Joe: 00:00
All right. All right everybody. Welcome to another show here at, show me the nuggets today. I am super excited to be joined by none other than James Schramko. If, if you guys don’t know James or don’t know of James, you’ve got to be hiding under a rock. I was thinking about it this morning and man, James, I’ve been following you and actually listening to you speak since like the stompernet days, so early two thousands when you were doing SEO, much like how I got started and and super excited to come on in and pick your brain today.
James: 00:35 Well, it’s certainly going back. It’s interesting. I’ve been through that sort of metamorphosis of SEO practitioner. Of course I sold that business in there. I do more coaching, but I guess you know, if you’ve been around for more than 10 years online, it feels like forever.
Joe: 00:54 Yeah, 100%. So right now you’re, you run super fast business membership, you run silver circle and then obviously the author of work less make more. And I’ve talked about this guys, if you haven’t read this book, you’ve got to go check it out. And I’m sure James is going to give us a nice little taste of it here today. But guys, this has made a huge difference and probably the book that’s made the biggest difference in my life, at least in past two or three years, man. So I really gotta say first and foremost that I’m just super thankful that you took the time to write the book and I’m excited to share some of that content and your message with the audience today.
James: 01:29 Oh, well thank you. And that book, I have a bit of help from a lady called Kelly Exeter to get that book out of me took about five years because had such a volume of content in it, I wanted to make sure that the book was concise and that’s actually really hard to do, as you would know, to sort of summarize it down into the shortest possible rate, but still deliver a lot of value.
Joe: 01:54 Yeah, yeah. I think that that’s a big skill set. I think nobody does that. And I think that your objective was definitely complete because man, it, it held me Hook, line and sinker, you know, it was one read from start to finish. So if, if it wasn’t very concise and to the point it definitely would have taken me quite a few reads.
James: 02:15 Yeah. You and everyone else, you know what 50% of books are actually not even opened in kindle. So I think it is a job to compel someone to get into it. And we tried really hard to make it active compared to some of the other books I’ve read. Read lots and lots of books, but they can be a bit hard sometimes.
Joe: 02:35 Definitely. So. Cool. James, let’s let’s recap a little bit. If people don’t know you, they don’t know your background at BMW they don’t know what you’ve been up to at super fast business. They don’t know your SEO background. Can, can you bring them up to speed on a couple of minutes?
James: 02:49 Absolutely. so I’ve found myself in a sales career. Initially BMW. Then I switched to Mercedes-Benz and I worked my way through management and through sales management, general sales management, and then eventually as a general manager of a Mercedes Benz dealership, that was the last job that I had. Towards the end of that, I felt like it was a little bit scary to be paid by one person, such a big way. So I started learning how to build a website and I wanted to have my own business and I wasn’t sure what I would do. And through a series of struggles, I’ll call it figured out how to build a website. And then I started promoting the website software that I’d use to build the website. And I started affiliate marketing. So I sold this software for commission. Then I created information products to support that.
James: 03:43 And then I started driving traffic for a CPA offers and eventually other people want and help to learn how to do it. So then I was doing events running a workshop and and also I had an online community to support people in between events. And that was a recurring thing and it’s been going now for over 10 years. I started podcasting 10 years ago. I still run live events. In the meantime I built and sold a website development business and SEO business. In these days I just sort of talking and coach people. I’m generally not people starting out, mostly people who are already in motion. And most definitely people at the very top level in our field. A lot of the popular names that most people would know if they’ve been online for any number of years. I’m often helping them with their business structure and organizing themselves and packaging things.
James: 04:45 And I’m sure we’ll delve into some of those things just so that they’re not becoming a stressed out, overworked maniac for too little pay. And, and also it’s sort of helped me attract a few business owners who are happy for me to come in and help them with their business for a small percentage of revenue. And that’s sort of my favorite thing to do lately and that’s, that sort of brings us up to the current mode.
Joe: 05:11 Alright, that’s awesome. So what, what made you kind of figure out the website hosting model and the website builder? What, what kind of got you interested there? How’d that kind of come up or how’d you fall into that, so to speak?
James: 05:24 Well, I realized that online was going to be a thing and then it’s we’re on a bit of a lag too here in Australia.
James: 05:31 We were a little bit behind the u s market whenever almost talking near dotcoms and having that first boom. I think we were sort of observing that with interest. But I realized having parents in the travel industry and the way that customers were changing their behavior as they were buying vehicles, they started coming in really educated and they knew all about the models before we were told by the manufacturer. So I knew the online thing was going to be big and I initially just struggled to build the website. And then I realized so many other people are gonna fail at trying to build a website. Cause back then you kind of needed to be a Geeky coder or learn how to use tools like front page or Dreamweaver. So someone starting up today wouldn’t even know what I’m talking about. But anyone who tried then had to pay someone a lot of money.
James: 06:22 Like you could pay 15 or 20, $30,000 for some geek to code out a website. Yep. There are a couple of tools that made it easy, but some of them lacks fundamental things like SEO or style changes. So I found this sort of middle ground and this tool helped me build the website and I got really good at it and I was learning about SEO and copywriting. So I sort of mashing together skills. Imagine a website that was fast loading, ranked well and compel people to buy. And then I created a guide around this called a cheat sheet. And I started offering this as a bonus for people who purchase through me. And eventually I was making a lot of sales of this software. I was one of the top affiliates in the whole world for this software. And then people buying my information, product people already had the software.
James: 07:16 And that sort of led me to move more into the, you know, affiliate marketing and coaching side. But in the meantime, people kept having a need for a website. And eventually I felt this tool was losing traction to the most popular tool that’s around now is wordpress. WordPress was sort of early days and just started to become dominant. And I thought, you know, I don’t know if someone should actually try and build a website anymore. Like wordpress became freely available. There were so many people who could develop it. So I had my team started building my websites instead of me. That was the first crossover. And then now two, it built over a thousand websites. Occasionally I’d sell a few and then I realized, well, maybe other people, maybe other people want a website and I can just get my team to do it. And initially also I had this guy in America who was building websites for me.
James: 08:12 I think it was about $500 for a website and I could sell these websites for a few thousand dollars. And then over time they got a bit sloppy and they quality lagged and the The Times blew out. And then he started putting the prices up and I thought, you know, i’ll just have my own team do this. So I had a team of 10 developers and we just sold websites to the public and I ran that for about seven years and eventually sold it to one of my clients who was actually a developer. It was, I was coaching him one day and I looked at his numbers and I looked at my numbers. I said, you know, this is the fascinating thing. I don’t know how to code, but I make more profit from my website development business than you do as a developer. I’m like, you clearly need a team. If you had my business and you actually know what you’re doing with the coding, I think you could have something pretty special.
James: 09:07 And we worked at a way that he could buy the business with some upfront money and then a payment a year later and it worked out well. And so he took over the team and I sort of got out of the Web Dev business. I can also tell you it’s a hard business to run because every customer has got such massive expectation on what the website looks like. They don’t really pay much attention to what’s under the hood. So it’s kind of glad to be out of it. And I do think the market’s moved again. These days. I’m not even promoting wordpress to most of my students. I’m a big fan of a program called Tenex pro and I think that is like the ultimate solution for what hasn’t been there for the last decade. So it’s, you know, there are these innovations and changes over time and I think a lot of the things that are current now will be made redundant. And I think I brought a lot of this from the car industry because the model car we’re selling now is, you know, that was in r and d for years before it got to the showroom and it makes all the ones that came before it superseded. But there are some things that never changed like from Mercedes Benz, they’re always going to be safe and they’re always going to be well engineered. But the way they look in the things they do will be different.
Joe: 10:23 Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I guess James, like one of the things that, that I’ve really respected about your work and following it over the years is that you’ve always led with integrity, right? I believe like like you said, you stopped promoting the program, right? And you iterated your program and your teachings because wordpress was now the big thing. And I says, I think that that says a lot about your character. I know that over the years, and, and I remember reading this in your book, that there’s kind of four big profit levers that you, that you talk about. Can we talk about those and can we break those down a little bit for everybody?
James: 10:58 Absolutely. and yeah, you’re, you’re right. You know, I turned off a $5,000 a month income to make a value call that I don’t think it’s the best solution in the market anymore.
James: 11:09 And eventually I met obviously a lot more than that from my web dev firm. I’ve done this a few times to turn off a valid income. The last client that I had is an agency was paying five and a half thousand dollars a month. Uthere was two of them and uI switched them off for this. I actually gave them to some students of mine and said, would you like to take over these clients? You know, it’s not part of my core. So that’s sort of lends itself to one of the profit levers and that’s your business strategy,uin the way that you price and package things. So over the years mine’s changed a little bit here and there, but for most people, they really struggled with this one. Like, how much to charge, whether it should be one time or recurring, should they do a course, a membership, a done for you service that done with you service?
James: 11:58 Should they be taking a piece of someone else’s business? Should they build their own, should they acquire something, should they be acquired? So this is, that’s a huge topic and I spent a lot of time and effort learning about research and especially develop the recurring subscription model. That’s probably my favorite. So that’s one of the four levers is, is, you know, what’s that vehicle in the market that you’re going to be bringing the money in? Is it efficient for you and does it get you the results you want make you happy? Do want me to share the others or, or dig into each one?
