Joe: 00:01 Hey guys, it's Joe Troyer and welcome back to another episode
of show me the nuggets. I'm super, super excited to be here with none other than John Logar and John, man. I know you got a lot of nuggets to share with us today.
John: 00:20 Thanks man. I really appreciate you having me on at 4:00 AM in
the morning. I might add, I'm committed. I'm committed,
Joe: 00:27 Super committed when it comes to the agency space. John and
I, when it comes to agency coaches, man, you're one of the people that I listened to the most. And so I'm super excited to share with everybody agency specifically on this episode. But I know that everybody else, even if you're just doing marketing for other companies, I know that you'll get a ton of takeaways from today's episode as well. So definitely stay tuned in. Don't leave us.
Joe: 00:52 So for those of you guys that don't know John John and I met
about six years ago. We ran actually into each other. Funny enough, after you had already been on our podcast you already interviewed at digital triggers and then we ran into each other at TNC for a little bit and shared about 90 minutes together and I walked out going, Holy crap. Like you just made me think better. I was, I was such in the weeds. I was like this at TNC, like tactic, tactic, tactic. And you made me walk out and think like strategy, strategy, strategy, like cha changed my mindset a little bit. So man, I'm super excited to have you on the podcast today.
John: 01:30 Thanks man. I really appreciate being here and I want to make
sure that our people do get some actionable takeaways from, from our talk too, which is really important.
Joe: 01:39 Definitely 100%. So I think I want to set the stage, John, by
having you talk a little bit about some of the big success and some of the big wins that you've seen in your agencies. And my goal, John, is to help people understand what's possible. Because as we were talking about before we started, I feel like there's a lot of, frankly, there's a lot of bullshit in the industry floating around. I believe by people that aren't out there doing it, they're not actually building agencies and what they think it takes and what they think the right steps are, I think are completely wrong. And I think it's left a lot of the marketplace going. I don't really know what's possible. So I'd like to show them like if they really think about this like a real business, what, what is really possible? And I think, man, your, your success stories can really help them do that. Well,
John: 02:25 I've been doing this for about 30 years. I was originally, I came
out of a consulting background. I was hired with a major consulting firm, a major international consulting firm out in New York. And these were masters of the universe. And I guess when people think about if you can scale agencies the agency that I worked for was an $18 billion company, so that's scaled. I went out on my own started a small business as a, as an entrepreneur. And I think the biggest thing that I learned in my business lessons was to kind of have the end in mind. You start with the end in mind as a concept. So for me it was like, I'm building a business what am I going to do with this? I'm like, am I building it to sell it?
John: 03:06 Am I building it to support my aspirations? You know where am I taking this and what is the reason we are, why am I doing this? Why am I going to work so hard to make this a reality? So one of the big things was getting really, really clear about what I was going to do with the business that I built. I've built several businesses. I want to also talk about the failures as opposed to the successes as well, because life is real. I've been able to successfully exit out of seven. I've failed with five. I've built three into the eight figure 30 million plus category one recently to 8 million in a in a three year period. Another amount to 30 million AR in a four and a half year period. But the big thing with that is to have a vision, number one is to have that vision, have that idea of what you want this thing to be, why it's so important, and who you're going to help as in part of that journey.
John: 04:04 And unfortunately it's, it, you're not going to do this on your
own. You know, you need to build a team of people. And so there are milestones in this business. The, the first milestone when anybody's getting into this business is to make an income. And the magic number seems to be, you know, a hundred grand a year, 10 grand a month is the magic number that people want to reach. Generally that's sometimes a handful of clients. That's like three to five, maybe seven or eight clients. For some people, depending on what they charge, and generally they'll undercharge. But if you want to keep 10 grand a month, you've actually got to generate about 20 grand a month because you've got to take into consideration your costs, your taxes, all those sorts of things. So that, say, the real milestone of revenue for personal income at that 10 grand a month is roughly 200 to $240,000.
John: 04:48 Because you've got costs the next milestone, once you hit the
six figure people, the magic figure is the seven figures, $1 million is the figure from zero to a million, 80% of your energy
and effort has to be in sales and marketing and 20% in fulfillment. My biggest belief is is that you're always going to buy the fulfillment if you're making the sales. So 80% sales and marketing, 20% fulfillment up to a million dollars. You're going to have a small team of maybe three to five people up to that point, but you're going to start to get into a management role. So you as the owner right now, the chief, everything officer, the sales person, the marketing person, the administrator, the all that sort of thing, you're going to generally the mistake that people make as a hire of VA or you should be hiring is a good quality, EA executive assistant or a project manager, a project manager, a good EA, people who can think, who can understand what, what needs to happen, who can build systems, who can communicate effectively.
John: 05:43 The mistake that people make is they push their tasks down or
they become very task orientated by hiring a VA. And this takes up a lot of your time and energy that you just don't have, because you're still going to do the fulfillment. Right? so from, from there you the million dollar milestone and what do you do? The next milestone is five to 10, so on and so forth. And it's fast to get bigger. But at that million dollar Mark, that million dollar milestone. You really, one of the things you want to get in early is your systems and processes., Leading up to a million and a million dollars. You become a leader. You as the owner now need to manage a management team. And the best hire that you can hire that's going to accelerate your growth is a operations manager or an operations director. That operations director will run your company, essentially replace you.
John: 06:27 So one of the things that I want to get to as quickly as possible
in my businesses is to get to that key hire of an operations director so that they will run my business. And then I can work on the strategy, the development. And the second hire is a salesperson. So first hire, operation director, second hire sales person. As soon as you hire a salesperson in your business is a game changer, it is a game changer for your business. Start to accelerate and grow. So, so in the businesses, in every business that I have scaled those are the two key. The two key hires is an operations manager that runs the business and takes you out of the equation. And the second hire is a sales person that starts selling because that's going to leverage your opportunity. Then you're going to focus on marketing.
