The $24,000 Birthday, The $140 Million Spent Online, Being Featured In A Rock Music Video, 30x Boost In Revenues In 90 Days… 9 CASE STUDIES … And Other Case Studies Of Web Business Growth
9 Case Studies of Business Growth
Jul 28, 2015
Welcome message from author
This document is posted to help you gain knowledge. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think about it! Share it to your friends and learn new things together.
Transcript
The $24,000 Birthday, The $140 Million Spent Online, Being Featured In A Rock Music Video, 30x Boost In Revenues In 90 Days…
9 CASE STUDIES … And Other Case Studies Of Web Business Growth
This report is a compilation of different businesses, in different industries and their growth stories. Primarily though, it's about leaving you with tips, tactics and insights from each case study that you can apply to your own business. You'll find actionable tips and success strategies through-out these pages. In this booklet, you’ll read some great case studies of business growth. You’ll read of a premium, organic skin care manufacturer who has grown their business from a few products in one niche, to a complete product line, 6X their sales in a few years, expanded to serve a second market, been featured in various media and recently were included in a rock music video ... all from what started as a mother and daughter team. You’ll hear of one man who 2.5 years ago didn’t know what sort of business to build or where to start. Today though, his niche authority site is already worth $300,000 and growing in revenue and value every single month. He’s now positioning himself for a $500,000+ exit. You’ll learn about one of the most impressive men in the martial arts world with over 2 decades of experience, a long list of black-belts and certifications, not to mention countless competition wins. His new focus is entirely on self-defense and he is one of the exclusive partners to an “underground”, revolutionary self-defense program that is endorsed by Liam Neeson (in fact, you’ve seen it “acted out” in Jack Reacher, Batman Begins, Mission Impossible, Wrath of the Gods and other blockbuster movies).
Personal Message from Rob Toth
You’ll meet Charlie who has been able to quit his job and pursue his focus (and impressive skillset) as a rock guitar player using a subscription-based business model. Turning his profitable passion into profit. You’ll hear from a man who raised nearly $100 Million in venture capital, another who spent $140,000,000+ in online ads, and a third who sold over $50,000,000. They’ll provide insights to the big sales and big numbers.
You’ll read a story of 3 strength and conditioning trainers who used to train NFL players but were struggling at developing a web-business out of their skills. You’ll find out how their revenues grew 30X with just a couple of months of key implementations. And others...
Each of their stories is impressive and possibly disheartening if your own business isn’t seeing such growth and fun. Therefore, I’d like to kick-off this booklet with a video that touches on the absolute truth and common denominator that is found in each of these stories. I won’t say what it is here, because I know you’ll benefit more by watching this award-winning video: www.robtoth.com/linkto/amar.html
With appreciation,
Rob Toth
RobToth.com
Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.
- Mahatma Gandhi
www.robtoth.com/linkto/amar.html
LAVIGNE ORGANICS ---------------------------------------------------- 5 How Vancouver, Canada Based Premium Organic Skin Care Formulators Established A Growing Legion Of Passionate Customers, Landed Themselves In 700+ Retail Stores, 6x Their Sales, Landed Tv Appearances, Magazine Features, And Even Inclusion In A Rock Music Video… In Just A Few Short Years. GD’S STORY ----------------------------------------------------------------15 From Where Do I Start (Step 0) To Owning A Current $300,000 Asset And Holding For A $500,000 Exit (Target 2016). Here’s What Taking Action Looks Like… MATT BRYERS -------------------------------------------------------------23 Modern Day Badass, Multiple Black Belts, Numerous Competitions Won, Trains SWAT And Law Enforcement And One Of The Exclusive American Partners To An “Underground” Industry-changing Defense System Featured In Jack Reacher, Batman Begins, Clash Of The Titans, Game Of Thrones, Mission Impossible And More… CHARLIE WALLACE ------------------------------------------------------32 The Real Guitar Hero. Charlie Wallace Launches A Rock & Metal Guitar Mastery Course, Quits His Job And Focuses On His Passion Of Playing And Teaching Guitar.
SCOTT REWICK -----------------------------------------------------------------39 $140,000,000+ Million In Online Ad Spend. Built 4 Companies To $25 Million Or Higher. Former Partnership With Co-founder Of MySpace Reached $23 Million In Its First Year. Sold His First Business For $30 Million. Built A Company To $120 Million/Year Revenue. Online Since 1999. EARL FLORMATA --------------------------------------------------------------47 Lessons From The Man Who Sold $50,000,000 In Services ULTIMATE STRENGTH AND CONDITIONING ---------------------55 A Team Of 3 Strength And Conditioning Coaches Who Trained NFL Players But Struggled With Their Online Membership … And How We Boosted Their Revenues 30X With A Few Changes In Just A Couple Of Months DALE HENSEL -------------------------------------------------------------------60 Nearly $100 Million In Funds Raised. 15 Companies In 22 Years. Newest Company Hit $23 Million In Its 3rd Year. CRAIG SIGL ----------------------------------------------------------------------68 The $24,000 Birthday And Building A Business In Golf and Mental Performance 2 Ways to Work with Me --------------------------------------------------74 Grow Faster With An 11-Year Veteran Who Was Selling Online Before Facebook, Twitter And YouTube Were Even Born. Benefit From A Decade Of Online Advertising And Business Development Experience...
CONTENT
How Vancouver, Canada Based Premium Organic Skin Care Formulators Established A Growing Legion Of Passionate
Customers, Landed Themselves In 700+ Retail Stores, 6x Their Sales, Landed Tv Appearances, Magazine Features, And Even Inclusion In A Rock Music Video… In Just A Few Short Years.
LAVIGNE ORGANICS
When I first met Linda Zaurrini to talk about her Lavigne Organics product line, the company was already 8 years old with a handful of very top-shelf products and some fantastically loyal customers. The problem was, their sales and marketing process was so manual that every new customer acquisition was a time consuming matter which kept their passionate, loyal customers count very low. After a few interactions, I gave Linda a run-down of the leaks and flaws I saw that I felt they could address (with or without my help). Linda replied to my quite bold email wondering whether I polished off a bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey before sending my notes over. And that kicked-off our on-and-off, multi-engagement, business relationship.
The implementation and changes started being rolled out as their time, team and company budget allowed. Changes and fixes focused on immediate leaks, branding and packaging that was costing them, web-page strategy that had major shopping experience and navigation leaks, social media which hadn’t been touched on much, email marketing tactics for developing a leads database and others.
Over the years, I’ve been called in and re-hired 4 times to support Lavigne’s growth and marketing goals. During one of those engagements, the project goal was to explore the expansion of their core and most popular product, “Mayan Magic” into a new market. We found that among the many positive testimonials about the product, the company had unsolicited testimonials from athletes, namely in high-impact sports and martial arts. The cream was, until this point, sold as a premium formulation aimed at mostly middle-aged women who could afford the pampering. But the product unlocks benefits for many others… one of those demographics is high-impact sports and martial arts. The market was researched, the product re-branded name “Damage Control Skin FX” was selected, the brand and packaging developed and initial webpage and ‘test campaigns’ launched to prove interest and sales. This product has since been sold in martial arts clubs and, with some product placement help from my OOAGENCY, ended up in a rock music video by a rock band that has been featured in Guitar World and has been in Top 10 radio charts.
Lavigne Organics on “Forbes Living”
Lavigne has recently picked up TV exposure and Damage Control Skin FX aired its first sport-channel advertisement. Until date, much of their sales have been through their retail and wholesale distribution partners. The company is now revamping their e-commerce initiative for the parent brand, Lavigne Organics while also establishing a strong direct-response web campaign for Damage Control Skin FX. Learn of some of the tactics and tips from this campaign on the next pages...
Brand Sponsorship in Queen City Heist's ”Tangerine Dream" Music Video
Launching a skin care product line is one of the more difficult businesses you could choose to pursue. It’s expensive in every sense of the word: time, team, capital. Lavigne now has a “foot in the door” and a customer base that is helping feed the fanfare. What about you and your e-commerce + retail distribution business or your beauty/skin related product line? Consider some of these tips … SPY ON YOUR MARKET We use a “spying” email (it’s not actually spying) and with our researcher, we locate the top competitors and communities associated with the niche we’re working in. This includes the main blogs, authority sites, discussion forums, Facebook groups, podcasts, YouTube channels, magazines, industry publications, experts/influencers. This is maintained in an ever-growing “Master list” and, where possible, we Like, Follow, Friend or Subscribe to these various channels… all using the one spying email. This gives us the ability to simply log in and browse the subject lines, the messages to find the content our corner of the world is talking about.
SPY ON YOURSELF Setup Google Alerts or other reputation monitoring tools to have alerts when your Brand Name or your company founder’s name or your market’s keywords are mentioned. This helps you jump into conversations or address issues immediately. This is part of today’s absolutely necessary “social selling” environment. MEET YOUR MARKET Get involved in the communities. If you’re interested in being sneaky, you can use a different named account. This let’s you ask questions like “which brand do you guys like for X” and other investigative posts that lets you better engage with your target audience under the radar. There’s no goal or purpose to lying or tricking people here but if you walk in AS the brand, many of your customers will be on guard expecting you to sell them. Regardless of how you approach it, find the top communities and create a weekly schedule to look at the hot debates and discussion topics to know where the problems/goals of your customers lie.
Quick Tips
USE A HUMAN TOUCH When you’re small, every single interaction, every single customer matters even more. Unfortunately, it’s unrealistic for a company with 10,000 new customers per month to execute the same courtesy steps as a company with 40 new customers per month. So figure out what’s realistic for you but consider steps such as a personalized phone call to a new account/customer. Where can you add in a “human” element? USE AUTOMATION Similarly though, your company should be making use of automation and leverage where possible to support (not replace) the human element. You should be using a strong CRM for all of your vendors and VIP clients that allows for reminders and alerts. (We use Nimble) . Consider sending a greeting card to your customers automated directly from your sales program. Use an email platform that sends out welcome, on-boarding, training and similar emails to your newest leads and customers (here’s our recommended platform). Make use of retargeting which is a way of having display banner ads “following up” with your customers or visitors who have been to your webpage. Make use of a knowledge base, support desk and training videos to better educate and help your customers and vendors.
KNOW YOUR DATA One of the single biggest mistakes made by the 140+ clients I’ve personally worked with was around the absolute lack or very incomplete monitoring of data. You MUST be able to accurately reflect on your business month to month from a numbers standpoint. Did your web presence or online store receive more visitors or less (know your traffic)? Did they stay longer or “bounce” faster? Which pages or products did they most explore? How many reached the shopping cart page but didn’t order? What is the average value price of their first order? Did they come back and order more? How many support tickets are you receiving (is it increasing? If so, why?). How are your overall sales conversions month to month? How many different products/SKUs did you sell? How is your overall “audience” growth? Do you have more email subscribers and social media fans/friends? What about internally… how many sales calls were made? How many content pieces were posted? What were your gross sales? How is your profit margin for the month? Refunds or returns? What was your ad spend like (this is one that scares many vendors since they’d notice that their ad spend is random, non-existent or shrinking vs growing which for most businesses is a very bad sign)? Think of these and other data points and create a monthly alert to monitor these in a clean, simple spreadsheet at first and later in more integrated and visual solutions.
BTE AND BTA Borrowed from my time as a line-cook at Cactus Club restaurants in my late teens, BTE is “better than expected” service and BTA is “blow them away” service. Surprise and impress your customers. This not only builds good will and loyalty but a referral and marketing engine as many will be quick to buzz about you and endorse you on their always-on social media. Send them a random knick-knack or silly gift or surprise sampler with their order (though if it’s gimmicky and fun vs just “more” of what they ordered, you’ll garner more conversation). Have an action step each month or each quarter set for your company to think of your VIP customers and your newest customers as well. Think of sending a low cost direct mail piece, a personalized video (from one of your sales team), a relevant knick-knack. Think of it this way… you can either spend $100 to acquire a new customer or spend $20 to surprise and impress a current customer which results in better loyalty, larger re-orders, social media endorsement and word of mouth referrals… PLUS the increased goodwill associated with your brand. (The $100/$20 are used for illustration purposes only, the numbers will vary to your business and needs).