Joe: 12:32 I think that that’s a biggie being happy. Right? and if not for your book. I was in a place of working way too hard. I’m probably not making near enough had built a business that was growing very fast, but the profits weren’t growing very fast.
Joe: 12:47 It was, if anything kind of sliding. And I was, you know, not, not loving life so to speak. So could you maybe hit would now maybe go be a good time james to talk about EHR and that first principle?
James: 13:01 Yeah. Well I kind of lends itself to one of the other levers that’s like self effectiveness. So an exercise that I have people do is I have them track where their time’s going and we work out what each hour is worth. Most employees even someone working at McDonald’s could actually tell you their hourly wage. You know, it’s published in the news all the time. The minimum wage, most employees know it, but most entrepreneurs wouldn’t be able to tell you the hourly rate. So it’s effectively, it’s the amount of profit that you make divided by the number of hours you’re working. So it’s not your revenue that, as you’ve explained, sometimes you can have the revenue, but all the money goes back out.
James: 13:47 You end up with not that much profit. And then you have to divide that by the number of hours you work. It’s quite feasible. Someone brings in $10,000 a month in revenue within, I pay back out in costs a 9,000 at least I’m a thousand the holders and if they’ve worked a hundred hours, they’ve only made 10 bucks an hour. So they’re, you know, they probably should be going down to McDonald’s instead and at least they’d get their nights off or the weekends off. So once we work at our effective hourly rate. It’s a fantastic way to filter what we should be spending our time on because if we can hire someone for less than what our effective hourly rate should be, it’s probably a good deal to do that. In the example of the website development, when I switched from building websites myself and acknowledging that I probably don’t aspire to be the world’s greatest website builder, I could hire developers for a wage, let’s, let’s call it $4 an hour, $5 an hour or thereabouts and I can resell that time for $80 an hour.
James: 14:54 And, and you know, you can’t sell every hour that you hire someone for generally unless they’re on a contract when you have full time people. But if they could work every one in every two hours, you know, you’d get a really good profit margin or even half the time that they’re hired for sure. You can still make a profit. So it’s a matter of getting someone else to do the stuff that you shouldn’t be doing or that it’s a low value. And then it also helps you, even if you are doing good stuff, maybe you have two different business models and maybe one of your business models is far more profitable than the others, but you never realized it cause you didn’t break it down by business category. So this is a really helpful tool. You can even apply it for your own team members.
James: 15:36 I’ve helped my team members lift their effectiveness by giving them tools, like a subscription software for example, that will automatically transcribe our podcasts and then they just clean it up. So now they can get a lot more of them done in the same amount of time.
Joe: 15:53 Yeah, 100%. Yeah. I never actually thought about looking at the EHR with different business models. I really liked that takeaway. And now it’s after reading the book and going through your training. So that was a nice little nugget right there. Okay, great. So then what are the other big levers, so to speak, James?
James: 16:10 So we’ve touched on the self effectiveness there. Yup. I’m often helping people, you know, get back to being happy and having fun and putting time blocks around where they actually going to do their work. And what kind of business they want and what drives them.
James: 16:26 So that’s a huge one cause I think your business will reflect the owner to some extent. So if you’ve got the business who’ve done the strategy, other things to think about are other way that you sell because you know, the selling is still a component of online business. You need to take, someone will identify who the, who the right person is, whose problem you can solve to let them know you exist, to get them to raise their hand and be interested to have them purchase from you, have them repurchase. So sales and conversions is always going to be a solid topic. And there’s also so many ways you can do it, whether it’s a sales page, written texts, videos, webinars, in- person telephone sales, live chat, messenger bots. That’s the works. So that’s a big topic. And then the last part of course is if you’ve got the right business and you’re selling and you’re having a good life, you will need to build in team and get some scale. So there are certain things that happen when you go from being just you to having actual business with the team. So you know, I learned a lot about running a team as a general manager and I’ve discovered that not everyone is a natural born leader and they often struggle with this particular aspect because is there anything more tricky than dealing with other humans? So it occupies, you know, you get that right. You can really have a fantastic business.
Joe: 17:58 Awesome. So thank you for breaking those down. When I think one of the things I’d like to, to ask you about is your sales funnel. James. I, I see that you take a very different approach with sales funnels than, than the norm. And I think the, the approach again is kind of refreshing and the way that you kind of qualify and self-select and, and build a journey based upon the buyer or the prospect is, is very different. And I’m sure that your conversions I would guess are really good because it’s the direct opposite of everybody else in the market.
James: 18:34 You know, certainly not afraid to do the opposite of everyone in the market. It’s like the first thing I noticed when I started selling was how terrible salespeople were. It used to blow my mind actually. Like I would come into the car dealership and I’d see the sales person standing there with a spreadsheet and I’d say, what are you looking at? He goes, I’m looking at the stock sheet to see which cars have the biggest bonus. And then he’d explained to me the next person that came in, he’s going to recommend them the car, the biggest bonus. And I’m thinking, shouldn’t you be recommending the right car for them? Like regardless of the bonus, because don’t you want them to buy from you again in the future? So I realized that most sales people are very selfish and it’s more about them paying for the mortgage that month, then the customer in front of them.
James: 19:27 So I’ve always had that duty of care to the customer and I want them to be very happy with the purchase. I want them to make the right decision and I want them to be in a position to refer me to buy again. So yes, my whole sales funnel is revolving around the customer and they’re challenging their needs and it’s sort of a choose your own adventure. But I don’t think I should show someone the right offer unless they’re in the right prospect. There’s no point offering them something that’s not a good fit for them because it starts to take away from their ability to get value and it just doesn’t feel right. And if you only show your right offer to the right prospect, yes, your conversions increase. But also your ability to get them results increases, your reputation increases. And so again, like when I stopped selling something that I felt the market had moved on from, I get plenty of traffic to my website who will never see my sales page because they shouldn’t see it yet. They’re not ready for that solution. So do I make less money initially? Possibly a, is it been a long term? I think absolutely. I can, I can sleep at night knowing that I’m doing my very best to help people with the right solution. And it certainly worked out really well so far.
Joe: 20:55 Yeah. So I mean, at the end of the day, to catch everybody up, it’s really like, what’s your problem? Where’s your budget? Where are you in this journey? And then you’re kind of self- diagnosing correct.
James: 21:06 Yeah. It’s although budget might not be the right word, it’s more like what size is your business? And the, the thing that is probably not obvious, but it’s a rather counter intuitive and directly flies against what most experts teach is I’m not a big fan of the ascension model. And that is where you start someone for free and then you give them a little product and then a slightly bigger product and then a more expensive recurring and then have massive product. I just think that is such a flawed concept because I look at it this way. Imagine you love drinking whiskey, like the finest whiskey from the greatest Glenn in Scotland. If you go into a bar, you don’t start off with the tap whiskey or the low shelf stuff and then work your way up to the good stuff on the top shelf.
James: 22:03 That whiskey drink is saying, I’ll have that. And they’ll point to the top shelf and they’ll start at the top. And the bulk of my client’s coming to my highest level program will come straight to it using that selector. And that’s what they want. They don’t, they don’t want to wait and I don’t want to work their way through a couple of hundred podcasts first. They want help now they, they know it’s the right solution and they’re ready to go. So I bring people in at the highest level if that’s the right level for them. And you know, the ascension model can go suck.
Joe: 22:40 Yeah. I completely agree. It’s like if I know James that I want to pay you for one on one coaching or your highest level program, should I really have to start at a tripwire for seven or $10 or go listen to your sales Webinar, you know, selling me $1,000 product if I want to pay you 30 grand a year.
James: 22:58 Yeah. I think some people get in the way of a sale with all this manipulation tactics. Yeah.
Joe: 23:04 100%. So that keeps your promotions, I’m guessing then James, like very simple. Right? Right.
James: 23:11 Yeah. Well I think, I think you know, again, if you look at what I do and what I teach many others, I don’t have affiliates and that makes life a lot easier. I’m not constantly looking for fraud or spreadsheets or sending out payments back, a big chunk of my income, you know, I don’t do launches. So there’s no hype or you know, getting all my mates to email their, their customers to death. Cause I don’t think that’s respectful of the client. That, that model. I am just very consistent with my marketing of content and organically happy customers making referrals so you can have a low pressure system that produces really well for the long haul. So I kind of feel like I’m attending a vineyard and I’m producing fine wine and it takes awhile and it’s organic, you know, like in food, people are going back to organic.
James: 24:12 Yeah. In fact. But to buy a pair of shoes to my wife yesterday and yesterday was the first day I discovered that what they call fake leather shoes or like pretty much what we might’ve called vinyl in the days. I couldn’t believe it. But the salesperson called them, she called them Vegan. There’s vegan shoes, which means synthetic, leather cracked me up. So we’re going back to the old ways of organic. And I think you know, all of the tactics that people use to cajole and prod and manipulate and, and annoy and disrupt people can backfire on them. If there’s nothing of substance underneath that. If you’ve got a really good product and you can be consistent with the way you share it, you can actually build up a lot of momentum. People will keep coming to the cellar to buy that wine. If you keep looking after the grapes and you don’t put crazy insecticides all over them and stuff,.