John: 07:11 Remember 80, 20 rule marketing, sales, 20% fulfillment. The
other thing is to scale is most people get caught in fulfillment themselves. I don't know how to design a website. I don't know how to run a Facebook ad. I don't know how to run. I don't
know how to set up automation for email marketing. I mean, I know the elements and the fundamentals and like, I'm sure I can find my way through it, but I don't want to do any of that because if I'm doing that, I'm not growing my business. So the first thing I did was I always made sure I partnered up with what I call a resource partner. It's what I teach people, get a resource partner that does everything. Kind of like Invisible PPC manages the client, has a dashboard sets up the campaign, manage the actual campaign reports on the on the results of what's going on.
John: 07:55 Has the expertise and knowledge with a team training support.
If I can get into a resource partner, this scales me much faster cause then I could actually productize my service. I can have a constructive figure of margin so I know what to charge over and above my costs. And this way I can be more profitable. Just from a money point of view, you want to keep your costs about 30, 35%, and you want to keep your gross margin 65 to 70%. If you keep your gross margin, 60, 60, 60, 65% at $1 million, you as the owner, including your salary, you're going to get to keep an extra $250,000 net income on top of your $120,000 personal income out of $1 million business. That's what you want to be aiming for. So so I've done this in different niches. In, in, in my own, in a, in a, in a 28 minute or agency, we built our focus was strategy and and customer relationship.
John: 08:51 Customer attention was our area of expertise. Back in the day.
We were people 25 cents an email. We were running campaigns that were making us $100,000 a day. It was crazy, crazy time back in. We used to actually [inaudible] today you can still charge for email, right? But back then we were charging per email 25 cents an email. It was like, it was, it was a, it was literally raining opportunity, but things have changed. Technology changes. Uso in that business I had over 150 people working with me in that business. We had seven offices around the world. Uwe had clients up the wazoo. Uit was an absolute nightmare to run. It was a very big business. UI had, I brought in a business partner. We invested a significant amount of money to grow that business. Uwe were spending about $4 million a year on advertising,uboth above the line.
John: 09:41 And online to grow that 30 million plus business, right. Recently
about five years ago, I started a business by going to a trade shows at CES. The area of the niche that I wanted to focus on was robotics. Now robotics is a very unique area and a fast growing area. Ever since the advent of the industrial three D printer robotics companies are popping up left, right and center. It's a growing, emerging niche. A niche is a real key word
here, a growing, emerging niche. And in that business, I grew that business by going to a trade show and introducing ourself to branded companies. When I started that company, I had the idea that I was going to sell that company. So what I did was I went to other agencies, bigger agencies, and said, listen you know, I introduced myself, said, look, I've got this crazy idea.
John: 10:32 I want to build an agency based on brands that you want to
work with, like they wanted to work with. And so I want to build this agency. It's going to be a recurring revenue model with projects and a team and a management team. And in about three or four years time, I want to sell it to you. So I went to four agencies and asked them, what type of clients do you want? Right? And so I went after those clients. I found those clients at CES, the consumer electronics show in was Vegas for 5,000 exhibitors, four days of madness. I've even had some of my consulting champions go with me to the CES show and generate hundreds of thousands of dollars with a peak with the revenue from people who spend millions on marketing millions. So target market opportunity, Niche in one space, spending money on marketing.
John: 11:20 That's the other secret, they're already investing in the ideas
that I have because they're much easier to sell. So much harder to sell to. So in breakthrough or agency right now where I'm involved, .I've been involved a strategy level with the partnerships. And you know, we developed a strategy where we got channel partners together to sponsor introductions to the physical therapy market. We run a very unique event. We do a pitch for 45 minutes, and at the end of that pitch, we generate 30 clients that invest up to million, billion and a half dollars in revenue in one hour, in one hour, which is a crazy way. That's like massive sales on scale. So 260 locations 60 remote team members, fully remote. We have a CEO operation sales director. We have a structure as a business.
John: 12:14 We have the partnership called partnership that actually
provides a service. And now we, we have a model where we have productized. We actually have infoproducts that we sell. We have a done for you service in marketing that's great. Generates about $7 million and a patient would need per month 9,000 patient opportunities per month. Fastest one of the fastest growing agencies in the country. We've just acquired a billing company to now generate billing from the $70 million dollars and the patient revenue that we generate. We looking now at recruitment because that's another pressure that the industry has. The vision for that business is very, very big division is to make physical therapy first choice for healthcare in
communities in market right now, physical therapy is not first choice. Now, this is not a great niche, right? If you had to said to me four years ago, the physical therapy niche is a fantastic nation.
John: 13:02 You can make lots of money. I know I would have gone. You are
batshit crazy because these adopters and doctors are hard to get into. And so this is a thing. So, but, you know, I'm glad I didn't listen because it worked and it's still working. However it is, you know, competition, lots of people coming in in space. We are the most expensive in the market. We have a rental model as opposed to an ownership model. So we rent our our campaigns or our funnels to our clients. We also have the right to market to those clients as well, that we generate as leads and patients as well as part of this product. We allow selling people into a three year program. We don't do month by month contracts. We do a 12 month program at a three year program and now so far I believe 12% of the people we make that offer to buy a three year in advance.
John: 13:50 And some people have even paid in advance with three years to
lock in price, which is crazy unheard of in the industry. Right? I'm telling you right now, right here live. So that's, that's I guess that's where where the business side is. I've been coaching now for more than five years. I have a group called consulting champions and I love the group hope, consulting rocket. And the idea is to help them to do exactly what I do is to get really clear about where they're heading, what they want to build, target that market, provide a valuable offer that, that Michael will get a result with, and then be able to scale their business. So this is one of the craziest businesses you get involved in. The danger of this businesses. It's very cheap to get into this business. You don't need lots of skills.