UNDERSTAND CASHFLOW VS PROFITS You want to maximize profits, yes… but first you want to maximize cashflow. As cash comes in, you’ll want to heavily re-invest (which is a lot of cash back out), in order to gain even more cash back in. This cash back and forth should remain high and aggressive as you aim to secure your place in a market. Do NOT make the mistake of treating all your “cash in” as profits. If you have $100,000 coming in, and your company could keep $40,000 after paying overheads, staff, product fulfillment
costs and similar… then put $5000 in your pocket as salary, $5000 aside to continually grow a small float… but push $30,000 right back out the door into advertising, PR, sales or whatever makes sense for your business. Do this month-in, month-out if you want to build a BUSINESS.
BUILD A HIGHER-TICKET OFFER INTO THE MIX, IN THIS CASE A KIT WITH YOUR COMPLETE PRODUCT LINE. Some customers want to buy a single stand-alone product, others want a complete system from one brand they trust. It’s similar to your company wanting to hire a freelancer for a logo design, whereas another business may want to align with an agency for all of its branding needs (complete product line). Not only is this higher margins on each sale (example: $119 for the complete kit vs $19 for one product) but this creates convenience. The customer doesn’t have to figure out which product they need… they just trust that the “kit” includes everything they’ll need. If they buy a stand-alone product, then when they run out, they can re-order from you or buy from a competitor. If they buy a full kit, they will very certainly run out of one product quicker than another … and to “top off” and complete their kit, they are more likely to re-order the missing items from your kit. Other benefits are a stronger buy-in with your brand. Your complete product line sits in their home, which creates more brand loyalty as you become the “trusted branded agency partner” (as in the example I mentioned) vs the “freelance logo designer”.
KNOW WHAT MAKES YOU UNIQUE When pursuing retail distribution, know that a store has an option of carrying your product or somebody else’s... what makes YOU unique? Sell by leading with a story not product details. Every company has (or will claim to have) incredible formulations. Find the STORY of yours and sell the STORY. Can you tell a compelling story about your product? Its origin? Its startup years? Its ingredient? Its formulation? An anecdote from a customer? An interesting case study from your businesses’ history? Take inventory of your company stories. Write them out. Learn them (and provide them in training to your sales team, and share them in communications with your customers). Use them. ENSURE YOU'RE DEALING WITH THE PURCHASER Does the person you're contacting have authority to sign off on your purchase when selling to retail stores or will you have to go through the education, presentation and “pitch” process all over again with a decision maker? BE ON TOP OF YOUR RECEIVABLES Retail creates a lot of opportunities where product ships to the retail store (or wholesaler) first, but you'd get paid later. Sometimes that "later" never comes. Shipping product that you didn't get paid for damages
cashflow and stalls your business. What can you implement to minimize this leak? Give discounts on invoices if necessary, create better relationships with the stores, offer discounts on their next order if they pay by X date? DON'T SHIP SAMPLES CARELESSLY. Samples are advertising dollars (they are an expense!). It would be great if every potential vendor and every potential customer could have a sample in their hand... just like it would be great if your advertising could be in front of all of them. But that’s not realistic as you have a finite ad budget to work with. Continually think 90/10 (vs 80/20) ... are you reaching the 10% that is statically 90% most likely to take the action and make the impact you’re aiming for? I advise this in all business models. Similarly for “consultants” when they carelessly offer “free consulting sessions” or “meet for coffee” with anybody and everybody. Your time, your products, your shipping… these are all expenses. And you must remain strategic with where you invest these.
FREQUENT SURVEYS. Run exit surveys on your webpage for those who left (why did they leave?). Discount and even freebie incentivized surveys to those who made it to your shopping cart but didn't complete the order (why didn't they order?). Discount coupons and greeting cards to customers if they tell you what they love about their product purchase and what they'd like to change about the product line or experience. Similar, surveys to your retail store partners etc. Build surveys into your automated email marketing and other processes. SOCIAL MEDIA When it comes to social media, identify the platforms that make the most sense for your product line. For example, Lavigne Organics is best ideal for Pinterest, Instagram (as these are both visual and women dominated) and YouTube, Vine (for beauty tips and cosmetic how-to videos) . Damage Control Skin FX is more ideal for Facebook. Don't dilute yourself too much by trying to be active on all social media networks. HAVE A CONTENT MARKETING INITIATIVE IN PLACE. Content marketing is viewed as THE most significant marketing strategy today by 72% of Chief Marketing Officers at $100M+ companies. Content marketing is said to be the "new PR", the "new SEO" and more. Advanced content marketing is a complex production but even basic content marketing like maintaining a YouTube channel with relevant
demonstration and how-to videos, writing informative blog posts, adding valuable content to your social media… each of these are items your team should be working on. NOTE: If your project needs are larger, explore our “Flood The Internet” service via our OOAGENCY.com). SNOWBALL YOUR WINS. Did you get mentioned in a magazine? Post about it on your blog and social media. Did you pick up retail distribution from a major chain? Run a press release, notify customers, publish news on your social media. Did you celebrate a significant anniversary for the product line? Run a birthday sale, notify your audience (emails lists and social media). Was your founder featured on a news show? Contact other news shows and media publications to entice them to also run a segment. If you’re like me, you may prefer to just stay the course, focus on work and get more work done … but if YOU don’t trumpet your own horn and announce the wins, nobody else will either. Nothing great was accomplished without enthusiasm. You must show and communicate your enthusiasm for what you and your company are doing in the market.
For media enquiries (newspaper, radio, podcast, blog)
or for distribution/retail opportunities, contact Lavigne Organics at
From Where Do I Start (Step 0) To Owning A Current $300,000 Asset
And Holding For A $500,000 Exit (Target 2016). Here’s What Taking Action Looks Like…
GD’S STORY
‘GD’ doesn’t like the spotlight. He asked to remain anonymous. So I’ll call him GD. He joined my private Genie Training group September 14, 2012... here’s his first post so you can meet him.
He was starting from step 0 (incidentally, where EVERYONE has to start from). He had previously worked in the “happiness” market but without much (ie: any) revenue success. He’s a man of a great and very generous heart. It was time for him to create something that would allow him to reap the financial rewards that his strong character had earned him. It was time to build a scalable business...
I got him started with the same process I start all new members and then assigned the tasks I assign to those who are looking for a first starting step. (More on these later).
September 14, 2012
By September 22, 2012 we had worked through the research process I assigned and had a few rounds of back and forth. We narrowed down into a business model, which is always the first thing I recommend a person identifies, and then the specific niche. From that, GD found an even smaller niche and we had a strong starting point.
Within a 16 comment thread of him and I going back and forth... we identified the exact niche, the domain name selection and the initial steps for him to work through. By October 9, 2012 (less than 30 days after joining the Genie Training), GD was excitedly posting about the initial progress and clicks of his website.
September 22 2012 October 9, 2012
Of course credit has to be given where credit is due... GD is an action
taker. He executes. He implements. He works.
Here’s what his business that he started in September 2012 looks like 3 years later: « 6-figure in annual PROFITS
« Mostly hands off / automated income
« Authority in his niche
« Sales, traffic and audience grow consistently every month
« His audience (email list + social media) is over 200,000+ strong
« His business saw over 2 million visitors in the past year... nearly all were organic (free)
« The brand+business is valued at $300,000 (fair market value)
« GD is, wisely, holding off to grow the business further and exit at $500,000+
« And he enjoys what he does. He enjoys the business (though I know he’s already thinking of new ventures and bigger challenges to pursue).
I run a primarily “Ask and Answer” structured Training group. I provide detailed replies. Sometimes in video tutorial responses. Sometimes in detailed, written checklists and explanations. But I focus on CUSTOM responses to address SPECIFIC businesses and the individuals. While I do provide modules and training (which has helped me sell 7-figures online personally), the focus isn’t on “watch these videos”... instead it’s on “let’s find out where you are, where you’d like to get to (or where you should get to) and the steps involved to get you there”. I asked GD to post an introduction about himself. And then I asked for past business experiences, past successes (to gauge overall business experience). I asked about his strengths and weaknesses (to gain an inventory of where he’s stronger and what’s likely costing him time/money). I normally also ask about any current pursuits (though I knew for him it was all starting from the step 0 of exploration). And I normally want to know what their goal is (building a $10 Million dollar company is entirely different than creating a hands-off, passive $3000/month, for example). This all gives me understanding but it also allows other members to immediately find areas to support, setup alliances, joint ventures, recommend vendors, affiliates, customers and similar.
The group I run is small on purpose. I can’t serve 10,000 members, plus it’s hard to establish trust and community that way. So I purposely set prices a little higher than the general “watch our videos and attend our webinars” type trainings and focus instead on hands-on, action-steps oriented, homework-driven format. This requires more personal responsibility and is an absolute waste of time and money to anyone who just enjoys watching training videos and attending webinars. But for those who want to get to work and want guidance, this model has proven extremely effective. GD was part of roughly the 15% - 20% who join the Training group without much direction of what to do next. Sometimes members do have past business successes and experience but are looking to build something new or bigger. Other times, they have no real financial success or experience but are willing to get to work. So my next round of questions and guidance focused on what I suggest is the most important part of the “new business” decision making process: the business model. While I don’t believe in “pursue your passions” (unless it’s a fun hobby that MIGHT produce some profits that you’re seeking), I do strongly urge everyone to find the BUSINESS MODEL that best suits their working style. I provide explanation and direction of how/why to make the business model selection a priority for any members in this position.
Now let me tell you a bit about how GD got started.
Let me explain this with a general example... Suppose you decide “I want to work in fashion”.
(Forgetting the fact that this is much too high level and will need to be drilled into a micro-niche to support the business launch... let’s focus on the business models).
So fashion you say? Okay...
Do you want to be a retailer of clothes? A wholesaler? An e-commerce store?
Each of those operates quite differently and is better suited to different individuals.
Or do you want to create fashion yourself?
If so... do you want to do it for clients or as your own line to sell?
Or maybe you want to review and talk about fashion?
On a blog (written format)?
Maybe a podcast (audio format)?
Or maybe you want a web-tv (youtube) channel?
And if it’s podcast or web-tv, will you want to be the person presenting?
Or you want to hire a team who creates the content and is the media personality? Or you want to interview others? Each of those is content driven but, again, caters to different personality and working styles. [email protected]
Or maybe you just want to be an affiliate and promote other fashion lines.
An “affiliate” model operates different than all of the others I listed. We could keep this going but hopefully you see the point.
Not everyone belongs in the metrics and data heavy world of being an affiliate, just like not everyone belongs in front of a camera as a media personality of their own “youtube” (or similar) show. Just like not everyone could create their own garments. And not everyone could employ staff. Some want virtual staff.
The variables are almost endless and that’s all still while just dealing with the very high-level subject of “fashion”, let alone deciding what period of fashion, what demographic, which sex (men or women), which age group, shoes vs dresses, evening dresses vs summer dresses, accessories vs apparel...
You get the picture. There’s a fine line between letting the process overwhelm you and paralyze you into non-action and between making a STRATEGIC and RESEARCHED best guess.
The only guarantee in life is that there are no guarantees. You will not know, with full certainty that the business model and niche you enter is (1) the best fit for you (2) the most profitable or ease to dominate market.
But picking just at “random” or thinking of a product first without considering the market (who will you sell it to and where will you reach them) and the business model (what will your daily work look like) is a costly mistake. Often costing something much more valuable than money: TIME.
UPDATE: "GD" provided a few responses as add-on to his case study last minute and I wanted to share these with you, the reader.
In GD's Own words “I got started in September 2012 while I still had a day job and made it a point to outsource everything. I hired people to write articles, I hired an assistant to post / schedule them to the blog, and started a Facebook "likes" campaign to get some readership. Soon I started an email list (everybody goes on and on about "the list", and for good reason). About 5 months (and a few thousand dollars) into it, I had my first profitable month - made a big $30 more than I spent that month. It was a big breakthrough for me, first time I was making a "meaningful" profit online.” (ROB'S NOTE: Really notice what GD just said. He marketed, ran ads and worked hard for 5 months before he finally saw $30 profit. Too many would have ran campaigns for a few weeks and become disheartened. Of course, there's a difference in burning money / wasting time vs moving towards in a profitable direction strategically... but building a BUSINESS isn't a "flip the switch, instant success".) “The early days... I worked my day job mostly and tried to set up systems, to get a better feel of this internet marketing thing. Nowadays, well I still try to set up systems :-) and think of how to make the website even more useful than it is.
