebook or trying to do anything on Facebook and professional companies that manage this kind of stuff, right? This is, this stuff that you can’t just pull off by yourself very often it seems like. One of the things I’m noticing here, so for anybody that’s watching this, there’s two important things that just happen in this.

First of all they hit ‘like’ so they joined your Facebook list if you will, right? And now that they’ve hit like and they’re part of your fans, you’re trying to get them to be part of your email list. That’s an essence of what you’re doing, so you’ve gotten them to be part of your Facebook community already and now you’re asking them to take one more step to actually get whatever you were going to give them in this case?

Craig: Right.

Jeff: Okay.

Craig: Exactly, and really for businesses that use an email campaign to follow up with their clients and well as communicating with them on Facebook. I mean the response rate goes up exponentially and then we know as marketers, that you want to have exposure really with every piece of media that you can. Whether it be social media, or email, or offline advertising as an example.

When you combine different media to deliver your message to your client, your response rate just goes up tremendously.

Jeff: Sure.

Craig: Yeah. This is a formula that we use for a lot of our clients and contests are very effective. Contests work well in converting that visitor to a fan and capturing their contact information. These days people are not going to like your page just because, so there’s got to be some compelling reason for them to like your page and become a fan. So utilizing contest is a great way to do that and once you’ve done that, once you’ve captured them as a fan. Now the next step is really to create that relationship and to cultivate that community that you’re now creating.

So as an example again this is Lasik surgeon located in Oklahoma City and a lot of businesses have the notion that they can just promote their services or their products on Facebook and people are going to buy.

Jeff: Right, it doesn’t work that way?

Craig: Believe it or not, right? So people go on Facebook to be entertained right? They go there to interact with their friends or their family or their associates, they don’t go there, it’s not a Google, they’re not searching for a solution to a problem, they’re not doing any technical research, so they’re going there to be entertained. So what you want to do as a business owner is effectively create a relationship with your audience through your daily posts.

And I’ll give you an example of some of the posts that we’ve generated for this particular doctor. So, of course being in Oklahoma City, he’s going to mention what’s popular right now.

Jeff: Sure.

Craig: So, this point ‘the Thunder are in the playoffs’ we’re just going to mention that, call that out to the local audience. Here’s another example of a post that getting some nice interactions. So ‘like this post when you find Facebook.’ This particular post received 71 likes.

Jeff: Wow.

Craig: So and the key is to post every day. So you’ve got to be consistent with your posting because your audience is going to expect that.

Jeff: Yeah.

Craig: If you’re truly going to take advantage of the Facebook platform and gain visibility for your business, you’ve got to stay in front of them on a daily basis.

Jeff: 71 likes for a Lasik eye surgeon post.

Craig: Right exactly, and the key to that Jeff is that yeah well it’s not related directly to the practice or to Lasik surgery. However when 71 people like it, keep in mind that Facebook sees that as a highly relevant post.

Jeff: Yeah.

Craig: So number one they’re going to put that on the fans’ newsfeed, and number two, when someone like that post, the average Facebook user has 130 friends. So now your brand has an opportunity to get in front of a potential 130 new people as a result of that fan liking your post.

Jeff: Right, so it’s like 130 times 70 there?

Craig: Yeah exactly.

Jeff: So that’s like 2 million likes then that he could have gotten, right? If I do…

Craig: Exactly yeah, or the impressions for the brand it is what we’re keying in on. So and this is a…

Jeff: So I was obviously kidding with 2 million, that’s literally 7,000 you’re saying by the numbers 71 times 130 that’s 7,000 plus impressions he could have gotten with that many likes.

Craig: Potential impressions for his brand, exactly.

Jeff: With one fine Facebook in this crossword, it’s impressive.

Craig: Right, exactly. Want to give you an example of another page, so this is McGee Auto Service & Tires. So they have several locations throughout Florida and I wanted to point out a couple of things. So there are a couple of posts that I wanted to share with you, so this was posted yesterday by our community manager. This is an image we got off the internet…

Jeff: That’s not your car?