John: 14:37 It's very inexpensive to start and if it's very inexpensive start, it's
easy for a lot of people to get their toe in this water. However, most people struggle with delivery. They struggle with what the, what is they deliver. They struggle with a clear offer they struggle with who's going to benefit by that offer. Also struggle with results. And one of the reasons why I like working with resource partners and I've worked with with invisible very closely and all we recommend all our champions utilize the services of invisible PPC. And rocketeers because it enables them to scale their labels into, be a lot more clear about what the offering a much more easy to get a result. So so, so this business, although it is, it is complex, there are some simple things that if you follow the simple things that you can find
yourself elevating through these scaling points or milestones in your business quite quickly.
John: 15:29 The fastest I've seen is you guys, when you, when you had your
agency you went zero to a million in four months. I found somebody that went zero to a million in 30 days. Which is insane. And let me tell you, cold email, cold email outreach, didn't know, had no relationship with the market, had no history with the market that he went after. He had history in terms of knowledge, but had no, no physical experience with that market. Zero million, 86 sales calls in 30 days through cold email 28 clients at 40 grand a pop in 30 days. Insane in bang. And, and no sales, no sales page, no website. Just a LinkedIn profile. But it just shows you what's possible if you, if you understand some of the fundamentals and the basics of this business. So yeah.
Joe: 16:28 Yeah. Take a breath and we're going to unpack it. I've been
feverously writing notes of, of talking points to go back to, so when we were getting started right before we hit record, we talked about, and after we hit record pretty directly, we started talking about going after the end in mind and having the end in mind. And you talked about how important that is. For me, the light bulb that I get people to understand that that has worked and I'm curious what your light bulb is, but when I talk with agency owners and I say, do you want to do this forever? And they're like, no. I'm like, so it's a business then, right? It's not like a freelance thing because you want to be able to exit one day. All of a sudden they go, Oh crap. Like, this isn't like if it's freelance, nobody wants to buy it.
Joe: 17:11 I have to build a business. And that's how I've been able to get people to have that aha moment, John, where they finally like treat it like a business. And they niche down and they come up with a core offer and they, they, they get serious about the things that are gonna move the needle. I'm curious for you, John, with all the people that you've coached and all the crazy success stories that your students have had, what's the thing that have what's the thing that has helped people to have that, that aha moment?
John: 17:38 I think that the biggest thing is, is that concept of thinking
bigger. You know, thinking, having that idea so, well, okay if I want to have this as a business, then I, then I can't do this my own. But the big aha is I need people, I need help. I need support to be able to do this. And so now the considerations are bigger. The, the, you know, you're sitting there thinking, okay if I step out of this business I need to be in a position where it still
runs without me. That's the, that's the thing. I've got to start hiring certain people so that I can scale. You cannot scale without hiring people. There's no, you know, unless you're in an eCommerce business where it's just you and a store, yeah, you can make $1 million, a couple of million dollars, but you're going to work to have to work really, really hard.
John: 18:21 And the margins are really, really small in this business. The
margins can be really big if you get them right. And the other thing is, is a lot of people undervalue their skills. So in, in your, if you're building something, if you have some skills, you can systemize those skills and those skills becomes saleable. Those systems, that IP that you're developing become scalable. I have champions now that are developing products to support their market. They use that as the entry point and then they use a done with done for you as the secondary, a opener. Or they do the reverse, they go, we do a done for you, but to get you up to speed, we've got this program here that we want you to invest in. So the thought process really is that I want to be able to step out of my business and have my business to grow.
John: 19:04 I have to hire a team to scale. I can't do this on my own. And I've
got to get really serious about sales consistency and sales is critical in this business. I have the good fortune to sit down with Robert Hurjavec. The guy from shark tank from Hurjavec industries you know so exited out of 300, million dollar business, has another business at $250 million in the cybersecurity space. And he's, this is, I'll never forget the conversation because I sat there and said, look, at the end of the day, all bullshit aside, Robert. You know, what's it going to, what's it take to make and help a happen in a business? And he just said to me, John, when times are great sales above all else, when times are shit sales, above all else, sales solves all problems. So, so, and on the other flip side of that, he didn't have this as a quote, but he says, and then sales creates all the problems, but, but but he's, you know, sales about worse.
John: 19:57 So if I look at the people that I work with, our number one focus
is to get consistent and being able to bring on clients every single month. The philosophy that I like to take as one client every 10 days the average client should be investing between 25 and $36,000 plus per annum in your business. If you're running a recurring model, a no less than that, very hard to make profit, less than that. And you want to be working with people over time. You want to have clients for years to come, not clients for a 30 days, 90 days. And this is a mistake a lot of people make when they're just starting out is they're doing this
trial thing. You don't need to do, if you're using resource partners like invisible PPC, you don't need to do a trial.
John: 20:37 You've already got case studies. You've already got results.
You've got 102 hundred clients, 300 clients that you're managing. That's a toolbox that you can bring to people and say, Hey, I'm, my team manages over 200 clients in the marketplace in 50 different niches. My team is responsible. Means that those were the ad spend every single month. My team has the resources, the systems, the processes to leverage your opportunity and to get the best possible results is we need to scale. And to scale means we need to work together in a process that we're going to be working over a period of time, not over 30 days. You can't get, you can get basic results or you can get some results, but you can't get people the results they're looking for in 30 days and you certainly, even at 90 days, the results are just starting to kind of create momentum and they give up.