Organic search traffic is growing, although I'm not high enough in search engines for any major term - but I am getting more and more traffic as a result of publishing more. I'm up to 3-4 pieces of content per day now (all original and high quality of course). LESSON LEARNED THE HARD WAY: ALWAYS put others first. ALWAYS do everything to help the others, whether it's the audience, the contractors, the joint venture partners - always see to their interest first, and try to make things better for them. This alone CAN make the business run itself and will, in the long term, make it very profitable, even though (and that's the lesson I had to learn) it's somewhat counter-intuitive.”
April 30, 2015
Time Is Money? Please gently slap anyone who says “time is money” again. That’s ignorant and dangerously incorrect. TIME IS FINITE. IT’S THE #1 PRECIOUS RESOURCE WE HAVE. You can’t create a single second extra of it. Money can be created. In fact you do it regularly. You probably did it today. But that’s because you “sold off” your time asset in trade for a bit of money. Agreed? Never carelessly trade in your time for money. This is what keeps people stuck or broke. MONEY IS A TOOL. USE IT! Use it to buy yourself more time. Use it to automate things. Use it to speed things up. Use it to help you create more money (which you can then further reinvest to capture and maximize even more of your time). Your life is lived in time. Even the giant mansion you might want or the private jet or the sports car ... all of it acquired and owned with money but EXPERIENCED BY SPENDING TIME. In your business, focus more (or at least as much) on your time leaks and time expenses as you do on your financials.
GD's Comments On Working With Me "When I think of Rob, the word that comes to mind is integrity. It's always a great experience to work or chat with him, and I can always count on him telling me exactly how things are - no "'lourishing / embellishing' and no drama added."
- GD
Closing Tip
EDIT MAY 2015: GD decided not to sell his business. He was disinterested in $300,000 acquisition opportunities and considered holding for $500,000+ (knowing full well the business will hit that rapidly). But he no longer wants to sell regardless of price. What a perfect example of doing the proper research, identifying the right BUSINESS MODEL, deciding on the right market, getting to work and letting the PASSION of that work turn not only PROFIT but building into a PURPOSE. Also, it's fun knowing that a niche business, that didn't even exist less than 3 years ago and was bred from the hard-work of an entrepreneur and the strategy and foundation we laid out in my Genie Training group not only now has 197,146 LEGITIMATE (real) likes... but even 9 of my own Facebook Friends Like this page. And I've never promoted it to my own audience. The value of this media / authority site "spills" even into my network.
Modern Day Badass, Multiple Black Belts, Numerous Competitions Won, Trains SWAT And Law Enforcement And One
Of The Exclusive American Partners To An “Underground” Industry-changing Defense System Featured In Jack Reacher, Batman Begins, Clash Of The Titans, Game Of Thrones, Mission
Impossible And More…
MATT BRYERS
Matt Bryers is a modern day warrior. His resume is incredible… with over 20 years of various martial arts experience, countless competitions, many different certifications a n d m o r e . H e r u n s h i s o w n s c h o o l , t h e J S A ( s e e : http://JiuJitsuCT.com) which is viewed as one of the most prestigious in the country and has seen world champions like Rafael “Formiga” Barbosa training there. Matt also built a dynamic online presence over the years. I’ll share some numbers and then highlight some of the “leaks” that I know many will be able to relate to. His combined social media audience was at 19,000. His email subscribers list sat at 40,000+. His webpages saw 45,000 views with roughly 15,000 uniques. And his combined YouTube video views are at a relatively impressive 4.1 Million. Those numbers aren’t industry-authority level impressive but they are certainly strong starting points. All from someone who trains all day, works with students at his gym, and never took a focused effort at building an online business. Matt mostly focused on putting out content and the above was the by-product of that.
HOWEVER… (and here are lessons or points to reflect on possibly for you as well):
« Matt never had a clear action plan. He loves training and teaching. So
he put out content without any strategy to it. This can keep you busy and even build an audience over time, but it will produce mostly non-existent financial results.
« He owns roughly 10 domains and operated his various content postings under several “brands”.
« On Facebook alone he had 3 different Pages. On YouTube he had 2 different channels. This is a lot of diluted effort and confusion for prospects. His pages were never monetized.
« His videos (which saw 4.1 million views already, entirely organically) were never setup for any lead generation or traffic.
« His communications to those same leads (Facebook Likes, YouTube subscribers, email subscribers) was very haphazard.
« Sometimes mailing just once a month and other times mailing
promotional material instead of properly leading these contacts to the MANY new, great content pieces he had put out.
« All of his content was scattered across many pages and channels, without any sort of central hub. There wasn’t a proper execution process to his work. He’d work on any random item, as time allowed. That shows work ethic and will keep you busy, but cost a lot of missed financial opportunity.
« He never (or more or less never) advertised. And he also never pursued any other promotional steps (affiliate partnerships, PR/media exposure, referrals)… all he focused on was his skill and passion (different martial arts and strength training) and putting out top quality content for it.
It’s not pleasant to be shown these (and many other) leaks in your business. It’s easy for ego to step in and say “no, I’ll keep doing things the way I’ve been doing them”. But the reality and proof is always in the results and the satisfaction associated with those results. Even in your own business…
Are your numbers reflecting your time and energy investments? And is the overall “ROI” and the model of your business keeping you satisfied or happy with your business?
Matt’s online business results were producing almost minimum-wage level earnings based on time+energy input.
HIS STORY IS EXTREMELY COMMON.
We get caught up in our strengths and gravitate to them. Whether it’s in “golf”, “garden design”, “boating/sailing”, “snowboarding” or even “ghost-hunting” (I’ve worked with clients in each of those niches) … we tend to stick with what we enjoy doing.
Similarly, Matt has tremendous skill and great work ethic so he stuck to putting out a lot of great content. That’s the equivalent of a rock band writing great songs, rehearsing (jamming a lot) and doing the local circuit that they get invited into… but never clearly approaching the BUSINESS side of their art. (At Matt’s martial arts and strength training level, I’d call him an artist).
When you have a 20 year veteran, respected by top athletes, contracted by law enforcement, operating one of the best BJJ schools in the country and being loved so much for his content that it results in a combined 60,000 audience and over 4 Million video views… then it hurts even more to see that their skills and dedication and giving-nature isn’t properly financially rewarded.
More recently, Matt became one of the exclusive partners to an underground self-defence training system based out of Spain and endorsed by Liam Neeson, called Defence Labs’ DNA (seeDefense In Action). While Hollywood has made use of the training “for show”, it’s first and foremost a real and hyper-effective self-defense methodology.
And That’s When Our Work 1-on-1 Advisory Work Started Together…
When I started working with Matt through an introduction from a referral, I took inventory of his “assets” and saw that he had created a strong foundation. But his ship was sinking. It was taking on water with so many profit-leaks, he had no shot of getting ahead. He would have remained “stuck” at the same online results for years if he didn’t become pro-active in making a change.
In fact, the ship is a great visual example of what I encounter with many businesses. Business owners sometimes are using the entirely wrong vessel in their journey (some should be on a speedboat, others on a yacht) ….
Out of those who are on the right vessel, many are floating around aimlessly. Constantly busy. Never getting anywhere.
And out of those who are out there on the water, most have a vessel that is taking on a lot of water fast. These profit “leaks” are keeping them busy in continually trying to keep the ship afloat, never having time to even steer let alone set the right course.
See http://www.RobToth.com/linkto/dna.html
Here are 10 quick points (a very short list) of what I implemented with Matt right away in order to start properly building and growing an online BUSINESS. After taking inventory of his many domains, webpages, social media accounts … we started making decisions on which ones to focus on, which ones to merge, which ones to redirect/ignore for now. We all know we have a maximum financial budget (right now you probably know you could spend $X) and basic common sense tells us we have a maximum time budget (ie: the hours left in the day) … but there’s also an energy budget. If you don’t focus your efforts, you’ll be infinitely busy and your energy budget will never allow you to get ahead. Furthermore, you confuse the marketplace and make it tougher to build an audience.
Next I wanted to implement tracking. We ensured we have at least Google Analytics running on ALL pages, that we started monitoring clicks and, most importantly, that we setup a simple spreadsheet which monitors all the data for the business on a monthly business. This one BLOWS MY MIND. It’s a deal breaker now. If a client doesn’t commit to gathering/providing monthly stats, we part ways (this has never needed to happen yet). I’ve seen again and again and again how a business that just operates off of guesses vs knowing the exact numbers for their business greatly kills their chances of success. No data means no business to me. No data means hobbyist. We built a Task management board to know exactly what the steps are. Everything organized and sequenced related to setup, sales, lead gen, growth and similar. We use Trello.com.
Matt need not guess what he should be working on today. He logs in and sees the EXACT steps that are pending next.
We’re still finalizing the brand consistency. Various channels used different brands and different names. MartialFighter, Matt Bryers, Warrior Combatives, Fight Authority and many others. TIP: Unless it’s a completely separate business, keep your social media usernames, your sign-offs and basically every aspect of your business branded the same. Create brand familiarity not brand confusion.
Matt has tremendous skills and accomplishments yet most who happen across his videos, blog posts or social media don’t know anything about the “man behind the curtain”. MattBryers.com was quickly setup and we created an in-depth interview called “Chaos” which we produced to focus on providing a clear introduction to who Matt is. This helps us build rapport with potential customers, affiliates, vendors and similar.
We’ve now brought in social media and communications support to help Matt with keeping in touch REGULARLY with his audience. Make no mistake… if you email your list once per month, you might as well be a spammer. Assuming you aren’t already THE established authority and own top-of-mind branding with your prospects, the majority on your list will wonder how they ended up on your list and why you are emailing them, if you’re not reaching out to them REGULARLY. We setup retargeting which I feel every business should be running. It’s a low-cost way to establish branding fast, get visitors back to your page and boost revenues, almost effortlessly. Matt is working on brushing up his popular YouTube channel(s). Establishing a more concise brand in his cover graphic, in his About and establishing an “editorial calendar” for publishing content. But more importantly, each YouTube video is getting reviewed and tweaked to ensure keyword rich titles and keyword rich descriptions (or transcripts of the video when possible). Each of these then also gains a hyperlink back to Matt’s primary website FightAuthority.com. And even annotations are being added to the videos to further entice viewers to Subscribe or to click through to FightAuthority.com. Consider these same steps for your content and YouTube channel.
We also created a campaign called MattAgainstViolence.com which was an Indiegogo campaign initially. The objective was to position Matt for precisely what he is… a man of heart, with a bigger mission/vision who wants to make an impact against the completely stupid and senseless violence in the world. This campaign gave us a great opportunity to reconnect with his audience and past alliances. This, along with the “Chaos” interview was a great warm-up for our future efforts and were necessary to make Matt relevant to his market and build rapport quickly.
We’ve gone through his analytics to find the webpages that get traffic and ensure those pages are optimized for user experience / navigation and monetization. (It goes without saying that all pages MUST be responsive and mobile-ready as well).
Of course, the above and many other steps are logically sequenced and prioritized in our task management platform. Matt always knows what to work on instead of being lost in an ocean of “to do” items. Our high-level next-steps are to rebuild FightAuthority.com into the largest fighting and self-defense focused resource online, establish Matt as one of the most elite self-defence trainers in the world and build Matt’s strategic partnership with Defence Lab into a household brand, no different than “Insanity”. Among the future initiatives (once we’ve reached an audience of 150,000 – 200,000 and a consistent traffic of 100,000+ monthly) is to produce a web-TV show in partnership with a strategic brand sponsor. Other steps include bringing Matt to the corporate world as a preferred trainer for staff. Many companies want to provide fitness programs to their staff. Focused especially on companies in Matt’s geo-local area, we’ll be offering self-defence workshops. This builds cashflow and more legitimacy (and more success case studies) for Matt’s future work. Of course, we also have work under way regarding Defence Lab. The multi-pronged campaign is expected to pull the first $2M - $3M in revenues for the company in the next 18 months, with continued exponential growth opportunities after. I mention these in case they are relevant strategies for you to implement in your business. I hope these insights are of actionable value to you.