Craig: I’m sorry?

Jeff: That’s not your car?

Craig: It’s actually in the shop right now, I’m having that done so…

Jeff: Dragon breathing is huge on [Veol] right now, so huge.

Craig: So, but just to give you an idea of the posts that we generate for an auto service shop, this is going to appeal to that audience. So this is the type of audience that we’re generating and you can see, we got 35 likes, four comments, a couple of shares. This one is a little more humorous, so we’re asking people to caption this photo. So as you can see, photos are huge, okay.

Jeff: Yeah.

Craig: So if you take anything away from this training today, it’s you want to incorporate photos on your fan page. Okay, in every post you generate, if possible, you want to use some sort of photo that’s going to catch the attention of your audience.

Jeff: You know I found that even personally just, my personal Facebook page, you put a picture up of the family or something and you don’t, and it’s literally like night and day. I mean people will just…

Craig: Oh yeah.

Jeff: Their eyes go to pictures, especially pictures of people they know or things that are interesting, yeah I’ve found that personally to be true.

Craig: Right, exactly. So photos are key for getting interaction on your page and the other thing I wanted to mention was that yeah we’re showing images of things that are not directly related to the business. So you might be wondering well that’s great, you’re building a community and you’re generating an engagement but how does that lead to business?

Well what we’re doing is we’re earning the right to now promote the service to the clients. Okay, so what you want to do, as a general rule of thumb, post five pieces of quality content, non-promotional content – like you just saw – for every one piece of promotional content you send out.

Jeff: Wow, that’s a good tip.

Craig: Yeah, so as an example we were promoting the giveaway that actually I didn’t share this with you. But there’s another contest on this particular page in which we’re giving away $500 Publix gift card. So every five to seven days or so we’ll promote that okay and we got eight people that like it. So what does that mean? I mean that’s another eight times 130 people that are potentially exposed to the McGee Auto Service & Tires page and the contest they were promoting.

Jeff: Yeah.

Craig: So yeah as a general rule of thumb, keep that in mind for generating business on your Facebook page. Now the other thing that I wanted to share with you is you can make use of the apps that Facebook made available in the new timeline format. So these can be super powerful in connecting with your audience and getting people to take action. So as an example when we’re sending traffic to this page, there’s an opportunity for people to shop for tires on the Facebook page.

Okay so the use of the new apps function that Facebook has allowed with the timeline format, we can now essentially integrate the website of the client directly into Facebook.

Jeff: Wow, cool.

Craig: So we can plug in the year, model, make option of the tires we’re looking for and then search for tires right on Facebook. We can also schedule an appointment, so can go to the appointments tab, rather than having to call in to the shop or check on availability, we can go right to the Facebook tab and schedule an appointment. Find my nearest location, so there’s a lot more functionality that’s available in the Facebook timeline than we had previously.

Jeff: That’s cool, so it’s like being able to have a lite version of your website right there in your social community.

Craig: It is yeah, absolutely that’s right.

Jeff: That’s killer.

Craig: Yeah, the other thing I wanted to point out also is I’ve noticed there are a lot of businesses that, well from number one, they don’t make use of this space. So on the new timeline format you have an opportunity to promote your business. This is kind of like a website header, so you utilize your logo or in this case your Mascot and then basically to promote your brand. But one thing you cannot do and keep this in mind is you cannot include any sort of call to action, you can’t include your website address, your phone number. You can’t have an arrow pointing to the like button instructing people to like your page.

So that’s against the Facebook terms of service, so what we see here is effectively all that Facebook is going to allow you to use. So your logo and your tagline is one of the extensive, anything else beyond that and you’re violating Facebook’s terms of service.

Jeff: Which I would assume could be bad.

Craig: It could be bad, yeah they could potentially shut you down.

Jeff: Okay, will they give you a warning usually do you know?

Craig: Yeah they probably would. I haven’t experienced it, I’ve never seen anyone get shut down as a result of that particular violation. I’ve known other Facebook pages to get shut down because of excessive likes. So for instance if you’re buying fans for your page, if Facebook takes notice of that, your page is not going to last long.