John: 21:22 And so what happens to the marketplace is we have taught
them to give up every 90 days to go and find somebody else. This is what the market has told you. So one of the things I would highly encourage you to do is they can't buy it unless you offer it. And what you want to offer is a 12 month program, a minimum of 12 month programs. They're going to be within 12 months are going to stay with you for another year or two years if you look after them, if you nurture them and have great client relationship. But that's, that's a trick. That's the trick. And here's the thing, don't call it a month to month contract. Don't call it a, don't call it a 12 month contract and don't call it a, we're doing Facebook ads for 12 months management friend as well. Months. We're not doing that.
John: 22:01 What we're doing, what you've, the words you should be using is we have a 12 month business development program and one of our core areas is Facebook or AdWords or AMI retargeting or whatever it is that we do. It is not everything that we do and people will pay for strategy, which is what most people don't charge for. People will pay more for strategy than they will for the service, right? We have people that I work with that do just sell websites, right? But to buy a website from them, you've got to have a $25,000 development piece before you buy the website. You've got to give them 25 grand up front to the blueprint on your website. Your website is going to cost you between 150 and $300,000 plus websites, right? Website developers, small team, five people working on major projects, making two to $3 million a year selling websites, right?
John: 22:50 Systemized process IP around strategy. Strategy is a line item
that you need to put on your invoice for clients because you're thinking about that on how to get better results for your clients. So critical thing. Think big. Think how are you going to walk out of this without a wall system growing? Think about what this is going to be worth to you as well. How this supports your aspirations, your family. You need to have a strategic plan in place that you, that is malleable and workable, right? You've got to have a plan, right? So my question to people first of all is how much revenue you want to generate? Let's say their site, let's say the magic figures at hundred and 20 grand, right? And 20 grand, great. To keep 120 grand, you got to do about 200 grand, right? 200 grand means if your average sale is let's say $3,000 per month per client, right?
John: 23:39 You need six clients, six clients to make you 200 grand, right?
Then how, how many people you need to present you and you get six clients. You might have to present to a 12 to 18 people, 12 to 18 people, right? So 18 people you've got to present to you. Now to be able to present the hiring people, you might have to talk to about 36 people, right? So now to generate children thousand dollars at $3,000 a month, it's actually 216,000 loans at $3,000 a month. You got to talk to 36 people to get 18 presentations to close six clients to have $4,000. And now you have a plan. And most people have no plans. Most people, when I ask them, what's your plan for the month? But I know how many appointments have you had this month? They don't know. Or they go, I've had a few, but I've had no presentations.
John: 24:25 What really had to grow a business without presentations? So
the focus right at the very beginning, and we do this every single month in all of my businesses, we sit down and we know exactly how many clients we want to bring on board, what their average revenue is, what we're actually charging, what our different business groups are, and we work towards a plan, a marketing plan to achieve that outcome, right? And with, by doing that, we've been able to scale and grow without the plan. You're just a tourist as general. George Patton once said, the famous world war II general. For those people who don't know the history he said without a plan, you're just a tourist wandering around aimlessly, right? You need the plan, right? That sales plan that I've just given you, think about it, how much money, what is the average sale?
John: 25:08 Then multiply that by four, because that's going to give you the
number, the amount of presentation you're gonna have to do to generate that one sale on average, and then multiply that,
double that again. And that's going to give you how many people you've got to kind of speak to, to see, to get to that point of having that fit. Now, $200,000 business, you can do that in. I've seen people do that in 90 days. Most of them. I've seen people with no experience literally from scratch, to go from zero to 200 K in 90 days by following that plan. That's it. It takes to do that will take you roughly two hours a day. That's it. Two hours a day. What people do is they tend to focus on consumption. They tend to focus on getting their ducks in a row. What you really need to be focusing on is actually having conversations.
John: 25:48 The one thing that I say to people when they first start with me is you need to understand how business works. To do that, you need to talk to people, real people, not internet marketers, right? Real people who run real businesses and you've got to ask them, how do you generate your clients? Where do you advertise? Why does a customer buy from you? Instead of going to a competitor, what is the sales cycle of how our customer buys a, how do you, what are your profit margins in this business? What do you believe the opportunities are? Where, why are you so great? What are you taking this business? How are you building this business? If you understand how businesses work, it's really easy to sell to them because there's three areas that most businesses failing. Number one, I have a very poorly optimized sales process.
John: 26:31 That's number one. Number two, they have a work. Tactically,
they don't work strategically. So what they are essentially running from promotion to promotion to promotion. Most businesses are promotion businesses. They're not actual businesses. The third thing is people, they struggle with management and systems and process. Like any business in the market and the people you want to target. I always say to people, don't go to small business with digs. I'll break your heart because they don't have the money. They're expectations are way high and the amount of investment is low. Where do you want to start? Is and where I always start is businesses. 5 million plus in the PT and the physical therapy space. We're looking at businesses around that. Two to $5 million is where the sweet spot is, right? Because these people, they've got team which forces him to spend money they have to spend money to, to keep that team alive, to keep that business going.
John: 27:20 They've got assets, they've got offices, they've got buildings,
they've got inventory, they've got, they've got to do advertising promotion. If their location, a destination that orientated, they need to spend money on marketing. So if you are offering
marketing services to people, then go to people who are already spending money on marketing. People often ask me, if I was in Adwords who would I go to? I would go and find the people who are spending the most money on Adwords. That's where I would start. Now I wouldn't, for me, I wouldn't be standing with people with a three or $4,000 ad budget. I'd go to the people who are spending $100,000 on that budget because there's something that I do know when people are spending that kind of money, most times 70 to 80% you've seen this Joe campaigns are unoptimize,d and if they're unoptimized, that means there's a lot of wastage.