If you’re looking to work with Matt on any of the above, contact me directly for a personalized introduction:
[email protected] Corporate sponsors for web-TV or for corporate self-defense training are invited to get in touch. Also if you run a media channel such as a blog, podcast, or YouTube channel, eMagazine and similar that is a match to Matt’s skills and trainings, get in touch for interview and content partnerships. Finally super-affiliates and high-volume media buyers interested in the Liam Neeson endorsed “Defence Lab” system that is yielding 2x – 2.5x ROI on ad spend, contact me for private affiliate partnership opportunities.
MATT’S WORDS ABOUT WORKING WITH ME
“I met Rob… through a referral online. [Rob] has been a great friend and mentor… helping me get going, helping me understand what I
need to do in regards to the internet marketing landscape… Rob
has helped me understand a lot bigger picture in taking me to the
next level… I really enjoy working with Rob, he’s very detailed… very
task oriented… he’s done a lot for me in organizing what I’m supposed to do … lays it out in simple tasks… I really enjoy working
with him, I can’t say enough good things about him…”
– Matthew Bryers, FightAuthority.com
Watch the full video here: h$p://www.RobToth.com/linkto/ma$bryers-‐review.html
The Real Guitar Hero. Charlie Wallace Launches A Rock & Metal Guitar Mastery Course, Quits His Job And
Focuses On His Passion Of Playing And Teaching Guitar.
CHARLIE WALLACE
Charlie first joined my Genie Training program (private “ask me” and classroom format) back in March 2013. He knew what he wanted to sell… guitar training, but he didn’t even have a product name, partial content and no marketing. Read his story on the next pages. And read his advice specifically for information-product merchants or for skills-based courses such as musicians, DJs, and similar…
“I decided to create a really great guitar course. I had spent 3 years in product creation (due to working 2 full time jobs and not knowing the exact direction to go in) and released Guitar Mastery Method in August 2014: GuitarMasteryMethod.com The reason why I started this was the fact that I no longer wanted to have a 'job'. I was having next to no time to spend on doing the things I really loved to do, and was burnt out all the time. I wanted to work on my own terms, make a lot more money doing it and have the time to work on my passions. One of those of which, has now become my business. During the first few months I was learning a lot about advertising and getting people into my launch sequence. I had done a test launch with my old list and one affiliate, all up I had 1,000 leads come in and made about $3000 in sales my first week that I had the course for sale. I then completed a bigger launch where I did some advertising to get more leads and had a couple more affiliates on board and cleared $7000. I went from having an old, neglected email list from years ago, sent out some emails and managed to get 1,000 leads. Since then I have built up a total audience of 39,472 in 7 months (growing everyday), paid off all my debt and now average over $3k in revenue a week. This is only the beginning.”
“My current work days are a lot different to what they used to be like. I get up around 8:30am and head straight to the gym and play some basketball. Come home and cook a nice breakfast then meditate to put me in the right mind frame before getting stuck into work. I then go through all the emails I have received over night, reply to any questions etc. I check my sales stats (it's great seeing how much money you made while you slept!) and how my ads are performing, then get on with my 'to do' list. This is where I could stop, working a total of 30(ish) minutes I could sustain my income as it is right now, making more money than I ever have [at my job]. But.. I'm not that way inclined so I am now onto my next step of creating more products, improving my sales funnel and ultimately increasing the amount of money I make everyday.”
“The tips I would give anyone getting into an information-product business would be:
Just start - You never get anywhere by standing still, even if it means working till 6am some days just to get going, do it. Trust me, it all pays off in the end. Test, test, test - I always heard internet marketing people say that you need to test everything. I ignored that for a long time and after I started doing it myself, I learned how much money I let slip through my hands. Don't be discouraged by other products - There is always room for you. There are a mountain of other online guitar products out there, but I have still been able to build a full time income from a market where customers have lots of choice. Just because some of your prospects have bought from someone else, doesn't mean they won't buy from you too.”
“If you are looking at creating a course teaching a musical instrument or anything artistic, my advice would be:
Teach before you record - Being a full time guitar teacher was one of my jobs before this. In doing that, I learned the 'way' to teach. And the main thing that I think made me a better teacher than 99% of others out there is I remembered what it was like to not know anything.
Make bullet points for video, not scripts - I spent A LONG TIME writing full scripts for 108 videos for my course. It wasn't until 2 days before I was about to record the videos (in one 12 hour recording session) that I realized I was going to look terrible trying to read scripts while recording video. Just make bullet points and speak naturally. If you are having trouble coming up with bullet points, then do what I did and write scripts first. But if I was to do mine all over again, I would save a lot of time and go straight to bullet points. You know what you are teaching, so as long as you have a 2 word reminder you can speak for minutes on one bullet point. Test multi camera angles - Work out your camera angles before you record. Get your own camera or even just your phone and get someone to take little videos with the angles you want. Watch back through them and make sure they are the best angles you can get. After watching through some of mine I
was thinking... Maybe if that was just slightly moved you could see better... The little details like this will make it easier for your customers/students. Get your own camera or even just your phone and get someone to take little videos with the angles you want. Watch back through them and make sure they are the best angles you can get. After watching through some of mine I was thinking... Maybe if that was just slightly moved you could see better... The little details like this will make it easier for your customers/students. Deliver some great content up front, for free - I have made pretty much all my sales by proving to people that I can teach them guitar, before I ask for their money. Build a relationship, a GOOD relationship, and you will have happy customers before they have even handed you their money.”
“Working with Rob is great. In fact, the price of joining his Training was fully paid for by the first piece of advice that he gave me about how to find the best name for my product as the name that ended up being chosen had 200% more response than others that were in contention. It's always nice knowing that there is someone who has, in a way 'been there, done that' so you can always hit him up if you have a question or just need a piece of advice on something. He is always sharp to the point, blunt and incredibly honest so you really know you are getting the advice you need from a marketing expert. You get the sense that this guy really does care about how you are doing, and I am very impressed with how in depth he has got with some of the questions asked by me and others in the group. Anyone either running an online business, or looking to get started in one... Talk to Rob Toth.”
– Charlie Wallace, GuitarMasteryMethod.com
CHARLIE’S WORDS ABOUT WORKING WITH ME
$140,000,000+ Million In Online Ad Spend. Built 4 Companies To $25 Million Or Higher. Former Partnership With Co-
founder Of MySpace Reached $23 Million In Its First Year. Sold His First Business For $30 Million. Built A Company To $120 Million/Year Revenue.
Online Since 1999.
SCOTT REWICK
Spending over $150M in display based media over the last 15 years, Scott is one of the true pioneers of modern day affiliate marketing and high volume media buying. Scott has been online and building businesses since 1999. He co-founded one of the early affiliate networks, MetaReward which was later acquired for $30 Million. He then co-founded NetBlue which started with $100,000. Scott grew that lead generation company to $120Million / year revenues and over 110 employees. His team routinely spent $400,000 - $500,000 PER DAY in online advertising.
Later companies included AdEx where Scott raised $8Million for this new lead generation company in partnership with MySpace co-founder, Joe Abrams. AdEx did $23M revenue in its first year. He is now an active angel investor and still a serial entrepreneur. He’s also one of the most sought advisors in direct response.
Scott’s skillsets and past businesses were in lead generation, high volume media buying, direct response advertising, mobile advertising and affiliate marketing. I asked Scott a few questions that I recorded from our quick phone call and I’ve included a transcript of part of that call. But before I jump to that, I want to help explain how the “money’ works in a business model like this so you understand the numbers.
Tune in. Completely tune in. There are plenty of business growth experts out there (many of them self-proclaimed), but very few have a success history like Scott Rewick.
Suppose I’m ‘Big Brand’ or I’m a ‘Big Agency’ (let’s say it’s OOAGENCY) and I need either leads or other webpage traffic. I have $250,000 to spend on advertising. I know if I give that money to someone untrained, I could lose a big chunk of that on mistakes and un-optimized efforts. So I seek out a top media buying professional or company (such as the ones Scott has built). We work out a deal that may include a fee + percentage of the ad money spent or fee + revenue sharing or whatever makes sense to me (the advertiser) and this company (the media buyer).
The media buyer goes to work. Using his / their team’s expertise in what converts (after sending over a Billion visitors to webpages, all with detailed tracking/testing, you have strong intel to know what will likely perform best). They likely produce the ads, select which networks the ads will run on, test/track everything… and they also have discounted traffic opportunities since, at that level, you’re the WalMart equivalent of media buying. But how the cash part works is… The Big Brand sends over $250,000 for this one campaign. That’s $250,000 in revenue for the media buying company. However, at best they likely collect a fee and a percent of that (let’s say 4% - 12% depending on the deal). The rest of the funds get spent as ad budget. So $250,000 came in but, for example, let’s say $250,000 -10% fee = $225,000 goes right back out towards advertising. . THAT’S ONE CLIENT FOR ONE AD CAMPAIGN. Big brands, of course, spend millions per month in advertising and they need top, reliable authorities to handle that ad spend. So ONE advertiser may be creating $500,000 per month revenue for the media buying agency… of which though, $400,000 - $450,000 is being spent back out as ad money to promote that advertiser’s webpage.
The above was the crudest explanation of the media buying transaction. There are 1001 bells and whistles and finite details, of course. But hopefully you understand the math a bit better. You can see that the revenues add up fast. The margins are lower. The “risk” is high. But if you have the right specialist on hand, the “automated” profits and ease of tremendous growth is unbelievable.
Watch Scott Rewick’s Presentation from (my former owned) Canada Marketing Summit 2014:
http://www.RobToth.com/linkto/scottrewick-cms.html
Rob Toth: Did you have schooling or previous work or something that took you into media buying? Or what was the transition? How did you end up getting into media buying? Scott Rewick: Rob, I think I was pretty classically educated. I went to school in Southern California, a private school. My college, my post college life prior to moving back to Silicon Valley was, it was highlighted by routinely getting fired, getting thrown out of jobs, I had 7 jobs in 4 years, so I really could not find my way for the better part of my 20ies after I graduated from college. Up until I moved back to Silicon Valley where it was just around the time when the first giant companies were getting created in the Valley such as Netscape, McAfee, Google. All these great companies were just getting going. So, I got very lucky (laughing). I got lucky that I got placed right there. Rob Toth: What took you into the specific model of business such as lead gen and media buying? Scott Rewick: It was completely an accident, you know. I mean we started a company back in 1999 that had an intention of being a search engine that paid people, called NetFlip. And when we realized
that that model did not work and we were losing money as a company, we quickly had it transitioned into something else. There is no better time for business than when your back is against the wall and you need to hurry to come up with another idea. It was around that time that advertisers started to adopt the affiliate model and they were in it to get paid a lot of money, mostly by credit card companies … So, it was kind of luck in a sense that we had tried one model and it did not work, but we did not give up and kept going on it and we were able to transition the model pretty successfully. Rob Toth: Terrific. Let’s help others in understanding I guess the affiliate, lead gen, media buying model. If I go into our industry, there are guys who understand what I am talking about… but if we go outside of it, there will be confused guys asking how the business model works. In just a rough form, could you explain it … What is it? Clients come to you, the advertising credit company says, you know we need this kind of deal. Basically, how does that work from the deal to you driving traffic to it actually turning to money into the company’s account?
Excerpts of A transcript From A phone call with Scott…
Scott Rewick: Rob, there’s two sides to the equation. Right, there is the affiliates who are going to be driving traffic to the affiliates’ offers and the affiliate network. The affiliate network’s job is to collect a group of high performing offers that they can put under their roof. That can get the affiliates to run. In this business money is made through a middle man. So, their job is to go find the high converting CPA, cost per acquisition, that they can introduce to these high-quality affiliates. Then the money is simply made by buying media and sitting in the middle, almost as a day trader, buying it for one price, getting paid higher price and making the margins in the middle. That’s kind of it in simple form. Many affiliates have introduced things such as squeeze pages in the middle to build their own databases. You know it is quite simple to understand. You buy media first for a cheap price and you make more money by essentially giving it to somebody else. There are certainly other details, but it is the general structure of it. Rob Toth: And one of the final questions. What sets you apart from others? And I do not mean in a fancy sense, but basically you guys were able to scale for a reason and is it just basically you were able to go build your profits and snowball that hard and that fast, or did you have investors dump in money when they saw results and that allowed you to snowball faster or was it anything that allowed you
to move that quick? Because I’ve seen you build several companies to strong 8-figure and higher revenues. Obviously not everyone reaches such levels. Scott Rewick: Well, I don’t know. In one sense it is fearlessness. I mean I think we had a lot of confidence going into this market. We understood that we could play at this game that we were playing. I guess on one hand we were confident in our abilities to buy traffic, to triple it and sell it for something higher. I also think that it was the idea if your back up against the wall and when you’ve got to burn the bridges and you’ve got nowhere to go, you move forward. Often times it allows you to be extra creative and push that much further. So, you know, it allowed the army of people benefiting considerably during and after the time by the virtue of sticking in the game and never giving up. I mean your chances of success when you give up are zero. So I felt like if I could stay long enough I would either learn the new technology and pick up how the game is played. So, I owe to those, combined with the Internet, which completely is still blowing up, in terms of where to buy media and put it up on the big supermarket that can feed a lot of families.