Jeff: Okay.

Craig: So there are services like Fiverr where you can purchase five or 10,000 likes or something for $5. I’d be careful with that. So Facebook is really looking for legitimate businesses that have a natural growth rate.

Jeff: Yeah,

Craig: So either through the use of Facebook advertising or organically.

Jeff: Okay,

Craig: So be aware of those other nefarious activities that could get you in trouble.

Jeff: Good use of nefarious by the way.

Craig: Yeah, I haven’t used that word in a long time, so…

Jeff: I’m going to go with that one soon.

Craig: Yeah for sure. So, and I also wanted to point out that on the right side of the page, the Facebook timeline is also, it’s promoting the fan comments on your page. So this is actually a great section that businesses can use to highlight your client testimonials. So as you can see, we’ve got people with “31 years and counting, we love you all.”

Jeff: Wow.

Craig:”I’ve been using Geo my whole life, wouldn’t go anywhere else” so, and when it comes to marketing social proof speaks volumes for a business and testimonials. So this really a key element that I think Facebook has added to the timeline. So as a business owner, you want to encourage your customers when they do business with you to leave a comment on your page, because it’s going to show up front and center when people go to your fan page.

So any time someone has a positive customer experience with your business, I mean offer them a $25 Starbucks gift card, offer them whatever you can in exchange for leaving a positive comment on your page.

Jeff: Yeah definitely.

Craig: Yeah, so I don’t know how we’re doing on time Jeff, but I want to just summarize real quick and then…

Jeff: Yeah definitely, we’re a little over 20 minutes, but you’re spreading some good content love, so I’m not going to stop you.

Craig: Okay good, it sounds good. So really I wanted to summarize real quick what we discussed. It’s incredibly difficult to grow a relevant fan page audience without the use of Facebook advertising. Okay, so even if you spend $5 a day on Facebook ads, if that’s all you can afford, it’s worth it. Because of the targeting abilities to hone in on the specific audience you want to direct to your fan page, you’re able to consistently build a relevant audience for your business.

It’s very difficult to grow an audience organically, unless you have that celebrity status like Jeff does or if you’re like an international brand.

Jeff: Also like Jeff.

Craig: Like Jeff yeah, so you want to make use of Facebook ads to build your audience, certainly make use of the Facebook apps available now, use the contest incentive to… you’ve got to compel your audience to like your page somehow. So use $100 gift certificate or something as incentive for people to like your page and then post every day. So you’ve got to post relevant content, use images and as much content as you can on a daily basis and also interact with them as well.

So don’t just throw up a post and hope a bunch of people comment on it, you also want to have that two way communication with them. So let them know that you’re listening, that you appreciate their comments as well. So that’s sort of a 10,000 foot view of what I wanted to do to cover on today’s training Jeff.

Jeff: Hey man, I really appreciate it, I know that you can go down many rabbit holes on this stuff probably everything that you showed us today, you could actually do a 20 minute talk and then some on it. And in fact everybody who’s watching us today, Craig already did I think an hour and a half webinar today. So he’s done a lot of training today, he’s probably pretty tired. So hey man, we appreciate your time, thanks so much for sharing.

Craig: Yeah.

Jeff: If people feel like they’re at that place now and they certainly recognize it’s going to be tough for them to pull off by themselves. How can they get in touch with you, how could they, they work with Maximize, I mean what would you recommend?

Craig: Yeah you bet. Best thing to do is go to maximizesocialmedia.com we’ve got a great newsletter than we produce on a daily basis, so it’s all original content that we write about social media for businesses Monday through Friday. So definitely sign up for that newsletter and then if you’re a small to midsized business and if you want to look into outsourcing your social media, then you can sign up for one of our three strategy sessions to speak with one of our consultants about your business and see if there’s something we can help you with.

Jeff: That’s cool man, we appreciate the time and I can vouch for Craig’s content, those guys know what they’re talking about. Craig’s been at it for a while, so anyway guys, thanks for watching the show today, don’t forget, don’t be greedy, share this with as many business owners as you can. If you learned as much as I did today, about Facebook and we will see you guys on the next show, Craig, thanks a lot, appreciate it man.