John: 28:02 And what you can do very quickly is make some adjustments,
minimize their spin, get much better results. And more importantly, you can actually build a foundation of a stronger structure to get results and outcomes for your clients. So if somebody put me on a street corner and said, you're going to be an Adwords guy, the first thing I'm going to do is go to the local library, get on the internet, the local library for free and just Google business and look at who's running ads and contact those businesses. Yeah, yeah. Before we go here, I want to make sure, I want to give everybody a really simple step by step processing, just literally close deals. So remind me of that and I'm looking at the time, so I'm talking too much. Joe, you go right ahead and ask this question.
Joe: 28:41 So you talked about, you talked a lot about what to, what to
find in a niche are or what to look for in a niche. Uh obviously the, the people spending money w was one of them. What are your other kind of niche criteria? High, highest level.
John: 28:56 Uh I should, I have to be able to help them. I have to, I know, I
must know that I can help them get a result. Now, if you're starting out that's going to be difficult. So what I would recommend is that you get involved with a resource partner who already gets the results for that market and understand how they get those results. So then you can go to market and say, Hey, we already know we can get predictable results for you. So number one, you need to know, you better result. Number two, you need to craft an offer. An offer that's going to work. And so here's my cheat sheet of offers. If you're going to do offers one of the things that I tend to do is there are people who've already spent millions and millions of dollars on testing ads.
John: 29:32 That's in every market and every industry. There's somebody that's already spent me as it does in testing ads. So if I was in the fitness market there's a company called LA fitness, right? It's
a very large fitness group. They have spent tens of millions of dollars in testing offers that work for their gyms and their fitness facilities. And so if you go on Google and look at Google images, you can type in best LA fitness offers. And the ones that come up the most are the ones that they've been spending the most money on. They are the ones that work. Now, I would not swipe LA Fitness's offer. What I would do is I would look at that offer and say, great, how can I adapt that offer to the businesses that I'm helping? Because we know that that offer works. We know that if we have a sales process to support that offer, then it's gotta to be a rockstar.
John: 30:13 So the first place always look is look at who's getting, who's
already spent the money, who's already been doing the testing, what type of campaigns have been working? And very quickly, I've got a campaign that works. There's a really cool piece of software called [inaudible], not espionage, Ispionage.com. You can literally type it, looking at, look at a company, look at their ad spend, look at their ad, the landing pages, look at the text, and they add a text that is actually working the ad copy. And you can look at four or five people in that marketplace and you can see some consistencies. Then you can go to the marketplace. Listen, if I could show you the three best top performing campaigns with the best copy and the best offers in the market, can we work together? It's one of the easiest ways to get clients to show people what already works, right?
John: 30:55 Yep. And you know, if I, if I, if I'm working with IPPC and you specialize in getting lawyers personal injury, case study case studies or you get plumbers get clients, I would say, great, let's look at the plumbers. Let's look at some of the best offers. We're already getting results for these guys. And I go, plumber, dude, you want a proven system that is already working, getting results. So right now you may not have one that's getting, that is predictable, that is consistent. Can I help you? Can we work together to help you get a consistent, predictable outcome so that we can build this business that you say you want to build? So, so for me I got to like them. You're going to like the people you work with. It's really, you know, a lot of people choose dentists.
John: 31:35 Dentists are hard to work with. I have people who work in the
dental market and they do really well, but they work really hard. I know that market really well. They've had skin in the game, they're skilled, but it's a tough market to get into, right? Because doctors don't want to get on the phone with you. Then one thing is you want to be able to have direct access to a decision maker. So direct access to the decision maker
businesses at that, at that 2 million to 10 million range, two to 10 million. It's really easy to get ahold of the managing director, CEO, president, principal, managing partner of business, that that's why that's important. So you've got to like them. You gotta like this business because if you don't like it, you're not gonna do too well for them. And number two, you have to be able to get a result.
John: 32:13 You have to be able to help them get a result. And number
three, can they pay or will buy pay for your services? Will they pay? So if they're already spending money on marketing, they will pay. Yeah. And generally businesses, 5 million at a five to 10% of their budget goes towards advertising and marketing. So that's, that's 250 to $500,000 in the budget that we can work with. Right. And remember, if our average client is doing 36,000, that's one that's less than one 10th of that budget, right. Goes to you. Right? And that's profitable. So it's an easy sell. It's an easier sell. I shouldn't say it's an easy sell was going to tell you an easy selling moment. Anyway, so, but hopefully that answered your question.
Joe: 32:55 Yeah, that's great. Fantastic. So, John, I'm curious why why did
you move to a 12 month program?
John: 33:03 Because three months to six months you're still learning. You're
still learning how to work with a client is still learning what the results are. You're still looking, getting feedback on the analytics. You need data. If I look at breakthrough, one of the, you know, for the first six months, for the first 12 months, it was about getting data. It's about, you know, and to be able to get data, you need time. And so when we started with our clients from day one, I said that we, we have to sell a 12 month program and we're going to call it a business development program or practice development program. That's what it is to practice development program. Uand it's, and it goes for a minimum of 12 months, right? And to be able to do that, that gives you, that gives you data that gives you the ability to actually see what's going on, make adjustments and improve without that data.
John: 33:46 It's really hard. Now we have four and a half years in and we
have millions of data points, right? So we know how these campaigns work in more than 270 different markets, big or small, right? We know what the conversion rates are. We know what the average plan of care is. We know because of it, because we've collected all this data, we now can go to the market. So 12 months gives you good data points at three months, you're only just beginning. You should, you know, most
people don't AB split test. They're not testing. Marketing is all about, you know, my, my mentor, your mentor, Joe, Jay Abraham you know guys like Dan Kennedy who I've had the good fortune of hiring and working with guys like you know John Caples you know, the, the history, the, the legendary guys Glen Sciaga, Schwartz, all these guys the number one thing they will tell you if you want to scale a business test, test, test, test, you can't just do one shot campaigns.