Rob Toth: So final question. If someone wants to dive into a similar business model right now, kind of high level grocery shopping list-wise, what are some things you recommend? Pick a quality network? Pick a quality offer? Pick a quality demographic? Set up a website? What basically would be top 5-10 steps to begin high-level how to get started. Scott Rewick: Yes. If you are in an affiliate game, certainly, you have to be working with an affiliate network that can provide you with the offers that you could not get on you own. There is a laundry list of really high quality affiliate networks. They handle a lot of heavy lifting on behalf of affiliates, they are going up, cutting the deal, bringing up all these amazing offers. So, you have to have that piece as that is gonna pay you big. On the other hand, having some basic assets to have you monetized is really important. That could be landing pages set up, those kind of things. And the third piece is obviously distribution, where you go to buy media. So, for people to do this, they need to understand all these priorities regarding media. From PPC to thousands of mobile networks, email networks, you know. There is a long list of places where you can buy traffic. So, if you look at it, these are three elements that people need to focus on.
If your brand or agency needs the support of a high-volume media buyer like Scott, contact
me for a direct introduction.
When Scott entered information products after a decade of incredible success with high volume advertising, lead gen and affiliate marketing … he reached out to a small handful of individuals for advisory/strategy support for various aspects of his new online business. I was one of these. “… Really what separates the people that do well in this space versus those that don't is finding someone who knows what they're doing. Look, we all know there's an aweful lot of noise in this space. And what I think is absolutely critical is finding somebody who has the breadth of experience and knowledge to make your project work.
And that's why I recommend Rob Toth. Rob has been instrumental and has really had a big part in what I've done over the last several years with respect to a whole slew of things that are awfully hard for online marketers to figure out; Things like sales funnels, things like marketing videos, things like strategies. We all need these things to survive and succeed online and I can recommend almost no one more than Rob Toth in this area.
So if you're considering working with Rob, I say Go For It… you're going to need someone like Rob on your team. So I want to give Rob the highest possible recommendation that I possibly can. Rob thank you for everything you do ... and I wanna encourage people if you're considering working with Rob , go ahead and do it.”
– Scott Rewick
SCOTT’S WORDS ABOUT WORKING WITH ME
Lessons From The Man Who Sold $50,000,000 In Services
EARL FLORMATA
At the time of this writing, Earl Flormata’s sales wall-of-fame is just short of $50 Million in deals closed. He has orchestrated tens of millions in sales. His previous work was with a company that had a client list including Nike, Netflix, ZipCar, Starbucks (where I’m finishing this particular case study from, actually). As part of a custom deal, I wrote some of the salescopy, including that company’s high converting headlines and landing page text that pulls in leads for their high 5-figure, 6 and 7-figure deals. Earl is a top 4% sales-rep, among the best of the best. He has pitched to Microsoft execs. He has trained sales novices into sales leaders. Earl has closed $250,000 deals on the phone and $1M+ deals in corporate-pitches. He’s also among one of the most creative sales-opportunity thinkers I know. I often see unique angles and attack plans for a product line or launch and am quite strategic in my approaches… so I enjoy every single conversation I have with Earl as he can dig up sales opportunities where many don’t even think one exists. He’s a pleasure to talk to.
Which is precisely why I interviewed him on our former Vancouver-based office patio a while back. I asked him two specific questions that are focused on building and growing sales teams and reaching/pitching high-ticket deals (typically to enterprise level clients). You can watch the short, off-the-cuff, sunshine-packed interview here: h$p://www.RobToth.com/linkto/earlfinterview.html Or read the transcript on the next pages…
Rob Toth: Well welcome to the interview. I am interviewing Earl Flormata. The reason I wanted to talk to him and it’s a pleasure actually having him here on our beautiful sunny Vancouver balcony here at… Thank you for taking a time. Earl Flormata: No worries, thank you for having me, Rob. Rob: I appreciate it. So, the reason we are actually talking to Earl is… He’s actually been able to do something a lot of sales reps, a lot of companies haven’t been able to do. He is basically a type of rep that a lot of sales trainers would call the top 4%, which is we refer to the Top 20% that do most of the closing and take the the top 20% from that top 20%, that’s your top 4% of sales reps. And essentially Earl qualifies that, because he has managed to sell 50 Million dollars’ worth of products and services on his end. I think that warranted an interview, to pick his brain a bit to find out how and why he has been able to do that. Give us a little bit about yourself and we can start from there. Earl: Sure. I’ve sold everything from, I guess, memory foams, dog beds to smiley faces on the Internet, so that’s on the weirder side. I’ve done stuff as boring as insurance, as boring as financial products and I guess the funnest thing I’ve ever sold is apps. Really. Because it is pretty much anything, every day is a different day here with.
Rob: You’ve sold in all these different industries and 2 questions that came to mind and the reason I wanted to get you on here is, the very first one... You know you are are obviously not selling to the ma-and-pa or the startup situations. You’re working more with established enterprise level and established companies who are ready to invest into premium level, in this case app or whatever it is. So, how do you… What is the normal process you use to actually reach out to someone and go from that intro call, or email or direct mail, or whatever you guys use, and that’s kind of what I am curious about… and then what’s the regular process to get them into the proper presentation so they know what the value is? Do you guys do webinars? Do you guys send someone to their offices? Do you always meet in person? What’s the process for that? Earl: Sure. So, how we get the big boys, really, we pay attention to the news. Right. So we watch out, for example, for Company A, I can’t talk about it because of NDAs but we knew that they laid off all of their staff for the mobile side, but they were outsourcing all of the stuff. So, we literally called them up and said “hey we’re the guys who made Starbucks [app], do you want to play?”. And then they wanted to play from there on in. So, because we’ve got that established portfolio, user base, we could throw our weight around a little bit. So it’s not like we’re new now. We can actually send them an email with a name Starbucks in the subject line. “Hey, we heard you were looking for app. Well we made this one. Are you interested”.
Rob: Yeah, it helps to have that clout, the celebrity feel, where we’ve already worked with these guys. We don’t need to go through the pony show and prove it to you. But even then, so you make the phone call… Is it literally you make a phone call and you reach out to the right person or is it a process of they put you through the next person and a next person? Really, what’s that process? Earl: It is the same as every other system. Right. So, on a cold call system, you hit the receptionist. You gotta get past that gate keeper and to get from point A to point B, there’s a couple of things you can do to get around that kind of stuff. You can say ‘”Hey, I found a white paper for your boss that might be interesting to them”… You don’t even have to write the white paper, you just have to give it to the guy and say “Hey, he was looking for information on this, that’s what I heard. I wanted to pass this along to him. Could you please give this to him with my name and contact information? Then, when you call back, they say “Oh hey! It’s Earl! Great!” and they just let you through the door. Typical Sales 101. So, I know it doesn’t sound sexy… there’s no secret sauce to it. But you just literally watch the news, listen to what people are asking for, and then just follow up with that, right? But there is a psychological piece to it. I’ll attribute this to Dr. Blair Dunkley. He’s the one who taught me, he’s one of my mentors. “Fear, Dream, Quantify, Close.” Fear, dream, quantify, close. That’s psycho analysis you have to go through for a sales process.
The fears are where people have to, kind of address their fears, like is this guy good, do they know what they are doing. Dream… Once you got past that whole fear barrier and they’re not so scared of you and they are not so scared of what the undertaking is... Some people think that an app is a magical fair land quest. They go in and they have no idea what the hell happens, but out it comes you know hoping that it works. So, walk them through that process. Then, the dream, let them go sky high. Let them figure out what they want. Realize that the Nike app was you know us sitting across the table, and those guys said we want the app that talks to a shoe. We’re good, but we were like what the hell do we do now? (laughing). Right. So, it’s like… uhh… okay? Once, the dream thing is done – quantify it. Say, we can do this like this, this like this and it then walk them through it. They feel like it is more real, it is more reachable. And then the close happens by itself. You do not have to do anything. There’s no actual closing part, just say “Hey does all this stuff make sense?”… Shut the hell up and nod. And then they just start buying things. Rob: Ok. Let me just dig into this a little. So, basically, you are giving someone a phone call, and then you proceed from the phone call, and you send a white paper and more phone calls. Some of these you’re sitting across the table. Do you bring out fancy PowerPoint presentations? Do you do anything flashy in that sense? Or do you basically just stick to – here is a conversation, here is the contract? Earl: So, what the model is we literally give them the free consult. Right, but it’s not just a normal consult. Most app companies, when someone says “can you build this app”, they go yes. And then, after you leave – what the hell are we supposed to do? Right?
Rob: That’s the age old “it’s easier to sell it than actually fulfill it.” Earl: Exactly. Where as, we’ve done it. We’ve done 2500 apps. It is not like we haven’t done this before. Right. What we do is we walk them through a process of what’s called a Dream Call. And it is literally an hour consult. Me or another senior Rep, who knows what they are doing. Both from marketing, both from tech side. And they know their stuff. And it really just helps the client. These guys who are buying an app, this is not what they do all day long. They have their core business, where they make all the money. They sell food, they sell clothes, they make videos, whatever they do. And the app is supposed to accentuate that and help them make more money. So, we show them best practices from weird stuff where they wouldn’t think that this would make sense in their business. Right? How does the people who have loyalty programs and prepaid card programs make any money. People don’t realize there’s money in that. You actually make the money from the money siting in the bank account doing nothing, earning interest. And then people go, oh yeah, you can make money doing that. And that’s what the loyalty things are for. That’s how Subway, Starbucks make all this money. People pre-buy cards and it sits in their accounts. You make an app that does that, you teach them – hey, this works. That’s it. You show them where the money is made. That’s the biggest thing. People don’t realize how many ways you can make money. Rob: It’s been an education driven marketing. You educate the prospect. Here is the model you might not have thought of, here’s some things you’ve done… or content driven essentially.
Earl: First thing we do is rearrange all their ideas and make in a cohesive manner for them, so they don’t go crazy. So we walk them through… Okay, I’m a user, I push the button and I login. Now what? What do I do? And we walk them all through that. Once it is all done, they feel like that idea is more real than it was because it was this fuzzy thing before. Once that’s all done, yeah, we start hammering them with ideas from other sectors, other places, where they can make more money that they don’t think about. Or other ways they can engage their audience. Like… I’ll give you an example. For a radio app we were looking at building. One of the things we wanted to do was build out a clap-o-meter. One of those things that you can vote for stuff. Your phone has a microphone in it, it can measure how loud you are cheering, literally with an assigned decibel level. Whoever audience cheers more, that song wins. Right, so, that’s a weird way to engage that no one is doing. So we just think what’s a fun way that no one is doing it yet to collect the same amount of data. Who wins – this one or that one, it doesn’t matter. It’s gotta be fun a way to do it. Rob: The apps you guys have developed or in some context been part of or fully developed, must have seen tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions downloads at this point. Earl: Yeah. Like the Starbucks app has like 5 million transactions a week. If that were to go down the world will end I think <laughs>. Pissed off people with no coffee is a bad idea.