Craig: Thanks Jeff.

Jeff: See you bud.

Jeff: Hey guys, welcome to the Get The Phone Ringing Show, where small businesses come to copy success in 45 plus categories weekly. I’m your host Jeff Wilson nice to meet you and today’s show is about getting a grip on your business. Meaning there’s five frustrations that every business owner has, I’m guessing you have all five, I know I do. And there’s six things that the most successful businesses do.

Yes, there’s only six and I’m also guessing you don’t do all six. So if that’s of interest to you, watch the show. If you’ve totally dominated all six of these categories, you probably don’t need to watch it. I’m guessing more of you need to watch than don’t. And our trainer today is Jim Coyle and his illustrious career. He has owned successful businesses, he has trained and consulted for Fortune 500 clients and in the last eight years, he’s owned a business advisory firm.

I say ‘has owned’ as if past tense, but actually he still owns a business advisory firm. The training he’s going to do today is originally a 90 minute training. He’s actually breaking this up into six training segments for us, so this will be the first training segment in that. So that’s pretty cool, he’s never done that before and he’s never done on a internet show, so that’s pretty exciting too.

So guys, let’s get to it, I hope you will stay tuned and watch this show and get a grip on your business. Alright, guys, here’s Jim Coyle, thanks for watching.

Hey guys, welcome to the show, I’ve got a business advisor guru Jim Coyle with us today, hey Jim, welcome from Kalamazoo I think.

Jim: Yeah, thanks. Good to see you Jeff.

Jeff: Yeah good to see you too man. Can you tell us a little bit about what you’re going to drop some knowledge on us today with?

Jim: Yeah, overall Jeff, we’re going to get into just the how to get a grip on your business. But actually before I dive into that, just a couple things I usually do this in 90 minutes and I actually normally do this in front of a live audience. So I can excitable, so I’m going to have a lot of hand gestures, so I try not to let that kind of have you lose focus on what we’re talking about ‘cause we’re going to talk about some really good stuff today.

Jeff: Well we’ve got you confined in little tiny box there, so that helps.

Jim: Okay good, you know you got to cage me.

Jeff: That’s right.

Jim: So what we’re going to dive into today is these things and first we’re going to really get into the background of the Entrepreneur Operating System which is EOS and give you a little bit of feedback on that. Then we’re going to get into the five frustrations of all small business owners or most small business owners. And then really get to the fun stuff is then the six things that the successful companies focus on, the ones these companies actually don’t have these frustrations and why don’t they through my journey and actually through other people that we’ll dive into here in a second.

We both found that really, or we all found actually that these six key things are really what set the companies apart.

Jeff: Yeah, cool man. Looking forward to hearing about that.

Jim: Yeah, well good let’s jump into it. Actually before I do, at the end I’ve got a really cool that I think is going to make a lot of sense after we go through the presentation, but I just want to tell everybody that free tool at the end we’ll give everybody.

Jeff: Yeah that’s awesome man, stick around everybody ‘cause this is actually going to be a pretty cool thing that Jim is going to include for you.

Jim: So let’s jump into it, so first the overview on the EOS, so the Entrepreneur Operating System. It was created by Gino Wickman, he’s out at Detroit, Michigan. I always kid around and say they were having problems making cars for a while, so it became a hotbed for business authors.

Jeff: A lot of free time.

Jim: What’s that?

Jeff: There was a lot of free time in Detroit.

Jim: A lot of free time all of a sudden yeah, you know some people kind of you know out of work so, but Gino is a great guy. He created this awesome system and he’s been doing it for about 12 years and there’s 38 implementers across the country now that are doing this.

Jeff: Okay.

Jim: So there’s been 2,500 full day business sessions actually done on it. So this is not a new thing or a new concept.

Jeff: So literally tens of thousands of businesses have been exposed to this then, in these sessions?

Jim: Yes.

Jeff: Wow cool.