John: 34:42 You've got to find and massage what works. This is why you
need to educate your clients. And so this is a process. This is a strategy. This is what they're paying you for and investing. And half the time we are not charging enough. Make sure you remind me if you're talking about money. But we are not charging enough rest skillsets and what it's actually truly worth to acquire. So so that's why you need, that's why I say 12 months. And when you say to people, I've got Brian, one of the guys that I've just started with, he's been in the chiropractic game for feet for a couple of years now, you know, 30 day, 90 days, 30 day, 90 days. So what happens harpies clients leave at 90 days cause he's given permission for them to go very first. I said we no longer sell a 90 day program from now on in this business, we only sell a 12 month program. He when offered a 12 month program to the next seven people he presented to and they all bought the 12 month program because that's all he was offering. He was not offering 90 days, he wasn't offering 30 days. He was offering a 12 month program. So that's why.
Joe: 35:37 I think we give a cop out, right? When we do that. Ultimately,
even if you hit your KPIs right during those 90 days though, 60 days, right? Like it doesn't mean that your client was actually able to turn that into revenue out the door to really have a good ROI. And so I think that's the problem is people just think about what they are doing. Marketers just think about, I got them more leads. They don't necessarily think about the timeline for them to actually be able to turn that into money.
John: 36:05 That's the other thing. And you made a really interesting point
in terms of getting people leads. You need to go beyond just getting people leads. You need to make sure that they converting those leads. You need to make sure that those leads are showing up for appointments. You need to make sure that the client is aware of the campaign, that they're running and making their sales team aware. Who's handling the inquiry that Hey, we're running a campaign right now and this is the calls that are coming in and willing to help these people to actually answer questions to help them buy. So if you are a true lead generation business, you are actually helping your clients with
the understanding to close those deals and you're helping your client to get focused on optimizing your conversion. That's where you become a true lead business.
John: 36:43 But if you're just sending leads to people, they're always going
to tell you the leads are bad. They're always going to take BZ. So you send a hundred leads to somebody and they can't handle a hundred leads. This is what happens with small business like can't handle them. They say, well, I didn't get to them in time or they burnt them. These leads are useless to me because I can't convert them themselves. Not everybody's jumping out of the boat, jumping into jumping out of the water into the boat, onto the frying pan full of themselves and there's a sale. It doesn't, it doesn't happen that way. So so some people, you know, when you say, I'm going to give you a hundred leads, you're giving people too many leads, they can't even cope. They can't even follow up. So you want to also talk about managing leads.
John: 37:18 You know, you want to talk about lead management with your
clients. And this is where programs building a program and info product is what we did. We've been there for a product to teach people that what they need to do at every stage, that stage of the sales process. And we charged them 12 grand for that product. And some, some clients, we actually make them buy that first before they sign up for 12 months. So they do that exercise so that when they do get into it that they, they converting those clients. So you've got to also realize there are about eight different ways to make money out of this business rather than just selling a recurring revenue for service. Yeah,
Joe: 37:52 100%. That's great. So what, what do you think is the biggest
retention mechanism, right? That, that you've seen or that you've seen at your disposal and the multiple agencies and offers that you got to ran.
John: 38:07 So number one, rather, the very beginning of any relationship
when a client has decided to invest in your services, here's something everybody can do. We do it at all. Our agency, I even do it consulting, unleash with our clients is you want to very quickly hop on a video and say these words, right? You want to say, Hey Joe, I want to thank you for taking the time to and trusting us and investing in our services to help you grow. My team and I are super excited. We're going to get to work and get work towards outstanding results with who we are looking to work with you for years to come. But first of all, as part of this process, I just want to say thank you for taking that time to invest in our services. Thank people for becoming customer
first. If you do that little three minute video of the script is right there.
John: 38:49 If you're watching this, send that video out to every single
customer that buys at 10 minutes after they buy a Senate video. Second, send a thank you card, send something nice to say. I really appreciate that you value this service. Then you want to do an onboarding interview. In that onboarding interview, you want to understand how that client has made mistakes with other providers in the past, what didn't work, what did work? How can you know, how would you like it to be? If you're asking these sorts of questions, the client sees that you actually care about the relationship. They will not treat you like a supplier. They will treat you like a partner and advisor. So your onboarding process has to ask questions. You have to survey them and in Survey, then you're going to do the thing that you need. And that is to understand how their business works so that you can help them so you can get a better results, right?
John: 39:33 And so you can assess, say also in that you're able to set
expectations. You're able to set expectations with the client, and you're able to six, to set the expectations for you to be able to deliver as well. So those three things say thank you. Personally with a video run up front, straight after they sign up, say thank you buyer's remorse, minimize buyer's remorse. Number two, send them something to say. Thank you. Send him a card. Cinema, a little practice. Hey, welcome. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Do something nice with their team. That works really well. One of our champions, what he does is he asks them to take a team photo on a, on a, on an iPhone, send the team photo. They take that photo to a an acrylic. A designer who takes the photo, turns it into a painting this cost about 200 bucks.
John: 40:15 And then they send the painting to the client and say, Hey,
really looking forward to working with you. Really appreciate being part of this. Your team is important to us. And we just wanted to say thank you for your client. And you know this artwork presented by that agency, guess where that artwork goes? They walked past it in the office every fricking day and they see their other team are blown away. They are blown away. 200 bucks. They've got a client that's just spending 40, 50 grand a year and their services. But the idea is you want to credit an emotional connection between you and the customer. And you want to say thanks. Nobody says thank you. The least that I would send is a nice book to say thank you. Right? 20 bucks. So say thank you. So number two, video. Thank you.