Rob: So let’s talk about the second question I have for you. These were really the two root ones I wanted to dig into here. Let’s take a company who maybe they’re already doing half a million or a few million revenuse and they want to scale up, they want to move up to 10, 20, 30 million. What can you advise? Cause I know you’ve ran sales teams. It is not just you. You’re the superstar so to speak, but you are not just the only one. What can you say about either scalability opportunities, whether it is automation or whether it’s bringing in sales teams. What kind of insights can you leave for that? Earl: Sure. When I started, I’ll go back to my finance days. My first year I did $150,000. Second year I was praying for $300,000, ended up taking Blair’s course and got $1.2 Million. And I am like, what did you do to my head? Can you do it to all my staff? We did it to the staff I brought on and recruited. And we did 40 million the year after. That’s my claim to fame. So, the main things are simplification. If people can’t repeat your message, and it is like really, really simple, no one is going to repeat it. It has got to be simplified, it’s got to be put into that context where anybody can repeat it and everyone can say what you said. Not necessarily to the same level, but so people can understand it. The next thing is automation. You’ve gotta make it so everyone fills in the same form, everyone goes through the same process. I actually automated everything and everything goes to InfusionSoft now. If this then that then
that… the salespeople, basically, can’t screw it up. Rob: Which is interesting. There’s a lot of… InfusionSoft is one of the companies that has a lot of people who love it and a lot of people who hate it… and I don’t meet too many people in the middle. So, you guys obviously love it? It’s working out for you? Earl: Actually, it is in the middle for me. We had to actually augment it to make it work. When we called InfusionSoft and asked them to build what we asked and tried to build, they were like “well we can’t do this” … And I go “yes, you can.” So, I ended up hiring like a bunch of different InfusionSoft technicians and I said I want this, this and that. Half of them said no, half of them said yes. Combined altogether, we got what we wanted. We asked it to do things it’s not supposed to do. But if automates stuff in the system here, less human screw up, more duplicability. That systemization, the whole McDonalds makes a burger the same way everywhere you go. Same thing. The sales process here happens exactly the same way. Rob: And do you normally just bring in seasoned sale reps who sold in enterprise for 20-30 years or you bring in also like intern level. How do you build the sales force? Where do you look?
Earl: All of the above. I get a mix of everybody. Because what happens is certain customers speak different languages and depending on the language they speak and what they are into, they are gonna connect with different people. Actually, our top number one sales guy right now is a total rookie. Had no real experience, but he is freaking killing it. He’s done almost a million bucks in the last two weeks. So, again, it’s just systemization, training and then having a diversity of sales people. We have a lot of different guys from all different walks of life. So, when some guy goes, “I want to make an app that does this versus an app that does that”, we go, who here knows anything about paintballs, weed or crayons? Or whatever they are looking for. Seriously, those are real calls. And we got the guy who knows everything about weed. Hey, you talk to the weed guy, go. <laughing> Right And they hit it off, there’s someone to talk about their extracurricular activity. So, they will be able to speak their language and speak to their likes, wants and what deals they are into afterwards. It’s much easier to do small talk when you pair them with the same type of guy or gal Rob: I’m stealing this from I think Chet Holmes, one of the many sales trainers, talking about how there are two things to look for in a superstar sales rep or anybody on your sales force, is ego and empathy. So, first, ego, meaning they are confident in themselves. Obviously, if they’ve gotten rejection so far, then you know. You’ve got ego, but not in a bad way.
You are definitely confident in yourself and you know your skills but you don’t flaunt it, but you definitely have the ego. And, then the empathy, is really what you’re saying is even if you don’t have the empathy, where you can’t connect with a prospect or a potential client directly, then what you are saying is that you bring in a person who can. There’s the person who knows paintballs, cause empathy is necessary to make that connection. Earl: Well, the sales team here knows that it’s better to get half of something than all of nothing. So what happens. They bring in the right guy to the right spot. And that makes a huge difference. Right? The other stuff that we do is we bring in the rest of our team… Sometimes they want to talk to a project manager, so they can feel the process is sound. Sometimes they want to talk to an engineer, so they can make sure that we can do what we say we can do. Sometimes they want to talk to a marketing guy. Hey, this is it. So, if you bring that in, that’s that whole Fear, Dream, Quantify, Close thing again… so Fear… if you never alleviate that fear, they’ll never trust you. They don’t trust you, I don’t care what else you will do. You can pitch till you’re blue in your face, they still feel weird around you. Rob: I appreciate your time. That’s all I wanted… to ask you those two questions cause I think they are really…. I mean they cover all the ground. I think a lot of people are either in a space where they need to scale up or they need to look at how to get in the door with the right people. So, again, I appreciate your time.
EARL’S WORDS ABOUT WORKING WITH ME
“Rob is truly a ‘genie’ granting people wishes. Marketing wishes. He’s a connector and a networker putting the right people together when they need to be, and has a definite strong marketing and systematic background that makes his clients a great ROI. If you’re looking to get ahead in the marketing world, he’s definitely the man to be in contact with. He’s helped me to connect with great people and is a pleasure to work with. If he can’t do it himself, he knows an army of people to refer you to that will get the job done.”
– Earl Flormata
Earl Flormata is who you’ll want to talk to about premium app development ($25,000 - $2 Million+ apps) and other custom coding/development. If
your brand would like to talk to or work with Earl for his sales training or for custom app and
development projects, you can contact me for a direct and personalized introduction.
A Team Of 3 Strength And Conditioning Coaches Who Trained NFL Players But Struggled With Their Online Membership …
And How We Boosted Their Revenues 30X With A Few Changes In Just A Couple Of Months
ULTIMATE STRENGTH AND CONDITIONING
I’m re-publishing this case study from an email I sent over a year ago. It’s important as it clearly highlights how much psychology and perception matters. Not fancy sales tactics. Not new “guru” endorsed buzz words. Just good old fashioned human psychology and perception. In this case study, I only worked on and tweaked those 2 elements and it revolutionized the business.
----- Republished ------ Doesn't matter if you're the "copywriter" in-house or not... if you're selling/marketing anything, especially online, salestext is involved. Whether it's an ad you're running on Facebook, the text you're using for a lead capture page or the text you write in a promotional email for a sale... you need effective salescopy. When crafting or reviewing the salestext you're about to use in your promotion, keep in mind that your 2 primary goals are: (1) get your prospect's attention (if you don't accomplish this, you'll never get the clickthrough or the opt-in or the sale)
(2) communicate at THEIR level (which will build rapport) Now... once you've accomplished those 2 goals, your next most valuable conversion points often won't be the use of sophisticated linguistics ... but instead your overall packaging.
Before
After
You know the 80/20 rule inside out by now, I'm sure. Same thing here. If you're running a very matured, highly optimized business then you have to keep seeking out the best of the best in salescopy and conversions psychology... But that's the minority. Most vendors are making so many mistakes and have so many "profit leaks" that simply tackling the 20% which makes the 80% difference is the first logical step. Here's how we made a very sizeable dent in a recent mastermind/advisory member's business focusing precisely on that. Packaging. Price. Confidence. The client's business is in the strength development market. Their business involved working with professional sports teams (primarily football) and other often pro-level athletes. But a year prior, they also launched a membership site with a continually growing collection of video courses that demonstrate how they work with their pro-athletes.
They are 100% qualified to teach the content and have the credentials for it. They're also in a hungry market and have extremely high value content. Sounds like easy money, right? It should. But the reality is strengths in one area, don't translate to strengths in another. This team of 3 went about and purchased an amateur and over-priced website. It looked like a high-school project. The reason I tear the site apart is because "looks" matter. While "pretty and polished" isn't always the goal, and, in plenty of marketing strategies, it should be avoided... this wasn't one of them. Their client roster was mid-level at worst and high-profile at best. And they run a respected fitness center for their specialization. Yet their $5 quality logo and their weak website communicated one thing: amateur.
The client wanted increased sales (naturally). They had questions on how to fix their salestext. But that's not where I was focused on. It would have been the wrong place to start... Instead, we developed a new design… a complete face-lift. While that (the "PACKAGING") was in development, I wanted to tackle PRICE and CONFIDENCE. The client's online-video membership was sold as a $9/month offer. Keep in mind, this is a team of VERY experienced strength and conditioning trainers with a lot of respect in the training space. Not a bunch of rookies wanting to "sell some videos online". They're the real deal and get hired by PROFESSIONAL SPORTS TEAMS. That $9/month was killing their revenues. It was too cheap and it made THEM look "cheap". Because of the team's admitted lack of internet marketing and overall sales experience, and the use of an incredibly broken website and an inability to pull traffic to the site... they hardly ever saw a sale. The lack of sales had them rationalizing that "maybe nobody wants to buy... maybe it's too expensive". That's how the $9 price came about along with the completely deflated confidence. On the field and in their training clinic, they were powerful.
Online, they were new and weak. And it showed... in every bit of salestext, "promo" emails and their prices. When the new website was finished, I encouraged the client to make a leap from $9/month to $99/year ... with the goal being to increase this to $99/month. I also shared a handful of salescopy cheats to fix their very leaky salescopy as well in-house, without hiring a copywriter (though I DO recommend hiring professionals, they operated with a modest budget and it wasn’t an option for “phase 1”). The combination of what we assembled worked beautifully... Their salescopy still was (and is) weak. This will require a bigger budget and the continued renewed vigor from the client. Their salescopy is night and day compared to their first version... and they accomplished this with a set of cheats (which I teach and make available to my Training group). The professional logo and website (top quality within the rigid budget constraints) received a flood of 'wow' and compliments from peers, associates and their subscribers. [email protected]
And the price hike from $9/month to $99/year was important to establishing that this isn't a rookie course. (Remember: when a prospect sees the price as $9/month, they don't think 9 x 12 = $108 per year. They think "this course is only 9 bucks?? How good could it be.") Even from their current price, client should continue to incrase rates. Overall... We took the roughly 0.4% sales conversions of a $9 offer to 1.1% of the $99 offer (without a single DOLLAR being spent on salescopy writing) ... • Previously 1000 visitors produced 4 (0.4% conversion) sales x $9
(lower price) = $36
• After the implementation I gave them, they're hovering at 11 (1.1% conversion before optimization) sales x $99
(higher price) = $1089
THAT'S A 30X INCREASE IN ROI. And the opt-in form they use on their page (not a "squeeze" or lead capture page, just the form in-line on their site) bumped from the roughly 4.5% opt-ins to just over 12%.
Their business is far from optimized. It has a LOT of continued development it will need… But the above is an important consideration in your business and campaigns as well. Before trying to get everything "perfect" or implementing every slick new tactic, look at where the biggest leaks are. What are the elements that are SINKING your profits? Address those as priority 1 and filter out every other tip and "shiny" suggestion. It's also a reminder to know that fixing the "we need more buyers" conversion problem isn't necessarily a game of just salestext revisions. [email protected]
Nearly $100 Million In Funds Raised. 15 Companies In 22 Years. Newest Company
Hit $23 Million In Its 3rd Year.
DALE HENSEL
Dale has that Mark Cuban-esque no-bullsh*t approach to life and business. He's confident in his business approach ... and it's well earned.
Having started in his first business at age 21 and having built 15+ companies since that time with tens of millions in revenues... Dale knows "where the money is" and can enter a market, bring in top-talent and funding, couple that with his systems/processes approach and scale up FAST to dominate in business.
He remains "off the radar" and unknown to most. His speaking appearances are minimal. In fact, I think my invite to have him speak at (my now acquired) Canada Marketing Summit was one of his only public speaking appearances. EDIT: I've included a link to his keynote presentation at the end of this case study. They say nothing great was ever accomplished without enthusiasm. If there’s truth to that statement, then Dale embodies it. He doesn't write success books or sell "how to" courses. Instead, he just gets to work, builds the team, perfects the process and scales tremendously fast. So when it comes to scaling up and high-growth, he's one of the top business leaders you can find. And for that reason I decided to give him a call and ask him a few "growth focused" questions. The transcript of that call is posted on the following pages.
Rob Toth: Can you talk about the business models you’ve worked with? Not every single business, because that list is long... but what kind of business models you mostly worked with? Dale Hensel: I worked with a lot of different business industries and models: everything from real estate to software, to online products to physical products, manufacturing and things like that. So, I’ve spent quite a bit of time with different industries. And some of the business models have been direct to consumer, direct sales businesses. Or wholesale. And, of course, real estate, which is rental, landlord type of stuff. Rob Toth: Let’s go back a bit. No need to talk about any sort of lemonade stand <laughs>, but what were some of your initial businesses? What got you started? Dale Hensel: I actually never had a lemonade stand. When I was a kid, I was just a kid. I was about 21, when I finally got curious about business. So, that was like 1991. And, my very first business was commercial diving in Alaska. I learned how to dive, and then I rented a boat, hired some crew and went to the ocean and jumped in the water and picked up some sea cucumbers, urchins, sea ducks and abalones. Put them in a bag, carried them to the surface and sold them. I was 21 and making about 1000$ a day and I thought I was hardcore. It was kind of fun. It was very, very adventurous. I was up in Alaska, out in the coast, away from any city. It was very adventurous.