Jim: Yeah and one of the big reasons is that… the biggest reason that many companies have actually been exposed to it, is because mostly of the book to be honest.

Jeff: Okay.

Jim: The book was just published and I think there is like 10,000 – 15,000 books that have actually been published on it. But there’s a couple business… hundreds of companies actually that have gone through all of these sessions.

Jeff: Okay.

Jim: Now on average, the companies that have implemented this process and this is on average not our high, they’ve grown 18% per year which is actually pretty amazing.

Jeff: Wow.

Jim: Now it’s much harder to track is what they’re doing on their bottom-line, but from everything we’ve seen, it actually looks like that percentage is actually higher on the bottom-line.

Jeff: Hey Jim, what do you mean by bottom-line?

Jim: Okay yeah just the profitability of the company. So ultimately what’s falling in the bottom and what can be put in the pocket of the entrepreneurs?

Jeff: Okay, 18%.

Jim: No 18% is the top-line. We actually think that bottom-line is a actually higher. So 18% top-line revenue level, it’s just easier to track. Small business where entrepreneurs use their money sometimes for their business, that’s a little harder to track.

Jeff: Okay

Jim: So what I want to do and actually before I get to this, what I want to do is actually, the goal here is to just to help you look at your company in a whole new light.

Jeff: Okay.

Jim: Really look at it in a different way and to do that, I’m going to ask a little bit favor and it’s going to make you feel a little bit silly. What I want you to do is to close your eyes, and I want you ultimately to float above your company, really get above your company and look at what the company looks like. And the reason I ask you to do this is because Albert Einstein – pretty smart guy – determined that you cannot fix a problem within the framework which the problem was created. Now I probably screwed that up ‘cause my eyes were closed.

Pretty close problems cannot be solved by thinking within the framework in which they were created. Now Einstein said that and not only did he say that, he proved it. Okay wake up everybody. Yeah, did I get you?

Jeff: Yeah I was just floating over my business.

Jim: Right.

Jeff: My business is so big, there’s a lot to float over so I was still floating.

Jim: Yeah right, the empire, really.

Jeff: Yeah.

Jim: So now, hopefully we got… I know we got Jeff floating over, now hopefully we got all of you floating over your business, seeing all the moving parts. Now assuming that’s the case, let’s dive into this a little bit more. And before I do though…

Jeff: And so the idea of that in essence is basically to get you in a paradigm shift where you’re thinking outside of your business, right? You’re imagining “hey I’m a third party looking at my business to see what I’m doing well, where I have problems.” So you can kind of almost give yourself permission to step outside for a bit. Is that the idea?

Jim: Yeah and what’s awesome is that so many people have written about this, people just have never seen it, connected it as much to Albert Einstein and there’s a bunch other scientists that actually have proved this to be the case. But in Michael Garber’s book the E-Myth, he talks about the idea you got to work on your company and in many regards, that’s what he’s talking about.

You got to get outside of it actually to be able to see it, so today I ask you to do that because that’s going to be really helpful for this stuff we’re going to go through.

Jeff: Okay.

Jim: So another thing, I’m used to actually doing this in front of live presentations and at this point, what I would do is I would actually find out about everybody in the audience, little bit harder on a webcam to find out exactly who’s listening. So but do understand every presentation and not every presenter actually comes off this way, every presentation is actually about you and so if there’s questions or concerns or things that you want to find out more about with this presentation. Please get in contact with Jeff or I in regards to that, we’ll talk about that a little bit at the end.

Jeff: Okay.

Jim: Well let’s jump into the five frustrations then. Now all business owners or most business owners actually have a number of frustrations and we really boil them down to their being really five main ones. Now the first one is a lack of control. They just don’t feel control over their business, ultimately the business is controlling them, they’re not controlling the business. This is ultimately just a difficult place to be, very frustrating.

The next one is profits and if we lost you along the way here I actually mean a lack of profits. Not actually having enough profits and really the point is, is that not getting the profitably you deserve and not getting the profitability your company can actually achieve. There’s been a lot of research done on this and Nexus has done some of this research as recently. But we found that most companies aren’t achieving actually the level of profitability that they actually have the ability to achieve.