Joe: 25:13 100%. I think from a system publicity standpoint too, it just makes your life so much easier, right? It’s like if, if you want to work with me, here’s the two ways you work with me. Like go through the selector basically, or the chooser and it’ll tell you what the program that’s right for you. You’re not trying to pitch something different every week or, you know having big launches or crazy complex funnels and sequences and everything else. It really follows your model of keeping everything very, very simple.
James: 25:43 People always ask me, you know, what software tool do we use for our selector? And I tell them it’s hyperlinked images. Like it’s very simple. And I like simple. You know, I remember I had this Russian client, he used to buy a six hundreds from me and he was telling me about Russian technology. I won’t do the accent, but he would say, you know, James what’s good about Russian technology? And I said, what’s that? Vladimir? And he would say, it’s simple and it works. You know, that’s how Sputnik was first in the space. I said, if you have a Russian gun, you can drop it in a river, pick it up, and it’ll still fire a bullet. It won’t have all the fancy stuff, but it’ll work. And I thought, that’s really cool. And I, I’d always stuck with me that philosophy. Of course, you know the story of this Russian space pen? Yeah, the antigravity they use a pencil. I don’t think it’s actually true. It’s a great story that illustrate that. I think we as humans tend to try and make things very complex. And I would say a lot of my time is spent uncomplicating things to people.
Joe: 26:57 Yep. a hundred percent agree with that. Uyou talk about in your programs and in your book you talk about 64, four. Can you kind of break down that? I think that fits right into what you’re talking about right now. Uand then I’d love to get your thoughts, James, on the 64 four of the team and the scale, kind of that last piece.
James: 27:19 So 64-4 it’s the Prater principle applied to itself and I think that’s a very powerful concept. Most of us, if we’ve read the four hour workweek or got about Richard Cosh we know about the Prater principle, the 80 20, I think we’ve heard it, we may not have really thought it through to the extent that it’s possible, but upon hearing that it’s fractal and applying it to itself, you end up with 64 four, it means 64% of your outcomes probably coming from 4% of the inputs. And that’s pretty wild when you think about almost everything you’re doing. It doesn’t matter. So it’s just a few of the things get you the results. And we know this is true because we kept grabbing our favorite t-shirt or you know, we probably have out, if you analyze your customer base, you’ll find there’s a few clients that that make up a great portion of your income.
James: 28:23 Would probably take the same traffic route when we go somewhere over and over again. So when we apply this one, one simple way to apply it to the extension of it that is pretty phenomenal if you’ve never done it before, is to actually teach it to your team. And I realized that even if I read the book and I understand that if I don’t pass it onto my team, then they might as well not know about the concept. So those is a plugin update that came through a security patch. And I notice my webmaster said, oh, she’s updating our websites for the security patch. And she listed them and I think she had them alphabetically. And I thought, well, hang on, this is really interesting. Like of all of our websites, let’s say at this time, I think we had half a dozen websites. One of them makes us about 80% of our income.
James: 29:21 The other one makes about 19% and all the rest combined, maybe 1% I said, why wouldn’t we patch the most important website first and then the second and then from then on like it wouldn’t even matter if you don’t get to the others by the end of today, just to the most important one. And then she thought, oh yeah, I didn’t think of it that. But now when we’re doing anything, that team, I actually helped them prioritize. Often they’ll send me something and they’ll take a guess at which ones are most important. But as a leader I will often share with them when we’re having a meeting each week or when we get together, I’ll say, look, here’s where we’re at. Here’s what’s on now and this is the priority. If nothing else happened, I’d like this one thing to be done. Everything else from there is a secondary to that primary objective.
James: 30:14 And if we do get that done, then we should attack these in these orders and everyone agrees on that. That way we’re always loading our effort to where it needs to be applied and we’re not wasting anything. In fact, we’ve even got what we call an infinity project, which is like a, a surplus project. If we run out of all the activities, if we complete everything on our list, this is something they could do forever in infinity. They can work on our project that is technically open-ended. It can never be finished.
Joe: 30:48 So I love the idea of an infinity project. James, I’m curious like how do you come up with a vision big enough to have a project that is never finished? And I like that. I would say it’s a pointless statement here.
James: 31:00 It’s quite simple really. You can have a content based website on a particular topic that you know, there’s no limit on the number of pages and the, the monetization for that you know, I’m sort of inspired by formula one racing.
James: 31:18 You know, when they, when they put on their brakes, they actually store energy back to go back into the engine, you know, it’s called Kurz. So it’s like an energy energy retrieval system. So if they keep posting to our content site, we can make more revenue from the advertisements around that site. So the bigger the site and the more SEO friendly the topic is, the more money we make. And the end goal is that someone will come along and buy that site. They’ll want to access the market quickly and they’ll buy the site that’s ranked at the top that has the traffic and a database. So we’ve been building a few of those over time and they just get bigger and fatter. It’s like growing my vineyard and one day I’ll sell the wine, but someone might also just want to buy the vineyard. So it doesn’t even matter if it’s not finished yet. But already when we get impacted, most of my content sites are bigger than my superfast business site, which, you know, it’s saying something cause that’s got big 15,000 index pages. Last time I looked at it quite a big site. You know,.
Joe: 32:25 What podcast episode are you on, James?
James: 32:29 I’ve recorded. I think I’m in the, around the 600 and eighties at the moment. Yeah.
Joe: 32:34 So one of the longest podcasts I definitely know about. So everybody definitely go check that out. Definitely not going away anytime soon. Very consistent with that. But man, 15,000 pages and, and this new Infinity project is getting more pages than that. That’s crazy. So how do you keep 64-4 in mind when, when you’re working on your project plan and what you’re going to hit and how do you keep your team from not over- complicating, even if you keep that in your mind and you agree to it, how do you help make sure that your team doesn’t over- complicate that list? And before you know it, it’s a mile long?
James: 33:12 Well, the easiest thing is to not keep a list. So I don’t keep it off. I don’t have it to do list. Okay. That, that makes life simple for me. So my 82, my 64-4 is whatever’s in my scheduler. If it’s, if it’s in my scheduler, then it’ll happen like this, call it all turn up, it’ll be done. It’s not going to sit on the list. So for my team, it’s very similar, like with a weekly meeting which takes about 15 minutes. It’s very easy to get visibility on where we’re moving with our projects. I’d like to just give a very few projects out to, I actually won’t give them a project in unless they’re made significant progress with the one they’re on now. But because we don’t have client facing work, we’re mostly an internal business. Now we’re just publishing.
James: 34:08 We get a daily report of the key metrics that indicate the health of our business. We have lead metrics and lag metrics, so we’re able to tell if the right things are happening. For example, a podcasts you mentioned and we send out two a week and those podcasts stimulate page views and they stimulate emails sent and they will lead to people seeing a call to action that will help them go through the chooser and some will become customers. And so we keep doing the podcast and we know the business will take care of itself. So I’d say a lot of people have very steady tasks in our business. We’ve already identified where, where the action is. And Right now my team are scaling up on social media marketing and video marketing because we think that’s where we need to go a bit deeper and we’ve got a lot of content to work with. And by improving the way we do our social marketing, we should be able to improve our business because we are really good with emails. We’re really good with support our products in line with the market. Now sales pages are great, our designs, great. Our SEO is great. So it’s just where it was strengthening our team right now and we’re sharing those learning objectives and implementing. So it’s just, it’s one major initiative.
Joe: 35:31 Yeah, for sure. That makes sense. Um,you’re just not over complicating keeping it simple. Just like we’ve been talking about this whole episode.
James: 35:39 Yeah, I like simple [inaudible].
Joe: 35:41 So when we, when you look at your book James, what other strategies or tactics would you share with people if somebody says, James, like what’s the big idea of your book? Or what’s the one thing that I should know? What would you tell them?
James: 35:57 Well, I would question everything. This why you’re doing the things you’re doing. Is it because you were told to do it by someone else? Have you given it much thought? Are there other options for you? My favorite sort of things to come back to from the book would be seeing where a recurring subscription model might fit in because that’s a, it’s such a rewarding business model. I would also look for a higher product to put on top of whatever you’ve got. Now that’s an easy win because your existing customer base is the easiest market to sell to. And they would probably spend 10 times more if you had a product that was 10 times more. Probably 10% of your audience will buy that. And I would also just have a look at how much time is spending on social media. And how clear you’re being with your team and in terms of leadership and yeah, and don’t chase things like the ascension model or the launch model necessarily that they might be at a place for them. Like sometimes like if you, I’ve got a client who teaches a particular sporting skill and it, I think they have an eight year course and because of the nature of that sport, it, it does have a step-by-step now in nature. So the client will need to ascend through eight separate levels according to particular things that, that require time to develop. So I can understand that there’ll be the occasional use for it, but often there’s not.
Joe: 37:37 Wonderful. All right, one more concept I’d like to break down, James, that we went into detail about but not great detail. How would you advise someone to create a chooser? I think if people walk away with the message that you’ve given them so far, they’re going to get a ton of value. But I think for most of my customers they over-complicate their sales process to the, to like the hundredth degree. And you’ve done such a great job simplifying your sales process. I’d love if you could just break down how somebody could go and implement kind of the chooser system for themselves.