Rob Toth: Awesome. It actually ties to the second question I am moving to. Let’s talk about some of the higher growth businesses, the really scalable ones. Can you pick one that was, let’s call it, a catalyst into the things you were able to scale up, take kind of global, get some high revenues with. What took you into that? Was it, you know, a business partner inviting you into it or your own research? How did you end up working with the businesses that can scale that big? Dale Hensel: Let me go for my first big business, which were actually real estate rentals. I was working as a Repo man and a bill collector and I had a house with a couple of roommates and they paid me rent. At the end of the month I had one hundred dollars more than I started with. And I thought after I pay all my bills, holy crap, this is cool. I should rent to more people. In fact, I should buy some more houses, and rent to them. I should have like a hundred dollars per house. I will be rich. And I started buying them. I started looking around and my first deal was a 15 unit apartment complex. And I bought it because I did not know it was supposed to be hard. I did not have any money, didn’t have any credit, and I didn’t know anything. Some guy, some old guy just offered it to me like “I have all this space, do you want it?” And I did. So he made me a deal and I got it with no money down. I took it over.
In 2-3 months after I cleaned it up, kicked bad people out, I started making about $2000 out of it. I thought it was awesome. So, 6 months later I went out to acquire my second one. And at that point my boss said “hey, listen, you’ve got 30 apartments, you are too busy, and you are fired.” So, he fired me, which was great. But I did not quite have enough money because I was evicting people all the time. I bought the third one, which had 44 units. I didn’t know that was supposed to be hard either. So, my next one, my fourth one, were another 44 units and a triplex. And I just kept going from there. And looking back on that, I go wow. It was kind of… I just did it. I guess I was lucky enough not to believe that it was supposed to be hard or impossible. If you want to do anything, you just decide and do it. You take the first step, then the next step and then pretty soon you find yourself 50 steps into it and it’s done. So, that was my first large business. I had about 250 apartments in a 2.5 year time frame. And I started with no money and no credit and no knowledge even. And then my next big one was in Dallas. I went from rentals and started buying loans from banks that were non-performing, that were nonpaying. And then when I actually grew up to the point when I took it public and I was a trader on a stock market. I grew that for about 5 years and then I sold it to a hedge fund in 2007. By the time I sold it we’ve grown from just a few properties to where we were buying around 300 properties per week all over the country for an average of about 25 cents to a dollar. And I did not know it was supposed to be hard or it was supposed to be impossible. So I just did it.
People would tell me that ‘you can’t do that’. And I was like really? YOU can’t, but I just did. I don’t know what’s wrong with people, but seriously they honestly work so hard to get in their own way. They really believe that bullshit in their head is true. And they act like it, and subsequently everything is hard. And the hardest thing about business is getting out of your own way. So, the latest one we did is global. I’ll tell you about it briefly. We sell home and beauty products. We started with 3 guys and we hit up our credit cards for about $850,000 we ran bunch of media. We set up a webpage, we got a contract with a manufacturer, and we got a shipper and a call center. We bought a bunch of traffic and sent it to a webpage and started making money and our first year was about 4.5 million dollars in sales. And the next year we made about 12 and half million dollars and this last year we did about 22 millions. We’ve grown really fast. And this year we will probably do somewhere about 40 million to 60 million dollars range pretty easily. And that was it. We’re now primarily in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and US. You know, so US is not our only market. The beautiful part about it is the logistical chain from ingredients to manufacturers, to fulfillments, to call centers is all outsourced and there are some excellent people out there, so logistical chain is very, very manageable using other people instead of having to build everything yourself. So, we just focus on sales.
Rob Toth: You know that’s one question I definitely wanted to jump on because I know especially with this growth you can attest to. One thing that I’ve known of you is your ability to find and recruit, and get passion and excitement from really top talent in whatever it is: media buying, sales or whatever. How is that? You are beyond entry-level guys. How do you find, seek out, you know, basically bring these top quality people on board and get them excited about your project, get them working with you? Dale Hensel: So, I do it one of two ways. One: I am just a really good salesman, when it comes to people, to getting talent. But I hired a lot of talent and one of the best things I discovered to do to get people excited is use what they are excited about. And what I do, really simple, I take where they are at right now and I draw a line that connects them to very visible, very, very concrete future that they can see. So I just connect their present to future, and the future just happens to involve me and where we are going. And ask whether they can see the intersection of where we are at and where we are going. And in the future it is going to look like X and they can be part of making it happen. So, I am very good at connecting the person’s present to the future that also includes me. So, that’s how I get people excited. Where do I find them? Ah, people like that are not sitting around, looking at Craigslist or anything like that. So, what I do, I network the hell out of it. And I approach the best people I possibly can. They don’t have to be in my industry at all. In fact, I find people who are not in my industry, are actually better.
They don’t have any bad habits that I have to overcome. So, they are usually not in my industry, like I’d picked up a top insurance sales person recently to be a media buyer. Now, I can train anyone to be a media buyer, but it took me a little while to find a right person with a right drive, and right place where they were at in their life and connect their future with our future in such way that they went ‘hell yeah.’ So I take a top insurance person and I approach them or I take a top logistics manufacturer person and I approach them. There are two different parts of business I focus on when approaching people. One, they’re in either management or two, they’re is sales or business development. So, management: when I take people there, I look for top talent who have worked for big companies and who are tired of corporate BS, and who would rather scale down to something more personable – they want to be important. Like our CFO. She was a finance person at the Gap. When you are dealing with a company with 15 Billion dollars in sales… you are just a number. I don’t care how high up you are in the company. Unless you are a CEO, you are pretty much no one. And, you know, she wanted to be important and be part of the management decision team. Instead of just a worker. I brought her up as a CFO and she is brilliant and capable CFO for a smaller company. So, here she has a lot of say. She likes that. So I appealed to the part of her that wanted to step out of a big corporate world and wanted to play within an entrepreneurial fast pace, very flexible organization as opposed to just being another number.
Rob Toth: Come to think of it. Actually, you were in my Mastermind and you actually took at least a couple of guys from there as you discovered these guys had some skills that are pretty sharp. I know several members who at one point either for few months or some extended period came to work with you. And I bet it was precisely for the opportunity of just working with you and learning from you and your operations. Good point. I have two final questions, but they are kind of tied to each other, so as you answer you may want to know both. So, I’ll give you both. So, one of the things I’ve been wanted to wrap up here with is any specific tips related to scaling up? I’m specifically looking at – you can have with someone… let’s say someone was sitting on, I don’t know, couple of millions of revenue and they wanted to go up to 20-30 million or even towards 100 million in valuation and so forth. What can you say about scaling like that? That’s kind of question one. Question two ties into that. Any pitfalls or losses, or mistakes you’ve made along the road or missed opportunities for growth that you feel, you know, here we could have done better that would have helped us to grow quicker. So, again, both questions are growth-related, what is your insights on these?
Dale Hensel: Sure. So, with growing up or scaling up the business: if you have a million or 2 million in revenues... What happened here is you kind of figured out what you need, you figured out what your practice is, you know how to get to your target market, and you are doing it. But what happened to get there is usually you fumbling around and hoping to hit your targets. You need to stop at this point and step back, ‘okay, we’ve got revenue coming in, we are maybe even profitable, we’ve got cashflow, we know what we want to do, we know marketing and we know so much more than when we started. But the problem is that we had to like create all these processes on the back of a napkin all the way up to this point. This is where you need to stop, back up, erase the white board, get on it for a couple of days, and really, really think through your process building. Map out your processes very, very well and in detail. Then step back and look at them and go ‘okay, is this really the most efficient way we can do this?’ And quite often hell no, it just happens to end up this way because we just fumbled it into existence and now it is working… but it sucks. So the first thing you need to do is really map out your processes, get your head around it, so then you can scale them up and say alright, what resources are missing, what people or processes are missing, what is not here that if we start scaling this thing up and turn this engine faster, it won’t break and fly apart.
As for what really kicked my ass in the past? So a couple of things. Finance sometimes kicks my ass, not having a system in place, attempting to scale too fast has kicked my ass. Not knowing the market place which I am entering has kicked my ass. And sometimes the exit – not exiting fast enough has kicked my ass. The virtue I had in 2008 – I lost about 20 million dollars which you know is never fun. Then I took some time off and then I got back into the game. So, that’s what I am doing now. Finance sometimes will hold you back. So dig you well before you are thirsty. Before I ever launch a business, I am talking to people about it in a casual way. Saying “hey, I am getting going with a new business, I will probably need about half million dollars. I’ll be starting to look for investors in couple months and here is what it is.” And I soft pitch somebody and then when I come back around, they’re asking – ‘hey, how is that deal going?” I go “well, we got 85% returns right now, are you interested in playing?” ‘Holy shit, yeah.’ So, I pitch way, way before I ever needed money, you know - months in advance. And I am always keeping people interested about that. Rob Toth: Amazing. Well I appreciate all the details. I said we’d take a few minutes though we ran a little longer. Thank you again Dale.
Canada Marketing Summit Presentation http://www.RobToth.com/linkto/dalehensel-cms.html
Canada Marketing Summit Speaker-Preview Interview http://www.RobToth.com/linkto/dalehensel-preview.html
If you’re an investor or are interested in talking to Dale about his various investment opportunities
(often with 80%+ returns), you can email me direct for a personal introduction:
DALE’S WORDS ABOUT WORKING WITH ME
“[Rob Toth] is good…knows his stuff…expert…professional… someone we hire over and over”
- Dale Hensel
Watch the full testimonial: http://www.RobToth.com/linkto/dalehensel-testimonial.html
The $24,000 Birthday And Building A Business
In Golf and Mental Performance
CRAIG SIGL
Craig and I met when my team ran a sales-outreach process we used to do to connect with qualified information product merchants. In fact, I’ll talk of that first, then I’ll introduce Craig and his business and talk of what solutions we implemented that you can also copy (model). First… this quick aside: While marketing is great (it generates leads or even “automated sales”)… it should only supplement sales activities. The 2 should be in place to support each other. I can’t think of many businesses where this isn’t true. Maybe it doesn’t make economical sense to “sell” a low-cost toothpaste product to the end consumer. That would be terribly inefficient. But you could sell them an automated monthly order (autoship) package. Or you should be “selling” retailers to carry the product. Or “selling” the industry media to feature and discuss your product. Many “internet marketers” only know to start an email list and send the same push-button message to everyone on the list. Without segmentation and certainly without incorporating any “high touch” sales engagements with those valuable leads. In my business, I paired the lead generation that leveraged marketing allowed for such as the content marketing and referral engines, along with a process that required a simple enough process that was executed for me by one staff member.
Back when my focus was primarily in the information products market (these days I take on fewer and fewer qualified clients in that business model), we used to run a process that would monitor newly listed information courses and then sort these, based on internal criteria that I set, to find the ones who I felt were “qualified” for an outreach. Then we initiated a cold calling warm-up step by sending a casual “hello” type message (which is part of a 6-step process we used that, over the years, brought in at least $150,000 in new clients). The objective of the email was more of an edified, virtual handshake and to then figure out further if the merchant was one that would be a match. Another sidenote: A lot of service providers or “consultants” are so starved for business that they pursue anyone and everyone who is willing to give them money. In fact, they think their market is “everyone”. Which is precisely why NOBODY is buying from them. By refining the criteria and being very clear on the service and VALUE you deliver, you can then get clear on the precise client profile you want to work with. And even then, it’s a bit like dating… you have to feel out whether it’s worth exploring a relationship. If you skip this step (as a service provider), you’ll be on a lot of ugly, blind dates. Odd, time and energy consuming situations where neither of you walks away happy. So now back to Craig …
Craig Sigl, a former FedEx employee and now the owner of GolfShortcutSecrets.com is a Mental Toughness Trainer and Single-digit HDCP golfer. He has been featured on ESPN, NBC TV’s “Evening Magazine” show, numerous radio shows and the Seattle P.I. newspaper. He is the creator of 6 mental game training programs for athletes sold in 28 countries. His newsletters go to over 18,000 athletes, parents and coaches worldwide. I found he had high-value courses in the Golf niche but I could see definite leaks that, if plugged, would really grow his business. Craig had a lot of pros: hard-worker and very knowledgeable in his courses. He’s also a fast action taker and fast learner. He also had some “cons” about his business… it was a scattered effort. Different products sitting on disconnected, individual, unoptimized sales pages. No true sales funnel. No “branding”. He was still wearing every hat in his business (including the ones that represented his weaknesses and were costing him tremendous wasted time and energy). Plus his network of offers had a host of user experience, navigation and even tech/page load challenges. Not to mention some short-comings in salestext and really the overall strategy. So we had a lot of work to get to. When the work was underway, Craig had a birthday coming up. Knowing that Craig had a host of quality products, a modest audience (“database”, “list”) … I felt we could build a quick cashflow promotion for him.