Jeff: Okay, that’s the president on line one Jim.

Jim: Right, I got people calling in.

Jeff: Not right now Obama, not right now.

Jim: This is great, sorry about that. The next thing is people, their employees, their vendors, unfortunately sometimes their family. They just have frustrations over people. I always if there’s money in the business, your number one frustration is going to be people. You don’t have money then ultimately that’s one of your number one concerns.

The next one is hitting the ceiling. Now this is a phenomenon that’s been proven by a guy named Professor Larry Greiner that this happens for every company. It’s not any if it’s a win, either you go out of business or you end up hitting a ceiling and so there’s really ways to push through that. If you hit a ceiling you’re at a point where you just feel stuck, you don’t feel like you can actually get through things. You just feel like ultimately you’re not making it and the way that shows up on your sales is that ultimately, you’re probably stuck between a certain framework.

We’ve done a little bit of research and actually even Sir Richard Branson has done some research on exactly where that is, so that’s another one of the big frustrations.

And the last one is trying a lot of stuff. We call these the flavor of the month companies, the owner is bringing in a new idea and in some regards their employees are just as frustrated with them because they’re bringing these new ideas and entrepreneurs aren’t built ultimately to deal with the details and for follow up and unfortunately, these things just get dropped.

Jeff: Okay.

Jim: So those are the five main things…

Jeff: I haven’t experienced any of these frustrations, but I’m sure other people do.

Jim: Right, well I’m about to show everybody why you haven’t actually…

Jeff: A case…

Jim: Frustrations.

Jeff: A Jeff Wilson case study.

Jim: Right, we just studied actually Jeff, I hope that’s a bigger sample size.

Jeff: Yeah.

Jim: Big enough sample size. Now as I mentioned, there’s two discoveries, now in the second discovery, is where there’s hope because what we found is that there was people that did have these frustrations but there was a select few that didn’t like Jeff in Get The Phone Ringing.

Jeff: Sorry everyone, I [dominate].

Jim: Right, so there is hope and what we’ve found is that there was a common threat for all of these business… Gino found this, actually we found this independently, some other people have found this and what we’ve found is that these entrepreneurs weren’t frustrated, they were in fact happy. They really actually had control over business, they’re working with people that they really like and things were working and they’re making the money that they deserved.

So that’s actually where I’d like to spend a lot of the rest of our time is actually talking about that and that’s the more fun stuff.

Jeff: Okay.

Jim: So at this point I’ve actually been talking about them, and them and them and what I want to start to talk about is you. The person that right now is watching this presentation because really let’s focus on what you can do to make changes so you don’t have any of those five frustrations. And what we want to do is actually talk about what it was that these successful companies did. And what they did was that they focused on six main things and when they agreed that they’re able to focus on those six key things, they actually really got to the root of all of their issues and they’re able to solve their problems for good. The problems didn’t just keep coming back around.

To agree they can get strong in those six key components, all the pieces fell into place, the discovery was this, all businesses have six key components. We got a million employees, you got one employee, they have six things that they have to focus on. And just agree you can strengthen those, all those frustrations are greatly just managed.

Jeff: And these are the principles Jim by which that 18% growth that you mentioned year over year?

Jim: Correct.

Jeff: The clients that follow this system, these are the principles that they start to adopt right?

Jim: Yeah.

Jeff: Okay.

Jim: And then beyond this, this has been, this research has gone into other very large companies who haven’t used this. But we’ve found that this is ultimately what made them successful.

Jeff: Okay.

Jim: So we’ll dive into it, so like I said we’re going to start talking about you. So you are the center of this model, your business is at the center of this model and for today’s presentation, I’m going to go into just kind of a high level of these six components and in subsequent presentations I really like to get into deep dive into each one of these and understand the tools that these companies that have grown on that 18% to answer your question although there Jeff is that, is one of the tools that they all use as a part of the Entrepreneur Operating System.

Jeff: Okay.