James: 38:12 Well, I have to give credit to Ryan Levesque for influencing that because as I was coaching him for a number of years, I got to see the effectiveness of the ask method and also went to Texas and I sat in on a high level workshop that he ran and I had some of his coaches also had a look and I did a deep dive survey. So I think that’s the easy thing. It’s something I do with most of my clients at a, at least a high level is we’ll run a single most important question survey. That’s what, what’s their current biggest challenge. We take those responses. We look for, we score them by the longest responses, multiplying ones that are willing to put a contact detail. And then we take only the top 20%, and then we look for the common threads. Then look for the three to five buckets.
James: 39:11 Ryan calls them. And that will give you a sense of the passion in the market, the words people use and the top challenges that they’re having. And that will usually guide you as to the segments that you might want to put your sales offer into. The how deep you go on that. It’s up to you. But I’ve used it for the homepage that leads to four different challenge types that people generally face, which correlate to the laborers we’ve been talking about. The second step of the, the business level, that was another, there was a chat that I was having this Ryan at breakfast when he came and spoke at my event in Sydney. I said to him, I, I really want to just destroy the ascension model here. How do I get people to the right offer even if it’s not on the same site?
James: 40:06 And that’s where silver circle I need to get that member there straight away. So we came up with that solution and it works really well. And yeah, once you know your segments, you, it helps you with you sales pages. I think I’ve got one sales page, I could go the full extent and have four. But in the interest of KPI, relatively simple, I I stick with one. However, we’ve already tagged the prospect on the way through. So when they join my membership, we will only send them the onboarding relating to that challenge so that if I have four things I could talk to them about, I’ll only send them one, the other, the other members will get something different so they’ll get a different experience when they join compared to potentially other people. So you get one of the, the four possible segments.
Joe: 40:58 So I’m going to try to break that down as, as well as I can without dropping out any value. So please correct me if I miss something. So from the get go, we’re kind of getting our visitors to self select where they need help, right? And I think that you have four different ones, which are the primary different levers we talked about today. So pricing self effectiveness and fun. And then the the, the sales funnel and conversion mechanism and then the team and scale. Is that kind of the four James? Okay. Yeah. Fantastic. All right. So then once they do that, ultimately then we’re kind of asking, which different program do you belong into? My kind of top 1% program. And that was in your tip as well to have the 10 x kind of bigger package offering and then kind of your core offering. And so it’s just kind of a selector to figure out which one to put them into. Correct.
James: 41:53 Yes. And there’s also the option of if they’re not ready yet, then I send them off to free training and I think there’s also recommended trainings that might be useful for them to get up and running. I actually developed with John Lynch a course now that I can send people to when they’re not ready for my program because I really only start coaching if someone’s making a minimum of $10,000 a year. I found that a great filter to remove me from a difficult prospect because they’ve got a lot of challenge in front of them to get to 10 grand a year. It sounds like not much. Let’s say vast majority of online marketers would not have made 10 grand a year. And with the higher level clients, I’m really only starting to chat to them if they’re making half a million dollars a year because my program is going to be too expensive for them if they’re not, but it’ll be a bargain for them if they are. So the, you know, the value proposition swings dramatically depending on what they’ve got in motion. So you can still harvest some energy from the people who aren’t your best prospects. You could even send them off to a competitor for an affiliate commission if they offer something that you don’t. So there’s a lot of opportunity there. Don’t waste the lead.
Joe: 43:10 A hundred percent. The other thing that you said, James, is you have just a couple of sales pages, right? And then ultimately it’s, it’s basically this is my recommendation based upon where you know, where you’re at and what you told me. And then ultimately if they do buy the last piece of genius that you said there was, that you customize kind of their onboarding experience. So I’m assuming if they say that they have a big problem with profit lever number one in the onboarding sequence at first email or first week, you’re saying this is the content that you need to consume.
James: 43:44 Correct. Yup. We send them, we’ve actually split our delivery into the four sections and with summarize the key trainings in each section. So there’ll be sent to that just one.
Joe: 43:57 That’s beautiful. Yeah, that’s fantastic. Because you want to make sure that they have a great experience no matter what bucket they kind of fall in. And that I’ve definitely noticed that with different clients and different programs that I have is we’re often not segmenting that the best. And some people have a great experience and other people don’t. And it’s really based upon how I’ve laid out the members area or the training. And I haven’t done the best job of navigating somebody to the section that will do best for them.
James: 44:25 Yeah, well it’s an easy win then for improving the back end, say, because we’ve all had experience where we bought something and then straight off the purchase we feel like we’ve forgotten about and the seller is off to the next thing. And I’d say that’s probably rife in the online community. I’ve watched it over the last 12 years or so. I’ve seen some marketers that are just constant shovel sellers and no matter whatever the thing of the vogue is, whether it’s bitcoins or whether it’s high ticket coaching or whatever, they’re just onto the next money making scam. And A, they’ve forgotten about everyone they’ve ever sold to and there and they’ve moved on and they’re just always on the hunt for new customer. And they make it hard for themselves.
Joe: 45:16 100%. Yeah. Pitch, pitch, pitch, always nonstop. There’s whole communities of it are left.
James: 45:23 All of them. I can’t stand it. Definitely. So last but not least definitely gonna leave in link to your book in the show notes. Definitely my favorite book as I said, the prime the last two or three years. But I would love to get some feedback from you James. Like what’s, what’s the, what’s the book that’s left the biggest impact on your business? Like when or, or on your life when you look at like direct correlation? Not like that book was good and it gave me a little bit of theory that maybe one day I’ll use, right. If you look at like pure input that pure impact that a book has made on your life, what would that book be and why?
James: 46:06 When I was a stock controller for a telephone company, I was succonded to a sales division and brand new sales team. And digital telephony was new in Australia in 1993 a little bit before America actually. And they’d recruited the best sales people from Xerox and from the other telecommunications companies. So they were like the top gun of salespeople. It was seven or eight of them. Okay. And they were fascinating humans. So I thought this was interesting. I was more of an accountant, credit controller type person. And they were all using a methodology that was popular at Xerox, a that was taught by Neil Rackham called spin selling. And that book was their core training. And they taught on that methodology and I couldn’t help but be sort of sucked into the vortex of that idea. And along with other other things, some Brian Tracy cassettes and Tom Hopkins book, I have to say that spin selling was the most important book that I’ve read in terms of dollars made because it gave me a methodology that I still use today even though it’s so deeply subconscious in the way that I operate.
James: 47:25 But I love it because it’s customer focused. It teaches you more about investigation and problem solving rather than 57 tricky closing phrases you can say to, to win a customer. So I, I love the thoughts of it. I like the research that was behind it. There’s not been anything like it since, except for the challenger method, which is the foreword is written by Neil Rackham because it’s fully research. But that was a massive thing for me. Iterate. And I took that methodology to Mercedes Benz and just dominated with it. I was the top selling salesperson in Australia for both BMW and Mercedes Benz. And I would say that book was a big part of it because it was a new concept for people.
Joe: 48:15 Wonderful. What was the, what was the challenge or method that you mentioned? I’ve obviously heard of spin selling. I’ve read it, it’s been a while. I’ll definitely revisit it. But what was the challenger method that you mentioned?
James: 48:26 It’s a newer book. It’s also backed on research. They found that one type of salesperson sells about four times more than others and it’s the one that challenges the prospect. So it’s not dissimilar to a spin selling method where you are probing and asking. And all right. Certainly would say that about myself. I can challenge people. I have the different voices that people have. I’m probably more of a prophet than, than others.
James: 48:59 So I would say that I’ve always, I’ve always not accepted the typical stereotypical sales role that we think it’s supposed to be all, you know, the wild wire push, push, push. All right. To be curious, you know, find out what, what’s going on and see how we can solve this together. And that involves push back sometimes, but that type of sales person turns out it’s more effective for our can see that in hindsight, I’d obviously never read the book through my whole sales career because fairly newish book, but this, you know, that’s sort of the next in the evolution of properly researched sales books cause it really hasn’t been much in the way its sales research for a hundred years. Like it’s, yeah, most of the books from the sixties, seventies, eighties, they all have outdated methodologies.
Joe: 49:53 Yup. 100%. Fantastic man. So we’ll definitely link up the book and the show notes. We’ll link up super fast business. Where are you active most on social or where else should we consider Linkingup for your J-? What’s important to you? Uthese days I’d say I’d probably post it Instagram most days. I think that’s seems to be a, an enjoyable platform for social media of all the platforms. Okay. So we’ll link up in a, in Instagram as well. And,uand just my personal favorite,udefinitely audibles so we’ll make sure we link up to your book in audible. Definitely how I got through it and got through it fast. Udefinitely. Again, guys, this, this is not a native ad for a, for James’s book, but definitely was an absolute pleasure. Uand, and has definitely helped. My e h r. So James, man, thank you so much. I really appreciate you coming on.
James: 50:45 Thank you, Joe always appreciate it. Healthy discussion around this sort of topic and I’m glad that you got something from the book.