John: 40:53 Then physical, thank you. Then onboarding survey. These are
three things. There are several other things, but if you do these three things your clients will stay a lot longer because what you're going, what you're doing is you're creating an emotional connection between you and your client. And that's what we do in all of our businesses is we want to create an emotional connection. So even if you mess up, you can mess up a dozen times and they still won't leave you because they believe your intent and you are going to do what you say you're going to do and that is help him out and get a result.
Joe: 41:23 I think the other thing is obviously not going month to month,
but having a 12 month program, right? Like that's going to do a whole lot for your retention. Speaking of that, why did you move from 12 months to three years?
John: 41:37 Well if you don't offer it, like kind of buy it, right? That's the
thing. So, so we, we realized that, and this happened, like in the third year of the business, we realized that there were people who had been with us for three years. And so we've been increasing our prices. In fact, over a three year period, we had about seven price increases over a three year period. And we're just about to go to another price increase. And so we, what we thought we'd do is because we rent a funnel, that's what we do. So one product, we're in a funnel and we sat down and said, you know what, if you want, you can lock in the price for the next three years. You can sign up now for three years in advance and you can lock this price in for three years.
John: 42:13 And lo and behold, people started to buy it. The old adage, they
can't buy it if you don't offer it. If you want to offer a high premium service to somebody, offer a high premium service so that they can buy it put value in it, explain and help them understand what their value is they go to buy. Right. So yeah.
Joe: 42:31 Beautiful. You said to remind you about money, I think, and
where you were going was what, what you're charging?
John: 42:38 Yes. Okay. So I'm going to blow people's minds here. So this is
happening, happened two weeks ago. The working with a person they were selling $3,000 websites, 3000 dollar websites, right. And they weren't making any money out of a 3000 old website. You know, I think they were making that four or 500 bucks a profit out of a three out of 3001 website.
John: 43:01 A lot of work, six to eight weeks getting this together. Lots of
back and forth. And you know, by the time they worked out there, they're profitable hourly rate. They were working to 10
bucks an hour. They can go work the in and out burger and get 15 bucks an hour and not have all the PR, all the pressure, right? Which is crazy, right? So margin is really, really important. And what people are prepared to pay. You may be surprised that if you low ball the price the client may sit there and go why is it so cheap? Right? and so one of the things you want to be mindful of everybody here, whatever price you're about to charge a client add 20% of that price, that extra 20% is your net profit. So if you're going to charge 2000, charge 2000, $200, I'm going to charge 3000 charge 3000, $600 in state, just put the price up by 20%.
John: 43:47 The client doesn't know the price until you reveal the price. So you need to take into consideration all your costs. You need to put your time, how many hours are you going to spend managing this client per month? You need to charge in your product price. You need to charge for that time. The minimum I would be charging would be $100 an hour for your time. You're spending five hours on a client's business over the course of the month. You then add $500 to the bill to the cost, not to the profit, to the cost. So whatever your cost is, the minimum that you want to be charging is three X on costs. That's 100%, not 50% 50% is doubling the price because you still have to pay half of it back, right? If you're doubling the price for $1,000 cost to $2,000, that is not a hundred percent markup, but as a 50% markup, which is $1,000, goes back to the costs, right?
John: 44:33 You're going to get to keep a grand. If you want to make 100%
on cost, you need to charge three times 3000 on a thousand dollar costs. So now you know you're profiting, you're profiting at 70% on cost of 30%. Now, price by value, you can make even more money. If you know roughly what the result is, you can charge 10% of the value. So if you can make a client $100,000 a month, you can charge $10,000 a month and then $100,000 right? That means now the client is paying you 120 grand a year instead of paying you 30 grand a year, 36 grand a year, or 25 grand a year. So you can price on value, right? If you're pricing on value, you've got more scope and room to do a better job, but you're resourced. I always say to people, if you don't resource me, I'll guarantee you a mediocre job.
John: 45:17 But if you resource me and give me the budgets that I need, I'm
going to guarantee you an outstanding result, right? You get to choose mediocre or outstanding. Which one do you want? Right? so pricing is elastic based on context in our market. The reason why we're increasing our prices because the results, we get $7 million a patient revenue per month. That's insane, right? That's 80 what's that? That's 89, nearly $90,000 of the patient,
$90 million in patient revenue a year that we bring to the market. We bring 120,000 patient opportunities to the year and the market. That's a huge result, right? So to, for us to charge two grand a month for something like that is insane, right? Our starting price starts at six and then we'd go up to, we have clients paying us 20 grand a month, right? For the same service that somebody is paying us six grand a month for, but they use the either multi locations.
John: 46:07 Right? And the other thing is, what most people don't forget is if
you're charging a management fee, you're charging the management fee for one campaign. You're not charging a management fee for three different campaigns, right? You don't get the same fee, three campaigns, three X the management fee, right? Because the time, energy, and effort you'd go into spending on developing strategy for a new campaign is going to be the same amount of effort. And so if you do that in your current margin, you're running two campaigns or three campaigns for a client based on your current margin, you're actually minimizing your expenditure. You're actually dropping down in your return on investment for you as a business. So pricing strategy, really, really important. It's really weird. A 10% of the market will always take the most expensive price, 10% of the market by far, we'll always take the cheapest price.