Jim: So let’s jump in to the components. Like I said I’m going to kind of start at the end of the journey, this is where all of our clients get once they’ve actually implemented these tools or and these components. So the center of it, is your business and the first one… you know and actually before I get to that, one thing that we’ve also realized is that all companies and this is every company deals with 143 things simultaneously.

If you can get control of these six key things, what happens is those things just fall into place, it’s awesome actually. I’ve had entrepreneurs tell me that they’ve been able to take vacations and actually be able to unplug from their business because of actually doing this. So the degree that you can get good at these six key things, all of those 143 things which are just symptoms ultimately go away and they fall into place. So, now assuming you’re still floating above your business, let’s get in the first one.

Jeff: Yeah I am, I never came down.

Jim: Yeah, you live there.

Jeff: Yeah.

Jim: So we’re still floating above our business, what this is going to give you is a new lens in which to look at. So the first one is vision, what I mean by vision is getting all of your people 100% crystal clear on where the company is going and how it’s going to get there. And some companies have the idea this is where we’re going but very few had a clear for all their people the plan on how they’re ultimately going to achieve that.

The next one is people. People, well without great people, you can’t achieve the vision it’s just a truth in business you got to have the right people. Well what’s very frustrating is you hear this top cortile and the platinum group and your high fliers, all these silly terms. But what does it mean to be a great person in your company? And that’s what you have to figure out, we’ll dive into some of the tools like I said in other presentations that actually that gets into what it means to have great people in your organization. ‘Cause what is a great person in your organization wouldn’t be a great person in my organization or Jeff’s organization.

So the next one then is data. Now we’re making decisions on a daily basis, a truth in life is the more data you have, the better decisions you make. So the more information you have, the better decisions you’re going to make. And most entrepreneurs actually don’t have the right data, they have the profit and loss, they have the balance sheet. But what that tells you is where you’ve been. We need to have activity based numbers that show you where you’re going. Be more proactive than reactive.

Jeff: Okay.

Jim: Now organizations that have really good data, they have the data that they need, their vision is crystal clear for all their people. They have all the right people, what ends up happening is it actually creates very open, honest, transparent organization. All the problems, the obstacles ultimately end up getting smoked out and half of them are going to have the ability then to focus on your issues.

Now what’s been proven and there’s been some good research on this says a [lady even] that shows that companies that are successful, the ones are successful from the ones that aren’t, are just very good at identifying their problem and then solving it.

The next one then is process. Now companies that are good at process become more consistent and consistency is very important every type of company. And what you do is you systemize your organization so you can become more consistent, more reliable, more efficient, more effective, more fun and really more profitable because of it. And what we found is that companies that really want to grow or scale the new term now, if they don’t get a grip on their process it just won’t happen.

Jeff: And the training that you give that will go beyond this training today dives into each one of these sections and really breakdown how a company can actually apply this in their favor right?

Jim: Absolutely.

Jeff: Yeah that’s cool.

Jim: And I’m really going to give away the tools, I’m the kind of person who gives, gives, gives and hopefully that people see the value in that of course. But the tools we’ll dive into and all of that kind of stuff that a specific way that companies actually do this.

Jeff: ‘Cause I think as businesses watch this, this sometimes might feel, ‘cause this is laying the foundation right, for what you’re now going to dive into and subsequent trainings and I think as business see this, don’t just dismiss this as, ‘oh this is just you know a very high level management talk.’ Well this is just basically letting you know what’s coming and how these all tie together so that when you dive in and do a deeper training on vision, people, data, issues, process and this mystery last one.

When you do that, that it will actually make sense, it will fit in the big picture. So I wanted to kind of point that out so that people understand like this actually goes much deeper and you’re going to take them deeper on it. We just couldn’t do it all in one session.

Jim: Right and it’s actually good to understand this first anyways and it lays the foundation and at the end the tool I’m going to give you will be great for you, hoping to understand which areas you need to focus on. So it’s designed in that way.