Joe: 50:57 100%. 100%. Thanks so much James, and thanks so much everybody. Hope you guys enjoyed Sayonara. Joe: 00:00 All right. All right everybody. Welcome to another show here at, show me the nuggets today. I am super excited to be joined by none other than James Schramko. If, if you guys don’t know James or don’t know of James, you’ve got to be hiding under a rock. I was thinking about it this morning and man, James, I’ve been following you and actually listening to you speak since like the stompernet days, so early two thousands when you were doing SEO, much like how I got started and and super excited to come on in and pick your brain today.
James: 00:35 Well, it’s certainly going back. It’s interesting. I’ve been through that sort of metamorphosis of SEO practitioner. Of course I sold that business in there. I do more coaching, but I guess you know, if you’ve been around for more than 10 years online, it feels like forever.
Joe: 00:54 Yeah, 100%. So right now you’re, you run super fast business membership, you run silver circle and then obviously the author of work less make more. And I’ve talked about this guys, if you haven’t read this book, you’ve got to go check it out. And I’m sure James is going to give us a nice little taste of it here today. But guys, this has made a huge difference and probably the book that’s made the biggest difference in my life, at least in past two or three years, man. So I really gotta say first and foremost that I’m just super thankful that you took the time to write the book and I’m excited to share some of that content and your message with the audience today.
James: 01:29 Oh, well thank you. And that book, I have a bit of help from a lady called Kelly Exeter to get that book out of me took about five years because had such a volume of content in it, I wanted to make sure that the book was concise and that’s actually really hard to do, as you would know, to sort of summarize it down into the shortest possible rate, but still deliver a lot of value.
Joe: 01:54 Yeah, yeah. I think that that’s a big skill set. I think nobody does that. And I think that your objective was definitely complete because man, it, it held me Hook, line and sinker, you know, it was one read from start to finish. So if, if it wasn’t very concise and to the point it definitely would have taken me quite a few reads.
James: 02:15 Yeah. You and everyone else, you know what 50% of books are actually not even opened in kindle. So I think it is a job to compel someone to get into it. And we tried really hard to make it active compared to some of the other books I’ve read. Read lots and lots of books, but they can be a bit hard sometimes.
Joe: 02:35 Definitely. So. Cool. James, let’s let’s recap a little bit. If people don’t know you, they don’t know your background at BMW they don’t know what you’ve been up to at super fast business. They don’t know your SEO background. Can, can you bring them up to speed on a couple of minutes?
James: 02:49 Absolutely. so I’ve found myself in a sales career. Initially BMW. Then I switched to Mercedes-Benz and I worked my way through management and through sales management, general sales management, and then eventually as a general manager of a Mercedes Benz dealership, that was the last job that I had. Towards the end of that, I felt like it was a little bit scary to be paid by one person, such a big way. So I started learning how to build a website and I wanted to have my own business and I wasn’t sure what I would do. And through a series of struggles, I’ll call it figured out how to build a website. And then I started promoting the website software that I’d use to build the website. And I started affiliate marketing. So I sold this software for commission. Then I created information products to support that.
James: 03:43 And then I started driving traffic for a CPA offers and eventually other people want and help to learn how to do it. So then I was doing events running a workshop and and also I had an online community to support people in between events. And that was a recurring thing and it’s been going now for over 10 years. I started podcasting 10 years ago. I still run live events. In the meantime I built and sold a website development business and SEO business. In these days I just sort of talking and coach people. I’m generally not people starting out, mostly people who are already in motion. And most definitely people at the very top level in our field. A lot of the popular names that most people would know if they’ve been online for any number of years. I’m often helping them with their business structure and organizing themselves and packaging things.
James: 04:45 And I’m sure we’ll delve into some of those things just so that they’re not becoming a stressed out, overworked maniac for too little pay. And, and also it’s sort of helped me attract a few business owners who are happy for me to come in and help them with their business for a small percentage of revenue. And that’s sort of my favorite thing to do lately and that’s, that sort of brings us up to the current mode.
Joe: 05:11 Alright, that’s awesome. So what, what made you kind of figure out the website hosting model and the website builder? What, what kind of got you interested there? How’d that kind of come up or how’d you fall into that, so to speak?
James: 05:24 Well, I realized that online was going to be a thing and then it’s we’re on a bit of a lag too here in Australia.
James: 05:31 We were a little bit behind the u s market whenever almost talking near dotcoms and having that first boom. I think we were sort of observing that with interest. But I realized having parents in the travel industry and the way that customers were changing their behavior as they were buying vehicles, they started coming in really educated and they knew all about the models before we were told by the manufacturer. So I knew the online thing was going to be big and I initially just struggled to build the website. And then I realized so many other people are gonna fail at trying to build a website. Cause back then you kind of needed to be a Geeky coder or learn how to use tools like front page or Dreamweaver. So someone starting up today wouldn’t even know what I’m talking about. But anyone who tried then had to pay someone a lot of money.
James: 06:22 Like you could pay 15 or 20, $30,000 for some geek to code out a website. Yep. There are a couple of tools that made it easy, but some of them lacks fundamental things like SEO or style changes. So I found this sort of middle ground and this tool helped me build the website and I got really good at it and I was learning about SEO and copywriting. So I sort of mashing together skills. Imagine a website that was fast loading, ranked well and compel people to buy. And then I created a guide around this called a cheat sheet. And I started offering this as a bonus for people who purchase through me. And eventually I was making a lot of sales of this software. I was one of the top affiliates in the whole world for this software. And then people buying my information, product people already had the software.
James: 07:16 And that sort of led me to move more into the, you know, affiliate marketing and coaching side. But in the meantime, people kept having a need for a website. And eventually I felt this tool was losing traction to the most popular tool that’s around now is wordpress. WordPress was sort of early days and just started to become dominant. And I thought, you know, I don’t know if someone should actually try and build a website anymore. Like wordpress became freely available. There were so many people who could develop it. So I had my team started building my websites instead of me. That was the first crossover. And then now two, it built over a thousand websites. Occasionally I’d sell a few and then I realized, well, maybe other people, maybe other people want a website and I can just get my team to do it. And initially also I had this guy in America who was building websites for me.
James: 08:12 I think it was about $500 for a website and I could sell these websites for a few thousand dollars. And then over time they got a bit sloppy and they quality lagged and the The Times blew out. And then he started putting the prices up and I thought, you know, i’ll just have my own team do this. So I had a team of 10 developers and we just sold websites to the public and I ran that for about seven years and eventually sold it to one of my clients who was actually a developer. It was, I was coaching him one day and I looked at his numbers and I looked at my numbers. I said, you know, this is the fascinating thing. I don’t know how to code, but I make more profit from my website development business than you do as a developer. I’m like, you clearly need a team. If you had my business and you actually know what you’re doing with the coding, I think you could have something pretty special.
James: 09:07 And we worked at a way that he could buy the business with some upfront money and then a payment a year later and it worked out well. And so he took over the team and I sort of got out of the Web Dev business. I can also tell you it’s a hard business to run because every customer has got such massive expectation on what the website looks like. They don’t really pay much attention to what’s under the hood. So it’s kind of glad to be out of it. And I do think the market’s moved again. These days. I’m not even promoting wordpress to most of my students. I’m a big fan of a program called Tenex pro and I think that is like the ultimate solution for what hasn’t been there for the last decade. So it’s, you know, there are these innovations and changes over time and I think a lot of the things that are current now will be made redundant. And I think I brought a lot of this from the car industry because the model car we’re selling now is, you know, that was in r and d for years before it got to the showroom and it makes all the ones that came before it superseded. But there are some things that never changed like from Mercedes Benz, they’re always going to be safe and they’re always going to be well engineered. But the way they look in the things they do will be different.
Joe: 10:23 Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I guess James, like one of the things that, that I’ve really respected about your work and following it over the years is that you’ve always led with integrity, right? I believe like like you said, you stopped promoting the program, right? And you iterated your program and your teachings because wordpress was now the big thing. And I says, I think that that says a lot about your character. I know that over the years, and, and I remember reading this in your book, that there’s kind of four big profit levers that you, that you talk about. Can we talk about those and can we break those down a little bit for everybody?
James: 10:58 Absolutely. and yeah, you’re, you’re right. You know, I turned off a $5,000 a month income to make a value call that I don’t think it’s the best solution in the market anymore.
James: 11:09 And eventually I met obviously a lot more than that from my web dev firm. I’ve done this a few times to turn off a valid income. The last client that I had is an agency was paying five and a half thousand dollars a month. Uthere was two of them and uI switched them off for this. I actually gave them to some students of mine and said, would you like to take over these clients? You know, it’s not part of my core. So that’s sort of lends itself to one of the profit levers and that’s your business strategy,uin the way that you price and package things. So over the years mine’s changed a little bit here and there, but for most people, they really struggled with this one. Like, how much to charge, whether it should be one time or recurring, should they do a course, a membership, a done for you service that done with you service?
James: 11:58 Should they be taking a piece of someone else’s business? Should they build their own, should they acquire something, should they be acquired? So this is, that’s a huge topic and I spent a lot of time and effort learning about research and especially develop the recurring subscription model. That’s probably my favorite. So that’s one of the four levers is, is, you know, what’s that vehicle in the market that you’re going to be bringing the money in? Is it efficient for you and does it get you the results you want make you happy? Do want me to share the others or, or dig into each one?