John: 46:54 If you are experiencing that 10% of market, I highly encourage
you to inflict those customers on your competitors. You don't want the people to choose lowest price on average. Most people because they understand value, they will choose the middle price. So if you want a neat trick to increase your prices, have I low ball poverty pack as your standard package, is your current standard pricing? Have a next pack that adds a little bit of value and increase the price in the middle and then have a premium package at the end and say, this is the enchilada that everybody really wants. Not everybody does, but our clients that do do this get amazing result because it's the enchilada package, right? And so what you do with a client, you want to create a yes or a yes situation. The, in the scenario, say yes means of these three things based on your experience in patient and most of our clients pick number two. But we do have pause, pick number one of these three things, which of these packages or programs suits you best? It is a yes or a yes. Answer, not a yes or no answer. And they'll say, Oh, I want the middle one. Great. Let's work with you on implementing the middle one, right? So that's how you can create a elasiticy in the pricing structure.
Joe: 47:53 Beautiful. And we're running out of time here. One more thing I
promised I'd remind you of what's the, what's the one tactical client getting thing that everybody can go implement right here, right now?
John: 48:04 Okay. So here's how you close a deal really quick and really
easy, right? Most people, it's a really simple structure. If you follow this model it will [inaudible] work most of the time. Most of the time if you get this right, it's really simple. You need to understand what the client's objective is. What is the objective? Why, you know, they say I want to generate an extra 10 patients per month or I want to generate 20 clients for my full five new clients a week. What's your number one objective? Right? So you need to, you need to have them articulate, look, at the end of the day, it's important. You want to go from here to here. What is the gap? Why? What is this? What is it important? What's the object? No one get the objective, right? Number two, why is this important to you as a business? Why is this outcome I must have for your business? So they are going to articulate to you why this is important that we achieve this outcome, right?
John: 48:49 And so the next question is what is the hold up? What's holding
you up from achieving this outcome? One of the bottlenecks that are stopping you. You said that this is what you want to achieve. This is why this is really important. Now, what's stopping you right now? What systems and processes that are not working that are not giving you that extra over and above revenue and income that you desire for your business that you must have, right? And they'll say, well, their team strategy systems, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the last thing is, and this is how you close the deal, right? The last thing is, is if we can work together and devise a plan to make sure that you're working on a trajectory of hitting this as an objective is it okay, if I show you how we can work together to implement that plan, that's it, right?
John: 49:33 It's really hard for somebody to say no to that because they're
telling you this is a must. It's important. It's a must. And a must is I need to do this now and not later. So we need to clarify, is this a now thing or a later thing? No, no. We need to do it now. Right? So you're telling me that this is what you want to do. This is why it's really important. This is what's stopping you. Let's work together on a plan using our strategies to bridge the gap, to eliminate those bottlenecks, bridge the gap, working together from where you are now to where you want to be. Right. And and then if we can do that, can I show you how we can work together to get that outcome happening? Every single
person you asked that question to is going to say yes, and that is a sale.
Joe: 50:13 That's perfect. Beautiful. Well done. I go through that process. But it takes a whole lot longer than you just explained. So that was, that was beautiful. That was a high level nutshell something everybody should be using and sales process and all too few people
John: 50:29 Obviously aren't [inaudible]. Yeah. Need to focus on sales. Need
to focus on two things you need in this business. Appointments and presentations, appointments to talk with business owners to see if they're a fit and presentations or sell. And that's all you need in this business at this stage. Anybody listening to this podcast, I don't care how big or small you are, you need to have consistent conversations every single day. One conversation day, 20 conversations a month. In a five day working week. If you have 20 conversations, you're going to close three to five deals, three to five deals for anybody listening as podcasts per month is a game changer. That is how you scale your business to a million plus.
Joe: 51:05 Awesome brother. So a last question here, just looking at the
clock, we are hit in the top of the hour. We're about to. So, so John, instead of asking you to recommend three books, like I feel like they do on every single podcast under the sun we try to do something a little different. So I want to ask you, John, what's the one book that as you look at your business and businesses today, right? What's the one book that you feel like has made the biggest impact on your businesses?
John: 51:35 The one book that not only just made the biggest impact on my
businesses, but also my life is how to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie. There was a new version how to win friends and influence people in the digital age. But that book, it was written in the 1930s. It's still stands, is probably the best sales book ever written. Best book on, on mindset, best book on being a friend, to have a friend. That's what you want to take with you as a philosophy in business. But somebody always very lucky. When I was 17 year old, somebody actually handed me that book. It was the first time I'd ever read a book, anything like that. I've read that book dozens of times over the last 30 odd years. I still go back to it. I actually still carry it with me and, and I give it away to a lot of people. But if there was one book that changed my life and certainly made the biggest impact on my businesses is how do we friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie.
Joe: 52:28 Wonderful John man. I just want to say thank you. Thank you
for coming and sharing from the heart, man. I know that you just come to deliver value and you definitely showed everybody at digital triggers all of the nuggets so to speak. So I really appreciate that man. I'll make sure that we link up to consulting unleashed in the chat. Is there anything else that you want to make sure that we link up for everybody?
John: 52:49 Just go to consulting unleashed and grabbed the mini course.
I've actually stepped out a really simple five step process and if you do the five step process, you actually make a sale. So it is free. You just jump in and just grab it. It's a, it's a really cool little program. I shot it from a Manhattan side of the Brooklyn bridge to the Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn bridge. I literally shot a whole mini course on how to generate clients. It's a lot of fun. But easy to grab if you just hopped out and got to consulting unleashed.com.
Joe: 53:13 Awesome brother. I really appreciate your time. It's been
absolutely fantastic, man, and I can't wait to do it again.
John: 53:19 Awesome, man. I'm looking forward to catching up along the way and I really appreciate you having me on the show. Take care
Joe: 53:23 Of course. All right, everybody, Joe. Troyer from digital triggers
signing out. See ya John
John: 53:29 See you man