So the next one actually is traction, so traction was the mystery one you talked about. This is so very key, this is where you become much more disciplined and accountable in your organization, you really get your people executing on your vision as I heard Gino say before, he says “Vision without traction is a hallucination” it’s just a dream or a wish.

Jeff: Yeah.

Jim: What we’re prone to say is the right answer is not the solution. The solution is the right answer correctly implemented, so it’s all about execution. A good idea is only that if you don’t execute on it, it’s just an idea. So really what we do here is really get it down so that people are really starting to execute.

Jeff: Okay so traction in essence in this example is in essence executing as you’ve gathered all the information and put systems in place. It’s actually making all of this work, was that the idea?

Jim: Right.

Jeff: Yeah okay.

Jim: In many regards and then having those specific tools that we use to actually make sure that that’s happening.

Jeff: Okay.

Jim: So these are the six components and so to agree that you can strengthen these. What we realized is that if leaders and managers and entrepreneurs can all strengthen these that 143 things just falls away. It’s actually amazing and it’s very cathartic actually a lot of my entrepreneurs just say “Wow, this is great, it’s easier.”

Jeff: I’m sure yeah.

Jim: The idea of making their lives easier is great. So that’s the training, now next time I think, good, so I did put a [side in] so next time we’re going to dig in to vision and that is going to be our main focus for next time. Really digging in on vision, making sure that you understand how to get your vision crystal clear, what it means to have a vision. The training is going to help you ultimately build a strong culture, what it takes to make a great filtering and guiding mechanism, figure out the things that are needed, ultimately to sell more business and to find out what companies who endure for decades do differently.

We’re going to do that, we’re going to dive into that stuff and some other stuff. We’ll have some more tools that we’ll also connect to that as we go and that’s the training.

Jeff: Yeah, and then the free tool that you were going to provide, that we’ll provide in the show notes, the resource section below this video today.

Jim: Okay,

Jeff: Can you tell us a little bit about what that does?

Jim: Yeah okay good, thanks I completely forgot, I made a promise upfront and I almost reneged on it.

Jeff: You were hoping I’d totally forget about it, but I didn’t forget.

Jim: No, it’s great I love handing this thing out. The organizational check-up is this, it actually will help you to see in this six areas, areas that you’re weak in. In so ask the right questions, you be able to do a one to five kind of thing and figure out where your company stands and so it’s great, it’s actually just a really good health check-up on a company. We’re supposed to, you know as guys we’re never good at this, where you’re supposed to go in and get a physical, it’s kind of like the physical for your company,

Jeff: Okay, that’s awesome and for folks that right now are like “Hey I don’t really want to wait for the rest of the training, I’d like to talk to you ‘cause I kind of feel like this is resonating with me, this is hitting me at the right time” how should people follow up with you? We’ll obviously include contact information and things like that again, like I said below this video but how would people work with you next if they wanted to?

Jim: Yeah like you said just contact me and then these presentations they have, yeah they have a slide here so just contact me. So that’s my office line, that’s my direct email, just tell people to give me a call or send me an email and I can get back to them and if they’ve got questions about any of this. So that would be the best way, go out to our website we got a little information in the services and solution section. So that would be probably the best one.

Jeff: Hey man, appreciate you taking a 90 minute presentation and breaking it up and, so one you’ve never broken it up before. Two, you’ve never given it over a webcam interview before so you’ve nailed both of those, so thanks for doing that and for everyone that’s seen this so far, go check out the free tool, we’ll have it below and then we will let you know, actually you can sign up for email updates below as well and then we’ll let you know when Jim releases new trainings. We’ll probably sprinkle those through the next few weeks and then you can kind of keep taking him off bitesize after bitesize.

And don’t be greedy, if you’ve found this information useful, please share with a couple other business owners, we’d love to spread the word and get Jim’s message out there as far as we can and all of our trainers because they do take time out of their day to train you. And that’s about it guys, thanks for watching the show, we’ll see you on the next one, Jim thanks for slicing and dicing it up for us, we appreciate it

Jim: This is great, thanks Jeff, talk to you soon.

Jeff: See you bud, bye.