Joe: 12:32 I think that that’s a biggie being happy. Right? and if not for your book. I was in a place of working way too hard. I’m probably not making near enough had built a business that was growing very fast, but the profits weren’t growing very fast.
Joe: 12:47 It was, if anything kind of sliding. And I was, you know, not, not loving life so to speak. So could you maybe hit would now maybe go be a good time james to talk about EHR and that first principle?
James: 13:01 Yeah. Well I kind of lends itself to one of the other levers that’s like self effectiveness. So an exercise that I have people do is I have them track where their time’s going and we work out what each hour is worth. Most employees even someone working at McDonald’s could actually tell you their hourly wage. You know, it’s published in the news all the time. The minimum wage, most employees know it, but most entrepreneurs wouldn’t be able to tell you the hourly rate. So it’s effectively, it’s the amount of profit that you make divided by the number of hours you’re working. So it’s not your revenue that, as you’ve explained, sometimes you can have the revenue, but all the money goes back out.
James: 13:47 You end up with not that much profit. And then you have to divide that by the number of hours you work. It’s quite feasible. Someone brings in $10,000 a month in revenue within, I pay back out in costs a 9,000 at least I’m a thousand the holders and if they’ve worked a hundred hours, they’ve only made 10 bucks an hour. So they’re, you know, they probably should be going down to McDonald’s instead and at least they’d get their nights off or the weekends off. So once we work at our effective hourly rate. It’s a fantastic way to filter what we should be spending our time on because if we can hire someone for less than what our effective hourly rate should be, it’s probably a good deal to do that. In the example of the website development, when I switched from building websites myself and acknowledging that I probably don’t aspire to be the world’s greatest website builder, I could hire developers for a wage, let’s, let’s call it $4 an hour, $5 an hour or thereabouts and I can resell that time for $80 an hour.
James: 14:54 And, and you know, you can’t sell every hour that you hire someone for generally unless they’re on a contract when you have full time people. But if they could work every one in every two hours, you know, you’d get a really good profit margin or even half the time that they’re hired for sure. You can still make a profit. So it’s a matter of getting someone else to do the stuff that you shouldn’t be doing or that it’s a low value. And then it also helps you, even if you are doing good stuff, maybe you have two different business models and maybe one of your business models is far more profitable than the others, but you never realized it cause you didn’t break it down by business category. So this is a really helpful tool. You can even apply it for your own team members.
James: 15:36 I’ve helped my team members lift their effectiveness by giving them tools, like a subscription software for example, that will automatically transcribe our podcasts and then they just clean it up. So now they can get a lot more of them done in the same amount of time.
Joe: 15:53 Yeah, 100%. Yeah. I never actually thought about looking at the EHR with different business models. I really liked that takeaway. And now it’s after reading the book and going through your training. So that was a nice little nugget right there. Okay, great. So then what are the other big levers, so to speak, James?
James: 16:10 So we’ve touched on the self effectiveness there. Yup. I’m often helping people, you know, get back to being happy and having fun and putting time blocks around where they actually going to do their work. And what kind of business they want and what drives them.
James: 16:26 So that’s a huge one cause I think your business will reflect the owner to some extent. So if you’ve got the business who’ve done the strategy, other things to think about are other way that you sell because you know, the selling is still a component of online business. You need to take, someone will identify who the, who the right person is, whose problem you can solve to let them know you exist, to get them to raise their hand and be interested to have them purchase from you, have them repurchase. So sales and conversions is always going to be a solid topic. And there’s also so many ways you can do it, whether it’s a sales page, written texts, videos, webinars, in- person telephone sales, live chat, messenger bots. That’s the works. So that’s a big topic. And then the last part of course is if you’ve got the right business and you’re selling and you’re having a good life, you will need to build in team and get some scale. So there are certain things that happen when you go from being just you to having actual business with the team. So you know, I learned a lot about running a team as a general manager and I’ve discovered that not everyone is a natural born leader and they often struggle with this particular aspect because is there anything more tricky than dealing with other humans? So it occupies, you know, you get that right. You can really have a fantastic business.
Joe: 17:58 Awesome. So thank you for breaking those down. When I think one of the things I’d like to, to ask you about is your sales funnel. James. I, I see that you take a very different approach with sales funnels than, than the norm. And I think the, the approach again is kind of refreshing and the way that you kind of qualify and self-select and, and build a journey based upon the buyer or the prospect is, is very different. And I’m sure that your conversions I would guess are really good because it’s the direct opposite of everybody else in the market.
James: 18:34 You know, certainly not afraid to do the opposite of everyone in the market. It’s like the first thing I noticed when I started selling was how terrible salespeople were. It used to blow my mind actually. Like I would come into the car dealership and I’d see the sales person standing there with a spreadsheet and I’d say, what are you looking at? He goes, I’m looking at the stock sheet to see which cars have the biggest bonus. And then he’d explained to me the next person that came in, he’s going to recommend them the car, the biggest bonus. And I’m thinking, shouldn’t you be recommending the right car for them? Like regardless of the bonus, because don’t you want them to buy from you again in the future? So I realized that most sales people are very selfish and it’s more about them paying for the mortgage that month, then the customer in front of them.
James: 19:27 So I’ve always had that duty of care to the customer and I want them to be very happy with the purchase. I want them to make the right decision and I want them to be in a position to refer me to buy again. So yes, my whole sales funnel is revolving around the customer and they’re challenging their needs and it’s sort of a choose your own adventure. But I don’t think I should show someone the right offer unless they’re in the right prospect. There’s no point offering them something that’s not a good fit for them because it starts to take away from their ability to get value and it just doesn’t feel right. And if you only show your right offer to the right prospect, yes, your conversions increase. But also your ability to get them results increases, your reputation increases. And so again, like when I stopped selling something that I felt the market had moved on from, I get plenty of traffic to my website who will never see my sales page because they shouldn’t see it yet. They’re not ready for that solution. So do I make less money initially? Possibly a, is it been a long term? I think absolutely. I can, I can sleep at night knowing that I’m doing my very best to help people with the right solution. And it certainly worked out really well so far.
Joe: 20:55 Yeah. So I mean, at the end of the day, to catch everybody up, it’s really like, what’s your problem? Where’s your budget? Where are you in this journey? And then you’re kind of self- diagnosing correct.
James: 21:06 Yeah. It’s although budget might not be the right word, it’s more like what size is your business? And the, the thing that is probably not obvious, but it’s a rather counter intuitive and directly flies against what most experts teach is I’m not a big fan of the ascension model. And that is where you start someone for free and then you give them a little product and then a slightly bigger product and then a more expensive recurring and then have massive product. I just think that is such a flawed concept because I look at it this way. Imagine you love drinking whiskey, like the finest whiskey from the greatest Glenn in Scotland. If you go into a bar, you don’t start off with the tap whiskey or the low shelf stuff and then work your way up to the good stuff on the top shelf.
James: 22:03 That whiskey drink is saying, I’ll have that. And they’ll point to the top shelf and they’ll start at the top. And the bulk of my client’s coming to my highest level program will come straight to it using that selector. And that’s what they want. They don’t, they don’t want to wait and I don’t want to work their way through a couple of hundred podcasts first. They want help now they, they know it’s the right solution and they’re ready to go. So I bring people in at the highest level if that’s the right level for them. And you know, the ascension model can go suck.
Joe: 22:40 Yeah. I completely agree. It’s like if I know James that I want to pay you for one on one coaching or your highest level program, should I really have to start at a tripwire for seven or $10 or go listen to your sales Webinar, you know, selling me $1,000 product if I want to pay you 30 grand a year.
James: 22:58 Yeah. I think some people get in the way of a sale with all this manipulation tactics. Yeah.
Joe: 23:04 100%. So that keeps your promotions, I’m guessing then James, like very simple. Right? Right.
James: 23:11 Yeah. Well I think, I think you know, again, if you look at what I do and what I teach many others, I don’t have affiliates and that makes life a lot easier. I’m not constantly looking for fraud or spreadsheets or sending out payments back, a big chunk of my income, you know, I don’t do launches. So there’s no hype or you know, getting all my mates to email their, their customers to death. Cause I don’t think that’s respectful of the client. That, that model. I am just very consistent with my marketing of content and organically happy customers making referrals so you can have a low pressure system that produces really well for the long haul. So I kind of feel like I’m attending a vineyard and I’m producing fine wine and it takes awhile and it’s organic, you know, like in food, people are going back to organic.
James: 24:12 Yeah. In fact. But to buy a pair of shoes to my wife yesterday and yesterday was the first day I discovered that what they call fake leather shoes or like pretty much what we might’ve called vinyl in the days. I couldn’t believe it. But the salesperson called them, she called them Vegan. There’s vegan shoes, which means synthetic, leather cracked me up. So we’re going back to the old ways of organic. And I think you know, all of the tactics that people use to cajole and prod and manipulate and, and annoy and disrupt people can backfire on them. If there’s nothing of substance underneath that. If you’ve got a really good product and you can be consistent with the way you share it, you can actually build up a lot of momentum. People will keep coming to the cellar to buy that wine. If you keep looking after the grapes and you don’t put crazy insecticides all over them and stuff,.