We created a birthday sale that was a bundle of his courses, at a deep discount, for a limited (birthday) time. We put this all under one new brand, one focused banner. We tied in a personal anecdote about Craig and his growth in the world of golf and the golfing he used to do with his dad to build rapport and provide us with a story. We used a story to speak of his own personal anecdotes, but to also remind his subscribers and buyers (and previous affiliate partners) that he’s a very giving man. This plays a bit off of our natural want to reciprocate to those and celebrate with those who give to us. Well Craig had been over-delivering (and under-selling) for quite some time. While his audience wasn’t very sizeable, the ones who were part of his lists knew that here was a man who has been giving out hundreds of dollars of value regularly. And now, for his birthday, he packaged a truly generous offer. This, even among a small internal list who had previously heard of each of his products many times in the past, really boosted conversions during the birthday sale. Similarly, Craig’s small handful of former affiliate partners, who have marketed his courses in the past were quick to take part and send some ‘birthday traffic’. Of course, they enjoyed the lift in sales conversions this bundle created.
The quick drafted sale (which was assembled in a part-time effort across a couple of weeks), produced $24,000 in about 2 weeks. This was Craig’s best sales month ever up until then and a definitely welcomed cash infusion for the continued revision and growth of his brand. That money was then allotted to fit the “big picture” strategy. Here is a screenshot of a Facebook post about the progress of this sale roughly 8 days into it…
When I build strategy, I work with the confines of the resources (time, team, money and similar) and the objectives/goals. For Craig, we assembled a multi-phase “business upgrade”. First, we brought in tech. There is no reason why any web business owner should be tinkering with their own webpages. Even if it’s something quick and simple such as installing a script. Craig needed a lead web tech (or “webmaster”). We brought in a lead tech to handle the webpage changes and other tech related to the funnel. We went on to fix various tech, navigation and funnel leaks. We created ONE brand to focus all the products under. One primary domain. One funnel. One audience. After working with 140+ private 1-on-1 clients in 40+ industries, I know that one of the major reasons for stalled and flat-lined numbers is our tendency to move away from the painful work of traffic, leads gen, sales and marketing and instead second guess landing pages and revise them endlessly, or create new webpages or build new products or move to entirely new verticals and business opportunities. Craig is a creator. He can put out content and create courses no problem. But this had resulted in a number of single-page offers, disconnected from each other and neither of them was honed in on and optimized.
To build a long term BUSINESS, a brand was needed. That was the birth of GolfShortcutSecrets.com which, with a new name, logo, back-end, designs and funnel brought his various courses under one roof. This then allowed us to roll into promotional activity such as Facebook ads and affiliate recruiting. Without the one optimized funnel, without the ONE brand, it’s an endless cycle of busy work for most people and with stand-alone offers, it can be quite tough to buy traffic profitably. This was one of the many business development changes we implemented during a 90-day contract together.
CRAIG SIGL’S TESTIMONIAL ABOUT OUR WORK TOGETHER “When I first hired Rob to consult me in my business, I was all over the place... The thing I most appreciate about working with Rob, is he always got me laser focused. I could just discard and not worry about the things that really didn't matter to me, my business and my situation and what I had to offer. Pretty soon after we started working together I said I need to put some money in the bank so I can finance these bigger projects of which he helped me create a big picture for in the long term structure of my business... I said I need to make some money.. So with my existing products, my existing handful of joint venture partners and some great ideas ... I didn't create anything new... I ended up within 2 or 3 weeks, I cleared $24,000 which was sorely needed at the time and helped me finance bigger things . Just working with Rob I would get inspired and able to clear out all the clutter so that I could get to work and move my business forward. The other thing I want to mention about working with Rob is he's a man of high integrity. You can count on what he says. You just know he's telling the truth and he really cares about your success... or my success So I highly recommend that you hire him.” – Craig Sigl, GolfShortcutSecrets.com
Genie Advisory and Genie Training: 2 Ways to Work with Me
Grow Faster With An 11-Year Veteran Who Was Selling Online
Before Facebook, Twitter And YouTube Were Even Born.
Benefit From A Decade Of Online Advertising And Business Development Experience...
Genie Training SMALL, PRIVATE GROUP, CLASSROOM FORMAT, PERSONALIZED BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT AND SALES/MARKETING TRAINING.
Because You Don't Want A Bunch of How-To Videos Or Unproven Theories From Inexperienced Textbook Experts... You Want Speed, Efficiency, Profits... You Want Customized Action-Oriented Steps and Results.
GENIE TRAINING IS 4 COMPONENTS: 1) "Ask Me" format access to me for customized, personalized, specific "next steps" guidance 2) Private group webinars and live-stream events (as needed) 3) Previous recorded modules and detailed tutorials, articles and discussion threads on specific web-business objectives 4) Community of members to learn from, learn with, cross-support and cross-promote But it's that #1 item that will be of most immediate impact to your income.
This is not a sit-back, watch-and-learn video membership. It's a "do this, then do that" take action classroom. There is nothing pretty and polished about it... other than personal support and the actual results gained. This is only useful if you're seeking experience-based answers to your business development, audience creation, product launch, online advertising, traffic, lead generation, scaling, revenue creation and other web-business questions. I provide direct, personal responses with clear "next steps" in a private group (small classroom). You learn not only from the custom answers that you get to your own business problems... but from the responses given to all other Training classroom members to their own bottlenecks and obstacles.
Genie Training: What To Expect
Imagine walking into a physical classroom (except ours is online in a private group). You take a seat as the newest member. I ask you to introduce yourself in detail so I can learn about you, your business, your goals, your challenges and identify your leaks and obstacles. I start assigning "next steps" as homework based on what I would do if I were running your business and had your objectives/goals. You get to work and ask me questions in the classroom as needed. I provide continued tweaks and optimization suggestions to your action steps and continue to give you "do this next" guidance. You eliminate information overwhelm, confusion and frustration. You decrease the amount of time wasted on ineffective tactics. You stop losing money on irrelevant purchases and unoptimized campaign ideas. In short... you start down a path of consistent, results-focused action and building a real business. If all you want is "how-to information", this isn't it. And in that case, I recommend you head to SlideShare or YouTube and type in your keywords... you'll find so much "how-to", that you'll be promptly busy studying content, making yourself textbook-knowledge rich and bank-account poor in record time.
ª If you find yourself asking "Can I pick your brain", "I just have a quick question", "What do you recommend for _____", "What should I do _____", "How would you _____", "Why didn't this work?" ... you want answers for your off-and-on questions.
ª Solopreneur or small team. You don't need your Strategist to cooridnate with a full project team or department. It's just you (and maybe a small virtual team).
ª Beginner or "new" experience level. Your overall business
experience is still relatively low or your business is very young. No need for direct access to an Olympic level boxing coach if you don't even know how to skip rope and put on your boxing gloves.
ª Low budget restrictions. Your operations budget doesn't
allow you to hire a 1-on-1 advisor yet. ª Confidentiality isn't an issue. Everything in the Training
classroom is semi-private as it's seen by other members. Of course, you choose which sensitive information you do and don't reveal.
Genie Training is ideal for:
Genie Advisory 1-ON-1 ACCESS. STRATEGIST AND ADVISOR TO YOUR BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT AND MARKETING GOALS.
Grow Faster With An 11-Year Veteran Who Was Selling Online Before Facebook, Twitter And YouTube Were Even Born.
I've worked as an advisory to VC funded tech start-ups, former CEOs of $100M companies and professionals who charge $25,000 per day for their services. I've been marketing coordinator to companies with Fortune 50 client rosters. I've helped launch brands, enter new markets and grow sales... and that doesn't even include the projects we work on with my OOAGENCY. Genie Advisory brings me onto your team via short-term retainer, for the pursuit of your revenue and growth goals.
Why Bring A Marketing Strategist and Advisor On-Board What age did you learn to drive a car? Did you figure it out on your own? (If so, did you run anyone over accidentally during that trial and error period?) Or did someone teach you to shortcut the learning curve, minimize the risk and increase the positive experience? How about helicopters? A friend is looking to add a helicopter landing pad on their residential property. He's not trying to just "wing it". Helicopter lessons are upwards of $30,000. He has hands-on supervision and guidance to ensure he takes off, flies and lands successfully. Do you have the same for your business? I recommend you don't try to figure every aspect of your business and marketing out yourself or pawn it off to a unqualified, low-skilled worker and hope they'll take care of it for you by watching a few YouTube tutorials and reading industry whitepapers.
And regardless of your business savvy and authority (maybe you built and run a $5 Million, $50 Million or $500 Million dollar company right now), if you're the smartest person in your office or the only "thinker" (decision maker), I'm certain your business is bleeding in a number of areas. You're maybe not even seeing this because you're too close to your own business to notice these otherwise-obvious leaks. Even the sharpest minds and top talents have trusted, outside advisors.
1 + 1 = 11. When you add in a high-level, experienced advisor, your results increase
exponentially not linearly.
ª Intermediate/expert level business owners. Your needs are complex and you often have teams or other variables to coordinate.
ª You're not trying to figure out step 1. You're trying to figure
out how to get from step 10 to step 100 in as little time as possible.
ª Aggressive budgets. Your budgets allow for a larger upfront
investment in all areas for a much more rapid and predictable growth and higher yield. You want to enter a market strong and dominate fast.
ª Established online or ìofflineî operations wanting to create
successful ad campaigns online and wanting to solidify which marketing channels are their most relevant and how to engage and maximize those channels.
ª Funded start-ups with a strong idea or technology but
needing marketing and business development support.
Genie Advisory is ideal for:
"He Is A Pure Jedi, He Is A Master Networker" - Jeff Mills
"Investing Into Rob Toth Was A Smart Decision For Us" - Collin Almeida "Rob Turned Out To Be A PROFITABLE Decision!" - Jeff Masterson "Rob Toth Is No Genie - He's A Marketing Magician!" - Brian McElroy "Has A Definite Strong Marketing and Systematic Background" - Earl Flormata, Jiffy Software "Saved Me A Lot of Time and Confusion" - Scott Bradley
"Rob Has Been Instrumental ... I Can Recommend Almost No One More Than Rob Toth ... The Highest Possible Recommendation." - Scott Rewick
"A Man Of Integrity... One Of The Most Creative Business Minds I've Ever Met. Complete Genius." - Heidie Woods
"A Tremendous Asset" - Allen and Donna Smith
"Rob Has My Very Highest Recommendation!!" - Jim McCarthy "The Next Frank Kern" - Chris Hubbard "Honest, Trustworthy, Creative, Hard and Smart Working..." - Mike Mograbi "Total Uniqueness And Abilities To Think Outside Of The Box" - Ricky Roberts "The 'Millennium Napoleon Hill'" - Tiffany Finley
"Freaking Brilliant! ... You're A Legend In This Game and Have Some Solid Advice!" - Jonny Andrews
"Extremely Valueable Advice... I've Been Working Online Since 1996 and Can Say That Rob's A Really Sharp Guy." - Big Jason Henderson
BUSINESS/MARKETING q Facebook https://www.facebook.com/robthegenietoth q LinkedIn https://ca.linkedin.com/in/robtothofficial q SlideShare http://www.slideshare.net/robthegenietoth/ q YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/robtothofficial
FILM/ENTERTAINMENT q Twitter https://twitter.com/robtothofficial INVESTORS/BUSINESS BUYERS q AngelList https://angel.co/rob-toth
ROB TOTH | ROBTOTH.COM Email: [email protected] Skype: robtoth Phone: 1-888-727-3330 TOTH Web Properties, Inc. #300 - 1055 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C. V6E 2E9
CONNECT
Related Documents