Joe: 25:13 100%. I think from a system publicity standpoint too, it just makes your life so much easier, right? It’s like if, if you want to work with me, here’s the two ways you work with me. Like go through the selector basically, or the chooser and it’ll tell you what the program that’s right for you. You’re not trying to pitch something different every week or, you know having big launches or crazy complex funnels and sequences and everything else. It really follows your model of keeping everything very, very simple.
James: 25:43 People always ask me, you know, what software tool do we use for our selector? And I tell them it’s hyperlinked images. Like it’s very simple. And I like simple. You know, I remember I had this Russian client, he used to buy a six hundreds from me and he was telling me about Russian technology. I won’t do the accent, but he would say, you know, James what’s good about Russian technology? And I said, what’s that? Vladimir? And he would say, it’s simple and it works. You know, that’s how Sputnik was first in the space. I said, if you have a Russian gun, you can drop it in a river, pick it up, and it’ll still fire a bullet. It won’t have all the fancy stuff, but it’ll work. And I thought, that’s really cool. And I, I’d always stuck with me that philosophy. Of course, you know the story of this Russian space pen? Yeah, the antigravity they use a pencil. I don’t think it’s actually true. It’s a great story that illustrate that. I think we as humans tend to try and make things very complex. And I would say a lot of my time is spent uncomplicating things to people.
Joe: 26:57 Yep. a hundred percent agree with that. Uyou talk about in your programs and in your book you talk about 64, four. Can you kind of break down that? I think that fits right into what you’re talking about right now. Uand then I’d love to get your thoughts, James, on the 64 four of the team and the scale, kind of that last piece.
James: 27:19 So 64-4 it’s the Prater principle applied to itself and I think that’s a very powerful concept. Most of us, if we’ve read the four hour workweek or got about Richard Cosh we know about the Prater principle, the 80 20, I think we’ve heard it, we may not have really thought it through to the extent that it’s possible, but upon hearing that it’s fractal and applying it to itself, you end up with 64 four, it means 64% of your outcomes probably coming from 4% of the inputs. And that’s pretty wild when you think about almost everything you’re doing. It doesn’t matter. So it’s just a few of the things get you the results. And we know this is true because we kept grabbing our favorite t-shirt or you know, we probably have out, if you analyze your customer base, you’ll find there’s a few clients that that make up a great portion of your income.
James: 28:23 Would probably take the same traffic route when we go somewhere over and over again. So when we apply this one, one simple way to apply it to the extension of it that is pretty phenomenal if you’ve never done it before, is to actually teach it to your team. And I realized that even if I read the book and I understand that if I don’t pass it onto my team, then they might as well not know about the concept. So those is a plugin update that came through a security patch. And I notice my webmaster said, oh, she’s updating our websites for the security patch. And she listed them and I think she had them alphabetically. And I thought, well, hang on, this is really interesting. Like of all of our websites, let’s say at this time, I think we had half a dozen websites. One of them makes us about 80% of our income.
James: 29:21 The other one makes about 19% and all the rest combined, maybe 1% I said, why wouldn’t we patch the most important website first and then the second and then from then on like it wouldn’t even matter if you don’t get to the others by the end of today, just to the most important one. And then she thought, oh yeah, I didn’t think of it that. But now when we’re doing anything, that team, I actually helped them prioritize. Often they’ll send me something and they’ll take a guess at which ones are most important. But as a leader I will often share with them when we’re having a meeting each week or when we get together, I’ll say, look, here’s where we’re at. Here’s what’s on now and this is the priority. If nothing else happened, I’d like this one thing to be done. Everything else from there is a secondary to that primary objective.
James: 30:14 And if we do get that done, then we should attack these in these orders and everyone agrees on that. That way we’re always loading our effort to where it needs to be applied and we’re not wasting anything. In fact, we’ve even got what we call an infinity project, which is like a, a surplus project. If we run out of all the activities, if we complete everything on our list, this is something they could do forever in infinity. They can work on our project that is technically open-ended. It can never be finished.
Joe: 30:48 So I love the idea of an infinity project. James, I’m curious like how do you come up with a vision big enough to have a project that is never finished? And I like that. I would say it’s a pointless statement here.
James: 31:00 It’s quite simple really. You can have a content based website on a particular topic that you know, there’s no limit on the number of pages and the, the monetization for that you know, I’m sort of inspired by formula one racing.
James: 31:18 You know, when they, when they put on their brakes, they actually store energy back to go back into the engine, you know, it’s called Kurz. So it’s like an energy energy retrieval system. So if they keep posting to our content site, we can make more revenue from the advertisements around that site. So the bigger the site and the more SEO friendly the topic is, the more money we make. And the end goal is that someone will come along and buy that site. They’ll want to access the market quickly and they’ll buy the site that’s ranked at the top that has the traffic and a database. So we’ve been building a few of those over time and they just get bigger and fatter. It’s like growing my vineyard and one day I’ll sell the wine, but someone might also just want to buy the vineyard. So it doesn’t even matter if it’s not finished yet. But already when we get impacted, most of my content sites are bigger than my superfast business site, which, you know, it’s saying something cause that’s got big 15,000 index pages. Last time I looked at it quite a big site. You know,.
Joe: 32:25 What podcast episode are you on, James?
James: 32:29 I’ve recorded. I think I’m in the, around the 600 and eighties at the moment. Yeah.
Joe: 32:34 So one of the longest podcasts I definitely know about. So everybody definitely go check that out. Definitely not going away anytime soon. Very consistent with that. But man, 15,000 pages and, and this new Infinity project is getting more pages than that. That’s crazy. So how do you keep 64-4 in mind when, when you’re working on your project plan and what you’re going to hit and how do you keep your team from not over- complicating, even if you keep that in your mind and you agree to it, how do you help make sure that your team doesn’t over- complicate that list? And before you know it, it’s a mile long?
James: 33:12 Well, the easiest thing is to not keep a list. So I don’t keep it off. I don’t have it to do list. Okay. That, that makes life simple for me. So my 82, my 64-4 is whatever’s in my scheduler. If it’s, if it’s in my scheduler, then it’ll happen like this, call it all turn up, it’ll be done. It’s not going to sit on the list. So for my team, it’s very similar, like with a weekly meeting which takes about 15 minutes. It’s very easy to get visibility on where we’re moving with our projects. I’d like to just give a very few projects out to, I actually won’t give them a project in unless they’re made significant progress with the one they’re on now. But because we don’t have client facing work, we’re mostly an internal business. Now we’re just publishing.
James: 34:08 We get a daily report of the key metrics that indicate the health of our business. We have lead metrics and lag metrics, so we’re able to tell if the right things are happening. For example, a podcasts you mentioned and we send out two a week and those podcasts stimulate page views and they stimulate emails sent and they will lead to people seeing a call to action that will help them go through the chooser and some will become customers. And so we keep doing the podcast and we know the business will take care of itself. So I’d say a lot of people have very steady tasks in our business. We’ve already identified where, where the action is. And Right now my team are scaling up on social media marketing and video marketing because we think that’s where we need to go a bit deeper and we’ve got a lot of content to work with. And by improving the way we do our social marketing, we should be able to improve our business because we are really good with emails. We’re really good with support our products in line with the market. Now sales pages are great, our designs, great. Our SEO is great. So it’s just where it was strengthening our team right now and we’re sharing those learning objectives and implementing. So it’s just, it’s one major initiative.
Joe: 35:31 Yeah, for sure. That makes sense. Um,you’re just not over complicating keeping it simple. Just like we’ve been talking about this whole episode.
James: 35:39 Yeah, I like simple [inaudible].
Joe: 35:41 So when we, when you look at your book James, what other strategies or tactics would you share with people if somebody says, James, like what’s the big idea of your book? Or what’s the one thing that I should know? What would you tell them?
James: 35:57 Well, I would question everything. This why you’re doing the things you’re doing. Is it because you were told to do it by someone else? Have you given it much thought? Are there other options for you? My favorite sort of things to come back to from the book would be seeing where a recurring subscription model might fit in because that’s a, it’s such a rewarding business model. I would also look for a higher product to put on top of whatever you’ve got. Now that’s an easy win because your existing customer base is the easiest market to sell to. And they would probably spend 10 times more if you had a product that was 10 times more. Probably 10% of your audience will buy that. And I would also just have a look at how much time is spending on social media. And how clear you’re being with your team and in terms of leadership and yeah, and don’t chase things like the ascension model or the launch model necessarily that they might be at a place for them. Like sometimes like if you, I’ve got a client who teaches a particular sporting skill and it, I think they have an eight year course and because of the nature of that sport, it, it does have a step-by-step now in nature. So the client will need to ascend through eight separate levels according to particular things that, that require time to develop. So I can understand that there’ll be the occasional use for it, but often there’s not.
Joe: 37:37 Wonderful. All right, one more concept I’d like to break down, James, that we went into detail about but not great detail. How would you advise someone to create a chooser? I think if people walk away with the message that you’ve given them so far, they’re going to get a ton of value. But I think for most of my customers they over-complicate their sales process to the, to like the hundredth degree. And you’ve done such a great job simplifying your sales process. I’d love if you could just break down how somebody could go and implement kind of the chooser system for themselves.
James: 38:12 Well, I have to give credit to Ryan Levesque for influencing that because as I was coaching him for a number of years, I got to see the effectiveness of the ask method and also went to Texas and I sat in on a high level workshop that he ran and I had some of his coaches also had a look and I did a deep dive survey. So I think that’s the easy thing. It’s something I do with most of my clients at a, at least a high level is we’ll run a single most important question survey. That’s what, what’s their current biggest challenge. We take those responses. We look for, we score them by the longest responses, multiplying ones that are willing to put a contact detail. And then we take only the top 20%, and then we look for the common threads. Then look for the three to five buckets.
James: 39:11 Ryan calls them. And that will give you a sense of the passion in the market, the words people use and the top challenges that they’re having. And that will usually guide you as to the segments that you might want to put your sales offer into. The how deep you go on that. It’s up to you. But I’ve used it for the homepage that leads to four different challenge types that people generally face, which correlate to the laborers we’ve been talking about. The second step of the, the business level, that was another, there was a chat that I was having this Ryan at breakfast when he came and spoke at my event in Sydney. I said to him, I, I really want to just destroy the ascension model here. How do I get people to the right offer even if it’s not on the same site?
James: 40:06 And that’s where silver circle I need to get that member there straight away. So we came up with that solution and it works really well. And yeah, once you know your segments, you, it helps you with you sales pages. I think I’ve got one sales page, I could go the full extent and have four. But in the interest of KPI, relatively simple, I I stick with one. However, we’ve already tagged the prospect on the way through. So when they join my membership, we will only send them the onboarding relating to that challenge so that if I have four things I could talk to them about, I’ll only send them one, the other, the other members will get something different so they’ll get a different experience when they join compared to potentially other people. So you get one of the, the four possible segments.
Joe: 40:58 So I’m going to try to break that down as, as well as I can without dropping out any value. So please correct me if I miss something. So from the get go, we’re kind of getting our visitors to self select where they need help, right? And I think that you have four different ones, which are the primary different levers we talked about today. So pricing self effectiveness and fun. And then the the, the sales funnel and conversion mechanism and then the team and scale. Is that kind of the four James? Okay. Yeah. Fantastic. All right. So then once they do that, ultimately then we’re kind of asking, which different program do you belong into? My kind of top 1% program. And that was in your tip as well to have the 10 x kind of bigger package offering and then kind of your core offering. And so it’s just kind of a selector to figure out which one to put them into. Correct.
James: 41:53 Yes. And there’s also the option of if they’re not ready yet, then I send them off to free training and I think there’s also recommended trainings that might be useful for them to get up and running. I actually developed with John Lynch a course now that I can send people to when they’re not ready for my program because I really only start coaching if someone’s making a minimum of $10,000 a year. I found that a great filter to remove me from a difficult prospect because they’ve got a lot of challenge in front of them to get to 10 grand a year. It sounds like not much. Let’s say vast majority of online marketers would not have made 10 grand a year. And with the higher level clients, I’m really only starting to chat to them if they’re making half a million dollars a year because my program is going to be too expensive for them if they’re not, but it’ll be a bargain for them if they are. So the, you know, the value proposition swings dramatically depending on what they’ve got in motion. So you can still harvest some energy from the people who aren’t your best prospects. You could even send them off to a competitor for an affiliate commission if they offer something that you don’t. So there’s a lot of opportunity there. Don’t waste the lead.
Joe: 43:10 A hundred percent. The other thing that you said, James, is you have just a couple of sales pages, right? And then ultimately it’s, it’s basically this is my recommendation based upon where you know, where you’re at and what you told me. And then ultimately if they do buy the last piece of genius that you said there was, that you customize kind of their onboarding experience. So I’m assuming if they say that they have a big problem with profit lever number one in the onboarding sequence at first email or first week, you’re saying this is the content that you need to consume.
James: 43:44 Correct. Yup. We send them, we’ve actually split our delivery into the four sections and with summarize the key trainings in each section. So there’ll be sent to that just one.
Joe: 43:57 That’s beautiful. Yeah, that’s fantastic. Because you want to make sure that they have a great experience no matter what bucket they kind of fall in. And that I’ve definitely noticed that with different clients and different programs that I have is we’re often not segmenting that the best. And some people have a great experience and other people don’t. And it’s really based upon how I’ve laid out the members area or the training. And I haven’t done the best job of navigating somebody to the section that will do best for them.
James: 44:25 Yeah, well it’s an easy win then for improving the back end, say, because we’ve all had experience where we bought something and then straight off the purchase we feel like we’ve forgotten about and the seller is off to the next thing. And I’d say that’s probably rife in the online community. I’ve watched it over the last 12 years or so. I’ve seen some marketers that are just constant shovel sellers and no matter whatever the thing of the vogue is, whether it’s bitcoins or whether it’s high ticket coaching or whatever, they’re just onto the next money making scam. And A, they’ve forgotten about everyone they’ve ever sold to and there and they’ve moved on and they’re just always on the hunt for new customer. And they make it hard for themselves.
Joe: 45:16 100%. Yeah. Pitch, pitch, pitch, always nonstop. There’s whole communities of it are left.
James: 45:23 All of them. I can’t stand it. Definitely. So last but not least definitely gonna leave in link to your book in the show notes. Definitely my favorite book as I said, the prime the last two or three years. But I would love to get some feedback from you James. Like what’s, what’s the, what’s the book that’s left the biggest impact on your business? Like when or, or on your life when you look at like direct correlation? Not like that book was good and it gave me a little bit of theory that maybe one day I’ll use, right. If you look at like pure input that pure impact that a book has made on your life, what would that book be and why?
James: 46:06 When I was a stock controller for a telephone company, I was succonded to a sales division and brand new sales team. And digital telephony was new in Australia in 1993 a little bit before America actually. And they’d recruited the best sales people from Xerox and from the other telecommunications companies. So they were like the top gun of salespeople. It was seven or eight of them. Okay. And they were fascinating humans. So I thought this was interesting. I was more of an accountant, credit controller type person. And they were all using a methodology that was popular at Xerox, a that was taught by Neil Rackham called spin selling. And that book was their core training. And they taught on that methodology and I couldn’t help but be sort of sucked into the vortex of that idea. And along with other other things, some Brian Tracy cassettes and Tom Hopkins book, I have to say that spin selling was the most important book that I’ve read in terms of dollars made because it gave me a methodology that I still use today even though it’s so deeply subconscious in the way that I operate.
James: 47:25 But I love it because it’s customer focused. It teaches you more about investigation and problem solving rather than 57 tricky closing phrases you can say to, to win a customer. So I, I love the thoughts of it. I like the research that was behind it. There’s not been anything like it since, except for the challenger method, which is the foreword is written by Neil Rackham because it’s fully research. But that was a massive thing for me. Iterate. And I took that methodology to Mercedes Benz and just dominated with it. I was the top selling salesperson in Australia for both BMW and Mercedes Benz. And I would say that book was a big part of it because it was a new concept for people.
Joe: 48:15 Wonderful. What was the, what was the challenge or method that you mentioned? I’ve obviously heard of spin selling. I’ve read it, it’s been a while. I’ll definitely revisit it. But what was the challenger method that you mentioned?
James: 48:26 It’s a newer book. It’s also backed on research. They found that one type of salesperson sells about four times more than others and it’s the one that challenges the prospect. So it’s not dissimilar to a spin selling method where you are probing and asking. And all right. Certainly would say that about myself. I can challenge people. I have the different voices that people have. I’m probably more of a prophet than, than others.
James: 48:59 So I would say that I’ve always, I’ve always not accepted the typical stereotypical sales role that we think it’s supposed to be all, you know, the wild wire push, push, push. All right. To be curious, you know, find out what, what’s going on and see how we can solve this together. And that involves push back sometimes, but that type of sales person turns out it’s more effective for our can see that in hindsight, I’d obviously never read the book through my whole sales career because fairly newish book, but this, you know, that’s sort of the next in the evolution of properly researched sales books cause it really hasn’t been much in the way its sales research for a hundred years. Like it’s, yeah, most of the books from the sixties, seventies, eighties, they all have outdated methodologies.
Joe: 49:53 Yup. 100%. Fantastic man. So we’ll definitely link up the book and the show notes. We’ll link up super fast business. Where are you active most on social or where else should we consider Linking up for your J-? What’s important to you? these days I’d say I’d probably post it Instagram most days. I think that’s seems to be a, an enjoyable platform for social media of all the platforms. Okay. So we’ll link up in a, in Instagram as well. and just my personal favorite,definitely audibles so we’ll make sure we link up to your book in audible. Definitely how I got through it and got through it fast. definitely. Again, guys, this, this is not a native ad for a, for James’s book, but definitely was an absolute pleasure. and has definitely helped. My e h r. So James, man, thank you so much. I really appreciate you coming on.
James: 50:45 Thank you, Joe always appreciate it. Healthy discussion around this sort of topic and I’m glad that you got something from the book.
Joe: 50:57 100%. 100%. Thanks so much James, and thanks so much everybody. Hope you guys enjoyed Sayonara.
